It's been a week since the barn party at my former news director's place. I would have written sooner, but I have frequent connectivity problems with my DSL. In fact, a couple weeks ago, I was on the phone with the support people for more than an hour. After much testing of this and checking of that, the guy finally suggested that I change the line going from the phone jack to the DSL hook-up. That seemed to work, but there are still a lot of times when it doesn't work right. Don't know if it's just because there are a lot of other people logged on to the system, or maybe my phone lines are bad. Grrrrr.
But, I digress. The barn party.
The band was supposed to start playing at 8:00, so I got there around 6:30. Quite a few folks were already there, and some of them were gathered around a car listening to the end of the Penn State-Michigan game. The last series was exciting, even though PSU ended up losing.
After that, I chatted with people for a while, until 8:00. That's when everyone moved into the barn and the ND came out, helped by his wife. He started to speak, but was interrupted by "breaking news", a.k.a. the blooper tape. It was really well done, and the ND was named the "man of the year." He got all choked up.
Once the festivities were over, the band started playing and the ND moved to a chair so he could sit down while people came up to talk to him. I spent some time with him just before I left and made sure to tell him how much I had learned from him. I'm glad I did that. He seems to be handling everything as well as can be expected, and he's already talking about next year's party. But...