Can I relax now

Oh how I wish it were just "Strictly Sports" ... (for those of you reading on MySpace, I also post a blog on Blogger that I entitle "Strictly Sports")

This week has been far from strictly anything.

I'm sitting at my desk at 10 a.m. Saturday morning, an hour until I meet Patrick Johnson, our prep writer, to head down to Lafayette to cover the semifinals of the boys basketball playoffs. And for the first time all week, I feel I finally have time to relax.

I just received my final mug shot for our All-Cenla boys and girls soccer teams, which will run in Sunday's paper. 22 photos. I was responsible for tracking them down. And boy did I have some problems. I thought, by going to the schools and trying to get yearbook pictures, that I was doing it the right way. Wrong!

Don't get me wrong -- some schools were very helpful. They gave me hard copies of yearbook prints or e-mailed it over to me. One school had already shipped off its yearbook pictures, but the ROTC department e-mailed me photos from school IDs. But others weren't nearly as helpful.

Going into yesterday -- mind you, with a graphic designer wanting to finish this big, full-page project up as soon as possible -- I still needed 10 or 11 mug shots. So I started tracking down parents and athletes. Some parents were able to e-mail me photos, and I am terribly gracious for that. Other athletes took time out of their busy schedules for me to shoot photos of them -- three Pineville athletes met me at the school at 7 p.m. last night, after I twice asked, and received confirmation, that I would receive yearbook photos via e-mail.

Coming into today -- after being in the office for a full eight hours yesterday on my "day off" -- I lacked just two photos, or so I thought. I got in touch with one parent, who said she had e-mailed me on Thursday -- an e-mail I had accidentally deleted. No problem. I hit restore and it was safe. That left one more, so I contacted him and asked him I could meet him to shoot a photo. He lives in Colfax, so he said he'd e-mail me. Three photos later and I'm done. Relax.

If that were only the story of my week. Here's where we get to the non-sports part of my job this week. Every year, The Town Talk puts out "parish profiles" every year on the 13 (now 11) parishes that we cover. For some reason -- and despite many protests -- I drew Catahoula Parish. For the record, so you guys won't think I'm just complaining, I'm the only one of our "content editors" (read people in charge of assigning and editing stories) that received one of these assignments. Yes, I write. I enjoy it. But I have many other responsibilities around here that a normal reporter doesn't have, which made this assignment very difficult for me.

First, I had to create time to drive to Catahoula Parish and gather the extensive information necessary to get the project done -- history of the parish, lots of interesting tidbits about its beginning, biggest scoundrels, well-known residents, etc. It was a lot of fun, but very time-consuming. Since I moved over to sports, I haven't had the time -- with prep playoffs going on right in the middle of when this needed to be done, and the fact that I'm the editor on duty every night that I'm not out covering a game.

So we created a day -- Tuesday -- for me to essentially take off to Catahoula Parish and not work in the office. So I left at 7 a.m. Tuesday morning to go to Catahoula Parish -- Harrisonburg, Jonesville and Sicily Island. I spent most of my day there and got back to Alexandria at 6 p.m. and started writing, finishing up at about midnight. Then I e-mailed my stuff to the office and came up here to put all of my stories into the system. That was a long day -- and I haven't been the same since.

I'm trying not to complain too loudly, because I did enjoy the assignment and learn a lot, but it was very inconvenient for me to have to shun the rest of my duties in order to do this parish profile.

Anyway, I could ramble on and on and on about my week, but I'll close on this note. Thursday was my birthday. I'm 25. A quarter of a century. I've thought about doing some type of retrospective, but as you can tell, I haven't really had time. Hopefully, I'll get some soon. But it won't be today or tomorrow. I'm leaving in 15 minutes to go to Lafayette, where I'll be until about midnight, before driving back to Alexandria, getting up to teach Sunday school and immediately leaving to go back to Lafayette to cover another semifinal game tomorrow.

This is my life. Pray for my wife.