Back in the swing of things

Here's the Quartet from Amanda's wedding.
More photos are available from my Facebook page.

Life is slowly getting back to normal. It's been knocked out of whack for a while now because of staffing, life events (see above) and the holidays. We're hiring people at work. We'd be doing it faster, but corporations move a little slower than the people working for them.

For my first real-life job, it has sure been a roller coaster. I've gone through major employment shifts and multiple hiring procedures/candidates. I've seen someone be hired and fired. I've been given a ton of responsibility, and I have seen people really come to the rescue when the copy desk was struggling. We're still not at full staff, but we're getting there. I'm learning a lot from the experience.

And in the middle of all this chaos, I still get to do some pretty cool things. I designed the front page for President Barack Obama's State of the Union address, and it was the first page in a while that I was really proud of. I worked with the wire editor (who knows EVERYTHING) to come up with how we were going to piece together everything from the speech. Considering we did this all basically from 10 p.m. to 11 p.m., the finished product is kind of awesome. So awesome, in fact, that Newseum actually picked it up for its "Top Ten" front pages. I took a screen shot for evidence:

Mine is the bottom left thumbnail. In retrospect, I should have taken a better screen shot.

I have the PDF of the page saved on my computer at work, so I will add it to the blog when I'm there next. Even though the theme of that day's "Top Ten" was papers that used a specific quote from the speech as a headline, I feel honored that mine was picked! That means people actually looked at it, you know?

A lot of information -- pretty easy to follow.