Writing about facts all the time for money made me hesitate to write for free in my spare time about my inner workings. Then 2002 called and told me to go home already; I was beginning to stink.

Writing all the time for money using my real name and accurate facts and news judgment and deadly serious (Important) topics seemed so different from spouting off about the other things I love: public records, lady turtles, growing stuff, making stuff, cooking pots of stuff, eschewing squareness and blatant consumerism, yard sales, Chicago, the Iladelph, foiled corruption, shaking it and leopard printed anything. And by different, I mean not at all the same, maybe in an OK way.

Now I get an outlet for The Fluff I’d die before writing about professionally but which occupies a lot of my brain. There’s time and space for Fluff, of course. There’s just also Important News that can be boring to sit through, but which makes for job that America needs and I kind of like. It’s that Making News Relevant, that Sitting in Court All Morning to Tell You How Many Years the Crook Got, that Digging Through Mountains of Forms and Numbers that I like a lot. It’s translating those languages for you, the taxpayer, that gets me out of bed every morning.

Enough of that already and onto the Cotton I Grew Last Summer, the little cotton plant my Mister gave me as kudos for landing a new job.