Times, Well, They are a Changin'

Well, I'm up in Wolfeboro now, and I have been for about two weeks. It’s been a pretty crazy last couple of weeks, I've had to find an apartment, furnish it, and begin to get settled at work and in town. When my mother and myself awoke on Friday, we had to find an apartment. We had a place, then we couldn't get the relatively enormous funds required for it together, and we ended up with what is probably a much better place for me. It's a very nice 1 bedroom, and I was able to move in right away.
After a weekend where we looked around town for furniture and to try to familiarize me with the city, I started work on Monday. I really got thrown into the fire, because most of the stories have to be in on Tuesday Night to allow for the paper to go out on Thursday morning. I ended up covering two stories my first day, which included a drive, first to Alton, the main town where the paper I am working on is based, and then close to New Durham, another town in the area. Just so you understand my situation, I work at the Granite State News office here in Wolfeboro, but the newspaper I work for covers Alton, New Durham and Barnstead. That's the situation, its really not that odd, when you consider that these are all small towns, but that there's a lot of interesting news here. One such story is that of Florence Holway, whom I had my first really large (in terms of time) interview with. I sent out a lot of newspapers to people last week, so some of you might have read the story by now, but for those of you who haven't, Florence was raped on Easter Eve 1991, when she was 75 years old. A man, drunk and high, broke into her home, beat her, and then proceeded to rape and sodomizes her. That night, she escaped to her son and daughter in law's house and called the police. But because the man who attacked her had worn a condom, there was no rape kit evidence, the local prosecutors made a plea deal with her rapist, who the police had found naked in Florence's bed. Florence could have been embarrassed, but instead she raised hell. She lobbied for tougher rape sentences and for victim's rights. And she won. Now she just reopened her art gallery that sits in her home. She's been painting since she was a child and now she's reopened her home and her art to the world. She was really amazing to talk to, as you can imagine.
On Tuesday I had my first drive out to Barnstead to cover a school board meeting. What worried me most was that it was snowing on my way out. But I ended up getting a couple of nice pictures and covering the meeting, which ended up running long, long enough that I ended up writing the story at around 10:30 that night for my editor to look at the next morning before she sent it to the printer.
The next few days I really didn't need to stay that late, because most of the work on the paper gets done on those first two days of the week, so when my parents came on Thursday, with furniture, it was great. I also got cable and Internet on Friday, but then something odd happened. While I was taking Netscape off of my computer, I accidentally took a necessary file out, thus making the Internet inaccessible. I am only getting it back tonight, so yeah, weird wild stuff there.
I asked my editor if she would allow me to post my stories online, and she said it would be ok, so tomorrow, for all of you interested parties, I'll post my stories for this week. I'll let you know more about this weeks happenings, as well as the election of Benedict XVI tomorrow.
Til then, I leave you with this look at Lake Winnipesaukee


The Lake, still with a bit of Ice still out. Ice Out was just declared this week
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