Welcome to this week’s Reno News & Review.
I want to give a quick shout-out to a couple of RN&R staffers. As I wrote in this column a few weeks ago, my fiancee, Margot Choltco, is pregnant. She’s now very, very pregnant—due, in fact, to give birth to our baby any day now. Any day now. Any. Day. Now. Needless to say, I’ve been a bit distracted.
I’m also experiencing some weird sympathy hormones that really kicked in over Thanksgiving weekend. I hardly left the house and didn’t even want to. All I wanted to do was laundry and curl up next to the fire with a good book. It was either some sudden, dramatic onset of middle age or just straight-up getting-ready-for-a-baby nesting vibes.
I’ve found it difficult to talk about much else. Nearly every conversation I’ve had in the last week or so I’ve somehow managed to steer toward baby talk. Like, for example, I could start writing a column ready to praise my colleagues and then somehow, two paragraphs later, realize all I’ve managed to say is that I’m having a baby.
So, yeah, I’ve been a bit distracted. I’m preparing to take some time off for paternity leave, and I took off a couple of days early in November to work on some personal creative projects I wanted to finish before Baby Time. And at the same time, our esteemed news editor, Dennis Myers, also needed to take some time off the last few weeks for personal reasons.
So, special projects editor Jeri Chadwell and arts editor Kris Vagner have been doing most of the heavy lifting around here—writing cover stories, arts features, news stories and whatever else needed putting ink to paper. They also edited the hell out of columns and features outside their usual purviews. And they did so with positive, supportive attitudes—repeatedly asking what else they could do to help. And meanwhile, our amazing calender editor, Kelley Lang, kept quietly plugging away at the most comprehensive events listings in the valley.
Huge thanks to all three of them.