hot, hotter, hottest

It's suck-the-breath-out-of-you hot these days in Phoenix, a special weather condition that requires temperatures of at least 111 degrees and less than 7 percent humidity. It's one of the few times a gentle breeze is less welcome than a dead calm.
It was a three-day week for me at work, which means I was busy (and no blogging entries when I got home at night). Lots of editing of stories for our "stockpile." Which we may be dipping into immediately, since we WILL be putting together a full-length issue in less than half the time we usually get, and putting it under one cover with a special section another unit is doing. At least that's the word for now. We'll see.
I sent off that query earlier in the week to the Hawaiian magazine. We'll see what response we get to that--"can I please write about this fellow you could easily send a local reporter to profile? I'm more interested in him than they are!" Which is true, but as an editor that might at least run through my mind. My guy could go visit them in person, and this girl in Arizona is going to rely on a phone interview. But, it's *her* pitch, so what do I do to not make it look like I "harvested" her idea? (Well, give her the assignment, obviously.)
Before I sent that off, I tried to open a CD of my clips from Echo that had previously made our old computer make bad scary scraping noises when I loaded it in the CD drive. It worked on the new PC, and I downloaded them all--no small feat, since I was at the magazine for 78 issues and I estimate I wrote at least 150 bylined articles for them. Not all of them are things I'd want to pass by an editor as proof of my writing acumen, but there are a variety of topics covered, and the PDFs look pretty nice. It's a major relief--that was a big chunk of my portfolio I couldn't access, except to go down to Echo's library and cart off more copies of "my" issues.
I've got a couple of ideas to play with today (play with stage precedes even research), and Scooter and I have some writing we want to do together. I think it'll be fun.