Back in my newsroom days, probably the most valuable and jealously guarded thing on my desk was my Legislative Manual. As the gummint editor, I had occasion to use it often, and if you weren’t careful it had a way of walking off. So I wrote WARTHEN in heavy block letters on the edges of the pages on three sides, so that I could easily spot it wherever it went.
Anyway, even though I can now get access to most of that info via my Blackberry from the Legislature’s Web site, it’s still a handy thing to have on your desk or in your pocket. And I’d been missing the fact that I didn’t have an up-to-date one. In fact, I was thinking about how I’d like to have one just yesterday.
Sen. John Courson must have been reading my mind, because I got a small-but-bulky package in the mail from him today at my home address, and lo and behold, he had sent me a new 2009 Legislative Manual! He’s never done that before, and what possessed him to do it now, I don’t know. But I was certainly glad to get it.
So now, I’m going to start concentrating real hard on how much I want a permanent, full-time job with benefits, and see if the good senator can send me one of those in the mail. It would probably take a pretty big envelope… But in case he can’t swing that, in the meantime I truly appreciate the Manual.