The Daily Hamari

So it's been 10 years.

When I started working as a professional journalist as a high school senior a decade ago, I don't know that I ever thought I'd still be doing it when I was 28.

I started because the adviser on my school paper said the local paper — The Appleton Post-Crescent — was looking for high school students to cover high school sports, and it seemed like a perfect fit.

I can't say it's always been perfect (don't ask me about my job after a four-hour meeting at City Hall), but it's always at least been interesting. I've attended Brett Favre's celebrity softball game, spent a day with a Christmas tree salesman and written more city government stories than I care to recollect.

But working at a newspaper has given me a decade's worth of experiences that I know I wouldn't have had if I was an accountant or lumberjack or something else.

Here's a look at some of the more memorable experiences.

Yer a wizard, Harry. I've never been the coolest person in the room (that would be my brother, whose hand-me-downs are one of my few sources of fashionable clothes), but I always thought I was able to hide my nerdiness (nerdliness?) from my co-workers.

That is, until the seventh Harry Potter book came out.

Like many things — drinking socially, The Wire, being able to talk to women coherently — I came to the Harry Potter party a little bit later in life than everybody else. I don't think I read any of the books until the first two movies were released, and even then it was only to get my friends to stop bothering me. But I got sucked in on the third book and saw why my friends liked the series so much.

So when the seventh book was coming out in the summer of 2007, I brought up the idea of going to a local bookstore and doing a story about the book release, which was scheduled for a minute after midnight sometime that July. Little did I know my bright idea would have legs. After talking to a couple of editors, somebody — and I still want to know who this was -- said, "Hey Al, why don't you do a live Harry Potter blog?" I thought about it for a while and figured it wouldn't be too difficult, since I was going to be at the bookstore for a couple hours anyway.

Then came the blog photo.

My editors decided they wanted a photo of me to run with my first blog entry, which would be a couple days ahead of the book release. I thought it would be just a mug shot of me smiling like an idiot. But no, they said, we want a picture of you smiling like an idiot while holding the six Harry Potter books in front of you. I'm not going to post it here, but suffice it to say, the photo that appeared with that blog is one of the many reasons I can never run for political office. One of the questions I asked the photographer was, "Does shame show up well in digital photography?" (As it turns out, it does.)

The live blog itself wasn't that big of a deal, except that my digital camera didn't work, so I couldn't post photos like I planned. But other than that, it was fun talking to people — some who showed up 10 hours before the book release to get their places in line — and I was relieved to find I was probably not the nerdiest nor the oldest person there. So that's something.

Life on a Plane. In the last 10 years, I've probably taken fewer than a dozen commercial flights. (I use my credit card points for Best Buy gift cards, not airline miles.) But in the last three years, I've piloted a four-passenger plane over the farm fields of Waukesha County and ridden in the belly of a World War II-era bomber, which I'm not sure you could do even if you had enough credit card miles. Last spring, representatives from the Airline Owners and Pilots Association held a meeting in Brookfield to try and recruit private pilots, the reason being the number of private pilots is dwindling and career opportunities are opening up. So under some flimsy pretense or another (and after finding somebody in the program who was tangentially connected to Brookfield), I set up a practice flight with one of the instructors at Crites Field in Waukesha.

I'm somewhat of a nervous flyer, but when you're crammed into an instrument-filled cockpit several thousand feet above the ground, there's not a whole lot of time to worry. You're busy watching your altimeter and checking your direction and windspeed, while the co-pilot gives you gentle reminders about not crashing the plane. I was surprised when the pilot handed the operations of the plane over to me 10 minutes into our flight; I guess he assumed I wasn't going to try a barrel roll or something. We landed in one piece, and if I had the spare time and the money (especially the money), I could see myself going back.

I was at Crites the summer before my flight lesson, too, but that time they didn't let me anywhere near the cockpit. A World War II-era bomber (one that was built right after the war but never saw any combat) was doing a tour of the Midwest and made a stop in Waukesha before it headed to Oshkosh for the EAA air show the next week. The organizers sent out invites to local media and VIPs, and, figuring that I'd never get the experience otherwise, I took them up on the offer.

(…continued)