Entry 1:

Good morning, Rob,

Dawn is breaking over southeastern Nebraska this morning with a relatively mild temperature of 20. Although skies look clear at the moment, there is a chance of freezing rain later in the day, but they always say that. In these parts, we have a weather phenomenon I love on a purely semantic level: thunder snow. I suppose that's fairly self-explanatory, but thunder snow has for me the effect of both causing worry that I won't be able to get out the driveway and fretting, irrationally, about tornadoes. I understand you're from Texas, so you are probably accustomed to summers of twice-weekly twister warnings wherein the regularly scheduled programming is interrupted by a weatherman talking about things like funnel clouds and "fingers" (my favorite), which, in the manner of God giving life to Adam on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, always seem to touch down directly on trailer parks. I live in a tiny farmhouse on seven acres of flat, tornado-baiting land, and while it's not a trailer, it's about as solid as a Volkswagen.

In other local news, tomorrow it's going to get up to 23 degrees!

Oh, you mean we're not supposed to talk about weather? But I've scoured the local paper, I swear. Here's something: I see that a Reagan pardonee has now been accused of killing his wife and burning her body in a barrel behind his house. Neighbors complained of a "pungent, awful odor" coming from the yard every night for a week! Ironic that accusations against Hillary Rodham Clinton for knowing of her brother's involvement in the Carlos Vignali pardon have been dominated by the word "smell." " 'It doesn't look good, it doesn't smell good, and it's just not good,' said Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala." I also noticed that on Face the Nation yesterday Shelby repeatedly said Sen. Clinton's claims of ignorance about the pardon didn't pass the "smell test." He's obviously never lived next door to a Reagan pardonee.

I don't know about you, but every Sunday I embark on a supermarket by supermarket search for the Sunday New York Times, and when I find it (hidden beneath stacks of Omaha World-Heralds and cartons of Winstons), I must reconcile the fact that I'm paying $4 for an edition that has neither the city section nor (gasp) the wedding announcements. But the front page in last Sunday's city section (sent to me from by father, who worries that I'm losing my Gotham edge) had an absolutely dead-on story by David Leavitt about why New York can be a bad place for writers. Like us, he has left the city (he now lives in Gainesville, Fla.), and I think he perfectly articulates the way the "literary life" to which so many hopeful writers aspire has been superseded by anxious gossip about who's getting huge advances and what's in the "Rights" column of Publishers Weekly. He moved because he can no longer afford $1,000 for a cruddy sixth floor walk-up on the Lower East Side and because, as a friend has told him, "In New York, I worry about other people's work. Away from New York, I worry about mine." Since part of the reason you and I were paired up for this column is that we both left New York for "less literary" pastures (although Lincoln makes New Orleans look like Paris in the '20s), you may not have read this, and unfortunately I can't find it on the Times Web site, but I wonder if you have any thoughts in this area.

In New York, I worried about other people's work. Away from New York, I worry about feeding barnyard animals. Gotta go break the ice that's formed in the troughs. I'm serious.

Meghan