REMA blog.

The first issue of Real Estate Mid-America arrived in boxes at my office this morning. It's been a four-month process, switching over from Real Estate Chicago, something akin to getting a new job. The first cousin of getting a new job, I suppose. I'm editing a different magazine. But with the same staff, in the same comfortable office. Anyway, it was a lot of work. Then you do it again. Such is the nature of the magazine racket.

In the last 12 months -- no, since Jan. 1, 2003 -- I've had a new baby, moved to a new house, and gotten half of a new job. There was also that matter of breaking an ankle. These things are known as life stresses by some, and by that reckoning, I ought to drop dead from them, possibly right after Christmas, a notoriously stressful time. (But not really for me.) Roughly the same thing happened in 1997-98: new baby, new house, new job. I remember yearning for routine, for normalcy, then. And I got it, more or less, though I had to get another new job in 1999 and then one in 2000 to achieve it in the longer run. My health didn't seem to suffer, but then again I was a youthful 36, not a doddering 42.