This was a busy few opening weeks so far

Man, my first three weeks with the Observer Media Group and I have had to spend it dealing with not one, but TWO hurricanes.

I originally wrote a column that, well, matches my personality. It was full of lame jokes and something to lighten the mood we had experienced with Helene.

But, now a second hurricane. Milton. 

We are all battle tested from these hurricanes, and as I write this on the Monday before Milton's arrival on Wednesday, I hope that all of our community stays safe and we all get through this.

For the record, I've been living in Florida most of my life. Since I was kid in the 1970s. Technically, the first hurricane I had been through was Irma in 2017.

I know, right, it's a long time.

Seven years ago, I was the digital editor for The News-Press in Fort Myers when I spent a couple nights sleeping on the newsroom floor and eating Cinnamon Toast Crunch out of the box for breakfast.

The shower, if you will, was a pipe in one of the bathrooms about head-high with icy cold water running out of it.

Irma hit on a Sunday and we were locked in the office with metal barriers on the windows and most of the newsroom had the TVs on with storm coverage. Meanwhile I sat away from the TVs doing updates and posting online while watching my beloved Green Bay Packers beat the Seattle Seahawks on my phone.

The real heavy winds from Irma started around 4:30 p.m., right at kickoff. By the time the game ended, it was 7:15 p.m., and the winds were dying down. Packers won too.

Good times.

After it had ended, the next day, there was the usual damage around the area, traffic lights dangling on the wire, power out everywhere, trees down, we know the drill.

We will have worse here. 

We continued to work and put a paper out that following week at the News-Press. Our engagement editor, Cory O' Donnell, and myself would run to Publix every afternoon to get frozen family-sized dinners of meatloaf and lasagna to feed the newsroom via a microwave as we reported the news.

That was my last week at the News-Press.

I had accepted a position two weeks prior to Irma to go to Aiken, South Carolina to become the managing editor of The Aiken Standard.

A year later Hurricane Michael hit the Florida panhandle and passed over Aiken as a tropical storm. I was standing at my gym at 6 in the morning doing a Facebook Live report for our community. Later that morning a reporter and I drove around Aiken and North Augusta doing another Facebook Live surveying the damage.

Hurricanes are worse now, whether you blame it on global warming or cyclical, we're in a rough patch lately and it's getting tiring. 

I've handled coverage for hurricanes before and of all the "immediate" news coverage I've coordinated, organized, managed throughout my career, clearly this is the worst subject.

But, in the news world, we run on a different frequency. As reporters and editors we jump at covering hurricanes, we want to inform you, let you know what is happening, and provide the most up-to-date information we can.

We jump at this simply because of our upbringing in journalism. 

For myself it started on better deadline subjects. I started as a sportswriter after college working in the Broward bureau of the Miami Herald. 

First for several years covering Friday Night Football and other sports for Miami and then Bradenton, to moving up to covering and organizing sports coverage for the Citrus County Chronicle and then the Leesburg Daily Commercial.

In 2000, that changed to just organizing coverage as an assistant sports editor at The Tampa Tribune. That immediate coverage was better, not easier, than organizing hurricane coverage.

For 11 weeks out of the year, we staffed and covered 45 high school football games, all pouring into the desk of three copy editors and a designer starting at 10:30 p.m. and all games had to read, edited, on the pages, and out the door by midnight.

But I will tell you, I did love those nights. They were brutal and you're exhausted by the end, but it was satisfying knowing you had all the games in and people got to read the coverage the next day.

In 2003, our sports editor, and my mentor, Richard "Duke" Maas, came up to me the Monday after the Tampa Bay Buccaneers won the NFC Championship to go to the Super Bowl.

"What are you doing today?" he asked.

"Oh I have a few things to organize, but nothing major," I responded.

"Would you mind taking care of the Bucs section today?"

"Sure."

That was about 10:30 or 11 in the morning and we had a daily special section of 16 pages just on the Bucs. We had it planned every day of Super Bowl week and a 32-page special section the day of the game.

We had about 30 reporters from sports, business, features, photographers, and editors in San Diego for the game.

We had as many 25 in Tampa writing Bucs-related local stories.

So we can fit everything in the sections, with plenty of stories leftover. Then the 4 p.m. editors meeting came.

The Managing Editor Donna Reed says "Duke, what we got going in the Bucs section?"

And Duke casually responds "Well Katherine has a story on this, Roy on this …"

He stops. Then says "I'm gonna let Mike Harris talk about it. In fact, Mike Harris is going to be the liaison the entire week for the Bucs section; he'll decide what goes there, what goes in A Section, Metro, Features, Sports."

As many as 40 editors turn to me as Duke just handed the entire set of keys to a 289,000 circulation paper to me.

But we did it. It was 14-hour days, but it was great.

News happens we have to respond.

The last few years I've bounced around as a copywriter with flighty tech companies that promise a bunch, but deliver nothing. 

The truth is, covering news, and managing a great staff is what I love to do. And I want to do my best and deliver fair and quality content for the Sarasota and Longboat communities. 

I look forward to meeting everyone I can and hopefully have a positive impact.

I would love to meet as many in the community as I can, but we muscled through Helene and now we must muscle through Milton. 

While Helene was marching toward us (and now Milton) and we were scrambling to put out the papers, I told Executive Editor Kat Wingert: "A lot of people will say this is not what I signed up for." And they may be right.

Not me.

"This is EXACTLY what I signed up for."

Please, everyone, be safe. We'll see you on the other side.