By the time you read this — assuming I haven’t been waylaid by transportation problems — I will be back in the full-time work world.

Two weeks shy of 24 years after I started in the full-time work world, I am starting today as editor of the Platteville Journal.

I’d say this brings me back to the 40-hour-per-week world except that, based on previous experience, being a small-town newspaper editor — for that matter, being an editor of any publication — is not a 40-hour-a-week job anymore than being a business owner is a 40-hour-a-week job. News does not stop at 5 p.m., and news does not take weekends off. I don’t say that to promote my work ethic over anyone else’s; that’s simply a fact.

I want to point out that no politician — not Barack Obama, not Scott Walker, not anyone else — deserves credit for this. I got this job because of previous experience, because of my relationship of long standing with my new boss (which brings to mind the line from The Who, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”), and because the previous editor left for another job.

My hope is, to quote the Boy Scout aphorism (and an Eagle Scout should quote the Boy Scouts, right?), to leave this place in better condition than I found it. That’s always been my goal, so don’t read that as a veiled criticism. It won’t be like my last newspaper experience, where radical change was necessary. People prefer improvement to mere change.

This concludes a year and a month of unemployment. I do not recommend the experience for anyone. Even though I got to do some things — go on my children’s field trips, for instance — that I probably couldn’t have done had I been employed, being unemployed is not a good place to be. The anger and depression I’ve felt over the past year has been off the charts and, as usual in my case, expressed at the wrong people. No one in my family will remember me fondly over the past year, nor should they.

The question readers will have (and I write that only because you are reading this; if you weren’t interested, you wouldn’t be reading, right?) is what will happen to The Presteblog. To which I reply: Good question!

Given that I’ve been doing this daily for more than a year, and given that the WordPress software claims that people are reading this, I would like to keep it going. Whether I’ll be able to due to, you know, this new job, as well as my other responsibilities remains to be seen. I know other bloggers maintain full-time employment while blogging (and as we all say, the , so I guess that’s something to shoot for, whether that’s every day or less often.

I don’t necessarily expect what Journal readers read will be what Presteblog readers read. People read The Presteblog presumably because they’re interested in what I have to say on whatever the subject of the day is. Platteville Journal readers read the Journal because they’re interested in what’s going on in Platteville and surrounding areas. They are not necessarily interested in what the newspaper editor thinks about, for instance, presidential or state politics, except as presidential and state politics affect southwest Wisconsin.