Allow me to gloat.

Today is my last day in the newsroom for, hmmm, let me see, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23 days.

The gestation period of a guppie, give or take a day.

I'm looking forward to:

1. Spending five days riding through the beautiful Sandhills on my bike and my Tour de Nebraska soon-to-be buddies.

2. Spending five days riding in the passenger seat (resting my sore tush) through the beautiful Canadian Rockies with my long-time husband.

3. Spending my remaining 13 days (and nights) being happy as I look foward to and back on my travels.

I might slip in a blog somewhere along the line. I might not.

In the meantime, miss me. And come see me her

It's one thing to hang out in the basement and watch the radar and the rain, feeling bad for your son and his sweet wife who planned to drive to the Orpheum in Omaha for a concert and can't because of the storms.

It's another to watch words scroll across the screen: four dead at boy scout camp in Iowa...

This morning CNN runs video of the scene, a building gone, stone and cement strewn. Then the names and ages of the four boys, three from Omaha where my sister lives.

We e-mailed each other this morning, two moms feeling sad.

"I just love my family so much I don't know how people survive such tragedies," my sister wrote.

I don't either.

In the past few months I have had two columns posted on Happynews.com.

I wasn't sure whether I should be flattered and share the posting with my editors, or be embarrassed that I would qualify as a happy news sort of gal. (A man at a trade show looked at me once and said, "Oh, you write those fluffy stories.")

Then I read the most recent updates on our Web site:

Man robbed handicapped man
Car-deer crashes up 76 percent
Man dies after bull attack
Horses killed in crash near Kimball
Break-ins at city pools investigated
NWS confirms second Omaha tornado

Oh, joy. And this doesn't even include the "Oil prices soar" headline on the business wires.

It's true: we don't make the news, we just report it, but it sometimes makes you look out the window and wait for the sky to fall.

Which the sky might just do, sometime later this afternoon.

Stay tuned.

In the meantime -- while you still have time -- check out Happy News.

Gosh, I'm glad I'm not a big time athlete trying to hide my Viagra pills in a vitamin bottle, ala Roger Clemens.

Apparently, athletes have known for years already that the impotence drug might also enchance their on-field endeavors. I guess I'll have to start checking out those baseball pants a little more closely.

One wonders: Will there be penalties for violating the four hour rule?

I'm not sure exactly when it happened, but I'm turning into one of those honey/sweetie/dear people.

I think it started when I was spending a lot of time with Corinne Weber, a wonderful wonderful woman who had breast cancer.

She had a tribe of friends who helped her family with everything from meals to babysiting. One of them was a sassy dark-haired woman who'd known Corinne since high school. Genenne talked fast and walked fast and had a quick come back for just about everything.

She also called everyone honey and sweetie and dear, just like a grandma. Except she was 42.

At first I thought it was odd, but it started to grow on me.

Now I find myself calling my friends honey and slipping and calling the young women at the Y sweetie.

I don't know if it's P.C. but I figure if some young man is going to call me ma'am I can call him darling.