Swine flu made me do it and finding more morels

     Here's the deal - I don't have the time, the ego or the Ashton-Kutcheresque lifestyle to be really great at Twitter.  But when one of my sources in my job as health reporter for The Gazette - the Iowa Department of Public Health - announced it would start Tweeting swine flu updates, I had no choice but to jump in and join. (and yes, we now call it H1N1 flu - please no calls from the pork industry - bacon's yummy!)

    So now you can follow me on Twitter, though I cringe saying that, partly because of that ego thing, again, but mostly because I'm a very private person. I won't be Tweeting about the great things my sons did for me on Mother's Day or the cool "Life is Good" t-shirt my sister surprised me with (thanks Henna!) or heaven forbid, what I'm making for dinner. Unless it's these awesome morel mushrooms my new best friend Dave gave to me.

So basically, I promise I won't bore you with the mundane details of my life. On the other hand, in my job as a reporter, I do get to go to beautiful places (including many area gardens this year, I hope) and meet fascinating people (like Dr. Johan Hultin, who dug up bodies in the Alaskan permafrost to decode the origins of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic: see The Gazette this weekend.) So, if that's the type of Tweet tidbit that's interesting to you, look me up on Twitter.