I never thought my last semester of J-School would be this busy! Wait, no, this is right on par. Sorry I’ve been away for so long, there have been a few developments:

I’ve been hired on as the (interim) copy editor for the Missoula Independent, a weekly Tuesday shift of slinging AP style and slaying comma splices. Believe it or not, it’s actually pretty thrilling. Or, at least it thrills me. I’ll be there until I start up in Idaho Falls this summer.

My Native News project — a yearly capstone class that teams writers with a photo/videographer for a week on one of Montana’s reservations — is well under way. I’ll be on the Fort Peck Reservation over spring break with Samuel Wilson to produce a 3,000-word piece on… actually, it’s a surprise. But you can find it online and in print in the Missoulian and Billings Gazette in June. We’ll have a running Twitter feed and photostream when we get up there, hopefully that will quell some of your curiosity. Just two weeks till showtime.

I’m still writing music too! Here are some of this week’s album reviews: Lo-fi locals Needlecraft have a new lineup and vinyl out and Minneapolis punks Off With Their Heads get a little too clean for their own good.

Finally, there was some fallout from my most recent Keep Missoula Weird column. Which is exactly what a good, opinion-filled column needs to do. Not to mention I wouldn’t trust an arts editor that didn’t have strong opinions about music. I would Storify the Twitter backlash from jam band fans that proved my point, but it’s not exactly Rated E for Everyone.

Oh, and my Twins commentary — we’re a seven-inning team thus far. We’ve blown it in the eighth more times than I care to remember. But at least our records get wiped clean again when we start the real season against the Tigers (gulp) April 1. Until then~