Some of you may have noticed a new byline on stories posted to http://www.ethanolproducer.com. Ann Bailey comes to us with a strong newspaper background, writing for the Grand Forks Herald, Agweek magazine, Farm and Ranch Guide magazine and other publications for the last 20 plus years. We’re very excited to have her on board!

A name you won’t see, at least for a while, is news editor Erin Voegele. She unexpectedly took her maternity leave a full month early at the beginning of last week. Everybody is doing well. I know full well that due dates are just estimates, since my little turkey was born at 41 weeks exactly, at 11:28 a.m. on Thanksgiving day, 11/28/13. Still, it did catch us all a bit off guard when things moved ahead so quickly for Erin. We wish the whole family a happy and bonding time during the next few months.

Sue Retka Schill and I are sitting in our same seats and doing the same jobs. Nothing has changed there.

Having a new reporter on staff reminds me of my first year writing about ethanol. (Although, in my case, I had a lot less experience as a reporter and certainly less experience as an agricultural reporter than Ann does.) As I’ve probably mentioned before, I worked for the company for one year back in 2006 and then left when my husband accepted a job elsewhere. I returned in January 2010 and have been writing solely for Ethanol Producer Magazine since then.

In the beginning, I had no idea what MMgy stood for, spent hours googling to find story ideas and sources and asked some pretty embarrassingly basic questions. Now, I’m far from an expert. But I’m a lot more confident in my knowledge and abilities. Plus, I have developed many contacts, whom I can email to ask for input, which helps shape the stories that end up in the magazine.

I have to laugh a little at myself when I think of one story in particular. And since it’s Monday and I assume some of you may need a laugh too, I’m going to tell on myself.

To set it up, I’ll say that, as a child, I often heard the saying, “there are no stupid questions.” But I have to say I’ve learned that’s not exactly right. Particularly as a reporter, the less time you can spend on basic, background questions, the more time you can spend asking questions that dig deeper. Of course, how much you have researched or already know about a subject isn’t the only factor. We all have those days where we just aren’t running on all cylinders. Or, at least I do.

Back in 2006, I was particularly tired one day. I’d been up most of the night with insomnia and I was also driving 65 miles to work, one way, while my husband was in school in another city. So I definitely wasn’t running on all cylinders. I was in the middle of an interview with someone from NASCAR—I believe at that point they were testing ethanol blends on the track, as it wasn’t until 2010 when they announced they would be using E15 in races. At one point he mentioned an oval track. That’s when I did it. I asked an incredibly stupid question. “What’s an oval track?”

I’ll just let that sink in for a moment. What is an oval track? The man I was interviewing very kindly answered that an oval track was kind of like a circle, but longer on the sides. The kicker is that I didn’t even realize until later, when I was transcribing the interview, just how silly the whole thing was. Almost a decade later, I still tell that story and laugh about it.

Here’s hoping you’re firing on all cylinders today and don’t ask any stupid questions. But, if you do, don’t worry. Someday it will be nothing more than a funny story.