Some months ago when I was at a social gathering in Cedar Hill, someone came up to me and said, “If Today Newspapers goes under, your job is going to get a lot harder. You realize that, don’t you?”

Well, that day has come.

Today Newspapers, which covered Cedar Hill, DeSoto, Duncanville, Lancaster and Grand Prairie, published its last issue on July 2 after nearly 50 years in business. Publisher Kim Petty told The Dallas Morning News that the decision to cease publishing was made after efforts to find a buyer were unsuccessful.

Yes, Today Newspapers was a competitor, but once upon a time, it was also a member of my family.

Ah, the Barnett Shale. We've all seen those dazzling commercials. You know, the ones that sound like they're narrated by the love child of Sam Elliott and that guy who does the Whataburger ads.

As the fine folks at Chesapeake Energy tell us amid placid images of rolling hills, greenery and softball fields, the Barnett Shale just might be the largest natural gas field in the lower 48 United States (that means Alaska and Hawaii don't count).

And you know what? That sucker is right in my back yard.

I'm starting to really hate driving. I mean, really, can't someone else do it for me?

I suffered a flat tire on the way home from work Wednesday evening. I've lost count of how many times that's happened to me in the last year. After a long day at the office, all I want to do is get home, get out of the work clothes, slouch down on the couch, lay the remote on my chest and dig in with a nice, relaxing evening with Suzanne Whang and House Hunters.

The last thing I want to do is wrestle with a spare.

There's nothing quite like the sensation of being sound asleep at 5 in the morning and suddenly have your bedroom light come on. You feel naked (metaphorically speaking, of course) and vulnerable, almost like there's an intruder in your home.

When it happens every night of the week, you just plain get mad. If you're just joining us, I've been dealing with a new remote-controlled ceiling fan with a mind of its own. It would come on any time it wanted because it shared the same radio frequency as something in one of my neighbor's houses.

So our ceiling fan in the master bedroom died a week ago. Its death throes sounded like a live chicken getting stuffed into a blender.

Got a new one the next day and had it professionally installed. It came with a remote control. Hooray, I thought. No more cumbersome, always-breaking chains. No more accidentally pulling the chain so hard that it shoots back up into the blades and strafes the room with hundreds of tiny pieces of shrapnel.

We went to bed that night, happy and content with our new, nearly silent ceiling fan.

And the nightmare started.