Of course we couldn't have that, so after our second year we selected the Christmas season as the obvious choice for an end-of-year break. That worked fine for another year, and then Therese said she wanted to start a Pro-Laziness Editorial Campaign, in which we'd set an example by taking yet another week off, this time in the summer. Of course, I fought that tooth and nail, just as I had the Christmas break because... OK, that's all fantasy. In fact, if I think back hard enough, I might even find that the Laziness Campaign was my idea.
At any rate, here we are in another summer, and you guessed it (well, it also states it at the top of Page 1), this newspaper is about to take a week off. Side note: We've never had a truly "set" time for our summer break (in fact, once we took it in March), but the choice was kind of easy this year because under our Thursday publishing schedule, the next date Thursday falls on is July 4. Our printers at Signature Offset are an accommodating bunch (thank you, Pat, Sean, Joshua and Mike), but I'm fairly certain they'd prefer to be doing other things that day than setting up their presses for our newspaper. The other choice would be to reschedule a day earlier, as is our practice during Thanksgiving week. But to be honest, that speed-up routine is a bit of a pain - complicated by key people often being out of the office - and then to try it in summer's heat? Ugh. About the only plus of publishing on the Fourth (and it's not a bad one) is that a free press is one of the pillars of the American republic that grew out of the principles stated in the 1776 Declaration of Independence. So we could have toughed it out for that reason: prove how free we are by slavishly publishing our newspaper when we'd really rather not.
One downside of missing any week is not providing coverage to our readers. A big one is the Kum & Go meeting June 27. We'll definitely follow up on it in our next paper July 11. Otherwise, can you try to keep things quiet for a week?
- K.J.