Holidays are too much work

I am trying to get away following a long weekend.
Whoever claimed that a holiday was good for you probably never looked at the amount of effort it takes to free up time. At the newspaper, all of our deadlines are pushed ahead.
That means everything has to be ready a day early. Advertising deadlines are moved from Monday noon for the Times to Friday noon. For the Rainy River Record, the advertising deadlines remain the same and we publish on Wednesday.
Our design and layout staff also have their normal deadlines compressed. As on all Monday holidays, we discovered many of our customers had slipped away early on Friday and were not available to check proofs early.
The same happened to some of our customers who prepare advertisements for national accounts. It made Tuesday even more hectic.
Our reporting staff is put behind because meetings that normally are scheduled for Monday are re-scheduled to Tuesday.
That makes for an extremely late evening, sitting at the council meetings and then returning to the office to write the stories and lay out the paper for printing early on Wednesday morning to meet the deadlines so that readers receive their paper in a timely fashion.
This past Victoria Day weekend, our staff was out covering a wide variety of community activities. It may have been fishing season-opener, but Alex Cruickshank was covering the opening evening of the Borderland Racing Association out in Emo.
He discovered that racing in May in our neck of the woods can be quite cool.
Then on Sunday, I and my son took Alex fishing for the first time in his life. Within minutes of dropping his line in the water, Alex was startled to find something wanted to make off with the lure.
It did successfully.
In Rainy River, editor Ken Johnston, with the loss of Monday, was focused last Thursday on getting stories ready for this week’s Record.
On Friday afternoon and evening, Heather Ogilvie was out at the Kay-Nah-Chi-Wah-Nung Historical Centre for the annual community fish fry hosted by Rainy River First Nations.
ON Saturday, the merchants of Fort Frances held their second annual “Show ’n Shine” on Scott street, which was covered by Duane Hicks.
Melanie Béchard and our summer intern, Crystal Green, also were kept busy keeping up with all the activities that herald the first long weekend of the summer season.
After a cold start to the weekend, the weather turned around and the boat launches on Rainy Lake were busy as anglers and families took to the water to enjoy the sun.
By mid-afternoon on Monday, the first bathers were jumping into the water although the temperature barley reached 15 degrees C.
While many of us took extra time to sleep in sometime over the weekend, or indulged in reading a book, the reporters of the newspaper were kept busy.