Thankful as I am for the time we’ve gotten off school (and, coincidentally, I’ve gotten off work), it’s screwing with me, big time.

Online production is today. Not as many people are going to notice, since we don’t have enough content to run a full edition. That’s a rant for another day. The trouble is, with Friday AND Monday off, we have exactly no class time to prepare for our next print production, which is the Wednesday we’re all officially back.

And man, is it brutal. We’ve got overlapping production cycles happening right now, and man will I breathe easy when I come back on Wednesday – not because I’ll be staring down the print production, but because I’ll be within slapping distance of my staff again. I’m seeing a couple people with the bad habit of forgetting that the newspaper exists without actually being in the newsroom, and it makes me nervous to not be able to physically check on anybody to see what they’re doing with their stories, or if they’re doing anything at all.

On a lighter side of things, we finally have a staff now, which means the days of doing everything more or less by myself are coming to a close. With any luck, people will settle into their new positions smoothly and we’ll start being able to streamline production cycles, with less of the bottlenecks we encountered last semester (Paul Sieger was pretty awesome, but no man should be expected to copy-edit an entire newspaper by himself).

In the meantime, I’m trying to focus less on the few people who are consistently disappointing me this semester, and more on the people who are really stepping up to the plate and… well… being reporters. For that, I couldn’t be happier.

In the meantime, I’ve got an online edition to manage. So see you next time, same bat-time, same bat-place.