Self-inflicted adversity! Good grief

A few weeks ago I said in a newspaper column that when you try to do "Big Things" in your life, it's not a rare occurrence when you make big mistakes in a big way. Such was the case this week while hammering away on my January 12 newspaper issue of the Bonanza Valley Voice. Without going into great detail, I screwed up in an epic way with what was a fairly lengthy girls' basketball story. They had a fantastic game against Kimball Area last week, but as I am so skilled at doing, I made a huge mistake by not getting the full story in print. Wow. Just the first few lines of the Kimball section were printed. The rest of the story vanished into thin air. I flirted with a 12-page layout, but after making a good run at 1 of the 2 extra pages, I had to call it quits and shelve that ill-fated idea.

The hardest part to this mistake is that (after the fact) I went back and got creative and adjusted things and deleted a few items that could have been printed next week...and LO and BEHOLD I had all the room I needed for the section on the team's wins over Kimball and at Maple Lake. There was even a little room to truncate the section about last night's win at Minnewaska. It could have worked. I managed to get "decent" coverage of the other three varsity teams in what was a skinny, 10-page layout.

I'll post that part of the story here at some point this afternoon. Ultimately, I have to move on from it and not let this pull the newspaper operation in the ditch. I put a lot of effort into my sports coverage, and normally this is a smooth running and well-oiled machine.

Unfortunately, sometimes I experience train wrecks. **I'm taking the night off!! The next 10 days are jam-packed day and night...no kidding. Straight through this weekend.

• Cleaning this mess up! Here you can catch the full girls' basketball story, click over to the Bonanza Valley Voice newspaper website (short link): https://bit.ly/3ZubX3X. 

Time to get back to a new blog post on Thursday afternoon!