Life is what happens when you are busy making plans.

No one knows thatbetter than a longtime newspaper person.

Usually, that makes this a dream job for a lifelong procrastinator like me. In this business, if you don’t put off until tomorrow what you could do today, you’re probably going to find yourself in for a massive rewrite at deadline.

“News,” by its very definition, is always in flux.

But once in awhile, the cooler, calmer, less fly-by-the-seat-of-their-pants members of our staff like to have things their way.

Like careful planning fora developing problem that will ultimately require an inconvenient, but hopefully temporary, solution - an easy rollout that will help our readers and advertisers adjust, make their own plans and accommodate our changes as best they can.

And that’s exactly what we planned for our transition to this all-ditigal Sunday edition - announce it three newspapers in advance, launch an online and in-print informational campaign immediately after to help our readers make the switch, transition my role as senior editor to primarily digital support, making the online experience as rich as possible for our subscribers.

But we didn’t even make it to Step 1- our Jan. 27 announcement - before those best-laid plans fell apart.

Our first staff member tested positive for COVID-19 on Saturday, Jan. 23. Seven more quickly followed suit on Monday, Jan. 25.

That’s eight of our staff of nine.

While we’re firm believers in cross-training, ourbench is no more than two-deep for any of the tasks required to put out two newspapers each week.

Our options were:

1. Lay it all at the feet of our one healthy staffer (OK, not an option);

2. Shut it all down for two weeks while the disease ran its course (which could cause us to lose our postal permit, in addition to not meeting other obligations); or

3. Lock the doors to the public and invite any infected staffer to quarantine in place, working as much or as little on any given day as he or she felt physically able.

It’s a delicate balance between not overstating our own importance and recognizing we do owe competing obligations to our advertisers, our subscribers and our employees.

As one staffer noted: “We’re not neurosurgeons. No one is going to die if we don’t do our jobs at all, but we also won’t kill anybody if we make a sloppy attempt.”

So we slogged our way through four sloppy attempts, hoping this edition is the last of them.

We were very, very fortunate that most of our symptoms ranged from mild to moderate, with no one requiring hospitalization.

But no one was asymptomatic, and those of you who have been down this road know that even the non-lifethreatening gamut of COVID ills can be pretty darn debilitating some days. For one of our staff, that meant a full week in bed battling COVID pneumonia followed by a second week of minimal activity.

But even he contributed work from home and was making occasional brief office appearances by the end of Week 2.

Every single other sick staffmember voluntarily worked parts or all of nearly every day of quarantine, checking in with doily texts to determine among themselves who needed to cover for whom and who needed to take it easy that day.

Our work product was rough and (for some of us, at least) our language and dark humor was even rougher, but we made it through as the team I am proud to call my newspaper family.

So here’s my shout out to Twila Adams, Jeremy Ingle, Robin Johnston, Brenda Slater, Michael Swisher, and our never-give-in leaders Barry Reid and Gary Reid for going beyond above-and-beyond. You

You guys are all--stars.