Column: Scotland?

People always ask me what the busiest day is for a small weekly newspaper.

That's a pretty easy answer, both Monday and Tuesday are equally hectic, and a lot is getting done to ensure the paper will come out on time.

Sometimes the best way to make these days a little less stressful is to not only work hard on Thursday and Friday, but to also work a little bit on the weekends. Even if it's an hour covering an event or writing a story, it lessens the workload of a very small staff.

There are a few weeks where I have finished five or six stories, taken a ton of photos, and built multiple pages before it even hits the weekend. This week is not one of them. I have been frantically trying to get myself motivated to get this done, but as I'm writing this on Friday, not really anything is done, and I'm afraid if I don't come in on the weekend Monday is going to stink. The same sort of stink I have previously mentioned when stopping at a Montana Department of Transportation outhouse.

As much as I don't want to spend a lot of time here this weekend or be stressed out early in the week, I just cannot focus. This is usually the case about once a month. I really want to get started on a story, but every time I get online I see these stupid quizzes that for some reason captivate me. Today the quiz was "Pick your food choices and we will tell you which city you should live in." I was pretty cave man with my choices. Bacon and eggs for breakfast, pizza for lunch, steak for dinner. The stupid results told me I should live in Edinburgh, Scotland. I'm not quite sure what that would have to do with pizza. When I think of Scotland I think of kilts and monsters that live in large bodies of water. Not pizza. I don't think I could take much comfort in having a pizza with extra haggis.

A lot of these quizzes will just give you a random answer. There is not real math behind it, but for some reason I think it could be a fortuneteller giving me advice on how to live my life.

I'm going to try really hard next week not to answer any of these stupid questions and have a lot of the paper done by Friday afternoon.

There are some really great things about the Internet, but I honestly wonder how much more efficient the world was before it became part of regular society. I think Facebook has probably only made it worse. There are certainly jobs where you can't be on your phone or a computer all the time, but there are a lot you can and I bet a lot more would get done if that wasn't the case.

I remember my first newspaper job and while we had the Internet, know one really used it that often. I thought it was a real treat to get on the dial up and research a story. I kind of miss that dial up sound, although it probably made most people a little bit crazy.

As is the case with most things in life, there is probably the perfect balance.

It's just a matter of finding it. I wonder if there is a quiz that could tell me how much Internet usage is enough?

Or at least how much usage is the perfect balance in Edinburgh, Scotland.