This Labor Day weekend, as you kick back to enjoy the weekend with family and friends, remember to celebrate responsibly if your plans include alcohol. Whether you're at a barbeque or out on the water, be sure to designate a driver or a skipper if your celebrations will include alcohol.

You'll be in the company of 148 million American adults who have either been designated driver or used one and the 85 percent of boaters who believe promoting the use of deignated skippers is an excellent way to encourage boating safety. Thanks to these efforts, along with effective law enforcement and community-based alcohol awareness and education programs, the U.S. Department of Transportation reports that drunk-driving fatalities during the Labor Day period have decreased by 44 percent since 1982.

This Labor Day weekend, let's all do what we can to keep our roadways and waterways safe by using a designated driver or skipper - or volunteering to be one. By celebrating responsibly, you can help make sure that summer ends on a safe and happy note.

Sincerely, Michael Donnewald, President Donnewald Distributing

It has started again. The endless cycle of school, which brings drama; work, which brings stress; and extracurricular activities, which brings even more responsibility. Awesome!

School is very different this year. It almost doesn't seem like Wesclin anymore. We start five minutes earlier for one thing. I also get to do a bug collection this year! Doesn't everyone just love running around like idiots to collect gross, antennaed, crunchy, crawly, squirmy bugs? I guess some people might...if you're really weird. For me, well... I just don't like creepy crawly creatures.

Also, I am a senior this year, which I must say is pretty great. The strange thing about this is that I have been going to Wesclin since kindergarten and yet it seems like I walk through the halls and only know a couple people. I heard there are about 25 new students this year, and that might be a factor. But I believe the main reason I don't know anyone is because freshman have literally taken over. It seems like there are just swarms of them running through the hallway. I don't really know how to react. I know seniors are supposed to be the big dogs this year, but with the class size of the freshman, I think we are so outnumbered we might be the ones getting hurt.

I take that back, seniors are still the best...and we can take any amount of freshman.

Anyway, things change, I'm not quite used to it yet. Eventually I will get back into the swing of things, but as of now I think everyone is in a frazzle.

Anyone who has ever visited our newspaper office knows it is not for the faint of heart.

I think it is a peculiar characteristic of both newspaper office and print shops (we dabble in a little bit of both) that the cosmetic appearance leaves something to be desired.

Through the years, our office has been no exception.

When we bought the Sun back in 1990, we operated for a few months out of the old office located on North Main Street (just north of Trenton House), moving into our current location in the spring (more or less) of 1991.

The building had been vacant for several years at that point, and was festooned in seventies-era decor left over from a ladies' clothier that had been the most recent occupant. There was multi-colored green shag carpeting throughout the building, and the walls were painted solid orange with stripes in green and purple, and maybe a few other colors.

The paint was peeling, the roof leaked, and the windows rattled every time a heavy truck passed by. We rented for a few years from my dad and Bill Kunz before finally buying the building from them.

We had a pretty good deal on the rent, so it didn't seem fair to pester them for improvements. After we bought the building, renovations never seemed like a justifiable expense, our surroundings having little to do with the success or failure of our business.

After a while, you just sort of forget how ugly everything is around you.

We fixed the roof, we replaced an air conditioner, and we surrounded the windows with some ugly new framing that at least holds them in place. They survived last summer's tornado; that's good enough for me. We replaced most of the carpeting with a more muted, shorter-napped variety, and ripped up the rest to reveal the tile floor beneath.

Earlier this year, we noticed that the floor seemed to be separating from the wall in the back part of our shop, and Sybil and I agreed that seemed like a cause for some alarm.

We have a very heavy old letterpress in the back of the shop, and a large steel "stone" that was used to lay out letterpress forms "back in the day."

Our fear was that the floor was sinking, and we hatched an elaborate plan to jack it back to level and shore up the foundation. We were relieved when it turned out the floor was still level. The daylight we could see between the floor and the wall was created because the plaster had been falling off the wall.

Apparently, when the problem was first discovered, decades earlier, it was resolved by placing an extra-wide piece of baseboard on top to cover it up.

The repair then became less complicated, but more expensive. We hired a guy to put up a false "stud" wall in front of the old plaster on two sides of the office, giving us drywall instead of plaster and allowing us to insulate and add new wiring to more adequately quench the 21st century thirst for electricity. We had the west wall painted a nice, sedate gray.

The east side of the office was a whole nother story. For years, Sybil has wanted to hang wallpaper printed like old newspapers on the walls in the office. About a year ago, she found the wallpaper she wanted on the internet and ordered it.

It's been sitting in the box it arrived in ever since.

I'd have as much chance of successfully removing your spleen as I do of hanging wallpaper in any way approaching competence.

But the guy we hired to build the new walls said he could hang the wallpaper. Was he sure? Had he done it before? "Many times," he assured us.

He did an excellent job framing up the walls, and hanging, taping, and mudding the drywall. His paint job on the west wall was very good. I had no reason to disbelieve him.

Because our work schedule is too hectic to accommodate simultaneous construction noises and activity, he agreed to do the work on the weekends, and we were both excited to come up to the office one recent Sunday to check out the wallpaper job, which was the finishing touch.

In a matter of seconds, it became clear that not only had our carpenter never hung wallpaper before, he had little capacity for figuring it out. It looked like a couple of drunk monkeys had hung the wallpaper. Blind-drunk too, not just a little tipsy.

There was no attempt made to match the pattern, and he looked at us quizzically when we suggested such a thing was common practice. Small pieces were patched in to fill out bare spots. He even glued up a few pieces sideways.

He put up some brief resistance, but ultimately I have to believe that even he realized how terrible the wallpaper looked. He agreed to buy new wallpaper and reapply it... this time with experienced help.

It looks much better the second time around, and our office is at least moderately more pleasant than it once was.

There is still some purple and orange paint to reckon with... and some battered paneling... and some cracked tile... and the restroom... and the disastrous back shop...

But we're getting there.