On March 14 of this year, I said goodbye to The Evening Sun after 18 ½ years working as the sports editor. I suppose I should have written, “see you later.”

It was a long farewell to the Norwich readers on a couple of fronts. One, I informed my supervisors of my departure three months in advance, and two; I summarized my career in about 2,000 words. My former boss, Jeff Genung, who spent nearly five more years with the newspaper, wrapped up his treatise in about half as many words

An editor at a larger newspaper may not have afforded me the opportunity to write a final column, and if he did, he would have surely placed constraints on the amount of space I used. The beauty of writing for a hyper-local newspaper is that I seldom had limits.

As a writer for the Sun, I have always had the enviable freedom to write about topics I thought were interesting to our readers, and I used as much space as necessary to complete my thoughts. Since I was a one-man-shop, though, I had to be as spot-on as possible with my spelling, punctuation, and grammar. If a mistake is made, you have no one to blame but yourself. Before any writer puts his name at the top of an article, he needs to take great care with the editing, the clarity, and the ease of reading. Best-case scenario, always have a second set of eyes to review your material.

My second set of eyes the past seven years has been Aidamarie Rull. The past several years, I have mentioned her by name in numerous articles, and for a couple of years, I used Aida’s talents as an artist to produce pencil renderings of our athletes of the week. She graduated from Gonzaga Preparatory School in Spokane, Wash. as part of a class of nearly 300, and was voted by her peers as the most artistic. She furthered her education earning a college degree from the Art Institute of Seattle.

Summing up: Aida has beaucoup artistic credentials.

After meeting her online through mutual friends in late 2006, we maintained a long-distance relationship for two years (Aida lived in Florida) writing each other several times a week, while also speaking on the phone nearly every day. Eventually, we merged our families in 2009, and after nearly seven years together – June 15 – officially blended our families in matrimony