It’s still March, but we’re dying. Since we’re running on little sleep and a lot of stress, we’re going to share some (sort of) random thoughts and things we’ve been meaning to write about. Enjoy.

We’re stressed and busy

Like we just mentioned, we’re trying to hold it together for fourth quarter. Working on the website takes up a significant amount of our lives, and, in addition, Jena’s been really involved with the Relay for Life committee lately, while J-Curt has had lots of work to do for the play. This means we haven’t been treating ourselves as well as we should be. We’ve been running low on sleep, and though some of us (J-Curt) were able to catch up by sleeping for 13 hours Friday night, we still wish we had more time for ourselves.

People read our stories

This week, assistant superintendent of administrative and educational services Alvie Cater dropped in to ask for our input on some district-related things. While here, he mentioned a phone call he received earlier this week. A major news station in Kansas City contacted him looking to get in touch with a source we had written about on the website for our third quarter special project. Though the reason said station wanted to get in touch with Ashleigh Meyer was regarding the attacks in Belgium, we still felt honored that such a major news source read our special project.

There are a lot of spring sports

As you probably know, we are responsible for coordinating coverage for the website, the bulk of it being athletic coverage. This quarter, there are more sports activities than in the past winter and fall seasons, so that’s more coordinating and editing. While more posts are definitely a good thing, it makes for more work on our part, which can be exhausting.

We won state (again)

We had almost no gap between winter and spring sports, mainly because of the boys basketball team winning the school’s second-ever state title toward the beginning of spring break. State coverage basically coordinated itself, since so many people wanted to be a part of the action, which was great for us. Being behind the scenes of a lot of sports and activities gives us an interesting connection to them, and, because of that, we were happy to see another sports team end its season with a state title. Now, the goal is for journalism to end the year strong with another state title.

It’s not that we want to leave high school, but we want to go to college

We love Mill Valley. We really, really love it. High school has provided amazing opportunities and experiences for both of us, especially during our senior years. But, we’re just about ready to leave. It’s not that we hate Mill Valley, but we’re ready for the new opportunities and experiences college will bring. (P.S. J-Curt is still deciding on a college, but will be studying — you guessed it — journalism, and Jena is going to the University of Kansas in the fall to study occupational therapy.)

Check it out: Like we said above, the Jaguars won another state title recently as the boys basketball team defeated the Kapaun Mt. Carmel Crusaders in the 5A state championship. We had a lot of awesome reporting and photography going on for the state game, and you should totally check it out. Our photographers put up three galleries from the game — one for the first half, one for the second half and overtime and one for the postgame celebration. Our reporters wrote two stories — one about the game itself, and one about the seniors that played their final game during the championship.

Lessons of the week:

J-Curt: Putting in effort pays off. Obviously, I’ve known that for a while, but I re-realized it recently. After nearly four year of putting a lot of effort into academics and extracurriculars, I got into two universities that I honestly wasn’t so sure I had a chance with. Seeing my effort pay off like that motivates me to put in enough effort to finish out my senior year strong, and, if you can’t tell from reading our blog this week, I need that motivation.

Jena: This week started fourth quarter of my senior year. I have no idea where the time went, but this week I’ve realized how much I love my fellow newsies (and yerds). As much as I joke about leaving the J-room and never coming back, I really will miss being a part of such a stellar staff. Particularly this week, I’ve laughed and sassed everyone more than usual. I’ve learned to not take time — even if there’s not much left — for granted. I’ll end this lesson with an iconic inside joke: That’s not a lesson, it’s a chinchilla.

Seniors Justin “J-Curt” Curto and Jena Smith are the editors-in-chief of Mill Valley News online. They appreciate captioned photos, categorized and tagged stories, staff members who don’t text about web assignments at 11 p.m., teachers and students who talk about things they read on Mill Valley News and all things multimedia.