Unless you were taking full advantage of last weekend’s mild second half, including that glorious Sunday morning as all December days should look and feel, you might have noticed your Morning Catch email missing Sunday and our websites missing for much of the weekend. We were missing them, for sure.

Thanks to circumstances way beyond our control involving a server, anyone who tried to visit our sites, including us, couldn’t. It’s about the last thing any media outlet wants. How could we show and tell you how Breakfast with Santa in Wiscasset and Wiscasset, Waterville & Farmington Railway Museum’s Victorian Christmas in Alna went on Saturday or give you the results of Wolverine basketball and Gingerbread Spectacular in Boothbay Harbor?

We could work on the stories offline, but the most important part, sharing them online, had to wait.  If these had been breaking stories instead, like a fire, crash or standoff scene to avoid, we could have told you on Facebook. Instead of posting a link taking you to the story on our website, you might have seen a post summarizing the news item.

One of the points of news outlets’ sharing posts is to send people to their websites. But emergencies have an overriding importance, so, live websites or not, we’d have managed.

Makes a person want to follow us on Facebook, doesn’t it?

Promoting aside, the outage reminded me of reporting’s pre-internet eras. Urgency matters in any era, for news is a business, and business is a competition. But something lifted a little, being away from the websites. For more than a day, it felt like I was back in the years the only place people’s stories were read was in print. It seems like so long ago now, but it’s all been in the span of a career. From a writing standpoint, it was nice to be back there, just for a little while.

But for the most part, I couldn’t wait to get back online, back to filing something and knowing people could be reading it that same hour or day, maybe well before our nice broadsheet paper hits the stands and mailboxes.

So I hope you missed us. We missed serving you. And may all things server stay running like clockwork again, because we do, for you.

Week’s positive parting thought: The Patriots are back on track. They had a shorter hill to climb Dec. 15, but they still could have faltered, and didn’t!