Times Publisher Brent Cruikshank hit the road to visit company President Alan Cruikshank in Vegas this past weekend, so we decided to let Alan take a break from his history lessons in order to have a nice visit with his son.

I guess that means I’m your substitute teacher for the week, though I won’t be diving back quite as far as Alan has in his columns exploring the history of Fountain Hills.

In fact, I’m only going to be looking back about 18 months.

Hold on a second, don’t stop reading just yet! This isn’t going to be a doom and gloom column about how difficult the pandemic has been on everybody. We’ve reported on plenty of that over the past year, so I figure it’s time to look at some of the positives.

I’ll start that journey here at The Fountain Hills Times. Despite all the obstacles that got thrown in our way and all of the adjustments we had to make in order to roll with the punches, The Times’ staff has continued to put out an issue every week, filled with as much of the news as we could pull together. That required us to get creative with some of our coverage and procedures through the bulk of the pandemic, but I’m proud of the work we’ve done and the issues we’ve continued to print on a weekly basis.

Some of those issues have been a bit thinner than our readers have grown accustomed to, but that primarily had to do with the state of the world this past year. In the heart of the pandemic, schools cut out just about all extracurricular activities, clubs and organizations closed shop and community events had to be drastically scaled back. Put simply, there was just a lot less to report on while everyone did their best to avoid getting sick.

As you may have noticed in more recent weeks, though, that’s started to turn around. Heck, we were even able to put out two sections last week due to all of the newsworthy activities going on around town.

We may not yet be back to normal, but signs of community life picking back up can be seen all around us. There are more sports and school activities to cover, various clubs are getting back to holding meetings and many of our regular events have started popping back up around the community. We had Oktoberfest just last week and, based on what I witnessed firsthand Friday evening, folks were having a great time in Fountain Park.

And speaking of schools and sports, readers likely have noticed the work of our new reporter, George Zeliff. We managed to cruise through the spring and summer minus a reporter but, once it became clear that things were going to get busier this fall, we figured it was time to bring someone new onto staff. He’s done great work so far and is looking forward to focusing on the news that impacts many of our young families here in Fountain Hills.

It feels like the community is finally starting to come out of hibernation. There’s still plenty of work to be done and we have to keep looking out for one another but, in the meantime, I’m happy to see little bits of normalcy starting to pop up from time to time.

The holidays are always filled with fun community activities and many of those are being planned for the months ahead, so here’s to things continuing to improve, one step at a time.