This week The Checker Maven marks five years of continuous, uninterrupted, on-time publication. It's a milestone reached by just the smallest fraction of web sites, and we take what we believe is justified pride in our achievement.

Our original business plan called for ten years of publication. We're halfway there, and G-d willing, we'll travel the rest of the distance, and perhaps even continue on past that point. We can't predict the future, so we'll just keep publishing, one week at a time, for as long as fate and fortune allow.

Some very big changes are coming, but hopefully you won't notice them. No, we're not going to change our format (though we've thought about it); we know you like the familiar appearance of our weekly columns and we aren't going to "modernize" our look or create confusion by moving everything around. Neither are we going to abandon our weekly Saturday morning schedule--- you've told us how you look forward to the weekend and your Saturday cup of coffee with The Checker Maven.

But we are going to close our Santa Fe office, and transfer all of our operations to our Honolulu location. This will happen around March 2010. Like so many companies in America these days, our corporate parent, Mr. Fred Investments, is "reducing its footprint" as they say, and the bottom line is that we can no longer maintain two office locations for an operation that produces only very limited indirect revenue.

We're grateful to you, our reader, for staying with us for so long. The Checker Maven would be pointless if no one ever visited our pages. But you do visit, several thousand of you each and every week, and that keeps us going. Thank you to every one of you for five great years, and here's to the next five!

And now, as a special fifth anniversary feature, we present a new work of checker fiction, a 3,000 word short story entitled "Once Again to Knighton." We hope you enjoy it.