While I was on vacation the week of Aug. 13 a letter from the Washington Newspaper Publishers Association arrived.

I found it on my desk the morning of Aug. 18 — yes, I stopped by the office on a Saturday morning while on vacation, I left something at the office that I needed, anyway — and was quite pleased with the news it brought.

“Dear Publisher: Congratulations! Your newspaper has won one or more awards in each of the following divisions of the 2012 Better Newspaper Contest:

News, Photography … Staff members whose entries placed 1st, 2nd or 3rd are: Kris Hill, TJ Martinell.”

A little background, first, though.

I hate newspaper contests. It stems, of course, from not winning the first couple times I entered while watching others whom I considered of lesser ability take home awards for articles I thought were, well, inferior to my work.

What can I say, I was in my mid-20s, I thought I was hot stuff. When I became a parent I realized I wasn’t and I knew nothing.

Another reason I am leery of contests is that for some reason I was asked to judge a similar contest when I was a cub reporter working in Las Vegas. Barely 22, I had been on the job as an intern at a daily newspaper for six months, so my qualifications at that point were lacking.

My supervisor asked me to help judge the contest I think so I could learn from the experience. I just hope I did a decent job.

Finally, contests are a royal pain the butt. It is incredibly time consuming pulling together entries then submitting them even though we can do quite a bit electronically. Essentially it makes me want to bang my head against a wall and hire a high school kid, pay her minimum wage to cut out pages or convert InDesign documents to PDFs just so TJ Martinell and I don’t have to do it.

In this process, Dennis Box is largely unhelpful, only chiming in to tell me to make sure we enter some stuff and then once more to tell us we did it all wrong.

Anyway, I finally won my first award last year for my series about teen drug and alcohol abuse called “Under the Influence.” Third try is the charm, I suppose.

This year’s WNPA contest is the third time we’ve entered any of TJ’s work, so, I guess that old axiom rings true for him, as well.

This is actually the third time in the past year I’ve received notice I’ve won an award — in the spring I took second place for best schools or education coverage for my series of columns about my participation on the Kentlake Site Council in a national contest — so I guess now I’m just used to winning.

No, no, I’m being sarcastic.

Really, for me it’s much more rewarding to see that TJ has won his first award. Considering he’s been in the newspaper business for roughly 18 months — it took me 10 years to win my first award, OK, I stopped entering contests for a while, like eight years — this is a tremendous accomplishment.

As I told him Aug. 20 when I returned from a week off, I am extremely proud of him. TJ’s work has come a long way since we first hired him in April 2011 and it really shows in the pieces he’s written, particularly in the past six months.

As someone who has been responsible for mentoring him, yes now is an appropriate time to lament his fate, along with Dennis, this means more to me than another certificate with my name on it.

We aren’t sure yet what either of us have won and we won’t find out until Sept. 28. Neither of us will likely be at the award ceremony which is part of a larger WNPA conference set for that weekend in Yakima. We will both have a lot on our plates by late September between the Tahoma and Kent school districts, coverage of three cities, as well as fall prep sports along with all the other stuff we do around here that you see in the paper as well as up on the web.

Thing is, we win awards not because we have our eye on that kind of prize, but because we try every week to give you the best community newspaper possible filled with stories about your friends, your neighbors, your kids, and how your tax dollars are being spent by entities of all sizes.

Awards are nice. They look good on the curriculum vitae, especially for a young reporter like TJ who will surely outgrow us here and move on to bigger and better things someday, but ultimately what’s most important is the fact that those are byproducts of fulfilling our mission as a newspaper.

As legendary UCLA men’s basketball coach John Wooden used to say, “It’s the little details that are vital. Little things make big things happen.” It’s the little things that TJ does around here that has led to this first award (or awards). I suspect it won’t be the last.

That letter was definitely a good way to end my week off. Hope you are as excited as I am about the news. We’ll keep you posted.