Don’t read too much into it
Everyone wants to get it right.
Sometimes an email reads stronger than the actual message. A note that seemed foreboding is a formality. Feedback that seems like the end of the world is actually straightforward. A seemingly curt email is simply someone giving you the information you need, nothing more, nothing less.
Right now we are putting the finishing touches on a new website for a client. We’re at the quality assurance phase (aka QA), which, for those of you not in the biz, means we are ensuring everything works and looks right. I used to overthink this kind of thing—what did I do wrong?—but now I realize that it’s just a part of the process. It’s a group of people collaborating both creatively and logistically to make something work.
No one is actually mad. Everyone just wants to get it right. Onto the links!
An article
I loved this New Yorker story about the heroes and thrill seekers that volunteer for Backcountry Unit Search and Rescue (BUSAR, for short) in the Great Smoky Mountains. Fun fact: It’s America’s busiest National Park. (I would have guessed Yosemite.) There are all sorts of details about hairy rescues, how the BUSAR team trains, and what drives a person to sign up for excruciating search and rescue missions. I can’t stop thinking about the phrase nothing scared him more than the wind:
He was telling me about it over sandwiches in the park, at a picnic table beside the Little River, when an acorn the size of a golf ball very nearly fell on my head. Sharbs went “Holy shit!” Then he said, “Also a big killer in the park? Falling tree branches.” Dead, dangling limbs are called widow-makers. Jonathan Dee, the park’s medical director, who is a family physician, told me that a patient once asked him which of the park’s wild animals frightened him most; he said that nothing scared him more than the wind.
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A movie
Saw Hamnet. TPF Review: Incredible acting. Way too sad. Grief porn. The entire theater was sobbing for two hours.
It did, however, make me want to see everything young Billy Shakespeare’s wife—and the real star of Hamnet—Jessie Buckley has been in.
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A printer
Finally broke down and bought a printer. I will miss my walks to the Ann Arbor Public Library to print official Three Point Four Media, LLC documents. Memories! One time I sent a sensitive financial document to a printer at a different library branch—somehow if you’re on the library wifi you have access to any library printers you’ve previously used?—and a very kind librarian called the other library and they immediately shredded all the documents for me. That’s public service.
I went for a Brother, because that’s what friend of the newsletter Molly Young suggested when we chatted over the summer. It’s great so far, no notes.
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A book
I am very slowly making my way through Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache universe. Just finished the second installment, A Fatal Grace. I didn’t like it as much as the debut, Still Life, but it was nonetheless a real pleasure to read. Mystery novels really are page turners. I especially liked all the scenes in the cozy Quebec bistros lit by fires and filled with crunchy baguettes and big red wines.
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A ski race
Speaking of people getting into trouble in the wilderness. This weekend is the Noquemanon Ski Marathon, a 50-kilometer cross country ski race in Marquette, Michigan, that I look forward to every year. The forecast is brutal and borderline dangerous. The TPF coaches and front office have advised me to sit this one out. Frostbite and frozen corneas are nothing to mess with. We’ll spend some time in the sauna and be back stronger for 2027.
The guy we did this Q&A with last week knows a few things about arctic weather.
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Just a note to say I always look forward to these. Been an email subscriber forever, don’t even know how we first connected (I edit Truly*Adventurous, maybe that’s it?). Anyway, just occurred to me that this has been a one-way street so thought I’d shout some joy at ya. Thanks for the heart felt shares and awesome tips and advice, which I always find myself reading to the end. Good luck on the ski marathon!