Well, if you look at the number of this week’s Friday Inspiration post—365—that means I have officially spent an entire year of my life writing these posts since I started back in November 2015. When I first started, I thought it would just be a way to share all the fun stuff I found on the internet throughout the week, and it is, but it’s also a job I take seriously enough to show up for every week.
If you’ve enjoyed reading these posts every week, or every once in a while, maybe sharing some of the links with friends, and they’ve added a little bit of joy to your life—or some of my other work has—I have some news:
I’m going to keep doing it. All of it. As long as I can make it work.
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Have you ever been watching the credits of a movie and asked, “What’s a focus puller?” No? OK, well, anyway, here’s a great short film on why you never notice the work of one of the most important/difficult jobs in filmmaking. (video)
I may be biased toward this episode of 99 Percent Invisible because I grew up watching 6-on-6 Iowa girls’ basketball, which went away right when I entered high school, but the history of the game, its small-town origins, and the fact that its existence wasn’t necessarily black-and-white sexist (as I’d always assumed), all made this a great podcast. And of course, the joy of the women who played it reliving some of their glory days (111 points by a single player in one game! Multiple times, at that).
Great piece about our local former ski resort-turned-backcountry-ski area/mountain bike park, Marshall Mountain, and the battle to keep it accessible to the public, in Adventure Journal/High Country News.
I definitely lean more toward Marie Kondo’s ethos of having less stuff lying around to get in the way of your life, but I am also happy to see she is admitting she’s not a a superhero but a human just like the rest of us, and kind of learning to live with the messiness of having three young kids at home.
If you are paying attention to the news/showdown/struggle over water allocation of the Colorado River, and you’re wondering “what about all this snow?”—my friend Sinjin at American Rivers put together a great piece explaining everything.
in 2020, Emily Pennington decided to visit all 62 U.S. National Parks in one year, much of which she wrote about for Outside as she was doing it. Her new book about the journey (and all the other stuff that happened in that year), Feral: Losing Myself and Finding My Way in America’s National Parks, came out this week.
“According to the Stormfax Weather Almanac(Opens in a new window), which tracks Phil’s predictions, the groundhog has only been right 39 percent of the time over the past 136 years. 39 percent. That’s abysmal! This is your god, western Pennsylvania?”
—Brendan
