Some of the papers went missing last week. Both Sloan and I were pretty sure we didn’t have them all – me when I picked them up and she when she met the volunteers for delivery.
I texted our guy and he said they were all there, but you get a feel when you handle them every week.
We were also missing the post office paperwork which Sloan discovered when she dropped the papers with Renae for the mail.
There were calls back and forth with the printer assuring us they were sent, and we must have lost them, and a call to the post office from the printer with the electronic version of our documents.
This all happened on Wednesday shipping and Thursday mail and delivery with me thinking I’d lost my marbles the whole time and questioning my existence. But then on Friday, VINDICATION.
Sure enough, I got a call from our Eureka buddy, Trina, who said she had an entire crate of our papers and a big envelope with our mail paperwork. Our shipping guy goes Hawthorne, Fallon, Sparks, Eureka, and then Ely and apparently, there was a snafu.
Not only in possession of a hilarious sense of humor, our Trina is also a great human and offered to meet me halfway for paper transfer. In a matter of minutes, I was on the road – an impulsive excursion across the Nevada desert to finally meet our girl in person. We’ve known her for a couple years now through email and in spite of several conversations discussing the starting of a local, community newspaper none of us have ever had enough free time to get together.
Turns out, half-way, based on the way each of us drives was at the New Pass Station Historical Marker, an old stage stop. Isn't that fitting.
And she’s a hoot! As expected. But in this little world focused on community newspapering we’ve sort of gotten used to that. The more of these people we meet the clearer comes the glimpse into the souls of people who dedicate their every waking hour to the flow of information in their communities. And the clearer we see our own.
We’re all working ourselves into the ground, wearing twelve hats and spinning forty-nice plates, and have developed a sort of gallows humor born of the mental gymnastics that comes from keeping a broad, objective perspective of our communities while digging into the minute details of each, individual story. There’s a bit of a personality split that allows us to, with equal vigor, write summaries of public meetings, investigate misbehavior, run QuickBooks, and figure out the logistics of an efficient delivery schedule.
There have been plenty of times over the past five years when we question our strange existence and to find someone who does the same thing day in and day out for years on end is a curiosity and a blessing. We are not alone in our strangeness – we are not unique.
So while we are grateful for our sister in newspapering and we check our shipping guy a little more diligently, we’ll be right here…
…Keeping you Posted.
Rach
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