π₯§ Week Notes 034
ποΈ // Aug 17, 2025 - Aug 23, 2025
This was a busy birthday week for Mary with four long shifts Monday through Wednesday, leading up to L's tenth birthday on Thursday. She handled it with aplomb, though, and still found time to whip up a ton of delicious runzas and bake a beautiful lattice-crust cherry pie, and two different home-made ice creams (cheesecake and vanilla) all at the birthday girl's request. A much more typical week for me, especially since they finally fixed the AC at work and I followed my normal in-office schedule.
β½οΈ I would have said Spurs winning 2-0 at City was far too much to hope for going into the game, but I'll take it. It certainly helped that City seemed to be more Bizarro than Superman this morning. Johnson opened up the scoring, and then Paulinha took advantage of City miscues in their box to put away the second goal.
π Both weekday runs with the girls this week ended up being at dusk and shorter than I would have liked because of the daytime temperatures, but still pleased that we were able to get them in.
π‘ My friend Morgan Richter has been a big source of creative inspiration over the last couple of weeks through her huge back catalog of videos, podcast appearances, old blog posts, and recent books. It's been quite fun to fully dive into all the stuff she's been working on over the last four or five years after tuning in on a much more occasional basis in recent years.
Watching
πΊ Dan da Dan S1E20: You Can Do It, Okarun! ππ This might be the most audio-visually epic battle episode yet during Okarun and Aira's team-up against the classical composer spirits. Looking forward to the Okarun - Evil Eye showdown next week now that he's leveled up and found his fighting rhythm.
πΊ When Gen-X Ruled the Multiplex Ep. 24 - St. Elmo's Fire π This is the first episode in this brilliant series that made me actively thankful that I've never watched this movie featuring the Brat Pack as terrible 80's 20-somethings careening into adulthood, and now will never have to. That said, I'm still intrigued to watch the Brat-Pack auto-documentary that came out on Hulu earlier this year.
πΊ Star Trek: Strange New Worlds S3E7: What is Starfleet? π A real clunker of an episode because they tried to put a documentary skin on a conventional episode, and Berto's anti-Starfleet agenda was completely at odds with everything we've seen the character do previously.
πΉ The preseason Asia trip vlog from James Maddison's new YouTube channel was awesome up until his injury, and then it turned devastating. He's a completely natural vlogger, and his interactions with Brennan, Archie, and Sonny were particularly entertaining. The bawling Korean supfan that gifted him a framed picture of him kissing the Europa League trophy was intense!
Playing
- π§ββ Worked on my dailies and Midweek Magic, but skipped a few days. Will probably play more ranked constructed next week with the season wrapping up then get back to drafting in September.
Reading
π The Divide ππ Finished at the beginning of the week and posted my review yesterday.
π¦Έπ» Nightwing I - Better than Batman π Enjoying the first couple of issues of the Dick Grayson experience as he attempts to single-handedly take down the Parliament of Owls from within. What could possibly go wrong? π
Listening
π Surely You Can't Be Serious Podcast: The Eagles "Their Greatest Hits 1971-1975" (1976) Track by Track! π Solid episode featuring the classic tunes straight out of my early childhood.
π SYCBSP: Miami Vice Soundtrack (1985): Track by Track with a Bonus Track! ππ Great episode enhanced by a special guest appearance from noted Miami Vice expert, Morgan Richter! Really happy to add the SYCBSP to my podcast rotation.
Projects
π‘ Not overly productive this week on random projects, but got out and did a bunch of backyard cleanup and fence repair today.
π Not saying I'm going to do it at all, but I had the passing thought that there are a lot of basketball movies out there that could be collected up into a series of blog posts or YouTube videos.
Writing
π Started thinking more about my long-simmering high school basketball novel again, and jotted down a few new things that occurred to me recently, but actual writing on it is a long ways off.
π Spent a fair amount of time cleaning up and copy editing the economics paper that will be the final paper of Houston's high school career. Found it harder than his previous papers because economics seems to have ramped up his naturally formal writing style another notch.