🎂 Week Notes 037
🗓️ // Sep 7, 2025 - Sep 13, 2025
It was a big birthday week for the family with me celebrating my 52nd birthday and my son, Houston, his 19th. So that meant back-to-back dinners and desserts of our choosing as well. I went with a homemade Panda Express-style Chinese feast and a raspberry blackberry pie. Houston went Mexican and got Mary to try her hand at homemade tamales, homemade Mexican chocolate ice cream, and churros. Everything turned out awesome, although we didn't have a full-size churro gun to extrude the batter in the typical 1" diameter. Still delicious though.
🏡 The voles that have been periodically creating huge mounds in our yard for the last several years returned in force this week after a quiet summer. I've tried traps, smoke, and various other methods to limited success. My current method is to take a pitchfork to all the surrounding tunnels to create some aeration and then rake back in most of the excess dirt I don't successfully return to the hole it originated from.
🏡 Still haven't finished taking down the pool. It's mostly clean and empty. Just need to vacuum it out one more time and disassemble it.
📚 Mary has been pursuing some new part-time job opportunities that are more in line with her religious education interests and experience, and will be starting up on a new one next week. Excited for her to get to do more work like this.
⚽️ Got in one soccer practice this week, but missed a couple more because of birthday parties and girls being under the weather. Hopefully, everybody will be ready for game time today.
Playing
- 🧙♂ Just about wrapped up my drafting of Edge of Eternities this week. I may do one to two more, but I'm somewhat undecided on whether I want to spend the necessary gold. Still debating on whether I'll get the mastery for the next set since it's not Spider-Man on Arena.
Watching
📺 Star Trek: Strange New Worlds S3E10: New Life and New Civilizations 👍 Underwhelming finish to the season and the Batel storyline. There were things that I liked about the episode (Kirk and Spock mind meld!), but it was all handled in a pretty clunky fashion, and I'm not really convinced that Pike wouldn't be completely devastated by everything.
📺 Dan da Dan: S1E23: Hey, It's a Kaiju 👍👍 Another wild episode as the Kaiju kicks everybody's butts and rampages through the city. The giant robot assembly at the end was unexpected and hilarious. I love how genre-bending and blending this show is!
⚽️ Spurs 3 - 0 West Ham - I had to watch in on replay because it was going on during my daughters' soccer games, but great road win in the first London Derby of the season. Xavi Simons looked super promising and set up Sarr for the opening header off an excellent corner.
Listening
⚽️🎙 A lot of Spurs podcasts for still being in the middle of the international break, but with Daniel Levy out, Spurs getting offers despite not being for sale, and Ange Postecolou taking over at Forest plenty to discuss.
🎶 A new Twenty One Pilots album, Breach, dropped this week, so I've done a couple of listen-throughs. I feel weirdly ambivalent about it despite finding it perfectly listenable and genuinely catchy. This is in direct contrast to their song from the Arcane Season 2 Soundtrack, The Line, which has huge emotional resonance because of how it tied into that story. I can only conclude that I need some kind of external context for their music because most of the time it just doesn't resonate with me personally.
Reading
📚 Ironheart: Born to Fly 👍 Enjoyable read, and I liked how different it was from the MCU series that clearly borrowed a little bit from it. The 10 Rings were particularly more interesting to me than The Hood stuff in the MCU (although I did like his crew of misfit criminals). I know that Riri being somewhat at odds with both Miles Morales and Shuri is kind of cool characterization, but I still found it annoying, particularly the initial Wakanda scenes.
📚 NIghtwing 1: Better than Batman 👍👍 This ended up being a lot cooler than I expected from the initial couple of chapters. Lots of fun fake outs, twists, and turns before the end. Nightwing's erstwhile partner, Raptor, being directly linked to his pre-Batman past was very cool, and the climactic showdown was 😘👌.