🧙♂ Week Notes 072
🗓 // May 10, 2026 - May 16, 2026
First week of summer mode on campus and I enjoyed the general emptiness and abundant parking. Not that it mattered, I always get to campus early enough to get free street parking. Summer projects are ramping up of course, but so far things are generally pretty chill for me.
⚽️ Spurs 1-1 Leeds - Couldn't watch this one live unfortunately because Xfinity on Campus was having issues on campus (so annoying). Maddison finally made his return from last year's ACL tear, did some good things, and was completely robbed of a dramatic penalty at the end of the game when he was taken down in the box. He gets absolute no respect or protection from officials and it doesn't help the EPL product at all.
🌧️ Finally got a little bit of rain midweek, ironically the day after I started watering our backyard again (I have to do it pretty late in the evening when the dogs are mostly lying around the house waiting for bed. Also had our first rainy, windy, and fairly miserable spring soccer Saturday today. I almost wore shorts until Mary shamed me into putting some on warmer sweatpants and thank goodness for that.
⚽️ Zephyr 4 - 0 Brooklyn - Huge win to give themselves a shot to make the playoffs. Incredible performance with their highest winning score to date, but they still need help from Ft. Lauderdale against Dallas Trinity- a team that is inexplicably in fourth place despite having a -9 goal differential heading into the game.
🏀 Did a bunch of high school yearbook research on my dad's career at Cascade High School thanks to classmates.com. The digitized yearbook collection they have for subscribers is a pretty amazing resource and I was able to look at all nine years that he was there at the Turner, OR based high school. I also found an awesome Oregon State high school records pdf that he was a part of as well.
Playing
- 🧙♂ Good week of Magic Arena. Played a little bit of Secrets of Strixhaven drafting and finally reached my 100 drafts "Dauntless Drafter" achievement. Racked up a bunch of wins in Midweek Magic which was a cool Standard variation this week.
Watching
📺 Blue Lock 👍👍 Started this semi-dystopian soccer anime series on a whim a few weeks ago, but stopped partly through episode 3. Picked it up again this in the last couple of days and now I'm fully invested. Basically the premise is that Japan has good players and teamwork in their National team, but they don't have the right cultural mindset for producing world class strikers. So this mad scientist type develops a program called Blue Lock that takes the high school sticker prospects in the country, isolates them in this locked down training facility and then pits them against each other in a series of games and challenges that will allow them to advance or end their international careers before they even begin.
📺 For All Mankind S5:E8 👍👍 The Mars conflict is really ramping up, Kelly ends up leading the Titan mission, and lots of questions about how it's all going to play out over the next two episodes now that the M6 military has arrived and the Marsies are running out of food. If they can hold out long enough the Soviet Union could dissolve and take the M6 with it, but completely unclear if they can hold out much longer.
📺 Mr. Monk's Last Case: A Monk Movie 👍 I always enjoyed the original series, but not quite to the extant of the rest of my family who have rewatched it multiple times. I thought this one was good, but a little bit of a bummer given the circumstances and Monk's depressed mindset, but the ending was pretty meaningful.
📺 Psych S5:E16 Yang 3 in 2D 👍👍 Another Mary and family favorite. They're in the middle of a full series rewatch (I've never done a full watch through myself), but I've been jumping in for the Yin and Yang trilogy episodes and enjoying them quite a bit because of the guest stars involved.
Reading
- 📚🧙♂ Started reading The Hobbit to the family after getting encouragement from the boys to revisit the tradition with their younger sisters. I don't remember when I read it to them, but it's been long enough that I appreciate getting to revisit the classic with fresh eyes. With Wizards of the Coast also set to release a new set based on the book this summer as well it seems like a good time to experience the story again and introduce the girls to Bilbo, Gandalf, and company.