Entry 789: TV Takes 2025

Last week it was music; this week it is TV. Here is a list, in no particular order, of five TV shows I watched in 2025 with a brief (except for the first one) take on them. I'll do my best not to include any major spoilers.

Stranger Things

When Ted Lasso ran its final episode a few years ago, I wrote a post detailing why and to what extent I disliked the last season. My mom read it, and then she said to me, "I agree with everything you said, but I still liked watching the show." This is where I find myself with Stranger Things after consuming the first half of the final season. I don't think the show is very good anymore, and yet I can't wait for the next batch of episodes to drop. I've coined the acronym ABE (Always Bail Early) for TV watching once a shows starts to go downhill, but I think I have to amend that to U BE (Usually Bail Early), because there are a few programs that I want to stick out until the end, even as they founder to the finish line.

Why do I think Stranger Things is bad now? Many reasons, but first and foremost is that there has been a lot of Eleven on the show this season, and she is simply not a good character anymore. She hasn't been for a while. One of my hot takes is that the series would be better if they martyred her off a long time ago. Her story lines when she's not actively fighting evil are incredibly dull, and her powers often serve as a contrived narrative crutch. Throughout the series she's vacillated between normal girl with no supernatural abilities and all-knowing, all-powerful being. Where precisely she is on that spectrum depends almost exclusively on what's needed to advance the plot at that moment. It doesn't help that she's currently spending all her time with Hopper, who has somehow transformed himself from a real person -- a flawed, troubled recluse -- into an indestructible action-hero. He's now a mix between Arnold Schwarzenegger in Commando and Predator, taking out paramilitary warriors with one hand and inhuman monsters with the other.

Hopper's arc is emblematic of another big problem with the show: The plot armor of all the main characters. The only people who die are random townspeople/military personale and newly introduced sacrificial lambs -- Bob, Billy, Eddie, etc.* This has two knock-on effects that make the show less intriguing than it could be: 1) The many battles between our heroes and Vecna's minions feel super low-stakes and not very interesting; 2) the cast gets bloated to the point that characters have to be hidden away (sometimes literally) for large swaths of the season to make the scripts manageable. At this point, the show runners are pot committed to El -- they missed their opportunity to write her off -- but there are definitely some characters we (or at least I) could do without: Jonathan (really? the love triangle with Steve and Nancy, again?), Murray (completely superfluous), and Max (good character, but they clearly didn't know what to do with her this season), to name a few.

*And Barb. Remember poor awkward Barb? 

The sheer size of the cast means screen time is at a premium, and the writers seem to have dealt with this by having almost all the dialog on the show be comprised of characters taking turns explain convoluted plot points to each other (and thus the audience). First, Will is up to tell us all about how being possessed by Vecna is currently affecting him. Then, Mike will expound upon what it all means. Next, Henderson will lay out why that's a problem they have to solve. Then, Nancy will formulate a plan, and so on and so forth. It's not so much dialog, as it is serial explanatory monologues. Well, it's that and Easter egg reference to things from the '80s (which admittedly I'm a sucker for). There is very little actual character development, and what there is often feels forced and pandering. Also, the plans they make are unrealistically complex to the nth degree. They would be logistically impossible to pull off in one reality, let alone multiple realities. They are also often ethically dubious, to say the least. If your best idea involves drugging, kidnapping, and detaining an innocent family, you might want to go back to the drawing board (this goes for both the characters and the writers).

With all that said, I still want to watch. I still want to spend time with Steve and Robin and Joyce. I want to watch evil Linda Hamilton get her comeuppance and eviller Henry be vanquished once and for all. I'm still intrigued. I'm barely in, but I am, in fact, still in.

Pluribus

I don't know if this show is the masterpiece some say it is, but I do like it quite a bit so far. There are a lot of ethical/philosophical questions that its premise brings to the surface, and I've heard these explored on various podcasts. But something I was thinking about that I haven't heard anybody else dissect is that this show is an excellent critique of modern liberalism. The protagonist is mostly correct -- she has a strong moral position -- but she's so unappealing in how she expresses her views that she can't bring the people whose help she needs over to her side. She's self-righteous and condescending and hypocritical and unwilling to meet people where they are at. Instead of trying to win people over by listening to what they want and finding common ground, she presents her position as if it's gospel, and then acts as if everybody else is morally degenerate when they aren't completely on board with her. I don't think Vince Gilligan consciously wrote Carol Sturka to embody the flaws of liberalism today, but he knocked it out of the park if he did.

The Middle

My family growing up wasn't in disarray to the same degree as the Hecks, but a lot on the show definitely rings true -- the messy house, the overgrown yard, the beater car. We watched this one as a family, and we all really enjoyed it. It goes on a bit too long (nine seasons), but it never really jumps the shark. It's solidly good-not-great pretty much from start to finish. I didn't love Sue's arc, however. She went from being my favorite character in the early seasons to my least favorite in the middle (as it were). They just made her too much of a cringey loser in high school. In college she got better, and we got more Brad, who surpassed her as my favorite character. Actually, now that I think about it, Frankie was my favorite character all along.

White Lotus

The worst of the three seasons, in my opinion, by a large margin. One and two are basically tied (I give a slight nod to two), and then three is way below them. I still liked it, and I'm still in on the series and eagerly awaiting Season 4 (en France), but I can't deny that Season 3 had some major flaws and was far below the high bar Mike White set for himself. I could easily write another 10,000 words on what exactly I didn't like about Season 3, but I don't have time for that right now, and you probably don't either. So, let's move on.

The Chair Company

Weird and hilarious, but I didn't like ending. It was too abrupt. I don't think Tim Robinson knows how to end things. This is something I've noticed in his skits on I Think You Should Leave. I will be watching a sketch by myself, literally laughing out loud, wondering where it's is going next, and then it just ends.

Until next time... 

Entry 788: That's A Wrapped 2025

It's cold here today, so cold it snowed a bit this morning, so cold I "invented" pajamas. Do you ever do that: Come up with an idea you think is really smart, and maybe it is, but then you research it or think it through a little bit more, and you realize that many other people have already thought about it, many other times, and it's already a well-established thing? I did an extreme version of this the other night. I was getting into bed, and our room runs a little colder than the rest of the house, and S wasn't there to act as my human heater, so I was a bit chilly, so I put on a long-sleeve shirt and sweats to sleep in. It was fine, but my outfit wasn't made specifically for slumber, so it doesn't quite fit as snugly as sleepwear should fit. That set off a light bulb in my head: They should make super comfortable, warm clothes just for sleeping! Genius idea DG, genius idea. Very original.

In other news, Spotify's end-of-the-year "Wrapped" reports came out a few days ago. It's always interesting (to me and perhaps only me) to see what I listened to over the course of the year. Here are my top songs. It's a weird list, but it makes sense, at least the first three slots. It would have taken me over 100 guesses, literally, to come up with songs 4 and 5.

1. A Rihanna song is number one because I listen to her a lot with S. S has worse different musical tastes than me, and so when we listen to music together it's usually one of the pop divas, a lot of Rihanna, a lot of Dua Lipa. It's not my absolute favorite type of music, but I do enjoy it, and I've found myself adding more and more of it to my playlists as I get older. (This Dua Lipa song in particular is a straight bop.) 

2. I love Fleetwood Mac now. I'm pretty late to the game, they've been a band for, like, 50 years, and I only started listening to them relatively recently, but as a middle-aged white guy, I think I'm right where I need to be now. "Dreams" reemerged in the zeitgeist in a major way five years ago with the video of that skateboarding guy drinking juice, but I didn't really start listen to it, or any Fleetwood Mac, until Christine McVie died in 2022. For some reason that prompted a deep-dive on them, and now I celebrate their entire catalog. I do think "Dreams" is their best song, however. It's basically a perfect composition of perfect individual parts. Like, it's amazing to listen to as a whole song, but if instead you just focus on a single part -- Stevie Nicks' vocals, Linsdey Buckingham's guitar, etc. -- you think to yourself There's no way anybody could do this any better.

3. Ugh... It should be "This Song Drives Me Crazy," amirite? It's catchy and nostalgic, so I put it on a playlist, and now I'm regretting it. There are a few songs that come up way more than they should, and this one is the chief offender. It's like, I got 227 songs on my list. How is this one coming up again? I'm making a mental note to delete it next time it comes up. People say-ay I'm obsessed...

4. I have no idea how this one got on the list. It's an okay song, but I don't even ever remember listening to it. I probably wouldn't list this among my top 1,000 favorite songs. I never put the earbuds in and think to myself, You know what I'm in the mood for? "Have Love Will Travel" by The Sonics!

5. Another random one, although one that I do enjoy quite a bit. (What's the Story?) Morning Glory still holds up today. I mentioned in a previous post that I recently read Mark Lanegan's memoir Sing Backwards and Weep, and here's what he says about Liam Gallagher.

Liam Gallagher was an obvious poser, a would-be playground bully. Like all bullies, he was also a total pussy. Always with the big fucking mouth as long as he was safely wrapped in the wet-nurse security blanket of the company of two tall, rotund dudes paid to protect and, I assumed, suffer his endless stream of bullshit.

Perhaps, but I'll be damned if he can't sign the heck out of a pop song. But I quite fancy her mother, and I think that she likes me... 

Alright, I gotta watch the next episode of Pluribus. I have heard it's a banger.

Until next time... 

Entry 787: Thanksgiving Audible

S is out of the country for work again, so I'm on my own with the kids for the week. It's fine, but it's hard to keep their screen time down to a reasonable level. They both have access to so many devices, and I can't be on them constantly about it. Well, I can, but it would be a constant fight, and I wouldn't get anything done I need or want to get done. We all know a big appeal of screen time is that it's easier on the parents. Also, the weather has been terrible, even considering it's the end of November -- some combination of cold, blustery, and rainy -- so I can't send Lil' S2 outside, which is one of my go to moves. That's never worked for Lil' S1, however, as like he told me the other day when I suggested he bundle up and go for a walk, "I've never really liked going outside." Too true, too true.

I am a bit worried about his lifestyle, to be honest, as all he seems to want to do is be on his screens -- play video games on one device while watching other people play video games on another device -- and eat junk food. He'll do other things when we make him. He does his homework somewhat willingly (and gets decent grades), and he does swim team, but left to his own devices, it's just that... devices. He doesn't even seem to want to hang out with his friends that much. He's not proactive with them at all, and a lot of his social engagements are still engineered by S, mom-to-mom arrangements, and he's about to age out of that phase of life completely, if he hasn't already.

There is a lot of chatter these days about how our devices are allowing us, encouraging us even, to essentially opt out of society, which is making us lonely and miserable, and it's only going to get worse as AI gets better and more intrusive. We know the secret to life. It's not actually a secret. We know what makes us happy and satisfied: close meaningful relationships with other people. And yet all of the profit motives in technology right now are aligned to do the exact opposite. A lot of people are getting rich by keeping us isolated in their fake worlds. It's a battle to do see who can pull us in and keep us there the best. It's hard for me to fight, and I'm a middle-age man with an already fully formed brain, who grew up at a time when being bored was still a thing and running around the neighborhood with whatever other kids you could find was how you passed the time.* What do you do if you're an impressionable teenager who's never known any other upbringing, and who is already conditioned to be stimulated by technology every waking moment of the day?

*Thankfully, this is largely how Lil' S2 passes the time as well. We're fortunate in that there are three or four kids on our block who are close to his age. But more so it's a personality thing. Unlike his brother, Lil' S2 likes running around and shooting hoops and riding bikes and throwing a ball. Different kids; different interests; different problems. Lucky S and me, we get the gamut of child difficulties. Although, we don't have a girl, so maybe I shouldn't be too sarcastic. I've heard they're a whole different ball of struggles.  

I don't mean that rhetorically. I mean it literally: What do you do? And what should we do as parents? When S gets back we will have to develop some sort of system to keep things in check. It might be no devices on school days or more requisite activities. I'm not exactly sure yet, but we gotta do something before these bad habits become even more entrenched. Parenting is weird thing. You want to cherish every moment you get with your children because you know how ephemeral it is, and yet you simultaneously cannot wait to come out the other end, when they are fully functional adults, and laugh at the things you used to worry about.

Anyway... as often happens, I set out to write about one thing and ended writing about something entirely different. I was going to write about Thanksgiving, but I'm almost out of time, so I'll just give you the abridged version. My sister came to town with her husband and two boys (20 and 17). My brother-in-law's parents live in Montgomery County, Maryland, so we were going to go to their house for Thanksgiving, but his mom came down with the flu earlier this week and had to cancel. Instead, we went to my brother-in-law's brother's house in Loudoun County, Virginia (a name that unfortunately makes me think of the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial race every time I hear it). It was a good time -- laid back, fun, filling. It was nice to my sister and her family, even if only super briefly. I wish she would have stayed longer, but their whole trip kinda got messed up.

The food was provided by Wegman's, and it wasn't bad, probably just as good as your typical homemade Thanksgiving dinner. I successfully avoided overeating and still ended up with an nontrivial case of indigestion. The problem is that Lil' S1 made a cherry pie, but he made it with maraschino cherries, which are already sugar-soaked, so it was cloying sweet, but for some reason I ate an entire piece anyway. I tasted maraschino creeping up my esophagus for the rest of the night, no matter how many Tums I consumed. Even just thinking about it now makes me wince a little bit. Next time it's a slice of pumpkin pie and maybe,  maybe, a scoop of ice cream.

Alright, that's all for now. Until next time...  

 

Entry 786: Pocket Advocate

I have an idea for a product. It's a million-dollar idea if it's doable, but I don't know if it's doable. It certainly won't be done by me, because I'm not entrepreneurial -- few things sound worse to me than spending my waking hours trying to convince people to give me money -- but for somebody who actually has the business chops to do it, it could be a serious money maker. It's an AI app, and the working name is Pocket Advocate. Although, I also kinda like AIdvocate. I just worry people wouldn't know whether to pronounce it "A-I-vocate" or "aid-vocate." Anyway, here's my Shark Tank pitch...

What's the worse part of society right now? If you asked people to give their top ten answers to this question, I bet going to the doctor would be high on a lot of lists. Going to the doctor is terrible, and one big reason why it's terrible is because it's expensive, and it's confusingly expensive. You never know how much things are going to cost until you get the final bill. Even if you know your insurance plan inside and out (which most people don't), there are always little (and not so little) fees that get tacked on, and every medical clinic has their own policies and services that aren't explicitly spelled out anywhere. They just show up on your bill seemingly out of nowhere.

As an example, I got the bill for my doctor's appointment from a few weeks ago, and there was a charge for "Weekend/After 5:00 pm Service." I made the appointment online and nothing alerted me to this extra fee when I booked it. It wasn't that big, but it's still annoying. And I have a much more expensive example. When I got physical therapy done on my broken finger earlier this year, I was told there was a $10 copay due at each visit. Being that last time I got PT it was $70 a session out-of-pocket, this seemed too good to be true to me. Indeed it was, as after I "graduated" from my therapy, I got a bill for hundreds of dollars with an itemized listing of a bunch of treatments I got while I was there -- things like "hot paraffin wax" and "electrical stimulation." Apparently, it was a $10 copay plus a bunch of other costs I would find out about later.

The thing is, I wasn't even really mad about it because I'm so used to paying for medical expenses this way. I go online and find a doctor in my network, go see them, do what they say, get the bill a few weeks later, and hope I have enough money in my HSA to pay for it. I think a lot of people do things similarly. And that's where Pocket Advocate comes into play. It's an app you run on your phone whenever you go to the doctor, and it listens to everything everybody says and tells you how much your out-of-pocket bill is going to be as you go. When you first install it, you input your insurance information into it, and then when you make an appointment with the doctor, it reads all their documentation (either it grabs it off the web automatically, or you take a picture of it and it reads it that way), so it knows everything. Then it calculates all your costs in real time.

Think about how great this product would be. Not only would there be no surprises, but it could save you a lot of money, because it would allow you to better advocate for yourself (hence the name). For example, suppose the doctor says, "This mole looks benign, but we could get it biopsied just in case." *Ping* A notification from Pocket Advocate: A biopsy will add $250 to your bill. Now maybe you don't want it. Or when a doctor hands you a splint and says you should use it for a broken finger. *Ping* A splint will add $100 to your bill. Or *Ping* Ask how much this will cost. This same implement is available on Amazon for $35. Who wouldn't want this product? Just charge a few bucks to initiate a session plus a few cents per minute of use, and then that's you rolling in the dough. It's brilliant.

Now, there is a big question of whether or not this product is even possible. To that I say, if AI can take over the world, like has been speculated, then it can figure out how to calculate a medical bill in real time. And this would be an actual good use of AI -- a product that helps people by doing something no human could practically do. That's what AI should be used for, in my opinion. We don't need it to feed us heaping servings of internet slop -- which is largely what it does right now -- as we are already quite good at doing that ourselves.

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In other news, I'm currently watching two shows -- Pluribus and The Chair Company. I'm about halfway through each of them and think they are both excellent, for very different reasons. Pluribus has got that brilliant Vince Gilligan storytelling, and Rhea Seehorn is so good in everything. At first I was worried it was another zombie dystopia show -- I got serious The Last of Us vibes from the first half of the first episode -- but it's not that. If anything, it's a zombie utopia show. And it raises some interesting questions about humanity. I don't want to spoil anything, so I'll just say that I'm not sure I would choose the path the protagonist is going down. I'm not that defiantly individualistic.

As for The Chair Company, it's just funny. Tim Robinson isn't everybody's cup of tea -- S, for example, couldn't make it through the first episode of this show -- but he certainly is mine. The Chair Company makes me literally (and I mean that literally) laugh out loud a few times an episode. Tim Robinson is the master of coming up with things so completely weird and random that you can somehow still recognize as a joke. Most of the time when I hear people say How did they even come up with that?! in relation to comedy, it's about something that a lot of funny people could have come up with. Most funny people, even super funny people, sound a lot like other funny people. But with Tim Robinson, I'm legit How did he even come up with that? It's just so bizarre and hysterical.

Alright, I'm out of time. Until next time... 

Entry 785: It's The End Of The Shutdown As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

Contrary to the parenthetical in this entry's title, I don't feel completely fine. I'm a little under the weather right now, which is incredibly annoying, being that I was just sick a few weeks ago. Usually I get at least, like, a three or four month buffer between illnesses. So, this is complete bullshit, as far as I'm concerned. It's just a cold, the type of thing that will pass in a few days, but a few days have not passed yet, so here I am, sniffling and snorting, sucking on cough drops, and rubbing my nose raw with tissues. The worst part is that it's really affecting my sleep. I actually feel pretty good during the day, and then at night, as my caffeine and adrenaline levels wane, my symptoms become much more acute (which isn't cute). I have this super irritating prickly-throated cough, and that's what makes it so hard to sleep -- both because it's just hard to fall asleep when you're coughing and because I'm sleeping in the guest room, so as not to disturb S with my hacking. Our guest bed is fine, but it's a bit like a hotel bed to me. It's just not comfortable as my actual bed because nothing ever is.

In better news, the government shutdown has final ended, which means things will at least move in the direction or normality, if not completely "get back to normal," again. This is a good thing, in my not-so-humble opinion, as I do not share the consternation of many on the left that this was some sort of grave capitulation by the ever feckless Democrats. If only they would just stand up to Trump! The obvious truth is the Dems were never going to get what they want -- a renewal of expiring health care subsidies -- this way. The reason being is simple: Shuttering the federal government hurts Democratic constituents way more than those of Republicans. That's it. That's the whole ballgame. You can't compel somebody into a deal they don't want, if the deal not going through will be worse for you than it will be for them. "Give us what we want or things are really gonna suck for us" is not a great negotiating tactic when the other side wants things to suck for you.

To be sure, a government shutdown is bad for almost everybody, but think about whom it most negatively affects. I'd say there are three many groups: 1) federal workers who are laid off, furloughed, or not paid during a shutdown; 2) recipients of essential federal aid (e.g., SNAP benefits); 3) airport travelers whose flights are canceled or delayed due to insufficient airport staffing. All three of these groups are more left than they are right, as I lay out below.

1) Not only does Trump not care about the vast majority of federal employees, but he just spent the first six months of his presidency completely gutting the federal workforce. The fact that so many thousands more were not getting paid during the shutdown probably made him less inclined to negotiate a stoppage, not more.

2) Ironically, there are probably more total Republican voters who benefit from SNAP than Democratic voters, but the only ones that Trump cares about, his hardcore base, have already demonstrated that they care much more about the cultural and spiritual gains they get from Trump than any material goods they lose. They feel seen and validated by Trump. In their minds, he elevated them from disrespected cultural losers into a social force the liberal elitists have no choice but to reckon with. To them, that's worth losing benefits. They probably dismiss all that as a hoax, anyway... as they take out a second mortgage to pay for their increased health insurance deductibles.  

3) Obviously, people of all political stripes use airports. But who do you think travels more, highly educated, upper-middle class urbanites and suburbanites, or less educated, working-class rural folks? Which of these is the base for which political party again?

So, yeah, I'm glad that eight Democratic senators broke rank and voted to get things moving again. It won't even be a big political hit for the Dems, unless they self-obsess about what a terrible capitulation it was, which certain members of the party seem intent on doing. They succeeded in bringing the issue of expiring healthcare subsidies to the forefront of many voters minds, and now they can campaign on that without the pall of a shutdown eclipsing everything else. One thing Trump does that I think is pretty effective politically is to just declare victory for everything no matter what happens. It's phony and delusion and often very bad for the country, so I wouldn't like it if Dems did this too, but I think they could stand to learn something from it. It's hard to make progress on your political agenda when seemingly one of the core tenets of your party is that progress can never be made.

Until next time... 

Entry 784: Hodgepode, Olio, Miscellany

It's a fire-through-a-bunch-of-topics type of night. So, let's get to it.

• Tuesday was election day at various places around the country, and it was kinda nice to see our democracy isn't completely kaput just yet. Dems won gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia by larger than expected margins. The last one is particularly nice to see, as, living in DC, it hits close to home. To be honest, however, I'm mostly just glad I won't be inundated with political ads while watching sports for another year or so. 
  
  
• Speaking of ads I've seen too many times, it's time to pull the one of the guy running on a treadmill to Collective Soul in his daughter's old room out of rotation. It was kinda funny the first time I watched it (I like the little flourishes the dad does while running), much less so the past eight hundred. Also, note to Liberty Mutual: Your ad campaigns -- both Limu Emu and the quirky ones that are always on a pier for some reason -- are doing the exact opposite of what they're supposed to do for me. I'm so tired of watching these commercials that if I ever need to switch insurance companies, I will intentionally look elsewhere first. 
  
  
• Zohran Mamdani won the mayoral race in New York, so good for him, I guess. He's not really my cup of tea. He strikes me as a politician rich people think poor people want. (In fact, I heard on a podcast today that he did better in the affluent areas of NYC than he did in the working class areas.) However, given that the other options were a disgraced retread, who already lost in the primary, and a kooky right-winger in a beret, I might have voted for Mamdani were I a Knickerbocker. I am, however, very skeptical that any of his initiatives will lead to any real improvements in the lives of New Yorkers. But who knows? It will be interesting to watch from afar, at least.
  
  
• I watched this YouTube video called "Plot Hole or Not Hole," in which Ben Lindbergh (a podcaster I like) interviews Vince Gilligan about a potential plot hole in one of the last episodes of Breaking Bad. I really enjoyed hearing Gilligan indulge Lindbergh as he broke it all down. I love when artists love getting into the weeds about their past work. Nothing is worse than the grumpy artiste who acts too cool for school about this type of thing. It's super pretentious, and it's makes you feel like a loser for caring about something so much more than the person who actually made it.
  
  
• Typically I'm not that bothered by plot holes because I rarely notice them. I'm not a big plot person in general. I want great characters, first and foremost. Then I care about other things--drama, comedy, tension, release, music, mood, etc.--before I care about plot. With that said, I do have two big plot holes that come to mind every time plot holes are mentioned...
  
  
• One, in Raiders of the Lost Ark, how did Indiana and Marion get back to DC after witnessing (or not, since their eyes were closed) the opening of the ark? They were alone on some remote island in the middle of the Aegean Sea that they arrived on via submarine. Presumably, neither of them knows how to operate a German U-boat and navigate back to the US with a crew of two. And did they or somebody else come back for the ark, or did they take it with them? Seems like it would have to be the former, but then what did they do with the ark--this magical artifact of unthinkable power that could destroy humanity if it fell into the wrong hands--while they were traveling the thousands of miles (in 1936) back to the US? Just leave it there?
  
  
• Two, in KPop Demon Hunters, what's the resolution when the biggest boy band on the planet just up and disappears one day? Boy bands break up all the time, but they only figuratively disappear. In actuality, they go on to host reality TV shows or something like that. I mean, what would have happened if, in 1997, every one of the Backstreet Boys simultaneously vanished off the face of the Earth? Would we have all just shrugged our shoulders and turned up the Spice Girls, as the public does with Huntr/x in KPDH?
  
  
• I mentioned in a previous entry that I was experiencing some internal inflammation. Turns out it was nothing, and I was pretty sure it was nothing when it was happening, but I got some testing done anyway, because I don't want to be that guy who dies of a treatable ailment because he couldn't be bothered to take the two hours out of his day to get the warning signs diagnosed. I went in on Friday, and the technician who carried out the test told me "off-the-record" that it was unremarkable, so I felt even more assured there was nothing to worry about. I got the official report from my doctor's office today, and it says the results are "unmarketable." Damn! I was hoping to put them up on eBay. There goes that idea! (The NP who wrote the report also examined me, and it's clear that English is not her first language, which likely explains the erroneous word choice.)
  
  
• I stopped doing intermittent fasting. No real reason why--I just got tired of it and caved to my appetitive desires. As those in the body positivity camp will tell you, most diets don't stick forever. I agree with this. However, I disagree that this means that "dieting doesn't work," which is something else you will hear from the BP folks. Diets do work while you're doing them, and they often work very well. When I'm on my 16-8 plan, I eat better, I feel better, and I look better. Those are all good things. If I could diet like this consistently, instead of only, like, half the time, it would be even better. But let's not let the perfect be the enemy of the half-decent. I don't understand why dieting off-and-on is considered to "not work," when it's significantly better than eating unhealthily all the time. If you are yo-yo dieting and losing and gaining and losing and gaining massive amounts of weight in short periods of time then, yeah, that's probably unhealthy. But that's not what I do, and I don't think that's what most other people do either. I eat how I want, and then I get to the point where my jeans are noticeable tighter than they were before, and then I diet, and it works, and my jeans fit comfortably again, and then I stop because dieting is hard, and I'm only human, and so I slowly gain back the weight I lost, until my jeans are tight again, and the loop continues. It's not ideal, but it works okay for me, and I don't think I'm special in this regard.

Alright, time to wrap this up. Until next time... 

Entry 783: Halloween In The Time Of Cholera

Okay, it's not actually the time of cholera, but I was quite ill yesterday morning. I had been feeling a cold coming on since Monday, but it was nothing serious, just the sniffles, and then Tuesday night I started getting this very uncomfortable internal inflammation. When it didn't go away by Wednesday afternoon, I made an appointment to see a doctor on Thursday. At S's behest, I took a sick day on Thursday, and I'm glad I did, because I woke up feeling like absolute horse manure. It was my morning for the carpool, so I rallied long enough to get Lil' S2 and his friend to school (thankfully, it's only about a ten minute round-trip jaunt; close enough to walk, but, of course, it was pouring rain yesterday), and then I came back and crashed out hard. I woke up thinking it was around 10:30, but when I looked at my phone, it said 12:30.

Those extra four hours of sleep turned out to be just what I needed, as I felt so much better--not 100%, but a little under the weather, instead of debilitatingly infirm. I then spent most the day doing puzzles from the New York Times Puzzle Mania! book. One of my puzzles is in it, so they sent me a free copy, and it's very cool. There are a variety of really fun puzzles in it. Later, I went to my doctor's appointment, from which I inferred that the inflammation is likely not related to the cold. I just happened to get hit with two ailments at once--not great, but, if you think about it, probably better than having one after the other. Less total sick time. The doctor prescribed me some antibiotics and an anti-inflammatory and sent me on my way.

So, that's where I am now. I'm feeling good enough that I worked a full day from home, and I'm planning on going trick-or-treating with the kids tonight. Well, they mostly go out on their own, with their friends, but I'll be wandering around the neighborhood with other parents, eating pizza and not drinking beer (I've heard it doesn't go well with antibiotics). It's nice. We actually have a little community, where everybody lives close by, and we all know each other, and our kids all hang out together. I never had that growing up. I'd go out trick-or-treating near my house and be lucky if I saw one other kid out. If I went with friends, it was always in their neighborhood.

By the way, I just remembered something: I think I was really sick on Halloween a few years ago. Let me check the annals. Turns out it was eight years ago, not exact "a few," but, yeah, the rest is accurate.

In other news, Lil' S2's flag football team, of which I am the coach, won the league championship this season. I'm way more pleased by this than I should be. I know it's just little kid sports, but still it feels good to be the champ. We didn't have an amazing regular season. We won four games and lost three and went into the playoffs as the sixth seed of eight. But we pulled out a one-point upset in the first round, which was particularly gratifying, as the opposing team's coach was jawboning the referees (three 16-year-old kids) the entire game. The next week, we came back in the semifinals after being down early, scoring a game-winning touchdown with only a few seconds left on the clock. Then, somehow, we pummeled our opponent in the finals, winning 33-12 or something like that.

The beauty of it is that it was a total team victory. We have some really good players, but we don't have that one way bigger/faster/stronger, precociously developed kid on our team. We just had everybody do their thing and the whole was greater than the sum or its parts. Lil' S2 played quarterback almost the entire playoffs, and he was great. He's not the world's greatest athlete, but he's got a pretty good arm,* and he's smart. He understands the game and how an offense should work better than most kids his age. It was really cool to watch him play and to be a part of it.

*And good hands. Twice we ran a "halfback pass," in which we hiked the ball to the halfback standing next to Lil' S2, and then he threw it to Lil' S2, and both times it went for a touchdown. That's my genius play calling, right there.

Alright, it's trick-or-treating hour. Until next time... 

Entry 782: Back To Reality, Unfortunately

The Mariners lost on Monday night and got knocked out of the playoffs. They were ahead in both the series (3-2 after five games) and the final game (3-1 after six innings), and they squander away both opportunities. It wasn't an epic meltdown of historic proportions or anything like that, but still it sucks. It means I have to return to reality, and that is unfortunate because reality kinda sucks right now in my neck of the woods. The massive DOGE layoffs, followed by the government shutdown means a lot of people in the DC area are out of work or working and not getting paid. There isn't an end in sight, either. Neither side is eager to negotiate, and neither side has much incentive to do so. Reps think they can pin the shutdown on the Dems, and the Dems want to make it look like they are doing something in opposition to Trump.

Personally, I think the Dems should cave on this one. They don't have to frame it that way, of course, but I think they should pass a continuing resolution and kick the can down the road. Then they could say something to the effect of, "We held out as long as we could, but too many innocent people are losing their livelihoods in this game of chicken. So, we are going to reopen the government, but continue to fight against rising healthcare premiums." Then they crank up the healthcare stuff to 11, and that becomes the main story by itself, with clearly delineated sides. As it is now, when people start feeling the pain of increased premiums, it's going to get lost in the broader shutdown narrative. It's just going to look like a result of political squabbling -- a pox on both your houses. It seems smarter to me politically (and better for the country) to isolate healthcare as a single-issue fight. It's a likely winner for the Dems, and they could use some wins at the moment.

Anyway... in happier news, Halloween is right around the corner, and tonight we are going to not one, but two parties to celebrate the occasion. We've got an Addams Family theme going on. S is Morticia; Lil' S2 is Pugsley; and I'm going as Thing (the disembodied hand). Lil' S1 is doing his own thing, and he's not going to any of the parties with us, anyway. (One is at the house of Lil' S2's classmate, and the other is an adult party.) I was going to go as Gomez, but the ready-made costume was kinda expensive, and I didn't want to spend a bunch of money for something I'd only wear for a few hours. This is when it would be good to be an artsy guy, who could craft his own costume on the cheap, but that's the exact opposite of me, so I'll just settle for being Thing. Even that is proving to be a challenge, however, as I have to figure out how to connect the plastic hand to my shoulder. I guess I'll duck tape it? Seems like the only option. Although, glue might work. I just have to use a shirt I don't care about.

Alright, I'm running out of time, so I'll just mention one more thing and call it a post. I just finished Mark Lanegan's memoir Sing Backwards and Weep. If you are unfamiliar with Mark Lanegan, you are surely not alone. I barely knew who he was until I bought the book. He was the lead singer for Screaming Trees, one of the less commercially successful Seattle grunge bands of the mid-90s, who still managed to score a few hits you might remember, namely "Nearly Lost You" and "All That I Know". I was never particularly into the band, although I'm pretty sure I saw them play live at some shady club once.

The book is a trip. You never know how accurate memoirs actually are, but if even a third of the stuff he says is true, it's crazy. He grew up in Ellensburg, Washington--a place I've visited many times, as it's a convenient stopping point when driving across the state (also my sister went to college there)--and he did not have what you would call a stable childhood. It's weird how the reader's (or at least this reader's) feelings changed throughout the story for the first-person narrator. In the beginning, I feel super sympathetic toward him and root for him to overcome his difficult upbringing and make something of himself. Then, once he gets a little bit of success, he becomes such an insufferable dickhead, egotistical and self-loathing (a toxic combination), that I only want to see him get his comeuppance. Then, after he fucks it all up and descends into unmitigated junkie-dom, I just hope he doesn't die.* Like I said, it's a trip, and if you're into that type of thing, I recommend it.

*Clearly he doesn't die because he wrote the book, but then he did die a few years ago at 57. Not exactly a ripe old age, but much better than 27, like his buddy.

That's all for today. Until next time... 

Entry 781: Diwali 2025

Tomorrow is Diwali, the festival of lights in Hindu tradition. We had a party at our house last night to celebrate with some of our Indian/mixed family friends. It was a lot of fun--too much fun, perhaps, as I am feeling the effects today. It's not the alcohol--I know better than to overindulge in that department and usually adhere to a two-beer limit--it's the food. We (S) ordered way, way too much of it, and as a result I ate way, way too much of it, and since the moment I woke up this morning, my stomach has felt like a witch's cauldron--a gurgling, vile morass.

It was so good, though. We got massive trays of samosas and pakoras, and those two items are probably my very favorite appetizers across any cuisine. I like to drizzle on both the red and green sauce (which I think are tamarind and mint chutneys, respectively, but I'm not completely sure), so that it adds a little soft texture to the crunch and a bit of sweet and sour to the spice. I probably ate, like, ten total samosas and pakoras, and then I had my actual "meal," a massive plate of biryani and palak paneer with naan. Oh, and somebody brought homemade mango cheesecake, so I had to have two pieces of that, as well. It would have been rude not to.

Part of the problem is that I hate wasting food, so I overeat to reduce the amount of "waste," but I really need to get over that fallacious line of thinking. At some point, pretty early in the night, I reach the amount of food I need to completely satiate my hunger. After that, anything I consume is "wasted" the same way it would be if I threw it in the trash. From a utilitarian standpoint, it is not any better to dump food down my gullet than it is to dump it down the garbage chute. In fact, it's unequivocally worse because it makes my stomach feel bad and makes me fatter than I need to be.

But, like I said, that's only part of the problem. Another major factor is that I love eating (who doesn't?), and I can, at times, exhibit poor impulse control when it comes to delicious food. It's a vice, and it's really my only major vice at this point in my life. Well, that and drinking too much coffee. And as far as vices go, it could be a lot worse. I could be a compulsive (losing) gambler like Pete Rose or a heroin addict like Mark Lanegan. The last two books I read are about these two guys, which is why they come to mind. Actually, I'm not done with the latter book, Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir by Mark Lanegan (lead singer of Screaming Trees), but I'm pretty far into it. (I might give a fuller recap on this blog when I'm done.)

Oh, if you are wondering what we did with all the leftovers, I froze as much of it as I could, given our container and freezer space restrictions, and then S gave the rest away to a family we invited last night, but who couldn't make it. It's still way more than they will be able to eat, but if they throw it away I won't care, because I won't know. 

In other news, the Seattle Mariners are one win away from going to the World Series for the first time ever. They can clinch it tonight or, if they lose tonight, tomorrow night. If they lose tonight and tomorrow night, however, then their season is over. It's been an objectively glorious run thus far, but I haven't even been able to enjoy it like I should, so convinced I am that it's still going to end badly. What can I say? 40+ years of letdown can do a number on your sports-fan psyche. I only watched about a third of the last game live. Lil' S2 had a basketball game at the same time, so I went to that, and then S and the kids wanted to watch The Middle as a family, so I did that. When I turned it off, the Ms were losing 2-1 going into the 8th inning. I put my phone in a different room, so that I wouldn't be tempted to check the score or look at my texts from fellow Ms fans. When I finally saw they had come back and won, I wasn't even mad that I missed it. I was just relieved that they pulled it off.

Hopefully, I get that feeling of relief again tonight. It would be especially welcome, given that I have a super busy next three days at work--I have to go into the office everyday--and so I can't be staying up late fretting over baseball too much. If the Ms lose tonight and have to play tomorrow, it could throw a serious monkey wrench into my sleep schedule. So, come on Ms! Win tonight! Win for all the fans who have to get up early on Tuesday.

Until next time... 

 

Entry 780: Marathon Baseball and Schitt's Creek

Very tired today. I was up until 2:00 am watching the Mariners playoff game. In a previous entry, I said that I was just going to enjoy the Ms' playoff run and not stress about it, but the thing about that is that you don't really get to decide about the things you stress about. If you did, nobody would ever be stressed about anything. We would all just choose to not be! As soon as the Mariners started playing, it was like I was a child again, hanging on their every pitch and plate appearance. It's not an enjoyable way to watch to baseball, being so anxious, but I can't help it. Some sort of obsessive fandom got embedded in me when I was little, and I don't know how to get rid it, nor do I really want to, because on the rare (extremely rare, in the case of the Mariners) occasions it works out, it's pretty awesome.

And last night it worked out! On the brink of elimination, facing the best pitcher in baseball, the Seattle baseball nine scrapped their way to a 2-2 tie after nine innings. (It was the unlikely Leo Rivas who delivered the game-tying RBI. He was in the minors for most this season. In fact, I saw him hit a home run in a Rainiers game I attend with some friends and family.) Then, in extra innings, the Mariners proceeded to blow golden opportunity after golden opportunity, as the game dragged on and on and on. Thrice the Mariners had the potential series-winning run on second with no outs and couldn't bring him around. The probability of not scoring a run in one of those instances is 38%, so the probably of not scoring a run in all three is only 5%, and yet that's what happened. Thankfully, for as inept as the Ms' offense was, their pitching and defense was the exact opposite, and they continually hung zeros on the Tigers to get to the 15th inning.

At this point, about 1:30 am for me, I'm hoping the Ms score in no small part so that I can go bed. It's like 65% I want them to win; 35% I want to sleep. Turning the game off and finding out the result in the morning crosses my mind, but I quickly dismiss it. I wouldn't actually be able to sleep, anyway. I can do that for a low-stakes regular season game, not for a winner-take-all playoff game. So, I stay up, continuing to watch, vacillating between sitting down, standing up like I'm part of the crowd watching in person, swinging a back-scratcher like a baseball bat (as a kid I used to pantomime what I wanted to happen each plate appearance), and stretching -- might as well do something slightly healthful.

I get my wish, and the game ends shortly in spectacular fashion. JP Crawford, one of my favorite players, leads off the bottom of the 15th and flicks a single to center field. Randy Arozarena -- a guy who had one of the greatest postseasons ever a few years ago for the Tampa Bay Rays and has been downright bad this one for the Ms -- gets plunked on the first pitch. Cal "Big Dumper" Raleigh, the Ms best player, in the midst of a historically great season, then flies out, but it's deep enough to move Crawford to third and, after a bad throw from the center fielder, Arozarena to second. This turns out to be a big deal, because it leaves first base open, enticing Tigers manager AJ Hinch to intentionally walk Julio Rodriguez. On paper, it makes some sense, as Julio is the Ms second best hitter, and loading the bases sets up the double play (the Tigers have already turned two of them in extras) and creates a force at every base. However, as somebody who has watched the Mariners play dozens of times over the past few years, I'm not that upset Julio doesn't get to bat. For all his greatness, he frequently chases pitches and strikes out. I actually feel better about Jorge Polanco putting the ball in play than I do Julio. And Polanco does indeed put the ball in play. On a full count, he drills a single between the hole at first and second base, and that's that. Ballgame. Series. Ms win! Ms win! And I go to bed happy.

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In other news of nonsense, I finished Schitt's Creek a few days ago. Great show. I tried to watch it some years ago, when it first came out, and just couldn't get into it. I don't know why. But then a few months ago, S, a big fan of the series, got me to watch the first few episodes again with her, and this time I really took to it, so much so that I convinced her to let me watch the rest of the series on my own, so that I wouldn't have to wait for those relatively rare moments when we are both free to watch something together. I love all the characters on the show--not bad one in the bunch--but below is a list of my ten favorites with a quote from each of them. It's in approximate order from least favorite to most favorite, but ranking your favorite characters is like ranking your favorite songs. If I did this tomorrow instead of today, I would have a markedly different list.

10. Jocelyn Schitt: Once I found a bag of Roland’s ex girlfriends bras... BURNED them... except the ones that were my size. 

9. Tywla Sands: My Uncle Ken only has three fingers now, which is too bad because he's deaf, and he only speaks using sign language. But he made his choices. 

8.  Bob Currie: Hey, Johnny. Keepin' busy, or, uh, hardly workin'?

7. Stevie Budd: I don't think I've ever heard you use the word courage before outside of criticizing people's style choices.  

6. David Rose: I’m starting to feel like I’m trapped in an Avril Lavigne lyric here. 

5. Johnny Rose: Hashtag. Is that two words? 

4. Ted Mullens: I don't know about little, because I'm benching 225 right now, so it's not really something someone little... 

3. Roland Schitt: I'm sorry, taut? (Laughs.) What is that, old English? How 'bout I hold it tight?  

2. Alexis Rose: You try parallel parking in a burka, David. 

1. Moira Rose: Stop acting like a disgruntled pelican.

Until next time...     

 

 

Entry 779: Lousy Situation (With Updates)

Last week, I wrote an entire post, and then today when I hopped on Blogger to write a new one, I realized that I never actually posted the one from last week. So, I guess I'll just do that and call it good. I'll throw in a few updates though.

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I gave Lil' S2 a buzz cut last night, and he's not very happy about it. It doesn't look bad. If you saw him, you probably wouldn't think twice about it. He just looks like a normal little kid with a very short haircut. But compared to what he used to have -- a bountiful, Beatles-esque moptop -- I can understand why he's sad about the change. Unfortunately, however, he contracted a terrible -- like, seriously disgusting -- case of head lice for the second time in six weeks, so it had to be done. Well, it didn't have to be done. We could've stuck with the shampoo treatment, but that can be a huge hassle if you want to do it right, and you want to do it right, because there's not a lot of gray area between right and wrong. Either you kill all the lice and their eggs or you don't, and if you don't, then they multiply and you're are back to where you started. We did two rounds of the shampoo, but during the second S was still combing out a bunch of nits and eggs, probably all dead, but there were so many that we pushed for the clippers. Lil' S2 reluctantly agreed and then was almost in tears when he saw the result. Oh well, he'll get over it, and the wonderful thing about hair is that it always grows back... until one day it doesn't, but he shouldn't have to worry about that for another 20 years or so.

Update: The first day after this happened, Lil' S2 wore a hat the entire day, but now he and everybody else has gotten used to it, so it's not a big deal. Plus, hair grows back pretty fast at that age. In a few weeks, we will probably have to take him to the barber for a clean up. The thing about buzz cuts is that they grow back even everywhere, which looks weird once it gets longer (baby chick look). At some point, you need to get it reshaped by a professional to avoid the goofy stage between short and normal.  

In other news, the distractions in my life are working decently well to keep me sane amidst a world of craziness. It's a tightrope walk to keep yourself informed and stay vigilant without descending into complete doomerism. Sports is my main form of self-medication. I've been able to maintain a steady workout schedule since school is back in session, so that's good. The main thing there is avoiding those nagging injuries that put you on the shelf for a few weeks at a time. I've come up with an ingenious plan to that end: Don't go as hard. That's it--don't run as fast; don't lift as much; don't punch as hard, at least not all the time. I gotta pick my spots now. Because I only go to my gym twice a week (for scheduling reasons), I typically double-up and take back-to-back classes, one martial arts/self-defense class, and one strength and conditioning class. When I first started doing this, nine years ago, it was no big deal. I could pretty much go max effort the entire time and be okay. Now, I just physically cannot do that anymore. I have to scale back during the first class or else I won't be able to survive the second class without pulling, straining, or popping something somewhere in my body. The instructor has noticed too. Sometimes he'll encourage me to be more aggressive and push myself, and I always say okay, but in my head I'm thinking: Nah, I'm not going to do that right now. You'll understand why in 20 years. Hey, if it's good enough for Lebron James, it's good enough for me.

Update: Of course, almost immediately after writing this, I violated my own rule and tweaked my back. We were doing front squats and the RX (recommend weight) looked a little heavy, but I decided to do it anyway, and while I was doing the last set, I felt something strain in my right lat. It's not that bad, thankfully, but still... annoying. Go moderate or go home! That has to be my new motto.

But as the intensity of my own athletic endeavors has ebbed, the ferocity with which I spectate others playing sports has remained steady. And it's a pretty good time to be a Seattle sports fan. The Seahawks are 3-1 through their first four games, having not quite blown it Thursday night against the Cardinals, and the Mariners--the perpetually not-quite-good-enough Emerald City nine--have not only made the playoffs, but they won the AL West for the first time in 24 years. Not only that but they earned a first-round bye, and they somehow have the best odds to win the World Series according to FanGraphs. Now, to be an M's fan is to repeatedly get the rug pulled out from under you, so I'm completely ready for--expecting even--the disappointing collapse, but there is something freeing in that mindset. There's nothing that can hurt me too badly anymore. It's like when I worked as a dishwasher at Pete's Barbecue Steakhouse and the dishes would pile up (because they were too cheap to adequate staff us), and all the servers were mad at me, even though I was going as fast as I could (and they weren't exactly offering to come back and help), and I'd reach a zenlike state where the negativity was just background noise that I could easily drown out (sometimes literally with the Mariners game on the radio, ironically). That's where I am now with the Ms now. They probably won't win the pennant, so I'm just going to enjoy their success now, while I can. If nothing else, they effectively put a stake through the heart of every Astros fan last week with this ridiculous play, and that is some glorious schadenfreude that nobody can take away.

Update: The Mariners play their first postseason game tonight against the Detroit Tigers. M's are heavily favored--they are clearly the better team--but in the baseball playoffs, random variance rules supreme, so the Tigers could easily win three games in a row and that would be that. And of course the games are on FS1, the one major sports channel not offered by my TV package (Sling Orange), so I begrudgingly upgraded (Sling Orange & Blue). It might not be that costly though. I think I can cancel before my next billing cycle, and only get charged about $6 for the prorated upgraded. That's totally worth it for at least three M's games (especially if they win!). Also, I now get NFL Network, so I can also watch the Browns against the Vikings tomorrow morning. It's a terrible game, but it is football.

Alright, until next time... 

Entry 778: On Several Disparate Topics

Whenever a politically divisive story rises to national attention, the one thing you can always count on is people pointing out how this proves the exact things they have been saying all along -- confirming one's priors, as it's often worded. I'm going to do that now, as I think two beliefs I've held (and shared on this blog) have borne out over the past few weeks. The first one is that I said that people on the left should not be cheering on or calling for people to lose their livelihoods for expressing opinions (or sometimes stating literal facts) that weren't 100% in lockstep with the social justice mores of the time. It's terrible politics, as it alienates could-be allies, and it contributes to an anti-free speech climate, which will undoubtedly not redound to your favor when different people, less friendly to your causes, are in power. The other thing I said is that as bad it is on one side, it's way worse on the other. The things "normies" hate about the left are true, but they're much, much more true of the right. Suffice it say, both of these priors have been confirmed recently, yet again, for like the millionth time. And I'll just leave it at that.

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Robert Redford died on Tuesday. I think he's the first "before my time" actor of whom I was cognizant. I knew who he was--he was Roy Hobbes, after all--but I also knew that his best work came before my earliest memories. There were the leading men of my childhood--Harrison Ford, Tom Cruise, Arnold Schwarzenegger--and then there was the generation immediately before them with guys like Redford and James Caan and Burt Reynolds. And I started thinking, is Robert Redford the last of the "before my time" male movie stars? Caan and Reynolds are both dead, and so is just about every other leading man from cinema prior to 1980 -- Steve McQueen, Gene Hackman, Paul Newman, etc. But, still, the answer is no, Redford is not the absolute last "before my time" actor. Clint Eastwood is still alive, after all, so is Jack Nicholson. And then are a few guys like Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, and Robert De Niro, who straddle the line between "before my time" and "in my time," so I'm not sure whether I should count them or not. But Redford is certainly among the last, and he might have been the best. In fact, if you consider his myriad excellent acting performances, his work as a director, and the fact that he co-founded the Sundance Film Festival, you could make a strong case that nobody had a better overall career in film than Robert Redford.

[So hokey, so good] 

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The other day some landscapers came over for a cleanup job, and I was watching them through the window lay down some mulch, and I was reminded that "mulch" was a word I didn't learn until surprisingly late in life. For the first 25 or so years of my life I called it "beauty bark." I just thought that was its name. Then one time I was at a friend house, and I walked through her backyard with no shoes on, and then I complained that I had slivers in my feet from the beauty bark.

"What? What's beauty bark?" she responded with a chuckle.

"That stuff," I replied as I pointed to it.

"You mean, mulch?"

"No, that stuff, right there. It's called beauty bark."

"What the hell is beauty bark?" she said now laughing hysterically.

"That stuff! That's what it's called!"

We didn't resolve it then, and we've since lost touch, but eventually I had to concede that she was right. It's mulch. Everybody calls it that, even a company named BeautiBark.

I tried to think of some other things that I used to call one thing and now call a different thing. I came up with a few. 

Pop. As a kid I was firmly in the "pop" camp. I was familiar with the term "soda," and it didn't strike my ear oddly when people called it that, but I always called it pop. Interestingly, the full "soda pop" would have sounded weird to me. That was the old-timey name you'd read in Archie Comics or something like that. This is completely a regional thing. And if this reddit map is to be believed, western Washington state is now a "soda" area, along with most the country. I might have been among the last generation of pop-sayers in the Sea-Tac region. But now I'm a soda guy. I've just lived too long in a place where it sounds weird to say "pop." In fact, Lil' S2 didn't even know what meant until a few days ago. We were watching The Middle, and one of the characters says something about drinking pop, and he was like "What's pop?"

Cream rinse. At my childhood home, when it came to shower time, we had shampoo and "cream rinse." It wasn't until I started spending the night at a certain friend's house that I realized that cream rinse only existed in my house. Everywhere else it was "conditioner." From what I can gather online, cream rinse was a thinner, less emollient precursor to conditioner, and by the 1980s, when I was a child, it was mostly obsolete, both as a product and a term. It never completely died though. You can still find it today, although it's usually branded as "creme rinse," presumably to make it sound more luxurious. Being that when I Google "creme rinse," however, the first hits are for lice treatment, I don't think the rebrand worked.  

It's funny, thinking back to that time at my friend's house when I first learned of conditioner. We used to wash and style our hair together, just for fun. Actually, Lil' S2 does that with his friends sometimes too. They call it "barbershop." It's cute.

Well, that's all for today. Until next time... 

Entry 777: A Mostly Optimistic Post

It was another rough news week. We seem to be having a lot of these over the past, what, five and a half years? As you've probably noticed, I don't really delve into the doom and gloom on this blog. I'm not naive to it, it's just not what I want to write about, and being that this blog really serves no purpose other than giving me an outlet to write about what I want to write about, I'm not going to write about things I don't want to write about. I'm going to write about things I want to write about, and today that's a really interesting episode of the Lost Debate podcast I listened to about AI. Before I get to that, however, I want to link to an episode of a different podcast, The Gist, about renewal energy. It's good, and reasonably optimistic, and probably on a more important topic than the AI one, but I personally find AI stuff more fascinating than climate stuff, so that's what I going with today.

You should listen to the Lost Debate episode yourself, but if you don't, I'll give you the tl;dl (too long; didn't listen) version below. And if you want the tl;dr version of my tl;dl version, it's this: Over the past year or so, the advancements in AI have mostly stalled out, and there's no indication that they will leap forward again anytime soon. This means the promise of a benevolent super-intelligence solving all the world's problems will likely go unfulfilled. But I don't think too many people were banking on that anyway. On the contrary, I think most people were apprehensive about the prospect of machines attempting to destroy humanity Terminator style, or at least of taking all our jobs, replacing all our human relationships, and depriving of us of any sense of purpose whatsoever. It seems that those things probably won't happen either.

Now, before I go any further, I should say that I am not an expert in AI, and I'm largely regurgitating what the guest of the podcast, a computer science professor named Cal Newport, said. But I do have a strong background in applied math and scientific computation, so I understand a lot of the concepts at a high-level (and I feel confident I could learn the nitty-gritty details if I took the time to do so). I have just enough of a comprehension to put my own spin on things, so I'm not just mimicking what the expert says. Also, everything everybody says is just speculation, anyway. Nobody actually knows what will happen. Not all speculation is the same--some people should be listened to over others--but it's still speculation and predictions. There's no reason why I can't add my opining to the mix.

Okay, with all those caveats out of the way, here are my thoughts...

To understand why AI technology has seemingly stalled, it might help to understand how AIs like ChatGPT work. I once heard somebody describe these AIs as an "amazingly good auto-fill." Basically, given a prompt, they decide what the "best" first word is, and then using that first word as addition input, they decide what the best second word is, and then using that, they decide the third word, and then the fourth word, and so, until they get to a point where the best word is no word, and they stop. If they were good at deciding what each word should be along the way, they will have produced an intelligent response.

This begs the question: How do they decided the "best" word along the way? That's where things you probably heard of like "training" and "machine learning" come into play. Basically, before an AI is released to the public, it goes through a long computing period, where it scours a kajillion bytes of available data -- books, blogs, songs, etc. -- and then it remembers certain markers about these things. So, when the user prompts it, it goes, Oh, I've seen something like this before; I should respond as follows...

It might be easier to think about in terms of a game like chess. The best chess engines can now annihilate the best human players. In the past 30 years, we've gone from machines can never beat humans to humans can never beat machines. The way computers are able to win so consistently is by making moves no human could ever think to make. For example, a chess bot might just give up a knight early in the game for seemingly no reason. It has a reason -- it's played against its self millions of times, and it knows from experience that a knight sacrifice in this given situation is a winning move -- but there is no way any human could possibly deduce this. Humans strategize and think a few moves ahead -- if I do this, they'll do this, then I can do this... Machines assess given situations, and then use what they've learned from their extensive training sessions to make the corresponding moves with the highest win percentages. Nobody, not even the machine itself, can explain exactly why a machine made a certain move other than that's just what the numbers developed through training say.

Because games have well-defined rules and state spaces, it's not too surprising that computers can get very good--far better than any human--at games through this type of learning. It's much, much more surprising that AIs can learn this way for life in general. But they can. In fact, this is what jump-started the AI hype a few years ago in the first place. The major AI companies decided to ramp up the training of their chatbots, using more computing power for a longer period of time, and the results were off the charts. Just by increasing training, the chatbots got way better at things -- holding conversations, solving logic problems, writing songs, etc. So, they did it again, and the gains jumped up again. So, they did it again, and again the results jumped.

This is when we really started to hear about AI taking over, as the belief, understandably, was that AI was going to just keep getting better as the training got more intensive. Working under this assumption, the AI companies ramped up again and built massive computing warehouses, and subjected their chatbots to super-powered months-long training sessions. And the needle barely moved. They got better but only marginally so. Apparently, the improvement for Meta's commercial product was so minimal, it wasn't even worth releasing as a new version. Just as weird as it was to see these incredible jumps in the first rounds of training, it was equally weird to see things suddenly stall out.

So, that's where we are now, and according to Professor Newport, the upward scaling of the training was the promise behind AI. That was basically the whole shebang. Without that, AI is just a normal, impressive, maybe-good, maybe-bad new technology, not a humanity altering singularity. And for most people, I think, this is a comforting thought.

Alright, I actually had a few more things to say on this, but I appear to have run out of time -- gotta go get my flag football coach on.

Until next time... 

PS -- Like last time, I had to hustle off to the game before posting this, and like last week, Lil' S2's team came up victorious. It started out shaky, as Lil' S2 threw a pick-six on the game's opening play from scrimmage, but we persevered, and pulled it out 18-13. I had a moment as coach I'm particularly proud of. Late in the game with us losing, we faced a big 4th-and-long. Defenses are allowed one blitz per four downs (where a kid can just run straight for the QB), and they hadn't use it yet, so I knew they would. The entire drive I had this kid M playing QB, so I put Lil' S2 next to him, seemingly as a running back and then I had M call "go!", but I had the snapper hike it to Lil' S2 instead. The blitzer predictably came for M, giving Lil' S2 enough time to get off a bomb to our star wide out Z, who made a brilliant catch in traffic, converting the first down. Then we scored the go ahead touchdown a few plays later. Bam!

Entry 776: Back To Normal Chaos

Finally! Both kids are in school again, so we are back to our regular schedule, so we are back to normal chaos. When you have a spouse who travels as much as S does, the natural of order of things includes a relatively high degree of disorder. She's here now, but leaving again at the end of next week, then returning for, like, ten hours, and then leaving again for a few days. It's okay. As the kids get older, it gets easier on me. It's the little things. I still have to do most the big things--meals, dishes, laundry, etc.--but the smaller things the kids can often do on their own now, and that takes a lot of the burden off of me. For example, Lil' S2 can walk to and from school now. He also can be home by himself for a few minutes. Just those two things are huge boons when it comes to planning out my day. Also, my sister-in-law just lives up the street and is almost always willing/able to help out when asked. (We have a nice quid pro quo going: She watches our kids; we watch her dog.) Also, also, S's travels earn me a lot of relationship capital. S already goes through spells in which she thinks she's "doing all the work." I, of course, disagree with this assessment, but it would be even worse (in her mind) if not for her work trips.

My take on the "doing all the work" thing is that she often underestimates the amount of total work that is being done, which I think is common for people -- everybody, not just S -- when they get stressed out/overwhelmed. Also, I think there is a prioritization thing going on, where people don't "count" things as much if they personally aren't that invested in them, which can cause a skewed perspective. For example, S isn't into sports, so I don't get as much credit for transporting/equipping/coaching Lil' S2 in his many sporting endeavors, even though it's a huge time and effort commitment on my part. Similarly, there are things S will worry about that don't seem all that important or pressing to me, and so I'm less sympathetic toward her in regards to these stressors. For instance, a few weeks ago, she became fixated on getting a new car, and it ate up a ton of her already limited bandwidth, even though our old car still worked fine. Yes, it was getting old and wearing down, and we were going to have to replace it at some point in the medium-to-near future, but the immediacy of the issue in S's mind seemed completely self-imposed to me. On the plus side, we have a new car now, so that's cool. 

Anyway... the only reason I feel comfortable airing S's and my marriage peccadilloes is because we have a strong foundation underneath it all. That's a welcome realty check I've gotten recently talking with people who have real relationship problems. I mentioned in my previous entry the father of Lil' S1's friend who is going through a contentious divorce, and I had a very strange text exchange with him last weekend. His son spent the night at our house, and he came over to pick him up in the morning. We were making small talk, and so I asked him where he was living now. He answered, and I literally thought nothing of it. Then a few hours later, I got a text from him asking how I knew he was getting a divorce, as if somehow it was supposed to be a secret, even though they separated like six months ago, and his son and my son hang out all the time. I wrote back a very vague, anodyne response, and the exchange went from there. It wasn't bad, necessarily, just weird and more than a little awkward. Apparently, he wrote similar texts to a bunch of his son's friends' parents, which is not the type of thing somebody does when things are going great for them. So, I tried to be human, while not really saying anything of substance and definitely not getting into the middle of things. And next time I see him, I'm sticking to the weather as a conversation topic.

This text exchange made me think of a friend of mine who also got divorced recently. We also met this guy and his ex-wife through our kids' friends, and we became pretty close socially, especially the dad and me, as we've gotten together for drinks quite a few times. He's been handling his divorce the exact opposite way, where it's been super amicable, and he's been very accommodating -- so accommodating that more than once I've thought he's being too accommodating. I thought he was getting walked on a bit and should be more of a hard-ass. However, in light of how this other dad is handling things, I see things in a different light, and I really respect the way my friend is going about things. It makes a lot more sense to me now, and I bet it takes a lot of strength to be civil in a situation like this (especially given he didn't want to break up in the first place). I mean, I can only imagine how terrible getting divorced would be, and that gets multiplied by one thousand when there are kids involved. Getting through it in a way that minimizes the damage--even if it means sacrificing a bit of what you want and putting your ego and hurt feelings and animosity aside--seems like a very worthy goal.

That last thing I will say on this, for the sake of fairness, is that breakups don't just involve one person, and I don't know everybody's full story (and don't need to or want to know), and it might not always be possible to navigate the situation like my friend is doing. It's something I hope I never learn about first hand.

Alright, my time here is up. I have to get ready for Lil' S2's first flag football game of the season.

Until next time... 

Update: I forgot to post this immediately after I wrote it, so the flag football game already happened. We dominated in a 27-0 victory. Lil' S2 threw a couple of touchdown passes in the effort. 

Entry 775: Only Halfway Back To School

We've got one kid back in school this past week, but what I've found is that having one kid back in school isn't that great when you have two kids total. Lil' S1's school doesn't start until after Labor Day because for some reason they can't just follow the public school schedule and make life easier on everybody. I find myself growing more and more resentful towards Lil' S1's school the longer he goes there and the more I learn about it. We pay a lot of money to send him there, and yet we have almost all the same hassles of public school. In some ways we have more because public transportation isn't as easy and because of this staggered schedule with his brother. His school is not even that great academically. I could say plenty more on the subject, but I'll stop there. It's not a great look for a parent to rag on his son's school in a (kinda) public forum. I'll just wrap it up by saying he likes it there and wanted to return this year, so we enrolled him again. It was his choice. That's what I tell myself to not get too irritated. Also, I don't look at our bank account when tuition is due, and every now and then I say a little prayer that he will want to go back to public school for high school.

But Lil' S1's school really needs to start again. He's been off the past week with no camp or anything, and it's been rough. He's not the type to run around with the neighborhood kids like his brother (plus, there aren't any boys in the neighborhood his age; plus, plus, even if there were, they probably would have been in school this past week, anyway), so he just putzes around the house all day, which is distracting when I'm working from home, and it means he gets way too much screen time. S and I have to come up with things for him to do, or else he's just doing to play on his devices, and it's hard for S and I to come up with things for him to do when we have to do our jobs to make money to afford his private school. He does like to bake/cook, which is great, but it's almost never healthy foods, and he always leaves a massive mess in the kitchen when he's finished. He can make a pretty good pizza from scratch, but he can't clean off the hook attachments he uses to mix the dough. Even when we get him to "clean up" after himself, I still have to go in after him and do the job for real. If I didn't, we would continuously have oil drips and flour dustings all over the counters and all our appliances would be caked in gunk.

I just need to get through this weekend, but it's a long weekend, literally, and possibly figuratively -- we will see how it goes. S is out of town on a combination business/social trip, so it's just me for the next few days. Last night went okay (other than the Mariners blowing a big lead and losing). Lil' S2 spent the night at a friend's house up the street, and Lil' S1 had some buddies over to play D & D. It's a regular campaign he does, with the location rotating between the participants' houses. I guess it was our turn because S told me right before she left that she set it up at our house. I didn't mind, but for the fact that one of the dad's was over an hour late getting his kid. Pickup time is 6:00 pm-6:30 pm, and dude arrived at 7:45 pm. I got increasingly annoyed as the lateness waxed because I wanted to shower and eat dinner and relax for the night, and I couldn't get in a relaxing mindset until all the kids (other than mine) were out of the house. Also, I didn't want to start doing those things and then get interrupted. I hate that.

When the dad finally showed up he apologized, but I found his excuse to be quite weak. He said that he had to pick up his daughter at her friend's house, and her friend's mother "put a giant plate of food in [his] face". So, in other words, he hung out and ate dinner with somebody instead of picking up his son. Here's what he could have done instead: not that. He could have said, "thanks, but I don't have time to eat right now, because I have to get my son." That is, in fact, what I would have done. Also, the story doesn't hold water, regardless. For one thing, when picking a kid up at a friend's house, you often don't even go inside and when you do, you rarely get beyond the entryway. I doubt this friend's mom answered the door with a plate of food in her hand and literally foisted it upon her guest without his consent. She almost certainly invited him, and he accepted, despite the fact that it would make him late to pick up his son. Then there is the fact that he was an hour and a half late, and eating a plate of food takes--what?--twenty-five minutes? The math doesn't come close to adding up.

The thing is, this guy just went through (is still going through?) a pretty contentious divorce, so I'm inclined to cut him a lot of slack. I don't think life is going great for him at the moment. However, a huge pet peeve of mine is when people behave as if their time and their life are more important than yours. So, in interacting with him, I tried to strike a balance between showing I was mildly annoyed without acting like it was the biggest injustice of the 2025. We actually ended up talking quite a bit (in our entryway), because his son was super slow getting his shoes on and gathering his stuff, and by the end of it, I was mostly over it. The kids were trying to talk us into having an impromptu sleepover at our house, but I said no, because I just didn't want to deal with it anymore. However, in order to placate Lil' S1, I basically said he could do it tonight, and I think he's going to hold me to that. That's okay--if I'm in a sleepover mindset in advance, it's not that bad.

Alright, time to go because I gotta get some lunch. I'm super hungry because I'm back on my 16/8 fasting diet. I listened to this doctor on a podcast talk about the adverse health effects caused by visceral adiposity (inner fat that surrounds your organs), and one possible sign of having too much visceral adiposity for men is having a big belly, and I have a pretty big belly, especially in relation to the rest of my body (I have very little noticeable fat elsewhere). The rule of thumb I found online, from a seemingly reputable source, is a 40-inch threshold. I measured my stomach from middle of the bellybutton to middle of the bellybutton, and it's about 41 inches. So, now my goal is get it below 40 and keep it there. Now, all the usually caveats with this apply -- you can't precisely assess overall health with a single number, the human body is complex, everybody is different, etc., etc. But there is very little downside to me trying to shrink my belly a bit (through hopefully there will be a downsize), and the potential upside, being healthier, living longer, being healthier longer, etc. is huge. It seems like a no-brainer to me. Also, I like the idea of using stomach size instead of weight as a metric, as more muscle mass (which is a good thing) can lead to a higher weight. Plus, when I look at myself in the mirror with my shirt off, I don't think Look at all that excess weight, but I do think, My belly is way too big, given how much I exercise. Might as well deal with the problem directly.

Until next time... 

  

Entry 774: Octogenarian Mom

We went back to the South Puget Sound region a week and a half ago for a relatively short trip to celebrate my mom's 80th birthday, and it was wonderful right up until the very end. The afternoon before we flew out, my 12-year-old nephew broke both of his ankles, and he and his father (my brother) spent the night in the emergency room. He was at one of those trampoline/foam pit/fun-zone places, and he apparently landed awkwardly and hit the ground too hard and got a hairline fracture in each ankle. It sounds like it was pretty fluky. He had already fallen into the pit like a dozen times (it was an American Gladiators style joust setup) before he got hurt. He's a very tall kid for his age, and it sounds like he unluckily found a crevice in the foam and hit the bottom with his feet. He literally slid through the cracks. It was a total bummer to end what was otherwise a fun and festive vacation.

But the good news is that my brother and his wife just bought a van, so they are decently equipped to transport a child in a wheelchair. Also, kids heal quickly. In a few months, my nephew will likely be back on his feet, running around, and it will be a "remember when that happened" topic of conversation. By contrast, if something like that happened to me, I would probably walk with a limp for the next half-decade. I mean, a few years ago my father fell off a small ladder and broke his foot, and he was laid up for many months and needed multiple surgeries just to get back to semi-normal.

Before all this went down, however, it was a good trip of seeing people I hadn't seen in a long time. I saw a handful of family members I hadn't seen since July 2017, a few more I hadn't seen since January 2017, and yet one more I hadn't seen since summer of 2007. I also randomly ran into two friends from high school I had mostly lost touch with. It's funny, when we came out to visit my family for a month a few summers ago, I didn't have a single chance encounter like this with anybody, and then I come back for just a week and have two of them.

Everybody came out for my mom's 80 birthday celebration. It was really a great event -- a lot of fun and the right amount of sentimentality. I feel so fortunate to have such a great family and friends (a few of my best buddies came down from Seattle with their families for the party) and that we are in a position financially/PTO-wise to fully take advantage of it. It really is a blessing, and not everybody is going to be around forever, so it's ultra important to take it all in now while it's still possible.

There were two big surprises for me this trip. One, which is not so great, is that my uncle has Parkinson's disease. He's in his late 60s, I believe, and he's always been quite healthy and spry for his age, so it was a total trip to see him at my parents' house shaking uncontrollably. He's still quite fit -- he says he runs or hikes almost everyday -- but he's much less outgoing and communicative, understandably so. His jaw quivers a lot, which, I can only assume, makes talking much less fun than it used to be. There is a genetic component to Parkinson's, which, being that my uncle and I share a direct ancestor (my great-grandfather, his grandfather also had it), isn't the most comforting thought for me, but I'll cross that bridge if/when I come to it. I'm not the type to go out and search for early warning signs. Yes, I might catch something sooner than I would otherwise, which would help with treatment, but I also might not and think I did, and then I will be living with that undo mental stress. I'll keep it in the back of my head, but that's where it's staying unless circumstances change.

The other surprise is that one of my longtime childhood friends has transitioned (is in the process of transitioning?) into a woman. This definitely threw me for a bit of a loop at first -- I had no idea she had any sort of gender dysphoria or anything like that -- but it's cool. She seems happy, and if that's the case, then I'm happy for her. To each their own, live and let live, and all that. It's trite but true. Also, I think I adapted to my new-old friend pretty quickly. I only misgendered her once (and she was cool about it), and after a little while talking to her it was like, Wow, you're a woman now! ... So, what else is new?

Alright, gotta go. But first, obligatory pic of Chambers Bay.

Until next time...  

Entry 773: Rabbit, Run... Please

I had the rudest of awakenings Friday morning. Well, technically, I was already awake but barely. My alarm had sounded, and I had arisen, but was not yet fully dressed, when S barged into the room in a panic. 

"Lil' S2 left his bike out and a bunny is stuck in the wheel!"

"Wait... what?"

"It's just stuck! It's bleeding! I think it's dead!"

"Uh... okay."

"Just put some pants on and get it out! I don't want to touch it!"

"There's a dead rabbit in Lil' S2's bike wheel? And I have to get it out?"

"Yes... I'm going to a Solid Core class. Bye!"

"Okay, bye... thanks for leaving this for me."

"Sorry!"

Then she was gone.

I peeked out the window, and S's description was accurate. A rabbit had somehow gotten its head stuck in the spokes of Lil' S2's bike* and was lying there bloody and lifeless. Now, just the sight of roadkill squigs me out a little bit, so I was dreading the idea of touching a dead animal and then doing... something with it. But the thought of it just sitting there on our walkway was worse, so I got dressed, grabbed a paper sack, found some old gloves we bought for a ropes course, and went out the door to get this thing over with as quickly as possible.

*It should have been stored in our shed. Lil' S2 forgot to put it away (because he's 9), and neither S nor I noticed it to remind him. When I told him later that a bunny had gotten stuck in it because he left he out, he replied indignantly, "That's the bunny's fault!" which I found morbidly humorous for some reason.

I was pondering what to do with a dead rabbit -- burying it near the creek seemed like the best option -- but as soon as I touched it, I realized it was a moot point. I could feel warmth and life still inside of it. So, then my mind turned to the question of what to do with a badly injured rabbit, but first I had to get it unstuck from the spokes without injuring it further.

And I'm not sure I succeeded in that regard. It's head was really wedged in there, so much so that a spoke had cut into its eye, which was causing the bleeding. I had to really pry to get it free. Once I did, I was hoping it would up and run away, but no such luck. It just laid there, staring at me with its haunting, bloody eye. I picked it up and put it in the paper bag, and it did fight me but very feebly. Once in the sack, it made no attempt to get out. This poor thing was not doing well.

As I saw it, I had four options: 1) Find an animal hospital that will take it (or do the equivalent of dropping it on the porch, ringing the doorbell, and running); 2) build it a habitat in a cardboard box and nurse it back to health, kids'-book-style; 3) go old-school, conk it with a shovel and bury it near the creek, using the justification that I would be "putting it out of its misery"; 4) release it near the creek and walk away, telling myself that that's just nature, but also feeling a bit guilty that I was too lazy and uncaring to do option 1 or 2.

I went with option 4. I'm mostly okay with it. I mean, it could move a little bit, so it's possible that it found a safe place to rest and gather enough strength to survive, and if it didn’t, well, Mother Nature is an evil hag, isn't she? Billions of living things die every second -- that's just way it goes. Also, I had a bunch of work to do and just wanted to get on with my day ASAP.

So, that was that. I'm still trying to figure out how it got stuck in the first place. Obviously, it didn't know any better, but something drastic had to have happened for it to wedge its head into such a tight area, especially since there was seemingly nothing there of interest to a rabbit. It's not like there was a carrot on the other inside it was trying to get to, and even if there was, a rabbit would have good enough instincts to go around, I think. My best guess is that it got spooked and ran full-speed ahead into the bike wheel without even seeing it, hitting it in the perfectly right-wrong way to get its little head stuck. It doesn't seem very likely, but it's the best I got.

The whole ordeal put me in a weird mood for the day. It's not like I was totally bummed out, and I didn't even think about it that much, but every now and then I'd get a tinge of -- I don't even know what to call it -- unease, I guess, and would think to myself, Why am I feeling this?, and then I'd remember, Oh, yeah, that's right: maimed rabbit. It did get me out of an errand at least. We ordered carryout, and S wanted me to go pick it up, but I was in the middle of a workout, so I balked at it a little bit, and so she started into a whole soliloquy, "I have to go to two different places, and I'm tired of driving kids around all day..."

"Sorry to cut you off, babe, but I had to pull a half-dead rabbit out of our kid's bike spokes this morning, doesn't that buy me anything?"

"Actually, it does. I'll get the food."

Nice.

In general, I feel like these types of things I do go underappreciated. Whenever there is something gross or physically taxing or technical that needs to be done, it's just assumed that I'm the one who has to do it. S will sometimes feel put out that she's doing "all the work" with the kids because she does most of the registration and appointments and stuff like that (although now that Lil' S2 does so many sports leagues and camps, which I almost always sign him up for, it's not that lopsided), but my response is always that that's not the only work that needs to be done. I mean, I could give a whole list of things that I do fairly regularly that S has never done -- clean the gutters, sweep debris off the roof and pick up the yard after a storm, clean the maggots out of the compost bin, put air in the tires, unclog a toilet or clear a drain, change a lock, carry bulk trash to the curb, reset the router, resync the controllers with the PlayStation -- but I won't because that would be petty of me.

Alright, that's all I got. Until next time...