1.7.25
We had a nice long Christmas break, and since we didn't travel to North Carolina like we usually do, it was pretty low key and relaxed.

I came up with the idea of making a list of Christmas movies and tv shows that we could vote on, including each of us getting one vote that automatically put that movie into the watchlist. We didn't end up watching all the ones that made the final cut, but it was a fun exercise, and we did have fun watching several of them together.

I wasn't feeling good at all on Christmas Day, but we made the trip out to my sister's for presents and dinner with her and my mom. I was sick enough that Julie had to drive us, and I don't really remember much—just being cold and miserable and wanting to get back home so I could get under several blankets and go to sleep.

1.8.25
In the past few months, I've watched the second seasons of three fantasy and sci-fi streaming dramas based on pre-existing IP: Apple TV+'s Foundation (based on the series of novels by Isaac Asimov); Max's House of the Dragon (a prequel series to Game of Thrones based on George R.R. Martin's Fire & Blood, a history of House Targaryen); and Amazon's The Rings of Power (telling the story of how the rings in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings came to be forged). Here are things that all three of these series have in common:

1. The first seasons were all paced far too slowly, with tons of characters and settings to get to know as part of the world-building before the real storytelling could get going.
   
   
2. Season 1 of each show just felt like a long setup for season 2, and although the second seasons were much better across the board for all three shows, they also unfortunately feel like more of a setup for the yet-to-be-released (but all greenlit and/or in production) third seasons.
   
   
3. Almost none of the characters (and none of the main ones) is having any fun whatsoever—they are all unrelentingly dark, with almost every scene full of exposition and fate-of-the-world heaviness hanging over every small decision. None of the shows seems to have learned that a big part of what made the first few seasons of Game of Thrones so great was the debauchery and humor that cut the gravitas and bloodshed.

Given the increase in action and faster storytelling beats of the second seasons, I am looking forward to the third seasons of each of these shows, all of which are expected to premier sometime in 2025 or 2026. But it still sucks that 1) the ramp up is so slow and long and 2) the wait for new seasons is so long.

1.9.25
Most schools and businesses in Atlanta, including Will's school, Julie's clinic, and my office, have already announced they are shutting down tomorrow in anticipation of a prolonged period of wintry weather, which Atlantans are ill-prepared for even though it seems like more than half the city comes from somewhere else where they grew up with snow.

Best case scenario we'll get a couple of inches of actual snow before things turn to rain and we won't end up with downed power lines. I don't really want to think about worst-case scenarios, but a heavy coating of ice on everything from freezing rain could leave our heavily wooded neighborhood without power for a day or more.

1.14.25
It snowed here in Atlanta last Friday, the first real, substantial snow I remember since moving here from the Baltimore area in 2012. We've had a few ice events, and we've had a couple of times where less than an inch stuck to the ground and was gone by the next day, but this time the temperatures were cold enough that the snow stuck around most places until two or three days later (and it's still hanging out in areas that stay in shadow all day).

It was snowing pretty hard around 8 or 9 on Friday morning, and we made Will get up to walk around in it for a little. He was not even two years old yet when we left Maryland, so he doesn't remember the snow there, nor does he remember our one trip to going skiing when he was younger, so this is the first time he's really seen snow in his whole life. I'm glad I got him up early and made him come out with us to walk around the neighborhood, because the heavy snow stopped before noon, and if I had waited for him to get up naturally, he might have missed all but some light flurries.

I love remote work, but this is one time when it was a disadvantage—since everyone is set up from work-from-home anyway, we didn't get a snow day even though the streets weren't really drivable until Sunday. We did lose power for a few hours which would have allowed me not to work, but that didn't happen until Friday night. Thankfully they got the power turned back on before sunrise the next day, so even though it got pretty cold in the house, we were able to sleep through most of the inconvenience.

1.15.25
Will's new school places an emphasis on education with a global perspective, and as part of that curriculum, all the upper schools students have the option to participate in a once-a-year school trip abroad. The school is going to Thailand for 12 days this year, and Will is going. His flight leaves on Friday morning, and he's so excited and a little bit nervous.

I'm pretty anxious about it myself, but I'm trying not to let him see that. He's never been on an international trip before, he's never traveled this long without us, and he actually hasn't been away from us in any context for this long since he was born. I also have a lot of anxiety around travel in general, and I feel pretty helpless about him being in a country I've never been to and being watched out for by people I don't really know (although the head of school who is leading the trip used to be a travel agent, and he typically scouts out the location for each trip by traveling there himself the summer before).

But I am excited for the experiences he'll have—I've only been abroad once, but it was for six months while I was in college, and that experience changed me and the way I see the world forever. And I'm a little jealous too—I don't know that I've ever taken a vacation for 12 days in my life, and I've never been to Thailand (or anywhere in Asia). It's a stretch for us to afford this on top of the school tuition, but I know this is something that he will remember forever.

1.16.25
I went to my first concert of 2025 last night, although it wasn't one I bought tickets for. My friend got a table for four at Eddie's Attic to see Tommy Prine (the late John Prine's son), and since he was only going with his wife, he invited Julie and me to come along. That's a great venue for seeing live music, but I wasn't familiar with Tommy Prine's songs, and while they were fine, I won't be rushing out to buy his album.

2024 was my biggest year for live music in my whole life. I didn't think I'd beat 2023, which set my previous records for concert attendance with 41 artists seen at 30 different events, but 2024 ended up blowing those numbers out of the water. All told, I saw 65 shows total last year at 48 different events, including my first music festival (Hopscotch up in Raleigh NC) since I went to the Virgin Festival in Baltimore in 2007.

I counted each day of that festival as a single event, and that, along with a several double bills, one triple bill, and one quintuple bill helped boost the overall count of artists seen to easily the largest number in my life. I think this might also be only the second time the number of shows I saw in a given year was higher than my age that year—I saw 22 shows in 1989 when I was only 18, but other than that haven't come close to having my concert count exceed my age.

I don't anticipate exceeding that 65 show total this year (or ever probably), but I guess I could come close if I decide to attend Hopscotch again and think about going to Atlanta's Shaky Knees for the first time (they are moving it to a new location this year that might make public transport an option). I'm supposed to go see a rescheduled MJ Lenderman show at the end of this month (which, if it had taken place on its original date, would have put my 2024 count at 66), but we're thinking about going on a weekend trip and I might miss that one. After that, I don't have tickets for any shows until late February, when I have a series of four shows stacked up in the span of one week (with two of them taking place in Athens).

1.21.25
Will is now in Bangkok and having a great time on his class trip. They were delayed by about 12 hours—their flight to Vancouver (where they departed for Thailand directly) was late, and one of the kids didn't fill out some required paperwork, so they missed their original flight. They got rebooked the next morning, with half the class being routed through Tokyo and half going through Hong Kong (Will wanted to go to the Tokyo airport because he's a little obsessed with Japan, but he thought the Hong Kong airport was pretty cool).

Later this week they will take the train to a smaller city, and then they will fly to a third place before returning to Thailand for their flight back to the US. Now that he's there and seems to be finding his way around with his classmates, I'm feeling far less anxious than when we dropped him off at the airport last week. But I'll still be happy when he's back safe at home.

1.22.25
We had a second reasonably substantial snow in one season yesterday, and that absolutely hasn't happened since we moved here. This one only accumulated about an inch or so, but it came via flurries throughout the day, and it was nice to look at the window while working from home and see it.

We didn't lose power this time, so it was just a nice little snowfall that didn't really disrupt much. I remember we got a bunch of days like that each season when we lived in Maryland, but they don't happen in Atlanta very often.

1.23.25
I'm a sucker for generation ship sci-fi books, and after seeing a couple of good reviews, I had high hopes for Michael Mammay's straighforwardly titled Generation Ship. As with many of these books, it covers the period where ship, after housing several generations of humans who have known nothing but living on a space ship, approach their final destination and start to think about what that change will mean for their way of life and their individual lives.

There were some promising aspects of this book—for example, the hard cap on life ending at 75 years of age, and a debate about whether that cap should be waived once they are within six months of their new planet—but overall I was disappointed by this book. The writing wasn't strong, and the technique of having several different points of view the story is told from seems more like a cover to let a lot of internal monologues serve as an expository tool that, were the story in better hands, would not have been necessary.

The book also seemed to chase new plot elements without fully resolving the previous ones, and often just dropping them altogether. Some of the characters had promise, but there were too many of them for what turns out to be a relatively small story for most of the book, and none of the characters really held fast to who they thought we were, having consistency in their personalities and actions sacrificed for the sake of moving the plot forward.

The end of the book set up some tantalizing possibilities for what comes next, but honestly, the author should either have gotten to those parts more quickly so we could spend more time in those scenarios, or left them entirely for a sequel and focused on the world of the ship and resolving the issues there. I have a feeling the author is plotting a sequel, but honestly, I'd rather he just left it alone. The futures of these characters (or their descendants) will require even more perspective-jumping, and at this point I just don't trust the author to do justice to the characters and the larger story.

1.28.25
While Will was away in Thailand on his class trip, Julie and I decided to take advantage of our temporary empty nest to spend a long weekend in Asheville NC, a place we've talked about visiting a few times in recent years but which I've never been to and Julie hasn't been to since she was a kid. What helped make our decision to spend our long weekend away there was a Chihuly installation on the grounds of the Biltmore Estate that was closing the first week of February.

We found a nice little Airbnb cottage behind a larger house in a old, quiet, upscale neighborhood similar to our neighborhood in Atlanta. It had it's own entrance and parking, and it was only about a 15-20 minute walk to downtown Asheville (and also very close to the interstates which allowed us to get to nearby attractions easily). We arrived on Friday night and went to one of the many local pubs for dinner, stopping on the way back to get some snacks for breakfast. It was super cold, so we didn't really do anything else on Friday night.

Saturday was the day we had tickets to the Biltmore Estate, with an entry time to the house at 10 and to the Chihuly exhibit at 2. The main mansion was one of the places Julie had been when she was younger, but it was all completely new to me (aside from my familiarity with the facade from its use in television shows and movies over the years). It was a pretty nice tour aside from the fact that it was pretty cold even inside the house, but the crowds were relatively sparse compared to the summer tourist season, so we got to linger longer at things we found interesting and didn't really have to fight crowds to see them.

My favorite part of the house was the so-called Halloween Room, named not because anything significant happened there on a Halloween night, but because of the witches, black cats, and bats that were part of a room-spanning mural painted by Cornelia Vanderbilt and her husband John Cecil as they transformed the room for a very exclusive New Year's party in 1925. My second favorite room was right around the corner from the Halloween Room in the basement: a fully indoor heated pool that existed pretty much as it did when it was still usable (sans the water, of course).

After the house tour, we had a very good lunch in the Stable House before heading over to another part of the estate for the Chihuly exhibit. That was exactly what you would expect if you've seen one of his installations before, but it was a good enough experience that we walked through it twice and picked up an exhibition catalog as a souvenir.

We went back home on Monday, and the rest of the weekend was spent checking out various shops and restaurants in either downtown Asheville or in the more bohemian West Asheville. Every single meal we had was great, but I especially liked White Labs Brewing Co. (they made wood-fired pizzas using their yeast and beers from their microbrewery) and the Early Girl Eatery in West Asheville, where we had a nice brunch meal on Sunday after visiting the record store across the street.

We will definitely go back sometime, and a big motivator for me will be getting to fully explore Woolworth Walk, a coop for local artists that we only discovered about 35 minutes before it closed for the day on Sunday. I was planning to pick up a couple of prints from a local artist named Rob O'Sheeran, a painter who paints in reverse on glass, painting the foreground elements first and then layering in the background on top of them. I found an original painting of a jar of fireflies that I assumed would be too expensive for us, but it was only $400, so I decided to treat myself. I only saw about a quarter of the artists in that space, and most of those only briefly—I could definitely have spend a whole afternoon in there if we had had the time.

On the way back home we stopped at the American Museum of the House Cat in the mountains of North Carolina, which we had seen on the drive up. It was a mostly kitschy collection of art, trinkets, and marketing materials featuring cats that was mostly from the collection of the museum founder (who passed away last year), but we were the only ones there for a while, and it was fun to chat with the lone staff member and play with the three kittens who currently reside in the museum.

1.29.25
Will got back home from Thailand last night shortly before midnight after another full day on airplanes and in airports. He had a really great time, but it's really nice to have him home safe again.

He didn't go to school today, and because of jet lag, it's unlikely that he'll go tomorrow either. We'll have to see how the rest of the week plays out, but I have a feeling that many of his fellow tripmates won't go back to school until next week, and we might let him do that too depending on how quickly he adjusts to being back on Atlanta time.

1.30.25
Today was a complicated day for getting concert tickets, as three shows I want to go to all went on sale this morning: Simple Minds, Sleigh Bells, and Nine Inch Nails.

Simple Minds and Sleigh Bells both had presales that started at 10, but I targeted the Simple Minds tickets first. They are playing one of those 80s triple bills with Human League and Soft Cell that seem to end up at Chastain Amphitheatre every year or two, and since those are assigned seats, getting on as soon as the presale opens is key to getting decent seats for a relatively low cost. And in a weird coincidence, I think the two seats we ended up with are the same as the seats we had for the last one of these shows, when the lineup was Berlin, Howard Jones, and Culture Club.

Sleigh Bells was general admission, but they haven't toured in a while, so I didn't know what the demand might look like. But it only took me 5 minutes to finish the Simple Minds transaction, so I was able to quickly focus on tickets for that show and picked up my pass pretty quickly.

Finally there was Nine Inch Nails, doing their first tour since 2022. I missed them the last time they came through Atlanta, and in fact have only seen them once in my life, way back in 1991 when they were part of the original Lollapalooza lineup. They're playing small arenas this time around, and what I learned from seeing several shows at State Farm Arena over the past couple of years (Duran Duran, the Cure, and Depeche Mode) was that it's better to have a direct view of the stage from the opposite side of the venue than it is to have closer seats off to the side of the stage.

This show is at Gas South Arena, up I-85 outside the Perimeter, and while I've never been to that venue, I approached my seat selection using those lessons learned from State Farm. I didn't want the pit, even though those tickets were sort of reasonable, and the floor seats behind the pit were way too expensive for me, even though I was just buying a single ticket. So I bought a ticket in the lower seating bowl (not the floor, but the bleacher-type seats that surround the floor) directly opposite the stage, where hopefully I'll have a good view of the screens and the stagecraft even though Trent and the band will be relatively far away.