6.3.25
I made it out to another concert on Sunday night, this time a group called Sleigh Bells who put out their first record, Treats, 15 years ago. They broadly fit into the category of maximalist hyperpop and have influenced younger artists like 100 gecs. I loved their first two records, started to sour on them a bit with the next two records (which leaned more into a cartoony jock rock sound), and then fell back in love with the moody, introspective mini album Kid Kruschev and its follow up, the full length Texis (I did not spell that wrong).

They just released a new album a couple of months ago called Bunky Becky Birthday Boy (which simultaneously celebrates the life of singer Alexis Krauss' late, beloved dog and the birth of her first child. I was a little worried that it might be drifting back into Jessica Rabbit territory (easily my least favorite of their releases), but thankfully it's a solid amped-up sequel to Texis.

I've never seen them live before, and although my anxiety and panic attacks have kept me from going to a lot of shows this year, I talked myself into this one because 1) the parking at the venue is pretty easy and relatively cheap for Atlanta (only $10), and 2) it was going to be a relatively short set. They've played the same 17 songs in the same order on all the dates for this tour so far, and because their songs rarely cross the 3 minute mark, the shows have only lasted about an hour (which is pretty short for a headlining act).

I'm so glad I went—I walked in after the opening act was done, about 15 minutes before Sleigh Bells took the stage, and found a nice cluster of short people about 20 feet from the stage so I had a great view of the stage for the show. Their music has a ton of energy in recorded form, but they really took it to another level live—it was bombastic (in the best way) and it felt like riding a huge wave that you knew was going to deposit you safely on shore. And Krauss and guitarist Derek Miller were exuberant and feeding on the energy of the crowd just as much as they were themselves energizing the crowd with their music.

6.4.25
Things usually settle down at work a bit once we get to June, but for some reason this week has been packed with a crazy amount of meetings. When the week started, I was scheduled for four meetings on Monday, five meetings on Tuesday (two of which were in person), four meetings today, and another four meetings tomorrow. Add in a couple of hours for dealing with email and another hour for Team chats throughout the day, and that doesn't leave a lot of room to actually do any work.

I rescheduled a couple of non-pressing ones (catch-up lunches with colleagues), convinced one coworker to cancel two others (those would have been my sixth and seventh meetings respectively with that person in the past five workdays), and just flat-out didn't go to one or two others (group vendor demos that several of my team members were also attending). That made it a little more bearable, and the meetings tomorrow won't be as bad (two are ones I don't typically attend, and two more are with my data team members).

Things do seem to settle down after this - next week I have no more than one meeting per day next week, and most of them are small meetings with one or two people instead of the larger meetings that I've endured this week. And the rest of June is similar as vacation season starts to ramp up, so I'm hoping it will finally start to feel like summer if I can just get through tomorrow.

6.5.25
The Switch 2 comes out today, and since I was lucky enough to get one of the preorders back in April, Will has been eagerly awaiting shipping updates, hoping that the initial delivery date of June 11 would update to either the day of or the day after release instead of nearly a week later.

That didn't happen the day before or the morning of, so when one of Will's friends reported going out to a Best Buy store and being able to get on in-person that morning, Will and Julie went hunting at a couple of places, hoping that if they found one, we could either cancel the order (when they left the house, the cancel button was still available on the order info page) or, worst case scenario, simply return it (since the store we ordered it from supposedly allows returns within 30 days).

It was kind of a hassle to think about that, but since this is Will's main birthday present (which we're giving to him a month early), I was willing to go along with it. They didn't end up finding one, however, and shortly after their last failed attempt to locate one in person, the order page updated to show that his Switch 2 had been received by a FedEx warehouse in Alabama and is now scheduled for delivery by Saturday.

That's not ideal—I don't know why the logistics arms of both Nintendo and FedEx couldn't have coordinated things better so that the shipping process started two days before release instead of the day of release (which other big distributors like GameStop, Best Buy, and Walmart seem to have figured out)—but at least he's not going to be waiting until next week. Luckily, only that one friend who found one in person seems to have gotten one so far, so he won't feel like he's missing out, and he'll actually still be one of the first people in his friend group to get one.

6.10.25
We hadn't been out to visit my mom in a couple of weeks, and since we had plans on both Saturday and Sunday, we decided to go out for a late afternoon visit on Friday. We typically avoid going on there on a weekday because we usually can't go until rush hour starts, which turns a 45 minute drive into a 60-90 minute drive. But since we were able to go during the day before the weekend exodus from Atlanta starts, it made sense given how much else we had going on the rest of the weekend.

What Will wanted to focus on was the arrival of his Switch 2, which I was able to preorder as his birthday present (which is in July) back in April when US preorders opened. The official release date for the Switch 2 was June 5, and often with big releases like this, the company will coordinate with the shipping companies to get them into the delivery pipeline in time for them to be delivered the same day the devices are released to retail. But as June 5 approached, it became clear that Nintendo and/or Target (which is where I was able to get a preorder) hadn't made these arrangements for the release of the Switch 2, and so Will wouldn't actually receive his on June 5.

The original delivery estimates were from June 6-11, and Will was bummed that it could possible be close to a week after release before he'd get his hands on it. But on June 5, the delivery info was updated to indicate that it would be shipped via FedEx and arrive on Saturday (June 7), only two days after the release to retail.

So of course he spent the rest of the weekend playing games on the new console once he got it on Saturday evening (unfortunately for Will, we seem to be at the tail end of everyone's delivery route, so we almost never get deliveries until after 5 the day we're expecting them). And that freed us up for our activities the rest of that weekend, which included our wedding anniversary on Sunday.

6.11.25
On Saturday night, Julie and I went to see another concert at Chastain Park Amphitheater (we saw Wilco and Waxahatchee there a few weeks ago). This time it was for an 80s triple bill consisting of Modern English (whose best known song is "I Melt With You"), Soft Cell ("Tainted Love"), and Simple Minds ("Don't You (Forget About Me)" from the Breakfast Club soundtrack), none of whom we probably would have been to see on their own but which made a fun bill stacked together.

It rained for a significant portion of the night when we were at this venue back in May, and it looked like we might have another wet evening for this show as well. But then the forecast predicted the end of the thunderstorms before the first set was scheduled to start, so even though we left a little later than we normally would, we still got to the venue in time to get parking in one of our preferred lots north of the amphitheater (which allow us to escape the heaviest traffic and get up to the Perimeter to get home).

A lot of people were arriving late like us, so the line to get into the venue was pretty long, and Modern English started their set before we were able to get in. We were in our seats for the second half of their short set, which of course included "I Melt With You" as the final song. Soft Cell took the stage shortly thereafter and also played a short-ish set (but still noticeably longer than Modern English's). They also closed with their biggest hits, a medley of "Tainted Love" and their cover of the Supremes' "Where Did Our Love Go".

Simple Minds played a full set as the headliners, and they also had a much deeper catalogue to draw from. When I was a teenager, I only owned Once Upon A Time (the album that came out after "Don't You (Forget About Me)" but which doesn't actually include that song (although the upcoming 40th anniversary vinyl reissue will rectify that and put that song at the end of side 1). But since getting into vinyl and exploring more of the music of the early 80s, I've also listened to the two albums that preceded Once Upon A Time, New Gold Dream and Sparkle in the Rain, and since 11 of their 18 songs came from those three records, I was pretty familiar with most of the setlist.

They predictably closed the main set with "Don't You (Forget About Me)", but they really blunted its power by turning it into an endless jam where they allowed the crowd to sing the chorus umpteen times. But that was my only real criticism—frontman Jim Kerr's voice still sounded great, and the band (which only included one other member from their heyday, guitarist Charlie Burchill) was on point.

Overall it was a fun night, but I'm not sure how much effort I'd go to in order to see any of these bands again. It was a great nostalgia bill, and I would encourage anyone to see these groups if you still can, but since I wasn't an obsessive fan of any of them when I was younger, once is probably enough for me.

6.12.25
It was our anniversary last Sunday (our 29th being married, but also the 37th anniversary of our first date), and, as has been the case in recent years, we kept it pretty low key. We had just been to the Simple Minds concert the night before, so we left Will to his own devices and went to a couple of vintage/antique stores we hadn't visited before up in Cumming, including one huge market that only opens for one long weekend a month.

For dinner, we went to the Iberian Pig, a tapas place on Decatur Square. We've been there a few times before, but it's been at least a couple of years since our last visit (and probably longer). I've become a lot more sensitive to indoor noise in the past couple of years, especially multiple loud conversations bouncing off bare walls and ceilings, so we asked to be seated in a little alcove up front with fewer people and more wood surfaces to absorb the noise, and it was a perfect little spot for me. I don't know if I'd have been able to stay if we weren't able to switch to that spot from the main dining room.

The food was great as always, if a little bit rich. That's the problem with a lot of tapas places: there's so many dishes we want to try, but many of them are heavy and they add up quickly. I think we found the right balance that night, however—we both left feeling satisfied but not overstuffed.

Next year will be our 30th anniversary, and we're hoping to take a big trip as we have on our 10th and 20th anniversaries. Ideally I'd love to go back to England, specifically York, which is where we spent six months studying abroad in college. We loved our time there, but we haven't been back since.

6.17.25
It was Father's Day on Sunday, but I like to keep things pretty simple usually, so that's what we did. The biggest thing we did was go out to dinner at a favorite local taco place whose best dish is oddly their sesame-seasoned fries. Julie and Will got me some gifts from a couple of stores that sell stuff by local artists and artisans, and it was generally a quiet day. Just how I like it.

6.18.25
Will has surprisingly gotten his first job this week. It's just for a week, and it wasn't really planned, but I think it will be a good experience for him.

It started on Monday when one of his friends (who is also the girlfriend of one of Will's best male friends) called Will and her boyfriend saying she could use a little help wrangling kids at her new summer job, which was being a camp counselor at a camp hosted where the three of them all went to middle school together. Will and his friend were a big help, so much so that when she asked them to come back the next day, they went to the head of the camp and said that they'd be glad to help out, but they wanted to be paid if they were going to be there all day for a week. The head of the camp agreed, and so here he is on his third day at a paid job.

I'm proud of him for being willing to help out a friend, but also for advocating for himself when that help turned out to be a much heavier lift and anyone anticipated. That's one thing that Will has generally been pretty good about his whole life: being willing to try new things. That, plus his outgoing personality, will open the doors to a lot of cool experiences, many of which will come just because he was willing to say yes to an unexpected opportunity.

6.24.25
Last Thursday was Juneteenth, which both Julie and I get a day off for. Will was otherwise occupied with his weeklong summer job, so we had a nice day just the two of us. We started with a walk on a trail that runs next to the Chattahoochee River just outside the northern edge of the Perimeter. We'd never been there before, but it was a nice walk (we walked from one end to the other—that part of it is bracketed by parking lots on either end) and we'll likely go back again.

For lunch we got mixed shawrama and falafel pitas from a place down in Emory Village. I don't eat lunch very often these days, and I also don't go into the office very much, but back when I did both, I would get that a couple of times a week (and the only reason I didn't do it more often was because the line/wait time could be very unpredictable).

Over the weekend we went to visit my mom and stopped for Hawaiian ice at a Pelican's Snoballs on the way back home. We had to go to work on Friday after having Thursday off, but Fridays are usually pretty quiet for both of us, so it was almost like we had a long four day weekend.

6.25.25
On Monday evening we went to see the new Pixar movie, Elio, about a boy who dreams about going to space and making contact with aliens, and then mistakenly does make contact with them and is abducted by generally friendly aliens from many different planets. He is taken to a central world, where they think he is the leader of Earth and prepare to induct him into the galactic community.

It was cute, and I enjoyed experiencing it in the theater, but I don't know that I'll revisit it anytime soon. Even Pixar's misses are still generally pretty high quality, but even though this was an original story, it still felt kind of formulaic and lacked truly distinctive characters.

6.26.25
I'm taking off tomorrow and Monday not because I have any real plans, but because I'm at my vacation cap and I need to burn two days or else I won't be credited with my accrual next month. Someday we're going to learn how to take a normal amount of vacation so I won't constantly be taking days just to stay under my limit. But I guess that won't be this year.