11.4.25
Will is 15, but is still enjoying going out with his friends to trick or treat for Halloween. We carved our pumpkins as usual, but we didn't get many visitors on our street this year. Anyway. Here's the annual photo of our jack o'lanterns:

11.5.25
Last Thursday Julie and I went to see Big Thief at the Fox Theatre. This was our second time seeing them, the first coming at the Eastern back in 2023 when they were touring behind their masterful double album Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You.

This time they were touring in support of their most recent album, Double Infinity, which, despite its title, is a single album with a running time that's pretty average for their records. Since the last time we saw them, their longtime bassist left the band, which was a big deal for a group that defined themselves as a collective. They haven't fully replaced him since he left, instead using temporary bassists to flesh out their live performances.

The show was fine, and it was cool to see how many devoted fans this band has been able to cultivate, but this stage seemed a little too big for them given their relatively stripped down stage setup—it felt like they should be playing a much smaller venue even though the show was a near-sellout. It was a show that tilted heavily towards their most recent songs, with more than half of the 18-song setlist coming from Dragon or Double Infinity that also featured four new, as-yet-unreleased songs. There was only one song each from Masterpiece and Two Hands, and no songs from either Capacity or U.F.O.F.

We usually end up getting tickets at the Fox that are about halfway back on the floor, but this time we got first row balcony seats. We were a bit further away, but the sound was fine, and we didn't have to worry about being seated behind someone who would block our view of the stage, which happens all the time on the floor. It was a different experience than we're used to at that venue, but I think this might become our preferred spot going forward.

11.6.25
I made my first trip up to Mojo Vinyl in Roswell in quite a while (at least a year), intending to spend a good while going through all the bins. But I started, as I always do when visiting a record store, with the recent arrivals bin, and that's also where I ended my visit after picking up only two albums.

The first was a clean 1988 pressing of Morrissey's debut solo album Viva Hate that I got for a very reasonable $28. There is a more recent repress, but it features different artwork and substitute's the original version's third track on the second side, "The Ordinary Boys", with a contemporary track called "Treat Me Like a Human Being", a change Morrissey himself apparently insisted on. But I really wanted the version that I remember from back in 1988, the version that I've listened to for nearly 40 years, and I was happy to find it at a good price at a local shop after passing up the more recent reissue several times over the past couple of years.

The record that put an early end to my crate digging, however, was a 2011 reissue of Whiskeytown's final album, Pneumonia. That's the last time this brilliant record was released on vinyl, and even though it was priced at $100—far and away the most I've ever paid for a used record—that was still well below the recent average for this pressing on Discogs. Still, that blew my budget for the day, so I wisely walked to the counter and paid for my two selections before building up a bigger stack of records that might have forced me to make some hard choices.

11.11.25
Over the past couple of weeks I've watched the most recent entries in tentpole IPs that I meant to go see in the theaters but which I missed and have now come to streaming. These were Thunderbolts (eventually revealed as an attempt to establish a new Avengers team that also mimics the Suicide Squad of the DC universe); The Fantastic Four: First Steps (a reboot of a Marvel franchise whose cinematic history is mostly failed reboots attempting to capture the right vibe from a beloved comic book series); and Tron: Legacy (a sequel to the 1982 movie that has also gotten its own sequel this year).

Thunderbolts was probably the best of the bunch, and it was only okay. It was much better than Marvel's other Phase 5 movie released in 2025, Captain America: Brave New World, but that's not saying much, as that was possibly the worst Avengers-focused movie in the entire catalogue of MCU Avengers movies. Thunderbolts is an attempt to set up Phase 6, which will include two new Avengers-titled movies, but I don't think it brought back your average moviegoer the way Marvel Studios had hoped, and it will be interesting to see if these characters remain an integral part of Phase 6 going forward.

First Steps features an entirely new cast for the Fantastic Four and is the first official entry in Phase 6 of the MCU. The casting was pretty good, and I loved the retrofuture setting, which combines advanced tech with 50s-era modernist style, but the plot was forgettable except that it reminded me too much of The Incredibles 2 (another Disney superhero franchise that taps the same aesthetic as First Steps). Even though this movie introduces us to Doctor Doom in a closing credits cutscene, who will be a centerpiece of the next Avengers movies, this film didn't perform that well at the box office, and I wonder how prominently this team will be featured in the remainder of Phase 6.

I'm still hoping to go see the new Tron: Ares in theaters (it was released last month), and since I never saw Legacy in theaters or on streaming even though it was released way back in 2010, I wanted to get caught up on that story before seeing the new one. It was a visual spectacle, and I liked Jeff Bridges revisiting his Flynn character from the original movie, but I didn't care for the actor who played Flynn's son Sam, who is the primary protagonist in the sequel. He doesn't seem to figure in the new movie at all, so I'm guessing audiences reacted to his portrayal of the character the same way I did.

11.12.25
A few months ago, my friend Kirk let me know that he and his wife Jody would be coming down to Atlanta in early December to see David Byrne's Who Is the Sky? tour. I was meaning to buy a ticket for the same night they're going for a while, but I kept putting if off even though I looked at the remaining single seats at least once a week.

I finally made up my mind to buy a ticket in the front row of the non-pit section since the cost difference between one of those seats and a seat 10-15 rows back was only $30-$40, but when I went to purchase the last remaining one, I discovered that it had been purchased by someone else in the few hours since I had last checked the seat map.

At that point, my options were to buy a middling seat for a lot more than I wanted to pay for that kind of seat, or to buy a pit seat for about $30 more than the front row seat I had intended to purchase. So that's what I did: I had already talked myself into the higher cost, and another $30 for a premium experience was negligible in that context.

11.13.25
The years go fast and the days go so slow...

11.18.25
It's my mom's 78th birthday today, so over the weekend we met up with my sister to celebrate as a family. We went to lunch at a crepe place near my sister's house where one of my mom's neighbors works, and it was surprisingly good (my sister's local restaurant choices have been very hit or miss).

Afterwards we walked a block over to have some ice cream in the unseasonably warm weather—it was warm enough that we even decided to eat outside. Then we went back to my mom's house for presents and to hang out for a while. It was a nice day together, and I'm glad we could all celebrate her birthday with her.

11.19.25
I've been reading Sam Keane's pop science books for a while now, and I especially enjoyed The Disappearing Spoon and The Violinist's Thumb. I just finished his most recent book, Dinner With King Tut: How Rogue Archaeologists Are Re-Creating the Sights, Sounds, Smells, and Tastes of Lost Civilizations, and although I enjoyed it, it has a lot more highs and lows than his typical books.

This book gives us a glimpse into the world of experiential archaeologists, people who try to recreate the world of the past by building weapons, brewing beer, makings clothes, and cooking recipies using archaeological evidence and materials that the people from earlier civilizations would have had access to.

Keane spends a lot of time with this breed of archaeologists who each are focused on different locations and time periods, and much of the book is about his interactions with them and his own attempts to recreate ancient items. But he also does something he's never done in his previous books: writing short historical fiction accounts that attempt to capture a day in the life of people from these different eras, interspersing these stories with the non-fiction reporting on the contemporary archaeologists who are documenting those civilizations.

It's an interesting approach that adds a different texture to the book, and when it works, it's really great. But there are many times when these stories are less engaging than they could be, and they really slow the pace of the book and don't necessarily add anything worthwhile to the story of a given civilization.

I still recommend this, especially if you like his other books. But I'd definitely start with the first two books I mentioned if you're not familiar with him.

11.20.25
Our house burned down in September 2021. Thanks to delays from the insurance company in giving us an initial payout combined with labor and materials shortages thanks to Covid, we didn't start rebuilding until spring of 2022, and we didn't move back into our rebuilt house until April 2023. We spent all the months between when we moved in and the end of the insurance claim window in September 2023 submitting our receipts and trying to get our insurer to reimburse us, which they did not for a substantial number of items that should have been covered by our policy. They didn't respond to tell us why they weren't reimbursing us—they just didn't communicate with us and they didn't send us our money.

After the claim window ended and we were still owed a significant sum of money, we were compelled to sue our insurance company, and they also used lack of communication and delaying tactics to further drag out the resolution of our claim. They did everything from waiting until the second to last day of the window to file a motion to have the case removed to a different court; delayed the discovery interviews for their witnesses three times, adding four months to that process, and then filing a motion for summary judgment that took the judge nearly 11 months to rule on.

But the judge finally did rule on it and was prepared to set a trial date, and surprise, surprise, they communicated with us for the first time in months asking if we would go to mediation with them. We agreed to this, because we genuinely would like to get this settled and put this behind us, even though we suspected this was just another delaying tactic, and that mediation session was today.

We have really strong evidence, and our lawyer was convinced that we would get an acceptable settlement offer by the end of the day, and we actually started to get our hopes up that this might all finally be over. But as the session dragged on into the afternoon, it was clear that the insurance lawyers hadn't really done their homework, and it seemed like the mediator spent most of his time educating them about our claims using the exact same evidence and documentation that the insurance company has had in their hands for over two years. And at the end of the day, they seemed to acknowledge that we were justified in what we were asking for, but they weren't authorized to offer us our bare minimum, and so the day ended with no resolution.

So that was disappointing, especially after we had gotten our hopes up that they might be reasonable and engaged for once, but the day still ended on a high note. A couple of months ago I reserved two spots for Will and myself to go to the Braves stadium and do a round of Upper Deck Golf, where you walk to different areas of the stadium and hit golf balls off of tees at artificial greens that had been set up on the baseball field below.

I wasn't sure if I was going to like it, but it was really a lot of fun. You basically got to walk around the whole stadium on your way from one tee to the next, and even though we were very good, it was still fun to hit the balls off the upper deck—it felt like they went really far even when you didn't get a good hit. We'll definitely do this again next year, and it would be really fun if it worked out so my dad could go with us.

11.25.25
As usual, I have too many vacation days, so I'm taking today and the rest of the week off to burn them even though we won't see any out-of-town visitors until Thanksgiving Day.