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7.2.24
We recently went to see Inside Out 2, the sequel to one of our favorite Pixar films. I'm pretty sure this was my first time seeing a new movie in the theater since before the pandemic.
Pixar films are no longer guaranteed home runs—The Good Dinosaur, Turning Red, and Lightyear were all pretty big misses in my book, and I haven't even taken the time to see Elemental yet even though it's been on Disney+ for several months now—but by and large their movies still tend to be better than your average animated film, even when it comes to sequels (Cars 3 and Toy Story 4 were both decent movies, but probably unnecessary). So even though this is a sequel to a film that was perfectly fine as a standalone one-off, I was hoping they would find a way to expand the universe inside our minds without abusing the trust of the audience and devaluing the original.
By and large they did that—instead of sticking to just the five emotions that we saw in Riley's head in the first movie (Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Anger), the filmmakers add four new emotions (Anxiety, Envy, Embarrassment, and Ennui) to signal the growing complexity of Riley's inner life as she crosses the threshold into puberty and the more layered emotional and social experiences she's navigating.
Not all of these emotions seem as obviously relevant to the core human experience, but the one they focus on the most, Anxiety, definitely is, and the other three new emotions all play a more supplemental role in the file compared to that emotion, who spends a lot of the movie vying for control of Riley's emotional state with Joy, the main character from the first film.
This sequel was about as well done as I could have hoped for, especially given that it was a follow up to a great movie that didn't necessarily need to tell more of this story. However, I don't know if I'll ever be interested in watching it again—coming from someone who has been suffering from severe anxiety that manifests itself in all sorts of interesting, ridiculous ways, the portrayal of Anxiety was painfully accurate, so much so that it was actually a little triggering for me in the theater.
Will and Julie really enjoyed it, and I won't be surprised if they go see it again even though it will likely make its way to Disney+ in the next few months. Will turns 14 in a few days and starts high school in August, so this is right in his wheelhouse in terms of the major life events that Riley is experiencing (she is 13 and also entering high school, although that math doesn't make sense to me—Will started school relatively early and is always the youngest person in his grade, and he will have been 14 for a month by the time school starts).
Given how much Will likes to talk, he's actually a very private person, so I don't often have a good sense of what's going on inside his head, but I'm hoping this movie might be a positive point of reference for him that helps him process some of the new experiences and challenges he'll face over the next couple of years.
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7.3.24
Will, Julie, and I all decided to do the Peachtree Road Race this year, a 10K that goes through downtown Atlanta and typically has more than 50,000 participants. None of us were planning to run it, but there are tons of walkers, and it's pretty easy to get to the starting line using the MARTA trains. This was Will's first time doing it, and the fourth or fifth time for both Julie and me (although we haven't always done it together—there have been a couple of years where I ran it but she didn't and vice versa).
My intention a few months ago was to train to run it this year, but due to travel, small injuries, and general lack of motivation, I never got around to getting anywhere close to ready to run a 10K. But I didn't figure walking would be a problem—even if it's not running, I still exercise at least 30 minutes a day, and I never have to do any training, etc., before we spend the day hiking (or, as we had just a couple of weeks before, walking around Chicago, which we did for miles several consecutive days in more intense heat than we would face during the morning of the Peachtree).
And walking the race was fine for the most part. My recent walking adventures have been done in my everyday Merrill hiking shoes, but I wore my Brooks running shoes for the race, which are what I typically wear for running. There was a little bit of discomfort walking up the steepest hills because my leg and feet muscles react differently in those shoes than in my daily shoes and I hadn't worn my running shoes in a few months, but I didn't think anything of it.
But when the race was finally over and I was waiting in the shade for Will and Julie to finish, I noticed my calves starting to cramp up a bit, so I ate a banana and made sure to drink lots of water. By the time they finished and we started the mile-plus walk back to the closest MARTA station, my legs and feet were definitely in pain, and I had to stop a couple of times to rest, which I don't recall needing in the past. And then when I would get up to start moving again, the pain didn't really stop, and it got progressively harder and harder to walk.
By the time we got home, I was basically immobile with severe cramps in my feet and calves. Julie got me lots of Gatorade and also a topical spray for cramping, but even with those aids, I basically couldn't move off the couch for a couple of days, and I was in a lot of pain most of that time. It was a solid week before I felt like I could return to normal athletic activity (I usually go on an outdoor walk or ride a stationary bike for my routine daily exercise).
I've never had something like that happen before, but lesson learned: don't do a 10K in shoes that your feet and legs aren't accustomed to. I think if I had done workouts once or twice a week in those shoes leading up to the Peachtree, or if I had worn my everyday shoes, I would have been fine. But the combination of unfamiliar shoes, dehydration, and lack of sleep led to a perfect storm where my body just said "Enough!".
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7.9.24
We don't have a set July 4 tradition since moving to Atlanta, but we've most often ended up walking to downtown Decatur and watching the fireworks there. This year, however, I wanted to try something different by going to a Braves game and staying for their fireworks display after the game.
I got lucky and found some relatively cheap resale seats near the Braves dugout, which not only put us close to the action but would also give us a great view of the fireworks. However, after the Peachtree and my cramping issues, there was no way I was going to be able to handle driving up there and making the 20 minute walk to the stadium, and I was both sad and mad when I finally accepted that I wasn't going to be able to make it work.
Fortunately Julie was still up for taking Will, and she was also able to convince her mom to come along so we didn't waste my ticket. I was bummed that I wasn't able to go, but they had a great time, and this is definitely something I'll look into again the next time the Braves have a home game on July 4.
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7.10.24
Will turned 14 today, and to celebrate we surprised him with a trip to the Georgia Aquarium to do the seal encounter, where a trainer lets you get up close and personal with a few of the harbor seals who live at the aquarium. We did the sea lion encounter a few years ago during the pandemic and we really enjoyed that, so it was fun to do it again with a different species.
Unlike the sea lion encounter, the seal experience took place in a big room that opens onto the beluga whale tank. It was cool to get to touch and interact with the seals, but I was just as fascinated by the belugas. They have long been some of my favorite animals at the aquarium, and they seemed very aware that we were not the normal humans they see every day, because they kept coming up to the surface to look at us.
After the aquarium visit, I took a little break while Will and Julie went to see a movie in the afternoon (I think it might have been Inside Out 2 again). When they got home, we took Will to dinner at one of his favorite restaurants, the Kura revolving sushi restaurant up in Doraville. All of us like sushi, and it's fun experience to grab the plates as they go by. And finally we capped off the day with a trip to Andy's Frozen Custard, which has become Will's go-to place to get an ice cream-like frozen treat since it opened up last year.
He'll still do a party with his friends, but that won't happen until later in the month due to everyone's travel schedules. But I think he had a pretty good day hanging out with us and getting to do some of his favorite things.
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7.11.24
I've never been super into the Godzilla IP, although I've seen most of the movies since the 1998 reboot that featured Matthew Broderick. But I recently watched Monarch: Legacy of Monsters on Apple TV+, a show about humans' early contact with the Titans and the creation of an organization (the titular Monarch) to monitor, understand, and potentially defeat them.
The show takes place in two time periods, and tells an origin story for Monarch that goes back to WWII era when humans first created atomic energy and weapons. The modern time period for the show piggybacks on the events in Kong: Skull Island, the 2014 Godzilla movie, 2019's Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and 2021's Godzilla vs. Kong. After I finished Monarch, I realized that I'd never seen Godzilla vs. Kong, but it was available on one of my streaming subscriptions, so I wanted to see how it tied into the show.
It had very few ties to the streaming show, as it turns out, and overall it was a pretty average modern day blockbuster—too many characters to focus on, too little character development, and too many megadestructive battle scenes that are essentially interchangeable with any number of superhero or monster movies over the past 20 years. Like so many franchise tentpole movies, it was more about the spectacle than the story, and in consequence, the story was pretty forgettable.
I really hope they make more seasons of Monarch—even if they don't focus on the same characters as the first season, I'd love to see a slower-paced story that looks at the day-to-day behind-the-scenes workings of the organization that monitors the Titans. I'm sure more movies are coming—in fact, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, just came out earlier this year (and I'm sure I'll watch that soon)—but I've enjoyed Monarch more than any of the modern cinematic treatments of that universe.
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7.16.24
I recently finished A City on Mars: Can we settle space, should we settle space, and have we really thought this through? by husband and wife authorial team Kelly and Zach Wienersmith. As you can probably guess from the title, it's a humorous exploration of all the technological and sociological problems we'd need to solve to establish a permanent settlement on Mars and all the ongoing issues that settlers would face even if we were able to establish a colony there.
There's lots of great scientific discussions here, and the humorous tone will be familiar and welcome by those of us who grew up on Douglas Adams. But the main problem with this book is that it's just too long: they summarize most of the issues fairly early in the book, and then spend unnecessary chapters going into excruciating detail about each issue, often without adding significantly to our understanding of the problem.
I would still recommend this if you like science-oriented books—it's a nice counterpoint to Elon Musk's stupidity about settling Mars (which basically amounts to "Let's just send a bunch of people up there and they'll figure it out") and a more realistic companion to Andy Weir's fantastic work of fiction, The Martian—even though I didn't love it quite as much as I'd hoped. I'll definitely be on the lookout for whatever they publish next, however, and I also want to pick up their first book, Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve and/or Ruin Everything.
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7.17.24
I just finished watching season 4 of The Boys, and while I still generally enjoy this show, I think it's the right call to wrap this up with season 5, which is due sometime next year. It seems like they are indulging in more gross-out scenes and ultraviolence than ever, while taking a lot longer to significantly move the story forward.
There was nothing really wrong with this season, but it's the weakest of the four so far, and coming on the heels of the very middling spinoff Gen V (which had so much potential as a parallel to the X-Men's School for Gifted Youngsters), it feels very much like Amazon and the showrunners are milking this cash cow a little too often.
I'm hoping the final season will lend a sense of urgency to the storytelling and pacing, which could get us back to the feel of the first couple of seasons, which remain very engaging television. They've been drifting a little the last couple of seasons, but I'm hoping they'll round back into form entering the home stretch.
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7.18.24
We're leaving tomorrow for a week in North Carolina, first to spend a couple of days in the Triangle with just Julie and Will, followed by several days in Wilmington where all of my siblings and our families will be together for the first time in five years. It will be fun and exhausting, and I'm hoping we won't have too many dramatic episodes to contend with.
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7.30.24
Our trip to NC was mostly about going up to Wilmington to visit family, but we started the trip with a weekend in Chapel Hill. We drove up on Friday afternoon and checked into our Airbnb in Carrboro with plans to go to an outdoor concert that night, but it was raining pretty steadily and the forecast didn't look good for that evening. However, it cleared up just in time, and when we got to the venue—an outdoor amphitheater at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh—the grass on the lawn wasn't even wet.
We met my friend Lydia, her husband Dave, and their daughter Simone for the show, which was headlined by the Connells (based in Raleight) with Dillon Fence (based in Chapel Hill) opening. Julie, Lydia, and I all went to the same magnet STEM high school in Durham (that's where I met both Julie and Lydia), and Lydia's daughter Simone (who just graduated college) also went there. The Connells and Dillon Fence are both bands that were starting out during that period, and I remember seeing both of them during my junior and senior years at that high school at venues in Durham and Chapel Hill.
It was such a lovely, perfect evening. The moon was almost full, and the giant paper lanterns (which were likely vinyl, but they were made in that style) they had sprinkled above the lawn area were a nice compliment to the gorgeous full moon that slowly rose above the stage area throughout the performances. I love any time I get to spend with Lydia—our friendship has been rekindled over the past couple of years with regular phone calls and occasional visits—and although most of the evening was spent with our spouses and children present, we did get a few minutes to ourselves to catch up one-on-one.
When I originally bought the tickets for this show, the third band on the bill was supposed to be Love Tractor, a band from the same era who were part of the burgeoning Athens GA scene in the mid to late 80s along with groups like R.E.M., the B-52s, Pylon, and Guadalcanal Diary. I have tried many, many times over the years (starting in high school and persisting to this day) to see Love Tractor live, and I thought I would finally make it happen with this show. But they apparently backed out at the last minute, so they remain one of the few bands that I've been listening to since my teen years who are still together who I've never seen in concert (even though they are still based in Athens and occasionally play shows in Atlanta and Athens).
Saturday was spent wandering Chapel Hill, where we took Will to the Morehead Planetarium on the UNC campus (where Julie and I had both visited many times as children, although not together of course) and explored Franklin Street, which has changed drastically since we were in high school. We also spent a good bit of time in Duke Gardens and ate dinner at Namu in Durham (which Lydia introduced me to a couple of years ago during one of my visits to the Triangle).
On Sunday morning we left our Airbnb to drive down to Wilmington to begin the family portion of our visit. It was nice to have a little vacation with just my nuclear family before we spent several days with the extended family, and that lovely evening spent listening to the Connells with Lydia and her family is something I won't forget anytime soon.
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7.31.24
We were in Wilmington for three full days, bookended by two travel days. We arrived from our sidetrip to Chapel Hill on Sunday afternoon and got checked into our hotel before heading over to my parents' house to meet up with the rest of the extended family.
My parents are selling the house that they built in the early 80s (which I remember them building, but which has been the only home my two youngest siblings remember living in growing up), and my original intention with this trip was to have it be just me, Julie, and Will, so we could spend some quality time with my parents, I could pack up all of my remaining childhood belongings, and I could say goodbye to the last of my childhood homes that I still have access to.
One of my sisters still lives in Wilmington with her family, so we knew we'd see her, but once I pinned down my dates and put in my vacation days, my other sister, who lives about an hour away from us in Monroe GA, decided she wanted to come visit at the same time. That's wasn't a big deal, because I'm used to seeing her pretty often anyway, and there was enough room in the house for all of us to stay there without anyone having to sleep on a couch or an air mattress. But then my brother, who lives in Ohio, decided he wanted to come as well, bringing his entire crew of six (him, his wife, and their four adopted children, who are actually his wife's grandchildren from a daughter who passed away).
So that's how we ended up in a hotel—it didn't make sense from a cost perspective for my brother to say in a hotel because he would need at least two rooms, and although my family would need two rooms if we stayed at the house, we could all fit into a single suite at a hotel. I didn't get what I wanted out of the trip in terms of some quiet one-on-one time with my family and one last chance to stay in the house before my parents sell it sometime early next year, but the four siblings hadn't been together in the same place at the same time since 2019, and it was definitely good to see everyone again.
It's always complicated trying to organize meals and group activities with that many people—I think there were 17 of us total, 7 of whom were kids ranging from 2-14—and there were definitely some tensions trying to figure that out. But we did end up going to the Children's Museum downtown, eating lunch at Salt Works, and making a weather-shortened visit to Airlie Gardens in the first couple of days.
I wasn't in the mood to go to the Children's Museum, but I drove downtown and dropped Julie and Will off with the larger group while I headed a couple of blocks down to the riverfront, where I spent a couple of hours walking up and down the boardwalk they've built that extends from the Cape Fear Memorial Bridge all the way up to the Isable Holmes Bridge a couple of miles upriver. During that walk, I listened to a just-released album from one of my favorite bands, Los Campesinos, the first time I had heard it, which was a great way to experience the first record that group has put out since 2017.
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