Wired Differently - Week of 3/16/2025

This was our first week of being called back to the office full time (for absolutely no good reason whatsoever period). It was honestly pretty draining and exhausting. I’d nearly forgotten what the Sunday night scaries felt like.

Took a four day weekend (and even with a four day weekend, it’s been exhausting and draining). I thought I’d be able to shore up our tech situation. Get VPN’d up and stuff. I made some progress, and expanded our Proton subscription to have two licenses, but now I need to figure it all out and teach Husband. Also need to learn how to set up the new router with a VPN, encrypted DNS, and ad-blocking. I bought a new Raspberry Pi but have no clue how to use it. Rounded up all always-on listening devices and am giving them, along with my eero router, to a friend. Turning on lights with wall switches - how common. How very common.

We had a great dinner together on Saturday at one of our favorite restaurants downtown, Due Amici. It’s consistently good. A little pricey, but high-quality and welcoming atmosphere. The big restauranteur in town is Cameron Mitchell. He’s got quite the little empire going but his food, by and large, sucks ass. His supposed crowning achievement, an exclusive restaurant so enigmatically named “M” is pretty much only highly memorable because it’s such a lousy rip off. Due Amici, on the other hand, had such a good shrimp carbonara that I asked the waitress to do me a favor: go back to the kitchen, please, and grab the chef by the shirt, slap him across the face real hard, and scream, “You can’t keep making food this good all the time! What’s the matter with you?!” She laughed and told him about the ‘request’ from a customer. She said he thought it was funny and passed along a thank you back to me.

The symphony’s performance of Boléro surpassed my expectations. Not only did they play at what I would’ve considered to be precisely the right tempo, but the artistic director let some good flourishes fly which gave the piece just the right amount of originality and personality. The snare drum percussionist, who was quite handsome, knocked it out of the park. The applause was deservedly noticeably louder for his all-too-quick bow. I mean, really. He fucking killed it.

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Highlights

📺 Watching

Follow me on Trakt: https://trakt.tv/users/wireddifferently

(Excludes re-watched episodes because Trakt doesn’t scrobble them)

Severance (I don’t think better television has been created, I’ll just say that); Resident Alien; The Morning Show; EVIL; Spine Chillers; A Black Lady Sketch Show; Abbott Elementary; The Hotwives of Las Vegas;

🍿 Viewing

Follow me on Trakt: https://trakt.tv/users/wireddifferently

No movies this week

📚 Reading

Man’s Search for Meaning (Viktor Frankl)

🍽️ Eating

Due Amici (chef’s kiss); lunch with two friends from work at Ringside (don’t order the veggie burger)

🎧 Listening

Follow me on Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/profile/WiredDifferently

David Byrne’s Here Lies Love; Frente!; Sophie B. Hawkins; Kim Deal; Macklemore; Moloko; Róisín Murphy; PJ Harvey; Stevie Wonder; Sting; The Ting Tings; Zhané; Prince; Throwing Muses