We are in our final days in Napa for this season after wrapping up a 3+ week road trip to Arizona and Utah. Son Matthew is in town, traveled from NJ to spend a week hanging out with us and working remotely.

1. Where I've Been Traveling

Julie and I left Napa in mid-March in the van and worked our way south, with a first night in Bakersfield and a second night near Joshua Tree. We stopped at the Patton Memorial Museum at Chiriaco Summit (the tank static displays were a letdown — a single Sherman and a bunch of modern vehicles) and then hiked the Mastodon Peak loop in Joshua Tree, where I added Costa's hummingbird, black-throated sparrow, phainopepla, and a magnificent chuckwalla lizard to the trip list.

From there we landed in Scottsdale for my third straight member-guest with Cliff in Rio Verde. Temperatures were 25 degrees hotter than the past two years — 102-103°F on competition days — but Cliff and I ground out enough wins and ties to qualify for the shootout. We made it to the final 8 before losing in a chip-off. My new swing is starting to show up off the tee; approach play still needs work.

Mid-trip highlight: Julie and I saw the Tweedy band at The Van Buren in Phoenix. This was the full band with Jeff, sons Spencer and Sammy, and their crew — not a Wilco show and not a Jeff solo show. They played more Meat Puppets songs (2) than Wilco songs (0), with five and six-part harmonies that you don't get out of Wilco. Jeff is in such a warm, happy place these days — being on stage with his sons clearly suits him.

Then we worked our way north into Utah for the national park leg: Return to Arches, Islands in the Sky at Canyonlands, and Canyonlands Needles.

The capstone was 5 days backpacking in Grand Gulch on Cedar Mesa with Jim and Mike. We went Collins Trailhead to Kane Gulch, with a Moon House visit the day before we started. Rain on the first night solved our biggest pre-trip worry (water) and created our biggest in-trip problem (a flooded gulch that forced us to bushwhack most of day 2). Cedar Mesa is the kind of place where your normal backpacking pace gets cut in half because you're constantly scanning canyon walls for ruins and rock art and dropping packs to go investigate. Day-by-day reports are on the blog: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5.

2. What I've Been Reading

Articles

1. Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI by Lalit Maganti — a systematic, evidence-backed account of building a real SQLite devtool with AI coding agents over ~250 hours. Refreshingly free of both "AI one-shot my project" hype and "it's all slop" cynicism. This is one of the better honest writeups I've read.
2. If you thought the speed of writing code was your problem, you have bigger problems — Andrew Murphy on why throughput obsession misses the point. The real bottlenecks are upstream of the keyboard.
3. Better, Faster, and (Even) More — Rands on what changes (and doesn't) when AI accelerates the work. He's always good at naming things you've felt but not articulated.
4. Your Frustration Is the Product — Gruber on the deliberate friction baked into modern services. Pairs well with The 49MB Web Page — a teardown of how absurdly bloated a single news article has become.
5. Wilco's Jeff Tweedy on Geese, ABBA and 'Twilight Override' — LA Times interview I read on the drive to the Phoenix show. Tweedy is generous about other musicians in a way most people his age aren't.
6. The Marginal Revolution Generative Book — Tyler Cowen released a "generative book" you explore via AI rather than read linearly. An interesting experiment in what a book even is when the index is a chatbot.
7. Mind the gap, South Africa — Johan Fourie on South Africa's political economy. The path to growth is clear but fragile. A reminder that "obvious" reforms are rarely politically obvious.
8. Tracy Kidder dies — NYT obituary. The Soul of a New Machine is still one of the best books about how engineering actually happens.

Books

1. Started a John le Carré binge with the early Smiley novels: Call for the Dead (Smiley #1), A Murder of Quality (Smiley #2), and now into The Spy Who Came In From the Cold. The first two are "just" crime novels with some espionage fringe action, but great intros to the George Smiley character. I've had failed starts with From the Cold and Tinker Tailor in the past and this background context is helping me.
2. Continued the Dungeon Crawler Carl audio binge with Julie on the road: The Gate of the Feral Gods (book 4) and The Butcher's Masquerade (book 5). The series keeps getting weirder and somehow keeps working.

3. What I've Been Watching

TV Shows

1. Still working through The Pitt season 2 with Julie — our regular evening watch.
2. Still enjoying Monarch: Legacy of Monsters season 2.
3. Started DTF St. Louis on HBO — Steve Conrad's dark comedy about a middle-aged love triangle that turns deadly. Julie suggested this and had me at Jason Bateman.

Movies

1. Bottle Shock — finally got around to watching the Napa-and-Paris Judgment of Paris movie now that we're back home. Some charm and fun seeing the driving B roll footage that takes place near our conseugros' home. But not a good movie.
2. The Naked Gun (2025) — the Liam Neeson reboot, laugh-out-loud funny at times, and just as uneven as the originals.
3. Project Hail Mary (2026) — saw this in the theater and highly recommend. Read the book about 2.5 years ago and was glad I'd forgotten some key plot points.
4. I'd been avoiding Spinal Tap II The End Continues for some reason. Sad to see what might be "the end"? Not wanting to tarnish the original? This is Spinal Tap is my most watched movie of all time. This was a worthy sequel with some fun cameos.

4. What I've Been Listening To

Music

1. Album club with Jim this month: Rocket to Russia by the Ramones. Simply outstanding and good to round out my knowledge of their catalog. Jim and I are living in 1977 right now and happy to be there.
2. Lots of Jeff Tweedy in his various forms getting ready for the show.
3. Early Chicago albums, mostly to prove to myself that I enjoy what Chicago was before Cetera took over as main lead singer.

5. What I've Been Playing

Boardgames

1. Doug and I finished an epic Holland '44: Operation Market-Garden game over Vassal that lasted almost 6 months. In a game that usually gets decided about 10 turns before the end, this one went the distance with Doug stealing a victory from me by cutting off a supply line at the end. Fantastic game and one of my all-time favorite wargames.
2. Allen and I continued our second BCS Arracourt campaign game. Starting to wind down a bit; we'll move on to something else soon.
3. Only table top game was Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor with Julie and Matthew on Masters Sunday. Matthew destroyed us.

Videogames

1. Enjoying Slay the Spire II, adding a co-op play with Jacob and Matthew to the mix. This will be in heavy rotation for a while.

6. What I'm Attempting

1. Still grinding on guitar lessons and practice, with good results. Brought my new mini Martin 6-string on the road trip and it was nice to be able to practice and play some campfires during the trip.
2. Embarking on my biggest AI-assisted dev project so far, related to photo library and asset management. Hope to have more to report on soon.
3. Our campervan has just 90w of solar on the roof, providing minimal extra charging. We stress tested things a bit while on our trip, keeping it parked in Scottsdale for 5-6 days without driving and seeing if the batteries + solar could keep the fridge running successfully. It did, but lost about 15 pct points of charge each day so we were cutting it close. We had a similar experience leaving the van while backpacking Cedar Mesa, though with cooler weather the van kept up a bit better. To add another option for keeping the van charged, I purchased the Overland Bugout 130. Tested it yesterday with the van (the output on the charger is standard SAE so plus right into the auxiliary power input on the StoryTeller van) and saw a huge jump, flipping to net positive charge without the inverter or A/C running. I'll also be bringing this to Africa with me to help mitigate similar charging issues we had roaming around in our own vehicles off the grid.

A week from tomorrow we'll depart Napa and work our way cross-country to Florida first before making a left turn to NY.

-Chris