Good morning good morning! I am sorry I haven’t been writing. And today’s will be short. We will be returning to our regularly scheduled cadence by tomorrow. Forgive me, forgive me.

My coworkers are here. Not all of them, but the C-suite: Kristen, our head of product, David, head of revenue, and Marc, our CTO. We have been hashing things out. Catching up. Getting in sync. It has been good. Only occasionally tense. Absurdly productive. Which I hate to admit since I am a die-hard remote worker, and I do think like 90% of everything can be handled remotely. But sometimes, for the knotty stuff, the big stuff, the complex and contentious, you gotta get together.

We are doing our meetings over at Chore House, which is a gay old time. We do the pool partner meetings over there too, but those are in the evening. I am not usually over at Chore House during business hours, so this is a fun thing. We can hear the dulcet tones of the neurodivergent-affirming pediatric speech therapy in the basement. It is quite lovely.

We hashed out the roadmap, hashed out higher company strategy, did lots of timeline plotting and thinking and it has been very satisfying, talked about everyone’s happiness levels and where they’re at in life. And I love it when my coworkers come visit, though I suppose I should probably do one of these meetings somewhere else one of these days. I keep saying we’ll do the next one near David’s place in Florida but then the time comes round and I don’t wanna leeeaavvveee hommmeee I like hooooome.

Also I’m the only one with a kid. So.

I’ve been taking them to decent-but-not-extravagent Chapel Hill restaurants. Nothing crazy. Aki Hana that sort of thing. They are impressed by the price and the okayedness of the food here. I mean, Michelin didn’t seem that impressed in their recent paid-for fly-by, but this is a different level of dining. Casual. It is hitting the spot.

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We’re listening this morning to the new album from Daniel Avery, Tremor. It is very dark electronic. Which is weird because every song has a collaborator, and a lot of the collaborators are shoegazy, like bdrmm. Maybe Daniel Avery was running a school for non-electronica musicians to make dark electronica that would be funny. I like it, though. Has a bit of a modern Depeche Mode feel to it. Lotta the collaborators are women so it is replete with quality female vocals. So far so good.

The Fabergé Winter Egg sold for $30 million. The first post-auction article someone sent me mixed up their dollars and pounds and said it had sold for $22 million. Which would have been basically a failure since that was the starting bid. But no, it sold for £22.9 milllion, working out to $30.2 million. Either way, it was going to be the highest sale ever for one of these babies, breaking the previous record set by the last time the Winter Egg sold. But I was hoping for blockbuster. But I don’t really think this was blockbuster. It’s a tough time to sell a Fabergé egg. Russia under Putin has been very into repatriating the things, and the primary method for doing so has been Russian oligarchs buying them and donating them to the state in order to curry favor. But Russia and a lot of the oligargchs are sanctioned right now, so legally speaking, that entire avenue was closed off as a sales option. Of course there may be some mysterious chain of proxy buyers leading back to an oligarch and then the state, but Christie’s claims they have very good KYC and wouldn’t dream of letting such a thing happen, quelle horreur, and, you know, with this solid-but-not-blockbuster price, mayhaps they were correct!

Thus far, the buyer is unidentified. In the next few days or weeks, this may change. If a museum bought it (unlikely, in my view) or a plutocrat bought it to donate it to one (ditto), we may hear about it. And of course a lot of rich people want the bragging rights, so they may… brag. We shall see, we shall see. I’m confident my trusty Google alert shall keep me apprised.

And I remind everyone that Lisa Monaco at the FBI under the Biden Administration claimed they seized a Fabergé egg on one of the Russian oligarch’s yachts like, mm, gonna say three years ago, and we have heard nothing about it since, which is highly suspicious. I am assuming the same thing I’ve assume the whole time — that the egg was fake. There are very few that we know to exist that are in unknown, private hands — most are accounted for or lost. Of course it could be one of the lost ones but I feel like we would have heard by now.

And of course if it were real, one would assume that the government would auction it off, but nope.

Unless Trump stole it which, hey. You never know.

Someday, when we have a real government again I will file a FOIA request on this egg, just you watch.

The whole work gang had dinner with Emma and Jane last night. Jane was on her best behavior and so excited to see them all and making them do math problems and asking them their favorite colors and it was just lovely and I was very proud of my kid. Really coulda been a catastrophe. Rolled the dice on that one.

The server, who I am pretty convinced is the owner’s daughter, was wearing a shirt for Jane’s school and we got to talking and she is an early-arriver drop-off and often in the morning line with us so that is fun. Now I know one of the morning line regulars. Maybe I will get to know them all one day.

Sorry this is so short today gotta go pick the coworkers up for our final day of summiting. Noise and Metal playlist for you cuz that’s what’s ready and I gotta get going. New Faetooth rules, love this Ragana Drowse record been listening to it a lot. The Abriction and Agriculture records are almost certainly going to be in my top 10 for the year. I cannot fathom how Abriction is bedroom rock it is so giant and complex and symphonic and metal she is so, so good.

Hope your week is going okay and I hope I promise I will be on track again tomorrow. Keep the faith, fair reader. Love you.