Take 5, D.

Weekly Update 2026-04-25: Zwanze-versary Edition

What happened during the week of April 20th - April 25th, 2026:

🧪 After nearly two weeks of Beaker being live at my employer, hints of normality are finally starting to surface. My hours are more or less back to normal, my stress levels have decreased, and I actually have found time to respond to non-Beaker issues. One of my teammates mentioned on Thursday 04-23 that since Go-Live on Saturday 04-11, well over 3000 trouble tickets have been submitted as a result! My boss, who has been at the employer for around 10 years, commented separately that day this has been the messiest and most difficult Go-Live he could recall. There’s still a ways to go before business becomes something close to “as usual,” as unwinding this Go-Live will itself take weeks to fully resolve.

🚙 My car is fully in its era when maintenance becomes more costly, but is still cheaper than buying a replacement vehicle. Given that the average new car price in 2026 is just a hair under $50,000, I plan to keep my 2015 Kia Forte in good shape, even if this means grimacing at an $1100 bill on Thursday 04-23 for new brakes and rotors. It’s not like my car has any other stopping options, as Flintstones-style braking is not viable. Still, I allowed myself to loudly yell “OUCH” at the repair costs, so if you were in the St. Louis are and heard some interjections two days prior to this publishing date...now you know.

🍺 On Saturday 04-25, my father and stepmother will celebrate 45 years of marriage, so to commemorate this event, I will attend a mens’ daycare event, aka Zwanze Day 2026. L. will amuse herself while I enjoy some lambics, wild ales, saisons, and other tart beers on a nice spring day. As a result of these events, this update will likely get published a day earlier than usual.

🏜️ Due to the changed publishing date, I can’t exactly predict what will happen on Sunday 04-26. I hope this will be a day when L. & I can start a deep dive into planning the upcoming New Mexico trip. In my Beaker-related haze and L.’s difficult staffing issues, we’ve both forgotten that in just two short weeks, our vacation will begin. Time to get a handle on our itinerary!

Items Of Note From Last Week:

Outbound Actions

Internal Obligations

Media

More Info About The Media Selections From This Week:

I have tried to keep the number of media selections consistent in my updates, but I feel like mixing it up a bit this week. I will start, naturally, with an ending, as the Tides Of History podcast has officially concluded. It’s still a rarity for a podcast to have a planned ending, and I’m happy with how Patrick Wyman signed off with a series of historically-inspired vignettes that could be seen as a segue to his new series, Past Lives. I still liked his earlier summation of explaining why history matters, so I’ll view “The End” as a well-earned victory lap.

Why so many episodes of Regular Car Reviews, you may ask? These were all reviews of kei vehicles, or kei-like cars in the case of the Ford Ka, so I grouped them together as “mini” reviews! I still think the Ford Ka would have been a great car to own, primarily its first-generation model with its New Edge styling. The Ka never made it to the US market, only getting as close as Mexico during its first-generation run from 1996 to 2008. It’s possible that if I were close to the Mexican border, I could still see running first-generation models, so maybe I should keep my eye open for them next month? As for the little Daihatsu vehicles, they are simultaneously ridiculous and clever, both in terms of presentation and practicality. The shade of green used on both screams mid-90s to me, which nowadays is a relief from the shiny grey-beige appliance colors most vehicles come in today.

Car colors aren’t the only thing screaming about the 90s, apparently. Nostalgia is aplenty, per Design Observer, ranging from 90s TikTok to wired headphones to workwear. The DO article points to these items as being more indicative of a “post-digital” revival, though once the piece started to wax nostalgic about hipster-era fashions (including workwear), I have to be honest about a part of me died inside. Combining a 90s revival with a hipster revival? “Somebody kill me now!" Kidding aside, along with my queasy feelings of seeing hipster-era fashion come back, I do have some sympathy for a post-digital revival. Like what Tracy Durnell says in her article, I am just sick and tired of reading about AI, or people’s reactions to AI, or reactions to reactions about AI. If this means that I may follow in Tracy’s footsteps and recalibrate what I read online, or even how much reading I do online versus tactile print material, maybe that’s a lesson I should learn for the future.

(Side note: I came across Tracy’s article from Bubbles, which is a community-driven blog coallator where you can upvote interesting entries from the IndieWeb ecosystem.)

As for the present, here’s something I have learned recently: who sources the in-house liquor brands for Costco? The Kirkland Signature name hides many other companies behind its label, with some easier to know than others. I had already known that Barton 1792 makes bourbon for Costco, as I had their small batch a while ago at an incredibly cheap bargain1. The other distilleries were a mystery to me until I read the VinePair article, though apart from the rums, nothing really jumps out at me as being notable. That being said, I’ll probably try one of the rums once I have room on my deliberately tiny liquor shelf.

You up for creeping yourself out? How about staying at a ryokan near Mount Fuji that’s within the “suicide forest” AND near the old headquarters of an infamous Japanese cult? Our Japanese tourist friend, travelgeek, rustles up his courage to stay at what turned out to be a nice adventure in spite of the area’s reputation in Japan. I’m still not sure I’d want to go on the night walk in the forest with the ryokan owner, though! If I did, I would likely pick soundtrack to accompany me that fits the mood, which is why I’d listen to the Flow State sampling of the {greyfade} label. It’s not a “creepy” collection of experimental, contemporary classical, and ambient pieces, but it’s unsettling in parts and doesn’t drift quietly into the background. It will keep you alert while you stumble around an infamous pitch-black forest at night, as you should be. Well, alert, that is. Not stumbling.

Finally, I will end with a beginning. ProPublica published a piece recently that detailed how folks who agreed to the opioid settlement from the Sackler family are still waiting for their payouts, with some unlucky families likely to be shut out. Purdue Pharma wasn’t the only company who negotiated a settlement for their roles in the opioid-abuse scandal, and they aren’t the only company trying to wriggle their way out of it. Mallinckrodt and Endo--the former being my old employer--both agreed to pay into the opioid settlement fund. Mallinckrodt filed for its second bankruptcy in four years back in 2023, specifically to renegotiate the amount it was willing to pay in. Technically, both Mallinckrodt and Endo no longer exist thanks to the companies merging together in 2025, but they cannot hide behind new names and organizations forever. ProPublica has put the call out for families who were part of these settlement negotiations to report back to them, as I’m sure many of them are in a similar situation as those who settled with Purdue Pharma. More to come as the news site investigates, and I will be eager to read about their findings.

Picture time!

Let's reward folks who've made it this far in the blog entry with a photo!

It’s late January 2005. L. & I were past our second year as a dating couple. She had recently moved to St. Louis for a job that hired her as soon as she had finished grad school. I was living by myself in the Lincoln Square neighborhood of Chicago, enjoying the sights and sounds of the city, but L.’s absence soon meant I would have to make some serious decisions about the future. None of those thoughts were in my mind at the time of this photo, which was taken as a massive snowstorm was blanketing the city. My camera was the first “real” digital camera I owned, a Canon PowerShot A85 that punched well above its weight and size. Allegedly, it’s not great form to use your on-camera flash at night, but I really like the effects of the light reflecting off of the falling snow. The location here is Giddings Plaza, formerly where Giddings Street intersected Lincoln Avenue.

The lamp seen here is the Lombard Lamp, donated from Hamburg, Germany to Chicago in recognition of Lincoln Square’s long Germanic heritage.

✉️ Reply by Email

🫧

  1. Last weekend, I snagged a Henry McKenna Single Barrel 10-Year Bottled-in-Bond bourbon at Costco for the similarly cheap bargain of $39.99. It’s already a hit with me and L., and may become a semi-regular in the rotation.↩

#Jobs #Life #Music #Photography #WeeklyNotes