Month: January 2025

Fifty-Six

A day late posting this. I had a pretty quiet day yesterday. Decided not to take the day off from work and save the vacation day for the future.

I got to go to coffee with a long-time colleague whom I haven’t seen much in recent years, so that was nice. Catching up on the various things we’ve been up to.

January 2025 has been pretty tumultuous so far, what with Trump, Gaiman, David Lynch, Bob Uecker, the Los Angeles wildfires, the looming thread of the H5N1 bird flu, and so forth. Naturally we’re all concerned that it will get a lot worse once we (somehow) inaugurate the most racist President in over a century on Martin Luther King Day, who is also so ignorant and incompetent that he thinks foreign countries pay for tariffs America places on their imports.

The weather has been unseasonably warm. Usually we’re having some sub-freezing lows in January, but I don’t think we’ve gotten below 35°F. And we’re regularly having highs in the 60s. I’m glad we got all that rain in December or we might be dealing with something like LA is now.

Have I talked about running lately? I can’t recall. Back in fall 2023 I was having foot and knee problems and took a chunk of the fall off from running. I think it was because I didn’t have great sandals for everyday use, and it was cascading to impacting my running (and even my walking). Since buying some better sandals (because I really don’t want to wear sneakers all year long, although I bet the day is coming some years down the road) things have been much better. I’m at the point that I’m running a 5k three days a week, and have gotten my average mile down by almost a minute. So that’s been nice. I still have at least another minute to shave off to get to my fastest mile, and I might never get there again, but I’m not planning on winning any races.

Tomorrow we’re going off to our traditional birthday dinner for me, which I always enjoy, but nothing particularly special planned for the new year.

Onwards to another year!

RIP FJL

When I first moved here in 1999, one of the restaurants everyone loved was Frankie Johnny and Luigi Too! They were a traditional Italian restaurant which at the time had a few different locations, but their oldest and primary location was in a cute old building in Mountain View. They had three dining rooms plus the kitchen/counter/bar area. It felt cozy and was always busy. Parking was sometimes a challenge, but I went often enough that I knew a bunch of tricks.

I guess they’d been there since the 50s, serving pasta and pizza. In the time I’d gone there, they remodeled one of the dining rooms to have an expanded bar, but otherwise it stayed mostly the same. Back when I was playing ultimate frisbee, Subrata and I would sometimes go there afterwards since they were one of the few restaurants open later than 9 pm on a weeknight. Debbi and I went there at least once a month for dinner and drinks for years. We got to know their bartender reasonably well.

In late 2020 they closed to demolish their building and build a new one. (That article has a photo of their old building’s front.) The new building was completed and opened in 2024, rebranding as Giorgio’s, which name the owner was using at a couple of other locations.

And, as you can probably guess, it’s not the same.

Their new building is mostly a pair of memory care facilities, and the restaurant itself has maybe six indoor tables, a bar, and some outdoor tables (which are much less appealing in cold or rainy weather). They decided to focus on their take-out business, which the second article above says “that’s kind of what was happening at this location before we closed it”. (Obviously that was true in 2020, but before that we would often go for dinner and have a decent wait for a table.)

We’ve gone in person once, sitting outside during a pretty chilly, windy evening, and then last night we ordered take-out. The dine-in experience is definitely gone, and frankly the food is not as good. I understand they’re using the same menus, but there’s something off about it, the two main dishes I’ve had were just not as flavorful. And frankly I’m not really a big fan of pasta as a take-out dish (and their pizza is not really the kind I prefer). Maybe most sad to me, I’ve been pretty disappointed in their sausage bread appetizer since reopening.

When I picked up last night, their indoor tables were full, the bar had a couple of people, and the outdoors had several people. So apparently they’re doing decent sit-down business. But for me it has moved way down my list of local restaurants to patronize.

It really feels like the end of an era.

2024 was Certainly a Year

I haven’t been writing much here lately. So much so that I wonder what percentage of my posts lead off with some version of “I haven’t been writing much here lately”.

So my 2024, such as it was, has largely been chronicled on social media, mainly Mastodon and Bluesky.

We did a little more traveling in 2024. In addition to two trips back east to visit family, we also met with Debbi’s friend Andrew and his family in Newport Beach (which I did write about), and we went to Las Vegas in November to meet with some other friends. Vegas is one of those “every time we go it’s changed, yet it’s exactly the same” types of places. We hadn’t been in almost a decade, and I don’t think it’s quite our kind of place anymore, but nice to visit once in a while. Our friends Karen and Conrad also visited us over the summer, which was fun.

Otherwise it’s been mostly the same things: Work, books, comics, television (though less of this as time goes on), cats and dog. I’ve done some little upgrades around the house, such as replacing the ancient iMac, the dead blu-ray player, and the outdoor accent lights.

As far as books go, I think the best novel I read last year was The Tainted Cup, by Robert Jackson Bennett. It’s a Holmes-and-Watson style mystery in a clever and well-thought-out fantasy world. I felt like I was reading an absolute master at assembling the pieces of a complex story. I will probably go tackle his back catalog before too long, but the sequel comes out this spring so probably that one first.

The end of the year was kinda rough, of course, as the United States elected a convicted felon who is a bigoted narcissistic grifter as President, and elected his fellow bigots to control of both houses of Congress, never mind that six fellow bigots and fascists currently control the Supreme Court. Even if we optimistically assume that this doesn’t mark the end of America as a democratic state, it’s going to be a generation or more before the nation recovers from what they’re going to do, and likely many thousands – if not millions – of people will not survive it, both here and abroad. I’ll probably be dead before we get there, if we do.

So, here we go into 2025. The last year of the first quarter of the 21st century. I’ll probably make it to the end of the second quarter, but if the Republicans tear down Social Security and Medicare and continue their war on science, then that becomes less clear.

Not the cheeriest of conclusions, but I think what happiness we get for the foreseeable future will be on a much smaller scale than the national or global.