Dag, I was looking at a list of Oscar winners over the last 20 years and there was one I'd never even heard of.

I mean, there were a bunch I haven't seen because I'm usually not a big fan of self serious Oscar-baity prestige movies because my tastes are weirder than that. But I knew all the other titles and what they were about even if I hadn't seen them.

My brain somehow skipped over 2022 winner Coda. Admittedly we were very busy in March of 2022 buying the house but still keeping track of pop culture is basically what my brain does. At the very least I have the overview. But nope. Nothing on Coda.

A clear case of accelerating old fartism.

Dipping in after catching up on 300 or so posts because I'm at my biweekly coffeehouse writing meetup. Having finished my first goal, 500 words on a short story I'm trying to finish for a submission call that closes 3/31, I'm procrastinating starting on my next goal, which is finishing the draft of the sermon I'm preaching this Sunday.

We're all mostly OK, except Dylan is still looking for work because the market is such a nightmare right now if you're a 50-something manager in a tech field (UX Design, to be specific). He's up to 208 applications, last I checked. When he hit 206 I joked that he'd just passed my childhood area code and hit our current one, so now we hope and pray we don't get anywhere near HIS childhood one, which is 918. Alex just has one more quarter left before he'll have his Associate's in Fine Arts, and he wants to get some work experience before going for his BFA. He'll be 22 next month! I hope he can actually find something at least arts-adjacent. I told him there's nothing wrong with having a mundane day job and doing your art outside of work (Exhibit A, me), but he's worried he wouldn't have the time and focus he needs to do both. Which I am also Exhibit A for, more often than I'd like.

Speaking of, this sermon won't write itself...

I am not laughing at you, Susan, I am laughing with you.

Also, WRITE THAT SERMON! (And you should pop down to coffee hour after the 10 AM!)

(Cereal)

It remains hilarious to me that we are attending the same church, but at different services. We clearly need a third Buffista to join so we have coverage on the first Sunday of the month for contemplative worship.

Totally! And I'll definitely at least put in an appearance at the 10 AM coffee hour, but I can't linger because I'm in the Phinney Neighborhood Chorus and we've got a concert at 2 PM. (And once that's over I'm going to come home, flop in the recliner with a nice hot drink followed by some cough drops, and order pizza unless Dylan and/or Alex cooks dinner.)

Yay! (I did my first Feeding on the Thirds sandwich duty this week! My 1990s fast food training came in handy.)

My brain somehow skipped over 2022 winner Coda.

I didn't see Coda until it was streaming, but I enjoyed it. It's kinda funny, kinda sweet... it doesn't feel like it's trying to be a big important movie.

I didn't see Coda until it was streaming, but I enjoyed it. It's kinda funny, kinda sweet... it doesn't feel like it's trying to be a big important movie.

But it was the winner!

I'm realizing now it's the Oscars for movies that came out in 2021 when most movie theaters were just barely re-opening.

The first movie we saw in a theater after the lockdown was The French Dispatch, but Dune was the only Hollywood movie we saw that year.

Don't feel alone David. If I knew about Coda before this morning it left no traces whatsoever in my memory.

I remember seeing New Mutants and Synchronic in the theaters in late 2020, correctly guessing that both would be sparsely attended. I think there were two other people in my showing of the latter.

Poking my head between Zoom lessons, to update that we're still as fine as possible.

(What's worse than a really long Zoom lesson? A really long Zoom lesson that has to be stopped multiple times because of alarms! With students who have been woken several times each night by alarms, so already find it difficult to concentrate, and a lecturer with a similar challenging schedule, yay.)

Take care, y'all. We're trying to do our best here, as well.