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The Legend of Zelda, the Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letter, technology upgrades … all the making of an excellent weekend.
As a big fan of different sub-genres of folk music, I was thrilled with Avi Kaplan’s new release, Peace Somehow. I’ve had it on repeat throughout the day.
As I sit here working at my desk at 1:35 a.m., December 20th, 2024, I’m listening to a recording session of Levels by the Robert Glasper Trio feeling exhausted, but grateful, for a phenomenal year. Decisions made over the past 18 to 24 months bore extraordinary fruit. I’ve also been thinking about something Charlie Munger said shortly before his passing.
I have a bunch of earnings reports to read and as I work from home, I can’t get Scarlatti’s Sonata in D minor, K.64 / L. 58 / P. 33 out of my head. He wrote it sometime around the year 1740 and it was printed in Volume II of a book of keyboard sonatas he published in 1742. Harpsichord, clavichord, piano, guitar … it just sounds so catchy no matter the instrument on which it is performed.
I could hardly sleep Friday night because of excitement. It felt like Christmas as a kid, when all that joy, happiness, and anticipation are bundled together. Only much, much greater. Imagine you had been waiting on Christmas to arrive for more than thirty years.
Many of you watched me put off this purchase for decades as I prioritized investing over consumption, but it is now here: Aaron and I finally settled on our “forever” piano. We purchased a Bösendorfer 230VC model with the Enspire Disklavier Pro add-on and a custom-inlaid Macassar ebony wood around the soundboard. It is being manufactured near Vienna, Austria for us and should arrive in the next year.
We recently discovered that in 2017, the SpaceLab9 booth at New York Comic Con sold an extremely limited edition Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Ultimate Vinyl collection etched to look like the famous sweet rolls from the game. The collection, which was limited to only 95 copies, contains the full 52-tracks found in the game. The moment we learned it existed, we knew we had to have it. After some searching, in June 2020 we were able to track down one of those boxed sets. We immediately bought it for our music collection.
Over the past year, one of my favorite tracks to listen to while I work is an instrumental piece by Iranian-born composer, producer, instrumentalist, and performer Sami Yusuf. In referring to his genre of music, Yusuf calls it “Spiritique”, which blends Eastern and Western sounds into something new and different.
Several incredibly talented people collaborated on a disco-style track called “Kill the Lights” that Aaron and I have been listening to on endless repeat. The build-up to the chorus and explosion of happiness is great, especially when the volume is turned up, the sun is shining, and you’re getting stuff done. You can’t help but dance. It’s probably going to be the song we remember most from Spring 2020 (even thought it was released several years ago and just flew below our radar). There is just so much joy in it.
One of the benefits of our relocation to the West Coast was going through boxes and containers dating back to early childhood, discovering things that we didn’t realize we had; toys from our nursery, birthday cards from elementary school, choral music from high school and college. This included migrating old computer archives before destroying the physical drives, resulting in large amounts of data we now need to organize and catalog over the coming years as a part-time personal project
I am a huge fan of the work of biographer Ron Chernow (many of you know him for writing Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., which is the best biography on the oil giant that has ever been published). Back in 2004, he wrote a biography of Alexander Hamilton. If you don’t have a copy, you should buy one and read it. My edition is marked-up, highlighted, cross-referenced, and scribbled upon. Through 800 or so pages, he lays out the story of one of America’s founding fathers.
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