My wife and I watched La La Land on Netflix tonight. We both really enjoyed it. The romantic in me did not like the ending. I won’t spoil it. Felt like a classic Hollywood musical.

On Saturday, my wife was asking me if I remembered the name of a hotel we stayed at in Florence when we visited there in 1997. I did not. But I remembered something about it being a monastery in the past. A Google map search did not help me find it. I remembered that we had to cross the river to get to the center of town and that the Ponte Vecchio was the next bridge in one direction.

I looked through my box of things that I kept from that year (we lived in Debrecen, Hungary for nine months). I came across this artistic card with the Duomo and figured that it must be it. I looked it up on Google Maps and it is where I expected it to be. It comes up on Google Maps as Foresteria Valdese di Firenze. And I found their website.

We stayed in Florence (Firenze) for a couple of days after spending Christmas in the Swiss Alps. The hotel was really nice. Much better than the accommodations we ended up with in Rome. I loved Firenze. Just walking around the streets was a visual feast as winding streets opened up to vistas of different landmarks.

My son’s girlfriend just got back from a trip to Italy and Florence was her favorite of the places they visited. That got my wife thinking about the time we spent in Italy which led to the question that led me down memory lane as I went through my box of mementos.

Last night I was playing MLB The Show and Mike Trout stole a 2 run homer from me much like he did in a game today. It is almost the same location in deep center field.

And then he led off the next inning and hit a solo homer. I eventually lost the game as the Angels came back and beat my Rays.

I had something similar happen when I was playing four years ago. I robbed a homer from the Padres while controlling Brett Phillips on June 5 (I had traded for him while playing with the Braves). And then on July 29th, Phillips robbed a Yankee of a homerun when he was playing with the Royals.

My eldest daughter, who is visiting from Nashville this week, and I visited my youngest daughter at work last night at Sourdough Cup of Joe, which serves Nana’s frozen custard. Third straight week I have dropped in on my daughter at work and enjoyed a tasty treat.

The second movie was as good or better than the first. The movie was so visually rich and had a great story. I can’t wait to see it again and to see part 2 in nine months.

My son finished up the first week of his summer internship at Flywheel. They hired him as a motion designer to make promotional videos for the company. They were really impressed by the video he made last year documenting his creative process of creating branding for the HSP production of The Grand Duke. It is a great opportunity as they are giving him a lot of creative freedom.

A bold squirrel at Murray State kept bothering my son while he was eating waffle fries from Chick-fil-A. We were sitting outside the library across from the Old Fine Arts building, where my son had his last final on Friday.

At one point, I thought the squirrel was going to jump on the bench my son was sitting on. The squirrel started to follow us as we headed over to the Old Fine Arts building so my son could clean up and collect the 3D-printed pieces that he had used as part of his final project.

At one point, my son was talking to the squirrel and the way he was holding his paw looked like he was asking, “Are you talking to me?” because it looked like he was pointing to himself.

I like the animated reveal of the images on the blog page of Studio Gusto.

This afternoon, I was playing around with tsParticles. I was working on an animated background solution for the new LGND website.

“Money plays an important role in life, but it can’t be the only filter for how you decide to spend your time. Nobody will ever pay you to go on a date with your spouse or take your kids to the park or grab coffee with your parents.”

James Clear – from 3,2,1 Newsletter