Hi Everyone!

This week marks an unfortunate milestone.

As I was headed back home after one of our many activities, a mohawked pigeon rudely decided to poop on me. What’s worse is that it kept on following me around while I was cleaning up, just waiting for the opportunity to strike again when I was caught off-guard. I don’t know what I did to that bird to deserve such cruel treatment, but it has made an enemy this week.

The moral of the story here: DON’T BE A PARTY POOPER. It’s not fun for you or anyone else, and worst-case scenario, you might end up with an arch-nemesis when all’s said and done.

With that said, let’s find out What’s Up With Will…

I got my first up-close-and-personal view into the grading side of final exams. Now it might change based on the school, but for SFSU, after Finals Week ends, teachers have an additional week to finish up scoring assessments and submit final grades to the university. I had each student complete an end-of-semester reflection in lieu of a final exam. However, since I allowed students to submit any late assignments, grading took up a lot of my time this week. I also spent time reaching out to students to make sure they submitted things. I am trying to figure out how lax I am going to be in the future for grading because it’s a balance of wanting to see my students succeed, but also this is putting stress on me, trying to get everything in by the deadline.

Aside from grading, the only other thing was to patiently wait to see if I passed my classes. AND I DID! We are still on track to graduate! Let the party commence!

It’s the Most Baller Time of the Year! Last week, the Oakland Ballers, the 2025 Pioneer League Champions, kicked off their 2026 season, so we hopped over to a game with two of our baller friends, Rachel and Cami! In addition to it being a 2 Dollar Tuesday, it was also Nurse Appreciation Night, so we all got these Oakland Ballers “I Love Nurses” Badge Reels. Throughout the night, there were multiple games, including a CPR to the beat of Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” and a bandage wrapping contest that wound up in a mummy wrapping competition. It’s a good thing there were some nurses to help recover from a tough 3-5 loss to the Long Beach Coast. The Ballers still haven’t won two games in a row, but it’s early in the season. All they need to do is dust themselves off, get a medical checkup, and then get back to doing what they do best: balling. Here’s to hopefully another great season!

We decided to kick my official start to summer by heading out for a date night at Burma Superstar. This restaurant was our first foray into Burmese cuisine when we moved here, and has since been our north star (excuse the pun here) to which we compare all other Burmese restaurants. I was slightly worried that we put Burma Superstar on too high a pedestal. Thankfully, though, this is not the case of rosy retrospection, as the meal was incredible. Their Burmese Fried Rice and Tea Leaf Salad have so much flavor within each bite. 

Now I know what most of y’all are probably thinking: “Why on earth would William get a salad?” And 99 out of 100 times, I would also ask that. I’m not going to a restaurant to be healthy, and it always feels like I am being cheated out by essentially ordering a bunch of romaine lettuce. But this Tea Leaf Salad, tossed in a fermented tea leaf dressing alongside fried garlic, nuts, and chickpeas, is without a doubt the best salad I have ever had.

After our star-studded meal (excuse the second pun), we hightailed it over to the Tiki Bar Kona Club to celebrate Connor and Alannah’s birthdays. If I had to describe Kona Club, I would say it had the ambience one expects when you say the word tiki, palms fronds, a volcano, and an animatronic hula dancer for good measure, yet the pool table and the drink prices of a dive bar. As we walked up to order, I noticed a t-shirt of Tom Selleck with the phrase, “Real Men Drink Chi Chis”. Chi Chis, in this case, is a Piña Colada that is made with Vodka instead of Rum. It’s vaguely reminiscent of those all-pink shirts plastered with “Tough Guys Wear Pink”, if you are familiar with them. Regardless, I took Tom’s words to heart and exclusively ordered Macadamia Nut Chi Chis for the rest of the night as we chatted about their favorite moments from the past year.

One night didn’t feel like a proper enough celebration for finishing the first year of my Master’s Degree, so Rylee and I decided to drive up to Napa. Our first stop was Honig Vineyard and Winery, a family-owned and sustainably driven vineyard. 

Honig, German for “Honey”, was founded in the 1960s by Louis Honig. The way our wine educator described it was that he was an Advertisement Executive who saw that every one of his friends was buying their own vineyards in the Napa area, so he did too. A classic case of peer pressure. At the start, they sold off their grapes to Caymus. However, when Caymus started winning awards from Honig’s grapes, they figured they could do it themselves. The Honig family produced a couple of hundred cases of Sauvignon Blanc and won a gold medal at the Orange County Fair. 

Since then, Honig has expanded to produce over 100,000 cases of wine annually, yet of this astronomical amount of wine, they only produce two varietals: Sauvignon Blanc and Cabernet Sauvignon. Over the course of the 8 wines we tried, we were astounded at the sheer variety. It is safe to say that we would have failed if this were a blind tasting. Among my favorites was a Sauvignon Blanc made using malolactic fermentation (the process that gives wine a buttery taste/texture) and a Sauvignon Blanc Late Harvest Dessert Wine. The wine tasting was also kind of cool, because as we talked with the wine educator, I brought up my Wine Education paper to her, and she was intrigued and asked me to send it to her to read. 

Also on our Wine Trip, we stumbled into the Robert Louis Stevenson Museum in Saint Helena. This tiny one-room museum has the largest collection of Robert Louis Stevenson books, artifacts, and memorabilia on public display in the world. In case you are wondering,  he was a Scottish writer best known for Treasure Island and Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Because he spent much of his life battling a chronic respiratory illness, Stevenson later traveled extensively through Europe and the United States in search of climates that would improve his health, and produced many of his most famous works along the way. 

The museum chronicles his life. Stevenson was the son of a Civil engineer who fully expected him to follow in his family’s profession. After a stint in engineering at the University of Edinburgh, he made a compromise that he would qualify as a lawyer, which he did. It sounds like he never used it, though, dedicating the rest of his life to literature. However, his time in engineering did help him when writing Treasure Island. 

It didn’t initially make sense why a Scottish author had a museum in Napa Valley, yet as we walked around, it became clearer. In France, Stevenson met Frances “Fanny” Van de Grift Osbourne, an independent American artist, and in 1879 Stevenson crossed the Atlantic and the United States to reunite with her in California. After Fanny’s divorce was finalized, the couple married in San Francisco in May 1880 and honeymooned in Napa Valley, living for several weeks in an abandoned mining bunkhouse near Mount Saint Helena. Their experiences exploring the region inspired The Silverado Squatters, one of the earliest literary accounts of Napa Valley. In this work, Stevenson writes, “Wine is bottled poetry”, which sums up the way that I feel about our wine trips and Napa as a whole.

Our final adventure of the week took us to the Lesher Center for the Arts for the final show in Center Rep’s 2025/2026 season, Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill. A jukebox musical featuring songs throughout Alanis Morissette’s discography, Jagged Little Pill’s plot centers on the Healy family as the facade of Connecticut Suburbia starts to fall apart. This might have been the best performance we have seen so far! The play is deep and hard-hitting, and it’s easy to see how it won two Tonies and a Grammy. I’ve never been a big fan of jukebox musicals, as it feels like sometimes the music does not align with the story beat, but Jagged Little Pill’s plot seemed to always connect to each musical number. From the production side of things, the AV was spectacular, and the singers had us in awe at the notes they were hitting! 

How convoluted can you make a mundane task? How about 15 minutes???? I give you this marvelous Rube Goldberg Machine. I can only imagine the time and energy it took to make this.