Hi Everyone!

It’s easy to turn work or school colleagues into work/school friends, but I have forgotten that it is infinitely harder to turn work/school friends into real-life friends. There is a lot of groundwork you need to do to get to a point where you can transition between the two. You might get along with someone in a professional setting, but it can take some time to figure out if y’all would get along outside of the confines of a job or class. I recently had a game night with one of my school friends, so I feel like we are finally making things happen. Here’s to building and growing our relationships, both professional and personal, in 2026!

Now, let’s find out What’s Up With Will…

There have been a couple of fun updates from a professional standpoint to share. First, is that I am now listed as an instructor on the backend of San Francisco State University’s educational system. Feel free to refer to me as Instructor William Willis now, or just whatever you have been calling me before. For real, though, I have actually put a lot of thought into this, and I have decided that I am going to tell students to call me by William or Will, whatever works for them. There are only two names that I will not go by, and that is Bill or Mr. Willis. I am not a Bill. Likewise, I am going to have to bring out the classic line, “Mr. Willis is my father, not me”. At the end of the day, I want to develop a community with these students, and requiring the use of titles only reinforces power dynamics and inequalities that are antithetical to critical pedagogy.

The other update is that I have been given my own Canvas page to develop. Learning Management Systems (LMS) are not the most robust software to use, and can be more than a little bit finicky at times. In fact, I was discussing this with my dad about my experiences with Canvas, and he began telling me horror stories about some of the awful LMSs that he has dealt with in the past. With this being said, I have been super intrigued by learning as much as I can about the backend of Canvas through poking around the page as well as tutorial pages¹. I have been using it ever since I started at Georgia Tech, but I have never seen the backend of it all before. This has been an opportunity to see how the LMS sausage is made, so to speak. I have been using it ever since I started at Georgia Tech, but I have never seen the backend of it all before. This has been an opportunity to see how the LMS sausage is made, so to speak.

With my time off, I decided to take a mini day trip to Pleasanton, CA.

The first stop was to the Museum on Main, which traces the history of Pleasanton and the surrounding Amador–Livermore Valley. The modern town took shape in the 1860s, when the arrival of the Southern Pacific Railroad sparked founders John Kottinger and Joshua Neal to create a town along the tracks named Pleasanton. Pleasanton quickly became a regional market center, though, linking local agriculture to wider markets and attracting new residents and immigrant communities. After World War II, Pleasanton experienced another period of rapid growth as Bay Area expansion, defense spending, and high-tech research transformed it into a commuter suburb. Additionally, the creation of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, its nuclear research facility, also helped spur its economic growth. The museum, however, does make note of the successive waves of settlement onto land inhabited by Indigenous peoples from Spanish colonization in the late 18th century to the U.S. conquest of California in 1848 and the upheaval caused by the Gold Rush.

The museum also covered local attractions like Gus, the horse Statue/Sidewalk Mascot of Pleasanton, as well as the once-a-year Alameda County Fair (which could be worth checking out!)

Fun Fact: Pleasanton was almost the home to both a Six Flags Park and Hearst’s Castle.

The real reason why I decided on going to Pleasanton was, unsurprisingly, to get a cup of soft serve from Meadowlark Dairy. Meadowlark Dairy has been around for over 100 years and was one of the first California-certified dairies. After it opened a drive-thru in 1969, its claim to fame then quickly became ice cream, specifically soft-serve. Over the years, it has stayed as a local institution, but has even made it onto Yelp’s Top Ten Ice Cream Shops in the U.S. in 2023. I grabbed a cup of their orange soft-serve swirled with vanilla, and the combo was essentially an orange creamsicle, but with the same creamy consistency that you know and love in a soft-serve. I rarely get the opportunity to have orange ice cream, so you have to make the most of it.

One of my favorite parts of this place is that they always have a new corny joke for the week. The joke of this week was, “Why did the bicycle fall over?”

The answer is…

It was too tired. Ba Dum Tss!

This weekend marked another Magic: The Gathering Pre-Release. I wasn’t sure I was going to make it, and by the time I decided I would, my usual shop had already sold out. I found another event online at Black Diamond Games and headed over, only to walk into a line wrapped around the store. I watched the owner count off players for the cutoff, and somehow, I was the last one in. Lucky Number 96!

I could not quite find my stride with the cards I opened. I lost my first match, but won my second against a high schooler who had just started playing. After the match, though, I reported the result as a win for him so he could claim the extra pack. He had the same excitement about the game that I remember from when I first started, and it felt better knowing the pack would go to someone who would actually enjoy it rather than gather dust in my closet. My third round was a bye.

Black Diamond Games itself has an impressively extensive board game selection and a two-story tournament space. It is recognized as a premier Magic store, a designation for shops that meet the highest standards of quality, service, and community, and it was easy to see why.

This past Saturday was Ken’s Birthday, so we made our way into the city for a small, low-key celebration.

The first stop was Trick Dog, a cocktail bar that won the 2025 Best U.S. Cocktail Bar Spirited Award, as well as a two-time award winner for Best Cocktail Menu. The bar had just released a new menu highlighting crazy flavors and ingredients like sandalwood, bay leaf, rice orgeat, and tomatillo salsa verde. I opted for the Ocean Park, a combo of gin, sherry, mango kombucha, gazpacho, and crostini. I would 100% recommend trying it out. As great as the drink was, the spot was packed to the brim, so we drank our drink quickly and moved to the next spot.

Instead of being crammed together like a can of sardines, we could eat them instead at Bar Gemini, a natural wine bar. The wine we tried was a little naturally funky which is sometimes a good thing. It was much more relaxed, and we got to sit down at some tables and chat with each other. Happy Birthday Ken!

When I think of the word tradition, I generally associate it with some deeply embedded cultural idea, action, or event that has taken years, if not decades, to form. And while that still is true, it fails to capture our own personal experiences that we share with ourselves, friends, and family. As I have noticed over the course of the past few years, it’s the “traditions” that we build ourselves that can be some of the most fun ones. Rylee and I have started our own such tradition over the past few years by turning the MLK long weekend into a nice, relaxing wine weekend. So Sunday morning, we drove up to Napa Valley to get things started.

Our first stop was Markham Vineyards, a spot that is known for its Merlot just as much as its Cabernet, and that is saying something in Napa Valley. We tried a variety of wines, including a blend of Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc, a blend of Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon, as well as some of the usual single varietal suspects. Our wine educator was lovely, chatting about the flavors of each wine and all of our thoughts. We both felt exceptionally honored when, at the end of the tasting, she asked us for our opinion on reordering the wine tasting menu. She said she would try it out in the future.

Throughout our tasting here, I noticed an image of a cannon plastered on every bottle, so I asked about it. Apparently, the sound of a cannon became synonymous with the beginning of a harvest, as the original owner, Bruce Markham, would fire his little cannon to signify the start of the grape picking. How Fun! AND LOUD!

Then came Laura Michael Wines. We were greeted by a dog named Herschel, who took us to the tasting room to meet the co-owners, Laura and Michael (Let’s be honest, Herschel is the real owner). As we tasted our way through the wines, Laura shared the story of the vineyard. She had moved from Arizona to the Bay Area for a big tech job, a transition that coincided with her divorce from her husband, Michael. Eventually, she bought a small plot of land planted with zinfandel grapes.

Years later, while on the East Coast, Michael, who had never really been a wine person, ordered a glass of Napa Valley Zinfandel on a date and immediately fell in love with it. Curious, he began researching Napa Valley Zin and eventually stumbled upon Laura’s vineyard. He wasn’t sure it was her as she had changed her name after a second marriage, and the only photo online was a side profile of a woman drinking a glass of wine. On a hunch, he emailed her: “Hey, is this the Laura I was married to?” Fast forward a few years, and they are now making wine together.

We enjoyed all of the wines, most of them zinfandels, but the most interesting was a dessert wine with a minty finish. I do not think I had ever ended a tasting with a dessert wine before, so it felt like a pretty sweet way to end it.

Finally, we stopped at Chateau Montelena (a portmanteau of Mount Saint Helena).

One of the events that put Napa Valley on the map in the wine world was what’s known as the Judgement of Paris. Back in 1976, after taking a trip to California to learn about Californian wines and being quite impressed with the level of winemaking, wine merchant Stephen Spurrier organized a blind tasting with several well known wine critics, comparing some of these California wines to the prestigious French bottles. Over the course of the night, the critics tasted 20 bottles, 10 Chardonnays (6 from California and 4 from France), and 10 Cabernet Sauvignons (6 from California and 4 from France). Going into the tasting, the critics were sure that the french wines would win. However, as the they began to taste, that assuredness quickly fell apart, being unable to identify each wine’s country of origin. Some lambasted French wines that they thought to be Californian, and praised Californian wines thought to be French. After the results had been tallied, it was determined that the top-scoring wines for both Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon were both from Napa Valley. It was a watershed moment for Napa, with it essentially becoming a superstar overnight, and completely reshaping the wine world. The reason I bring this up is that the Chardonnay that won was from Chateau Montelena.

As soon as you walk onto the grounds of the property, you find yourself in a beautiful Japanese Tea Garden. The Chateau Montelena building itself is a picturesque old-world style building, that actually lives up to the name chateau in my opinion. At the very least, the name is more fitting than A. L. Tubbs Winery (it’s previous name).

During our tasting, we got to try their Chardonnay, which has been made in the same way since 1976, to try to capture the essence of that moment in time. The Chardonnay was well-balanced and strayed away from malolactic fermentation, which causes Chardonnay to have butter notes commonly associated with the varietal. I loved that we got to have our very own Judgement of Paris just in time for its 50th anniversary!

This video of the week is a bit different. At Chateau Montelena, they were quick to bring up Bottle Shock, a movie from 2008 recounting the Judgement of Paris. We watched it immediately afterward. If you have the time, it’s a fun and silly movie night option. Here is the trailer, on the off-chance it sparks some interest.