Wellness, Part Trois (and Packers and Station Eleven, too)

 It's been four full months since my previous post here, and also of weight loss maintenance.

Even through the holidays, I have been below my second goal weight of 170 pounds, and during an especially active period during which I biked 40 miles in one September trip and completed a 50-miler the next month, I dropped down to 165 pounds, a full 50 under where I started on June 5th.

I'm confident enough in my routines and habits that I ended my Noom subscription in November, and around a week ago, I stopped logging my meals in the Lose It app, too. Weight is still being tracked daily just to ensure I am on target, though imagine there will be a time when that'll be done weekly or even not at all. I've remained stable all through the past several days

Google's year-end update of activity was enlightening and encouraging:

Though the brisk pace of my walks at just over 4 miles per hour did not change since the time I transitioned from using a Fitbit to a TicWatch running Google's WearOS mid-October, it appears that's sometimes tracked as running rather than walking. Icy roads and paths have made keeping up my lunchtime routine and longer weekend hikes daunting, but I've done it, and fortunately had bruises rather than breaks from four bad slips and spills this month. 

On the topic of bruising: last night's Packers loss to the 49ers, in a season when they were again the 1st seeded NFC team but this time had the most promising roster of players in years, will smart for a long time. Noah was devastated. Laying next to him in his bed for a long time, comforting and processing through it with him, helped me, too.

I'll miss seeing the players who made up this year's Green Bay team play together. Like I have for the past half-dozen years, I've gotten to know them well through all the human interest pieces on their website, and many interviews other places. Instead of a shot at another Championship and then the thrill of a long-anticipated trip to the Super Bowl, they clear out their lockers this coming week.

It was difficult to settle into sleep and then stay asleep last night, but I woke up at peace this morning, rising almost three hours later than I would usually get up, going through my morning routines, then shoveling the few inches of snow blanketing the drive, our monthly Wine Club tasting followed by lunch at Cooper's Hawk. In exactly a month from today, if all goes as hoped and planned, I'll spend my first night on Anna Maria Island for the first time in a few years, joining Melanie and her parents there for my extended Mid-Winter Break in the Florida sun. 

Life moves on. Life is good.

And, sometimes, even often as of late, life can be tough. 

Station Eleven has been a favorite since my first read of it at our Cobmoosa Shores beach rental cottage several years ago, an eerie place to do so with its post-pandemic setting around Lake Michigan. Watching the television adaptation in our present situation was even more affecting.

Its presentation of events as block-lettered time before, during, and after an apocalyptic flu brought home the fact that we're now approaching Year Two of our own virus-altered world. Most such stories feature widespread and near-complete death of the world's human population. COVID-19 hasn't been as devastating, but in addition to the many people gone from our lives, we're continuously grieving other sorts of losses. There's uncertainty when some of the missing pieces will return, when what a grade school friend and fellow teacher recently named as "chronic low grade trauma and stress" will finally abate. In the meantime - we mask when around others in public spaces, adapt school activities to minimize potential exposure and spread, and find all the ways we can to stay connected with and care for one another. 

Wellness, Part Deux

 On June 5th, the day the last very different and very challenging school year officially concluded, a post entitled "Wellness" was made, without the usual link on Facebook. In it, I wondered if it would be read by anyone. If the Blogger metrics are accurate, four people did.

At that time, I weighed 215.6 pounds. My goal was to trim down to 185 pounds, and - based on my responses to a number of questions - the Noom app I'd just started using then projected that to happen by November.

"It's going to happen."

Well, it did happen, but not on the predicted timeframe. 

It happened on July 31st.

Many factors played into that success, several of them the type of happenstance that some would call karma, and others might see as "God messages." I'll detail them later, but I believe those strokes of fortune and positive factors were the result of awareness honed by intention. A big part of it was what we all know and most struggle to practice: eating well, eating less, and being consistently physically active.

I set a new goal, and shared it with family and a few close friends: 170 pounds. It would put me near the midpoint of the healthy BMI range, and it also seemed clever to "lose 45 pounds during my 45th year."

It took awhile. There were ups and downs.

This morning, September 23rd, the scale recognized the hours, days, weeks, and months of work.

That's still not to the midpoint of my "Normal" BMI range, but I feel outstanding and am satisfied with my appearance for the first time in a very long time. Physical activity is more exhilarating than exhausting, food is fuel rather than consumed in a fog.

One of the many new habits I've adopted is a midday walk in the time between my morning and afternoon classes, strolling on Buck Creek Trail the past few weeks for one or two briskly paced miles. Yesterday was a chilly one, the first of the season... which astronomically began yesterday, too.

Over recent years, I've gained a new appreciation of Fall. Having my birthday fall on the longest solar day of the year, the first day of Summer, it's been the one for which I have had an affinity and love all my life. As has been told to our kids many times now, when they bemoan the end of summer vacation and the start of a new school year, we would not appreciate those warmer, carefree days nearly as much if every day were like that.

It occurred to me on that walk yesterday that, at 45 years old, if I am fortunate to live to see 90, I am just now beginning the Fall season of my life, too. 

A week ago, a Miracle Morning (yes, another change) reading of Gretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project included a quote from Samuel Johnson that I in turn shared on Facebook:

"There is, indeed, something inexpressibly pleasing in the annual renovation of the world, and the new display of the treasures of nature."

She quotes him often, and many have resonated, so should add some of his collected works to my mounting to-read list. 

I can express what's pleasing, though. It's in the contrast of the verdant times with dry, cool days that we get a sense of life, and some measure of comfort in the eventual passing of ours, as it's simply the way of things. I accept its joys alongside its limits. Don Cupitt's Above Us Only Sky was my first read after Hal Elrod's The Miracle Morning; Solar Living as articulated by Cupitt is my choice from here forward.

In my usual rambling way, what I really mean to get to here is: I Am Well, and Doing Good.

Wellness

My friend Matt has been posting his Fitbit-tracked weight loss progress with Noom for awhile now.

I've been inspired to give it a shot.

My weight yesterday was 215 pounds. For a person of my height, that ain't great, and while I generally feel well and have energy for most of my daily tasks, there are other recreational activities I'd like to enjoy with more regularity and intensity.

My goal weight is 185 pounds - still not what it should be, according to BMI measures, but to hell with that for now. 30 pounds is ambitious, but given how much time I have available to make progress towards goals in the summertime, I am going for it. After answering a battery of questions, Noom targets that goal for November. It's going to happen.

I don't plan to post daily progress as Matt does, or Before and After body shots. Appearance isn't my main goal, here. 

My wife Melanie has been kicking ass for about a year now, too, with daily moderate intensity workouts and moving us towards healthier meals. She's an inspiration; I want to be well for her and for our kids. 

I usually post links to these blog posts on social media, but won't be doing that now. If you happen upon this one, cheer me on the next time we connect.

Bookmarks

 It's the time of the year when days stretch out leisurely, windows open, buds appear on branches, and we shake off the crusty stuff also seen in dark corners of parking lots.

It's also time that our family typically does some clean-up - both of physical things as we make room for the kids' latest birthday gifts, and also of the more sedentary routines of winter.

Walking outdoors has been invigorating.

By sticking to a schedule of gradual progress each day, I managed to finish off my spring continuing education course well ahead of spring break, while simultaneously mapping out adventure opportunities for the getaway to rural northern Georgia we're making then. 

Our Pathfinder 2nd Edition RPG campaign has kept me connected to friends through the the colder, darker months of seemingly endless COVID quarantine (I am vaccinated, Melanie is not yet) and I'm hard at work learning Roll20 to help our online sessions run smoother than they do through kitbashed Google tools.

We watched all of The Mandalorian Season 2, The Boys Season 2, Fargo Season 4, and WandaVision - and Melanie many more whole seasons and series aside. The kids have been digging The Clone Wars (which they jokingly call "Star The Clone Wars Wars" every time they sit down to watch it together) and we are all pumped for the second episode of The Falcon and the Winter Solider later tonight. Somehow, I missed that Invincible released!

Well, no mystery, actually - virtual teaching has been consuming almost all of my time for months now. We've only got a handful of sessions of IMAGE left after the break, and this year, doing the marathon of qualification testing will actually feel like a relief, I think.

I'm only writing here because I cleaned out the bookmarks for my Google account. Wow, was it a trip - gong back years and years to around the time I finished up my Masters, changed teaching positions, and we packed and moved (into storage and the in-laws' house, back out of it once we found a new home) all in the span of a few months. There were links to the We Are Comics movement that sprang up in 2014, GameFaqs (!) guides to the Final Fantasy Dimensions mobile game, 13th Age RPG fansites that are no longer active, and a slew of stagnant blogs.

The only link from the "Blogs" folder that actually survived was this one. I figured I'd better breathe a bit of life into it until the time it can get more attention. I hope any who are reading are well, too!

Something Old, Something New

Comic hunting.

It's something I've done for years, in all its variations.

The very first comics bought for me were discovered "in the wild" - random titles stocked in a small rural grocery store. They'd sat on particle board shelves there for unknown days, weeks, or months before a kid tagging along with his Grandma Sophie begged for something to bring home, and made the always-reliable pitch for reading material.

That kid became a comic book fanatic, and he browsed for and bought them whenever and wherever he could. There didn't seem to be much rhyme or reason to what titles were stocked at Gust Asp, Ben Franklin, and Wilbee's Pharmacy. Every visit was like unwrapping gifts, wire spinner racks subbing for paper and boxes.

When I was 12, I discovered a random short box in a Chicago O'Hare convenience shop, and in it, Captain America #300 for dimes. Having gotten just about everything else I'd asked for from my dad on our Walt Disney World trip, I left empty-handed. 

After decades of being spread haphazardly among boxes and bags, my collection's been organized over the past several years, starting when we settled into our current home. Holes in series were noted, and then gradually filled with purposeful hours of browsing boxes at Grand Rapids Comic-Con and some local shops. (This also starts new series collections; last year, noticing that one booth had a bunch of different issues of Wonder Man spread among its many $0.50 boxes, I picked up every one they had.)

The expected (but still sad) news of GRCC's cancellation for this year prompted me to make a retail therapy trip to The Comic Signal yesterday - not my usual shop, which has been The Outer Limits for almost 15 years, but still a place with a vast and well-organized collection of back issues. After around 90 minutes of hunting while referencing my list of missing books, I scored a load of them, including oddballs like the two issues of Fallen Angels I was missing, and the final one of Speedball: The Masked Marvel. Persistence pays off; on my way to the register, a box labeled "New Comics" had a full run of the 2007 New Warriors Volume 4, and so I picked up the eight issues I was missing from it.

There's another form of comic-hunting, and maybe my favorite: visiting a shop and looking for new titles.

In the days when The Outer Limits stocked the weekly Comic Shop News, some things featured would catch my eye, and I'd then watch for them to hit the shelves. 

Without CSN as a guide, it's now just a matter of browsing - the same sort of mostly-aimless exploration I love to do in libraries and book stores, too.

I've intentionally picked up more #1s than usual lately, maybe because so much of life is rote and repetitive now. They stacked up for awhile, and this week, I decided to read one new title each day. Like always, treasures were found.

Here they are, ranked in order from "meh" to "added to pull."

And Then, Nothing

 In late June, I made the obligatory geek blog post about a dearth of updates at a geek blog post, and expressed my hope of getting back on track with writing throughout the summer.

Only one post followed, detailing our long-overdue cable-cutting.

Why?

Primarily, the things I planned to write about fell to points of low interest, and time has been sparse.

We haven't played Animal Crossing: New Horizons in weeks, but joy for it waned as early as the June break to focus on my continuing education class. Though many friends played, and a couple new friends were even made through the game, my visits to their islands were few, and theirs to mine even fewer, usually to water flowers to theoretically help along our breeding and cloning efforts. When those became frustratingly slow-going, and fun daily routines became chores, the fact that our character was stuck on an island with mostly the same daily cast of characters became another layer of social distanced isolation.

I made the mistake of starting to work through my comics backlog with Marvel titles.

The first was the intentionally limited series, Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge. Its flashbacks to untold stories from the happier times in the mythology reminded me of how ultimately disappointing the newest trilogy was, in the end. On the other hand, the tales set in the new Disney theme park didn't help the acute sadness that - given the state of COVID-19 now and our seeming collective unwillingness to take action to seriously mitigate its spread - an October 2021 trip to Disney World to enjoy Galaxy's Edge along with the 50th anniversary celebrations is a fading dream.

The second was Future Foundation. It was everything that I love(d) about some modern Marvel comics: diverse and youthful cast, callbacks to legacy characters and events balanced with references to recent continuity, energy and optimism. See also: Runaways, Champions, Unstoppable Wasp, Sam Wilson: Captain America, et al. It also was everything I despise about today's House of Ideas: inconsistent creative team (new artist after 3 of its 5issues...?) and a promising premise aborted by an abrupt cancellation. See also: every title above, except for the MIA Runaways, apparently returning in February.

Together, the experience of reading these 10 comics soured me on moving through the rest of the stack for several weeks. I've just started at them again. Die! Die! Die! continues to be outrageous but irresistible, and The Plot by Vault Comics might just be better than the similar Gideon Falls, an Eisner Awards darling that I also read and love. 

The only title that I have read day-of this past half-year has been Excellence. The fact that I was struck by how prescient it was when racial justice protests erupted in response to George Floyd's murder now, upon much more reflection, makes me realize how intentionally oblivious I was to that state of our nation. I'm working on it.

In addition to the aforementioned Learners Edge continuing education class, countless hours the past few months were spent puzzling out how to continue the project-based, collaboration-intensive IMAGE program I teach and coordinate. That intensified in August. We started classes this week, and I meet the first of two classes of new 3rd grade students in less than an hour after this writing. 

I've been busy. The things about which I write here were things I haven't done much lately. Friends and I are gearing up for the start of our Pathfinder 2nd Edition Extinction Curse campaign next weekend, and I have been playing and loving the Xbox One port of Pathfinder: Kingmaker. The Boys Season 2 is nuts. I'm excited to read some of the comics that now have several issues banked and ready to binge. 

Maybe I'll write more sooner rather than later.

Cutting the Cord

And here we are, almost a month after the post stating that I would like to begin posting regularly again!

In the meantime, the kids and I enjoyed a trip to my hometown in the U.P. - our first there in around 7 months - and reconnected with family there, as well as said goodbye to our Grandma Jean, whose year-long battle with lung cancer ended on July 10th.

I finished the purge and reorganization of over two years of photos, readying to create our Disney World memory book.

I haven't read a lot of comic books, actually; just finishing up History of the Marvel Universe and Excellence as it is released, but I have a growing stack to read. For whatever reason, I just haven't been in the mood most evenings, instead reading Pathfinder 2nd Edition game books.

Noah camped in the backyard.

We also opened and set up the Abomination Build-A-Figure set of Marvel Legends figures. 

Hope spent a week (safely) at Geneva in the out-of-doors, with company of other young people, and growing spiritually. She always seems like a different, older person on our 30-minute drives and chats back from camp.

About 1/3 of my continuing education coursework on Autism Spectrum Disorder in Inclusive Classrooms is finished.

Oh, and we have bare spots on two of our media shelves where cable boxes used to be.

The prompt for this brief post was an emailed bill from Xfinity for $97. That's down from the $277 we were paying for far too long. That could be reduced even more by buying our own modem/router, but for now, haven't taken that step. We just have the "Blast" internet package.

We invested some of my birthday gift money in a Roku Premiere. When that worked very well, I put all the Target gift cards I was gifted for Christmas and Teacher Appreciation Week this past year by students and their families towards a Roku Ultra. The Ultra had some trouble with a few programs (Hamilton on Disney+ and Sabrina on Netflix) on our Black Friday special TV, but since swapping the Roku devices between TVs, there have been no problems.

We did subscribe to YouTube TV so we can enjoy local stations and (maybe?) Green Bay Packers games this fall, plus the sorts of things Hope likes to watch (animal-related shows) and Noah tunes into most weeks (wrestling). Almost immediately after we did so, the price increased from $50 per month to $65, but even with the one-time $130 in devices and the $50 for YouTube TV, just a single month in, we're at a break-even on what we were paying in cable, and the only thing we have truly missed is Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (the main segments of which can still be watched on YouTube).

In addition to continuing our Netflix, Amazon Prime (Video), Disney +, and WWE Network subscriptions and now easily streaming those on the Roku devices on the main floor and in our bedroom upstairs, and not just on the Xbox One in the basement, I discovered loads of other free Channels. Pluto TV has some great stuff, the 24/7 Mystery Science Theater 3000 channel (...on that Channel) seeing the most use by me so far. That's also available on Shout Factory TV - but with individual episodes ON DEMAND. Insane. Others I have added and dabbled in:

• HGTV Go, Good Network Go, and ID (Investigation Discovery, a.k.a. "Murder Shows") Go, and ESPN, the two former for Melanie and the latter two for me, all of which are available on YouTube TV but have some nice on demand content in their Channels
• PBS
• Roku Channel (of course)
• Vudu
• Stirr
• Tubi
• Xumo
• Crackle
• Fawesome
• Filmrise
• Popcornflix
• NewsON
• Skynews
• WeatherNation
• Pandora
• AccuRadio

There is enough available on all of these Channels that I think I could truly go without YouTube TV and still have plenty to enjoy in the rare times that I am in the moot to watch rather than read, create, or play a game.

Nobody in our home has once voiced regret that we no longer have cable TV.

Reliable wireless internet, a quality streaming device, and subscription services seem to be the things that made our transition painless. If any are interested in doing the same, I'm happy to talk more with you.

"Mostly-weekly"

Haha! Maybe on average, given that I was posting daily for a good stretch in March, but it's now been almost three months since my last post.

There are several reasons for that.

One, I just couldn't keep pace with the MCU reflections and reviews when we were watching a film each day. That was especially true once we returned to "remote learning" following spring break.

It wasn't a break at all for me; I spent several hours each day of it prepping materials that were then shared through Google Classroom with my 9 classes of students once the break was done.

The weeks that followed that were full identifying the students who qualified to participate in the program for academically talented students that I coordinate and teach. A great deal of the data and processes usually used for that were unavailable, so considering alternatives, sharing and discussing those with our district leaders, and then communicating (and, when questioned, justifying) those to many teachers, principals, and parents were all huge untertakings.

Communicating with the parents and teachers of qualifying students took me all the way through early June.

Whew.

Also: there's Animal Crossing: New Horizons. It's been about a decade since I dove into an AC game. Our copy was shipped to us on March 25th, and it's been a comfortable and captivating second life since. I can't think of another game that's had a more tragically fortuitous release - an escapist game with intentional community components, arriving right at the time that gamers were given carte blanche to stay at home for days and weeks and months at a time. I sense the intensity with which many played it is waning - for us, too - but I still log at least a couple hours every day, sometimes much more than that if I am up early and Melanie is watching something at night in which I'm not interested.

Plans for Geek Fire Oil in these summer months:

1. I have notes on all the remaining MCU movies that we watched. I will compile those into posts at least once a week, in a looser format probably won't lend itself to as much structure or detail as those posts that came before. Our lives were ultra-structured in those weeks.

2. Comics are starting to release again. The 11th issue of my current favorite, Die, comes out today. I would like to get on a schedule where I respond to one individual comic or series every week, too.

3. Tech stuff. We are cutting the cable cord, and have started using alternatives already. I'll share what is and isn't working for us. There will probably also be posts about New Horizons since it's such a significant part of our recreation time right now.

4. I am playing in a Tales from the Loop online game with friends and also prepping work for a long, exciting, quirky Pathfinder 2nd Edition campaign (the Extinction Curse Adventure Path), so expect occasional posts about one or the other.

5. Noah and I have started collecting Marvel Legends again, so we'll share what's new with those - maybe some unboxing photos and videos that will be cross-posted to his YouTube.

6. Rasslin'. We watched Undertaker: The Last Ride on WWE Network and I have some thoughts on that, as well as the production of their shows through this pandemic/LEFTIST HOAX.

That should lead to at least a couple posts a week!

I'm also struggling to get started on the work of a distance learning Learners Edge course - much prefer in-person classes, but they are also significantly more costly, both from price and time perspectives - so there might be lapses in activity here when I am making headway on that work.

I hope these words find all who read them in good health and high spirits. Geek On.

Wrestlemania 36

And now, a brief interlude to the Marvel Cinematic Reviews.

I can't mar peoples' opinions of me much more than I already have, so I'll go ahead and admit that in addition to collecting comics and for most of my life obsessing over Star Wars, I am also a decades-long fan of professional wrestling.

To be fair, most of us were in the 1980s, when Hulk Hogan's Rock 'n' Wrestling shared cartoon airtime and toy shelf space with G.I. Joe and Transformers.

And again in the late 1990s, when the screens of sports bar TVs in college towns featured Stone Cold Steve Austin and The Rock, the nWo and Goldberg, I was part of the "in" crowd.

The difference being: in the time between, I was a high schooler hosting pay-per-view parties with betting pools for vents that featured characters such as Mantaur.

I can tell you the differences between him, The Barbarian, The Warlord, and The Berzerker, and have an opinion on which of them was the better pro wrestling character.

When few were still watching in the mid-2000s, I was geeked to see independent wrestler CM Punk among the pinstriped gangsters that came to the ring with John Cena.

There have been times when interest waned and years that I did not watch at all, but for the better part of the time I have been alive, I've loved rasslin'.

Our 8-year old son Noah has adopted and elevated that fandom. When we cleaned the top level of our home yesterday, it took him about 20 minutes to clear out the custom-built arena and 50-odd figures (a fraction of his collection) that crowded the floor of his bedroom before we could vacuum it. He can tell you, in ascending order, the Top 10 Heaviest Wrestlers Ever. He knows in which year The Rock's cousin Umaga died. He's made and bonded with some of his best friends over their shared love.

Really, pro wresting is just superheroes and supervillains brought to sweaty, spandexed life - with less property destruction, more chair shots, and the battles contained within a squared circle and only the loosest of rules.

Melanie has also gotten into the goofy fun of it, and has strong opinions on the performers and story lines. Ask her about Ricochet and management's handling of him.

So, this past weekend, we watched Wrestlemania 36 together. Not on one night, but two - nominally because it was "the only Wrestlemania too big for one night, but more likely so that World Wrestling Entertainment didn't have to produce an NXT show on Saturday.

Not on pay-per-view, but streaming on the WWE Network. Not with a cash pool attached to our picks of winners, but bragging rights - though I teased Noah that if I had the most points, I would be awarding myself a T-shirt of his most hated wrestler, King Corbin. Not with fellow B.O.-oozing teenage boys, but with a couple rambunctious cats.

But, man, did it stink. Melanie and I agree that the biggest takeaway of it was that the live crowd is a much bigger part of pro wrestling than any of us realized. The athletes can pull off the high-risk, devastating-looking maneuvers as usual, they can deliver impassioned promos and cheer victories and mourn defeats, but without an audience surrounding them and reacting, it falls flat. The crowd is in on it (usually) and plays its part. With all respect to the performers and their talents, I just don't have any desire to watch if they continue the programs as they've been these past few weeks.

An exception: The Boneyard Match between The Undertaker and A.J. Styles. Instant camp classic. We are big fans of "The Fiend" Bray Wyatt in our home, but mixed on The Firefly Funhouse Match. I liked what I saw, but with it coming near the end of Night Two, have to admit to being somewhat tuned out while nearing the end of boarding and bagging a few dozen comics. Maybe I will watch it again more closely instead of any of their new shows this week. We still have to watch R-Truth 24, and I want to see Chronicle-Drew McIntyre.

Captain America: Civil War

Captain America: Civil War (May 2016)

Primary Characters

• Steve Rogers/Captain America
• Bucky Barnes/Winter Soldier
• Tony Stark/Iron Man
• Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow
• T'Challa/Black Panther
• Sam Wilson/Falcon
• Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch
• James Rhodes/War Machine
• Vision
• Peter Parker/Spider-Man
• Scott Lang/Ant-Man
• Clint Barton/Hawkeye
• Colonel Helmut Zemo

Secondary Characters

• Secretary of State Thaddeus "Thunderbolt" Ross
• Sharon Carter/Agent 13
• Deputy Everett Ross
• Brock Rumlow/Crossbones
• T'Chaka

Notable Story Elements

• Wakanda
• Sokovia Accords
• Hydra
• F.R.I.D.A.Y.
• B.A.R.F. (Bionically Augmented Retro-Framing)
• The Raft

Times viewed: Around 10

• Original theatrical release
• Many viewings at home on BluRay - more to come in the weeks away from normal routines
• Friday Family Movie Night sometime in the past year
• 23 Days of Marvel - March 31st, 2020

Easter Eggs

• The leather-bound book in which the Winter Soldier's commands are kept has a deep crimson cover, which could simply be reflecting the "red state" of Communist Russia, or a reference to Bucky's brainwashed crimes superimposed with Black Widow's statement in The Avengers that, "I've got red on my ledger"
• Falcon is assisted by the Redwing drone; in the comics, he has telepathic and empathic connection to and control over birds, and Redwing an actual falcon
• At the Avengers compound, Vision is dressed similarly to how he appears in Tom King and Gabriel Hernandez Walta's critically acclaimed limited series

• Scott Lang enlarges himself in the battle between the heroes; in the comics, Hank Pym was Ant-Man for only a short time after the Avengers formed, instead using the guise Giant-Man and later Goliath
• Lang is seen drumming with his hands in his cell on The Raft, foreshadowing his house arrest pastime in Ant-Man and the Wasp
• The cell phone that Steve sends to Tony is the same one he will use to contact him in Infinity War

Yesterday, the governor of Michigan announced an executive order that will close school buildings for the remainder of the school year due to our state's escalating number of cases of and deaths from COVID-19. Like many teachers, I support this decision but am still hurting from the finality of it.

There were many irreplaceable experiences in our IMAGE program for academically talented kids scheduled for these past weeks and the next couple months, and it's knowing how much excellent learning and growing they are missing that stings so much.

Our daughter will miss 6th grade camp, the capstone of her elementary years.

With all this, my enthusiasm for reflecting on and writing about the MCU movies as our family rewatches them together has waned. I'm still numb. This will likely be my last post for awhile. We have only 6 of the 23 left to go as of this writing, and I'll take notes as we do so. At some point soon, I will get back to blogging.

For the moment, Captain America: Civil War is my favorite MCU movie. As I wrote at length in the post on Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Civil War was one of the last well-conceived and consequential modern-era Marvel comics events, and I loved its portrayal of Steve Rogers as the type of person Sharon Carter describes in Civil War through her aunt Peggy's words: principled, unflappable, a leader by example.

While the Avengers are a huge component, Cap is definitely the centerpiece here, at the fore of the new team seen at the end of Age of Ultron - minus highly conspicuous members War Machine and Vision - on a covert mission in Lagos. Hydra sleeper agent Brock Rumlow returns at Crossbones, a central figure from my favorite stretch of Captain America comics.

Instead of the character Miriam Sharpe publicly calling for the registration of superpowered individuals after the Stamford tragedy cost her son Damian his life, here it is the mother of Charles Spencer confronting Tony Stark individually about the high price paid for the escalating collateral damage done in the conflicts of him and his teammates, specifically in Sokovia. I like this decision by the screenwriters. Given all the media noise today, it could have come off as Tony being guilted into a course of action; instead, he sees the personal loss of a grieved mother and makes a conscious decision to pursue a safer course.

That's the crux challenge: whose safety must be assured, and who makes those decisions? Steve argues that the Avengers could devolve into a military strike force steered by governments, and that they'd be more heavies than peacekeepers. Tony and - in a return from The Incredible Hulk - now-Secretary of State Ross point out in chilling sequence the trail of destruction left in their wakes. Another of my long-time favorites, the Vision would rather see logic and control prevail than a superpowered arms race.

The fate of the Winter Soldier is an additional point of contention, given his apparent role in one of the tragedies that prompted the Sokovia Accords (standing in for the Superhuman Registration Act). There are dozens of top-notch chase sequences in the MCU, but the one in Bucharest introducing Black Panther is the best.

On Black Panther, and revisiting Michael Douglas as Hank Pym from the previous post - what's becoming clear to me now as we enjoy all these movies again is that the casting department for the MCU may be the real MVPs. Chadwick Boseman and Tom Holland sing here, but how about Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans? My wife is not nearly the fan of the latter as she is the former, but to me, I cannot imagine anyone else as Steve Rogers. He's perfect. The voice and mannerisms I extrapolated out of comics decades ago are his. It's uncanny.

They both play their roles with confidence and make their arguments with conviction. Whose Side Are You On?

"He's my friend."

"So was I."

Damn. Those words carry weight, and almost a decade of excellent, carefully interwoven movies bear the emotional load. The fall of the shield that "doesn't belong" to Captain America strikes with a haunting finality, but we're lifted again by the close. It's not shawarma shop fuzziness, but a hell yeah nod.

Civil War has the perfect pacing of The Avengers with a much more involved plot and challenges its viewers like few other Marvel films. It's going to be tough to sort out if I still like this one more than the Endgame finale.

Ranking

1. Captain America: Civil War
2. The Avengers
3. Guardians of the Galaxy
4. Captain America: The Winter Soldier
5. Iron Man
6. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
7. Ant-Man
8. Avengers: Age of Ultron
9. Iron Man 3
10. Iron Man 2
11. Captain Marvel
12. Captain America: The First Avenger
13. Thor
14. Thor: The Dark World
15. The Incredible Hulk