Flippers gone wild

This property is a flip, sold earlier this year for $1.6M and now being offered for $4.6M.  We have photos from the 2014 sale (for $1M); did the flippers add $3M of value?  

There was a pool, the pool is gone.  The tennis court still exists, but it looks like it's in poor shape.  My guess is that the pool was in bad enough shape that it had to be removed in order to sell the renovated property.

View from above, 2025

The listing claims the property was "built" in 2025, but it's clearly a significant renovation of the original cottage-style structure, not a complete teardown and rebuild.  From the front, it looks like a full second floor was added to the main part of the house, previously there were dormers.  A three-car garage was also added to the side of the house, and it dominates the complex. 

Front 2014 and 2025, side-by-side

The back used to have a lot of asphalt; that has been torn up and replaced with grass.

Back 2014 and 2025, side-by-side

Throughout the interior:

• fireplaces appear to have been removed; 
• cross-beams were removed;  
• interior stone was removed; 
• dark wood floors replaced with white oak; 

... in general, anything that gave the home any kind of unique cottage-y character is gone.

Interior 2014 vs 2025; I *think* this is the same room, but it's hard to tell.  All I know is that is a big damn wall. They tried to make it less severe by putting on the paneling, but it's a tough room to work with. 

Interior from 2014 and 2025.  These are *not* the same room, but are illustrative of how the house had character to it, and now it's a super white blah space.

What I read in 2025 (books)

I've logged 51 titles in my spreadsheet for 2025 so far, up from 2024 and well above my 10-year average.  What was different?  Well, 7 of those titles are DNFs, and it's unusual for me to have more than 2 in a year.  So, yay, I was trying things I wasn't sure I would like, and yay, I put them down when they didn't work out. 

What stood out this year?  Picking a few:

Siren Queen.  Nghi Vo's novel about early Hollywood with a fantastical twist, where being admitted to the studio system feels a bit like being trapped in Faerie lands.  The cameras are magical devices that can literally harm your soul, and becoming a big star literally puts your likeness in the sky. 

The Women. Kristin Hannah's novel recognizing the American women who served in Vietnam and the erasure of their experience when they returned home.  I read this on the recommendation of a friend, and then read Mystic Lake later this year.  

He Who Drowned the World. Shelley Parker-Chan's sequel to She Who Became the Sun, and the concluding novel in this series.  Unlike the previous book, this was not a Hugo finalist; I think it was equally worthy.  This is a book in which a number of people achieve everything they (thought they) desired and find out all the terrible things they've done weren't worth it, and all because their aim was simply to achieve an end, without a plan for what would happen after.  This book, and its predecessor, also neatly examine how the world treats people who do not conform to rigid gender expectations, as well as the cost to those who harm themselves in trying to conform.

What Grows from the Dead. Dave Dobson's (a friend) rollicking crime / mystery / thriller set in modern day North Carolina.  

Lines. Sung J. Woo's (a friend) Sliding Doors-style story of a couple's relationship after a collision (or near miss) in Washington Park, NYC.

What Feasts at Night.  This is T. Kingfisher's sequel to What Moves the Dead, and the second in her "Sworn Soldier" novellas, which are a mix of Ruritanian romance and horror.

Alien Clay.  Adrian Tchaikovsky's novel about a dangerous planet where undesirables are sent to toil so that Earth can learn enough to eventually be able to exploit the planet.  This got my top vote for the Hugo award this year, because it did the best job of examining a thought experiment that was reasonably novel to me (no shade on the other finalists). 

The Tainted Cup.  Robert Jackson Bennett's first novel in a fantasy detective series won the Hugo award for best novel this year.  Excellent worldbuilding and a detective that's like Sherlock Holmes turned up to 11, but so overly sensitive to her surroundings that she can't leave her rooms without a blindfold on, so her "Watson" has to do all the investigating and bring the clues back to her.  I expect to read the sequel for the 2026 Hugo finalist book club.

Another World.  Pat Barker's first book after completing the Regeneration trilogy (the first of which I read back in 2009).  I read this after finishing Mystic Lake, and it was a great chaser, for while both books are about "normal" lives, Hannah wrote an entertaining tale about the melodrama of likeable people, and Barker wrote about a thoroughly banal family.  I nearly put the book down a few times in the first 50 pages, but Pat Barker skillfully drew me in to her story, and ultimately it was a pleasure to see a master at work.

What I listened to in 2025 (podcasts)

I've had Pocket Casts on my phone for a while, but it wasn't until this year that I finally made more of a habit of listening while doing yardwork.  I tend to listen at 1.4-1.5x speed, and liberally skip episodes (or parts of episodes) that don't interest me.  So what's currently in my podcasts list?

The casts I look forward to most include:

1. Our Opinions are Correct is a fortnightly conversation between Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders, veteran award-winning SFF authors.  They talk about subjects I like, their conversations hit the right balanced between structured and impromptu, their experience and friendship and personalities shine through the medium, and their runtime hits a sweet spot of about an hour.  
2. Brave Little State is a VPR program that has run for 9 years, researching and answering selected questions from listeners about Vermont, tending towards the uncommon and odd.  It airs fortnightly and typically runs under half an hour, which is perfect because I probably don't need to hear more than 22 minutes about the Tinmouth apple.  
3. The Important Thing is sporadically published conversation between two friends about a topic of recent interest/concern to Michael and Lyle.  It's pretty low structure, but it's kept short (typically under 20min with a few running to 30).
4. Served with Andy Roddick, but just the interviews.  I don't really want to read or hear about tournaments and matches, I want to watch them.  
5. Choiceology with Katy Milkman typically starts with a motivating story to illustrate the topic, and then moves into discussion with experts.  Several times I've found myself skipping to the discussion with experts because I've understood the topic and don't need/want 20 minutes of motivating story.  

Casts that I'm still getting used to include:

1. Worldbuilding for Masochists was a Hugo finalist for best podcast this year, and I listened to the finalists in order to make an informed vote, and I am generally enjoying the discussions among the hosts and with guests about how they approach elements of worldbuilding in their work.  
2. Hugo, Girl! was another Hugo finalist; this is largely a recorded book discussion group.  I like the hosts; I'm not convinced I want to listen to other people discuss a book rather than have a discussion with my friends.  
3. Coode Street Podcast was *another* Hugo finalist.  So far there's a been a bit of a mix of book discussion and other topics; my favorite episode so far was an excellent discussion with China Mieville. 
4. The Great & Secret Knowledge I added when they interviewed Lois McMaster Bujold and she mentioned it on her blog.  Episodes run 2-3 hours.
5. Happy Vermont is a "travel" podcast, but it tends to focus on the unusual.  So far it's paired well with Brave Little State.

There is also Vermont Edition, which runs 4 times a week for 50 minutes; it's simply the in-depth daily story from VPR repackaged as a podcast.  

Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age; Annalee Newitz

Four Lost Cities is top-notch pop-science reporting -- it provides a great start for someone to dip their toe into an area of knowledge to determine their interest, and then go further if there's a spark.  I learned something new (and in most cases, quite a lot) that I didn't know before about each of the cities: Çatalhöyük, Pompeii, Angkor, and Cahokia.

One of the things Newitz tries to do, and I think succeeds at, is to differentiate for the reader what is known versus what is theorized and contested about each site, and what are the basic arguments for each opinion.  

The central thesis is that none of these cities were truly "lost", and all cities go through natural cycles of growth and abandonment.  I liked that Newitz applied her own personal experience with a (very brief) abandonment and regrowth cycle in San Francisco, and can't help but think about places like Buffalo and St. Louis, which haven't recovered (yet); Pittsburgh, which shrank as steel left and decades later recovered as a tech hub; Burlington, VT, which continually hemorrhages its youth to larger and higher-income cities, but maintains a steady state through immigration (both people from wealthier states looking for a smaller city, and international immigrants).  Newitz briefly mentions New Orleans and Detroit, and writes of how some research of modern urban areas can be applied to archaeological work; it feels like this is an area ripe for follow-up.

Four Lost Butterfingers has joined Future of Another Butterfinger in my camera roll

Do I... actually like Microsoft Teams?

About 2.5 years ago, my data science team was part of the AuthAI acquisition by Availity.  Among the many challenges was one of tooling: we were going from a Google Suite / Zoom / Slack setup to Microsoft Suite.  I hadn't touched Microsoft Suite since leaving IBM in 2016, which was prior to the existence of Microsoft Teams; we used Webex for conferencing (just audio and desktop sharing) and had no messaging system, just email.  This was clunky for distributed, remote collaboration, but we made it work. 

Both Dataiku and Olive AI had Google Suite / Zoom / Slack setups, which I thought worked very well.  GSuite was (and still is) superior for collaborating on documents, and Slack was the missing link for semi-synchronous communication that moved faster than an email (or setting up a meeting) and was less demanding and intrusive than a phone call.  The main problem was that Zoom was necessary for anything other than a small group meeting, and anything typed in the Zoom chat was extremely inconvenient to get into Slack; at Dataiku, our solution was to use Slack channels as the meeting chat (at least for anything we wanted to keep; "whatever happened in Zoom chat stayed in Zoom chat."

So, there was naturally some trepidation when moving to Microsoft Suite.  Focusing on what looked promising, I pointed out that Teams meeting chats were saved directly the product, which was an improvement over Slack + Zoom.  This was cold comfort to a team used to Slack, and identified a number of pain points on Teams:

• Chats and channels were separate tabs, which meant people responding to chats would miss new messages in channels, driving people to send messages in chats rather than use channels.  The ideal is for the vast majority of conversations to happen in public channels so that knowledge is shared and new ideas get eyes on them, and Teams was encouraging the opposite.  MS fixed this by putting chats and channels in the same tab; sadly, the damage has been done and we have to retrain ourselves to use channels, but this is progress.
• Meeting chats were simply chats, not part of any channel, which meant that if a new instance of a meeting was created, say, because ownership of a meeting changed (MS doesn't allow you to change meeting owners; you need to create a new meeting), an entirely new meeting chat would be created.  You can now schedule meetings within a public channel, so while the new meeting chat would still be created, at least all the meeting chats will be in the same channel.  1:1's are still a problem, because you still end up with your personal chat with a person in addition to the 1:1 meeting chat.  Still, there is progress here.
• No custom emojis meant you couldn't inject your own team/company character.  This made using Teams less *fun*; while it's not a "get stuff done" feature, it's an important quality of life feature.  This was fixed earlier this year.
• Similarly, only one emoji reaction to a message was fixed this year.
• Teams seems to play badly with hardware.  I have a Sony bluetooth headset that worked fine with Zoom on my Olive laptop; on my Availity laptop, I'm inaudible when using the mic on my headset on Teams.  This continues to be a problem; I know this because Teams will sometimes change my mic setting from the external webcam to the headset.  This remains a problem.

All in all, significant progress has been made by MS in delivering on the promise of the premise that Teams would provide better integration into the rest of the office suite than GSuite / Zoom / Slack.  Calendar is now fully integrated, and I can mostly ignore Outlook, just checking the inbox a couple times a day.