While in New York City for the Acquiror Summit, I finally had the opportunity to see Hamilton. The show has been going for almost a decade now and has even been here in the Triangle while I’ve lived here, but I hadn’t seen it before Saturday. Mom and Dad joined me at the show as part of a long weekend in New York City.

I’ve seen six shows on Broadway now and several others off-Broadway, and Hamilton is right there with The Lion King with the two hard to compare as I saw them at different points in my life. None of us listened to the music beforehand, which I would advise anyone who doesn’t regularly listen to hip-hop to do so that you can understand more of the lyrics. I read the Chernow biography in college, though, and I was able to understand the words in all of the songs. The place was packed and the energy was high even for a Saturday matinee.

King George was hilarious with his short vignettes during the performance even if fans of John Adams might be upset by the treatment he received from the British monarch. Thomas Jefferson was also cast in a soft villain role, which worked from the perspective of Alexander Hamilton but is not a universal view. The real villain of the story was Aaron Burr, the man who shot and killed Hamilton on the dueling ground. His character received little development, a deliberate and well-executed choice given Hamilton’s perspective that Burr lacked any real beliefs. The play accentuated Hamilton’s immigrant status and the actions and life of his wife, but it wasn’t done in the beat-you-over-the-head-with-my-ideology sort of manner preferred by lesser writers. In summation, I left the theater without wondering why the show has seen such a long run.

I’m now back from my vacation and have jumped right back into the swing of work. This week, I’ll record a few of my favorite parts of the trip. You’ll note that the motorbikes in Marrakech will not be on this list.

My favorite places of the trip were the areas away from the cities and where I was either alone or with only my guide. There is something enchanting about large sand dunes in a moonlight glow. And a little off roading during hikes to waterfalls or up narrow slot canyons gives a walk a little more sense of adventure. I opted for a more physically demanding tour than most would choose, but even if you aren’t interested in hiking you will need to be ready for stairs when visiting most places in the country.

On the trip, I purchased a couple of Berber rugs. I saw a few that I liked and so I decided to buy them. Then it was a matter of agreeing to a price. It wasn’t the usual sort of dynamic with wild differences in valuation and I wasn’t eager to make it such due to the nature of the business as a cooperative. There was still some back and forth, though, done by writing numbers as a means of limiting the possibility of confusion. Then the call to prayer rang out from the mosque in the village. And that was that, with the price already more or less in the middle of where we’d started the discussions and the owner of the co-op making reference to the transaction being divinely ordained. We shook hands and that was that. I chuckle a little thinking about how the whole thing played out.

The two most memorable and enjoyable meals on the trip were the two meals where I did the least. In both instances, I just went exactly where the guide told me, sat down, and let the guide order for me. One was near the main square of Marrakech. The place was unassuming and I probably would have just walked past it, but Salam stopped and told me this was where I needed to eat lunch. The oven was actually built into the ground, and there were several lambs being cooked. I had both some lamb meat from this kiln style oven and tangia, a beef dish slow-cooked in a covered clay pot with all kinds of spices. I ate at a single communal table in the back of the restaurant stall alongside people of multiple nationalities and sprinkled the lamb with the mix of salt and cumin that was on the table in front of me. It was great, and the tangia was even better. The other was on the drive back into Marrakech on the last day when we stopped at a roadside food hall of sorts. There was one stall for the butcher and another stall for the cook, running two different businesses. It was Friday so other stalls were closed, but on any other day there would have been a place for drinks open and a pharmacy too. I had meatballs and Moroccan salad, but what made it special was sitting there on the plastic chairs being the only white person surrounded by people eating, drinking tea, and having a pleasant if late lunch.

My guide was also a celebrity in Morocco. Everywhere we went people came up to him and spoke with him or asked to take a picture with him. He started publishing videos during COVID and now has a few hundred thousand followers on the various platforms. It was funniest at police checkpoints, where the police would often stop him but only to talk; there was only one time where the officer even asked for his ID. The videos are all in Moroccan Arabic, but I actually took or recorded some of his most recent content. Links if anyone is curious: Facebook; Instagram; TikTok; and YouTube.

This is shoulder season in Morocco (high season is the spring and low season the summer), so at several points I’ve been the only tourist staying in my accommodations, eating at a restaurant, or visiting a store. This was starkest during my overnight stay on the edge of the Saharan dunes. My camel ride across the sand was in a caravan of one, even if there were other groups around headed for some of the other tent camps. I chose when to eat my dinner and sat in the large tent alone next to the space heater. Then I retreated to my tent.

As the moon was nearly full, I was denied a mind-bending view of the stars sans light pollution. It made for a slightly eerie glow instead; there was enough light to be able to see all around but not to see fine details. I’ve watched a few nature documentaries shot with low light cameras in recent years that have had a similar visual effect, but city lights drown it out most places. And the wind whipped through the night. In a different time it might have been a djinn of the desert, but such stories aren’t told as much anymore. The moonset in the west more or less coincided with the sunrise over a raised plateau in the east that forms the Algerian border and I was up early to take them both in a short distance from my tent camp and towards the giant dunes. Then it was off to breakfast and then onto the next destination.

There have been a lot of windshield miles on this trip. As it’s just me with my guide/driver, we sometimes go long stretches without speaking, though our conversations have grown deeper as the days have passed. Morocco is not a country filled with wildlife either. The only animals are birds, herd animals, dogs, and an obnoxious number of cats in the cities and villages. It is a country with varied topography, though. I’ve seen the Atlantic Ocean, four different mountain ranges, beautiful high-walled gorges, rolling hills of wheat and olive fields, valley oases, a lake at the base of a desert sand dune, and miles and miles of high shrubland plains. It provides time for thinking, and me not accessing the internet for the last few days has given me some mental space for that thinking time to be more than just focused on the next work tasks I’ll tackle when I return next week. It has been refreshing and something I’ll try to replicate at intervals through the year even without traveling across an ocean to do so. Even as I type this out, I’m sitting alone on a patio, sun back over my right shoulder and me facing the Anti-Atlas Mountains to the south. It’s a nice view, especially since I have some dates and cookies in front of me which my host so generously provided.

On Saturday, I flew first from RDU to JFK then overnight to Casablanca. It was yet another overnight flight where I failed to get any sleep. Maybe someday. My plan was for this to be a true vacation. I even built in a buffer of a few days in case one or more transactions bled into the new year. Alas, a couple of matters have dragged more than a few days into the new year and I’ve worked early mornings and into the evening. Maybe I jumped the gun a bit and should have waited until this week to start the vacation, but I’m not sure that there will ever be a great time and I only have a few days back in Durham before heading out again for a work trip anyway.

Sunday was a wash given how tired I was. The itinerary called for very little time in Casablanca. The only stop was to tour what is the third largest mosque in the world, which was much more ornate than the only other mosque I’ve visited. This one has a minaret that is something like 200 meters tall and holds around 25,000 people inside. The scale was beyond what my tired mind could truly appreciate. Then it was off to Rabat, the capital city. A bit more touring and a seafood platter for a late lunch that involved far too many bones and I holed up in the hotel for the evening to sleep. I didn’t even go out for dinner.

Yesterday was a transit day (I’m writing this on Tuesday evening) to the northeast and into the Rif Mountains. The destination was Chefchaouen, a city I’d never heard of a few months ago when I decided to visit Morocco but one that the travel agency put on my suggested itinerary. It is the blue city of Morocco and has become much more visited in the era of Instagram. I arrived in the late afternoon, worked some, then ate a late dinner of a beef tagine with dates and plums that I chased down with the sour lemonade that I’ve now had on multiple occasions. It really should’ve been better than it was, but maybe it was because it was so late and didn’t really sate my hunger.

Today marked the first day when I felt like I was on vacation, for a while anyway. After a work session this morning, my guide drove me around the mountains into which Chefchaouen sits for a full day of hiking at Akchour. It was my sort of place—gravel crunching under hiking boots with few people around and limited cell service. Along with my guide, I walked first to God’s Bridge, a high natural arch over a river that offered a really nice view. Then we took a much longer walk to a series of waterfalls. Those were underwhelming, with the larger falls probably looking something like Bridal Veil Falls but there was only enough water for it to be a trickle. That is unusual for this time of year, but so it goes. Then we came back into the city and I had what is so far the best meal of the trip, a beef rib with some roasted vegetables. It was in a fancier restaurant and there was a guy playing mostly classic standards on the guitar. The song playing when I left was “My Way,” a personal favorite. Then as I walked back up the stairs towards my hotel, the call to prayer rang out for the final time today. It was quite a juxtaposition.  

By the time this newsletter goes out, I should have arrived in Fes. It will be my third different home thus far in Morocco. This trip marks a return to a faster-paced vacation format that I went away from during the past few years of spending roughly a week in one place before moving onto the next destination. It’s too early to know which format I’ll choose next, though perhaps my next travel vacation won’t be a solo one. Again, one can dream.

The new year brings reflection. As I’ve written previously, I’m not big on resolutions for the new year, but I will spend a few hours today looking back at my calendar and thinking about what I enjoyed most (and least) and what I might change going into this year. It may not be as glamorous or celebrated, but I’ve found it much more practical even if the exercise looks slightly different each time.

In comparison to the past few times January 1 has rolled around, there is much more stability in my life today. Two years ago, I changed my residence on New Year’s Day. Last year, I was a few months into my residence in Durham and celebrated with friends by watching the fireworks in London through the power of streaming television. If anyone has children who want to see fireworks for the new year, that is a handy trick. This year, I’m in the same apartment, there were thunderstorms on New Year’s Eve, and I was in bed by 10. Sure, my mood is not as dark as it was during the COVID years, but the hopeful expectation of positive change from the last couple of years is absent.

There are plenty of reasons why I should be excited—I’m coming off time with family, I have a well-positioned business, my social calendar is fuller than it was a year ago, and I have an upcoming extended vacation—yet I’ve felt morose these past few days, even on this bright and sunny morning. I’m sure I’m not alone in that, and it is my hope that reading this helps at least one of you know that you’re not alone if you are experiencing malaise yourself. After scheduling this to send, I’ll take a walk in that sunshine. 

With both Christmas and New Year’s Day falling in the middle of the week this year, there is an odd rhythm to the final weeks of 2024. I still have a few transactions scrambling to close before the end of the year and there is a scattering of conversations with prospective clients looking towards early 2025, but we have not had our normal internal meetings and won’t again until the new year. Our assistant has also been out so I’m getting a reminder of just how glad I am to have an assistant. Even sending the newsletter this week and next week will probably prove a challenge the workflow has changed since I last published it myself.

I’ll be traveling back to Durham today. We always celebrate the holiday early and there tends to be less traffic on Christmas Day. Then I’ll have something like a two or three day workweek depending on how I choose to spend my Saturday. I haven’t had one of those in a while, but I’m hopeful that a good work sprint will allow me to make progress not just on my outstanding matters but also on a few strategic planning initiatives that I’ve initiated for next year. Next week’s post will be more of a summary of the year. It has certainly had its ups and downs. This one is just a short missive before I gorge myself on breakfast food. I hope that each of you enjoys this holiday, whether you were awakened way too early this morning by excited children or will be traveling most of the day like me.

I’ve never been one to watch parades on television. Even this year, I left the room on Thanksgiving once the television came on. Saturday morning, after a trip to the grocery store, I walked to get my weekly blueberry muffin. This time, instead of returning back to my apartment I headed to meet friends at a prime viewing spot for Durham’s Christmas parade. Until Friday afternoon I didn’t even know that there was a parade, but it wasn’t as if I had alternate plans.

It was sunny, cold, and windy and there was a helicopter overhead that made quite a lot of noise, but my friends’ little guy wasn’t bothered by any of it. He was in his coat and standing in his wagon. And when he got out of the wagon he ran a few laps around a ramp for the building we stood in front of, hair all askew from being under a winter cap. Some of the other children were less enthused about sitting in the cold, but he had the best time of anyone there. The loud cars, the drums, the people, everything—he was smiling and bouncing in his wagon the whole time. People in the parade were drawn to that happiness and that created a virtuous cycle adding even further to his mirth. Then to top it off, there were fire trucks at the end of the parade. Fire trucks are his favorite and he wasn’t about to let a cold wind interfere with his enjoyment of their lights and sirens. I haven’t experienced that level of joy in months.

I could reflect more on the parade—my thoughts about the marching bands, the different civic organizations, two guys walking with a banner (which is what their banner announced), the Mesoamerican dance troupe, or the people handing out tins of sardines—but it was really just about watching the excitement on the little guy’s face.

I haven’t been for the past month or so, but reading fiction in the evenings has been a part of my evening shutdown routine during my better stretches this year. I’ve read mostly science fiction this year in the evenings, which brought a change from my previous habit of more classic literature. There was a short story collection that sparked a few thoughts, but the highlight of this reading was the Red Rising trilogy. I picked up the first one after hearing about it from a couple of the podcasts I listen to occasionally and ended up plowing through all three (there have been subsequent novels set in the same world too but I haven’t read those yet) in perhaps too short a period of time.

The first book starts on a partially terraformed Mars set at some indeterminate point in the future amidst a community of the lowest caste of a solar system wide society spanning from Mercury to the moons of the gas giants. There is interplanetary travel in the story, but there is nothing like hyperdrive and it can take months to traverse between different planets and moons. The main character, Darrow, is a young Helldiver operating deep in the mines of Mars. Then things proceed as Darrow navigates a world dominated by Golds (with a whole lot of other colors in between).

I won’t give a plot summary since I’m not interested in spoiling anything, but it is a wild ride. The action across the three novels is taut and fast-paced. I know that the mental image I have of some of the characters is wildly different than how they are described in the text, but that has never stopped me from enjoying a book before and there isn’t yet a film or television adaptation. The reader gets more of Darrow’s inner thoughts than those of the other characters, but there is a great deal of turmoil in him as he both shapes and is shaped by the events unfolding around him. This also isn’t a simple story of good universally triumphing over evil, and that makes it much more compelling.

Over Thanksgiving weekend, we celebrated my sister-in-law’s birthday. Some of our cousins were driving through on Saturday and so they stopped to surprise her. The older children were the flower girls in my brother and sister-in-law’s wedding, and they love pleasant surprises. I was part of their greeting party. The two older children were so excited to be part of the surprise, to the point of being giddy with their little hands shaking slightly. The youngest had just woken from a nap during the car ride and was carried into the house, but eventually he warmed up too and played various games with the little balls that were some of the only toys on offer. I hadn’t seen the kids or their parents for several months, and seeing the little ones is always a highlight.

The meal was decidedly kid-focused with tater tots and pulled chicken bbq. I sat with the older children during the late lunch and talked to them about school and new friends that they’ve made in their classes this year. The cake was red velvet so I didn’t partake, but everyone else enjoyed it and most ate seconds.

Then we were treated to a ribbon twirling performance set against a background of Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus songs as the middle child was given her own birthday gift a few days early too (along with a matching one for the eldest to mitigate any envy). The music would not have been my first choice, but no one asked me and that’s okay. After all, it wasn’t my party.

I’m in Kentucky this week, to the slight detriment of my productivity but to the benefit of my soul. I extended my Thanksgiving stay this year in order to hunt deer last weekend. Independent of the success of the hunt, there is something invigorating about watching a sunrise bring a glow and warmth over a frosty field. There is life in a sunrise that is absent from staring at a computer screen. The sunset has its appeal too, but the sunrise evokes more in me since I see fewer of them due to the orientation of my apartment.

This annual hunt also offers a chance to fill my freezer (and my parents’ too) with venison. I’ll be taking a cooler full of frozen meat back with me, as I do almost every time I come to Kentucky. It is good lean meat that has been a staple of my diet since I was a child, even if I rarely serve it to guests.

I won’t go into any great detail here about the hunt itself, but it was a successful weekend. That means I’ll be able to take another cooler full of meat with me at Christmas when I return. We’re about to start the end-of-year sprint that is integral to our transactional legal practice, so even a short, dedicated time of being in nature should prove very useful.