penultimate

— पांच हजार एक सौ सात — I keep thinking about the wide-eyed innocence with which we rang in the year 2020. The word "coronavirus" was already in the news; I'm sure I had already heard it once or twice by New Year's Day that year, but we were all still walking around in our mental cocoons of denial, blithely assuming it would never become the kind of big deal we could never have imagined, simply because it was something we had never seen, nor had anyone else for literally a century. COVID-19 came at us with a vengeance only two and a half months later. COVID-19 has come at us with a vengeance again, in different forms, at least twice in 2021, the second of those being what we're in the midst of right now with Omicron. But most of us are vaccinated which makes a very big difference—which was not the case when we rang in 2021 a year ago, making it a New Year's Eve unlike any other before in any of our lives, just like every other major holiday in 2020. Last year was the firs time I rang in the new year just at home in my pajamas since college (and, in college, I would have still been in regular clothes, not pajamas . . . not that that matters). I did watch the fireworks just from the roof of our building one year, ringing in 2008, but that was also a mini party: Barbara was with us; as were Gina and then-boyfriend Eric, plus Brandi and then-boyfriend David. There won't be any party this year. Hell, even Ivan is scheduled to work so he won't be home—but, I'm still holding out hope to come to the office, so we can both see the fireworks in person and watch the augmented reality version, at the same time. I don't want to be stuck at home and no one else will be in the office anyway. I would have wanted to go to Seattle Center but they still aren't allowing crowds to gather, especially with the massive Omicron spike. I still want to see the fireworks in person as, after high winds canceling them for 2020 and then COVID canceling them for 2021, I want a return to some at least hybrid sense of normalcy for 2022. In any event, a lot about the ringing in of this new year is more downbeat than any of us expected six months ago, because of this new surge of cases. Indeed, here we are, back under a directive to wear masks at the office again, regardless of vaccination status. In fact, it seems leadership asked each VP to email their departments separately, presumably because different departments have different needs when it comes to having to be at the office: Kwanteria confirmed via email this morning that her department, Social and Environmental Responsibility ("SER"), have been directed only to come into the office if they need to mail or print something, until further notice. The email that came yesterday afternoon from our current VP of Merchandising, though, began with this verbiage: With the rise in COVID cases due to the omicron variant I would like to ask everyone who can work at home to work at home. If you need to be in the office I would advise you to wear a mask unless you’re actively eating or drinking. Also please postpone any in person meetings or gatherings at the office for the time being. The phrase "if you need to be in the office" is where it gets into a gray area for me. It's not just that I hate working from home. It's also a far bigger challenge for me to work efficiently. As I have told multiple people now, there's this: I really need my dual external monitors, and I really don't want to have to dismantle them again and get home stands from IT again and transport all this heavy equipment home again, only to bring it back to the office again in probably four to six weeks (assuming Omicron spikes very quicky—albeit also very very high—and then plummets quickly after about a month, for which there is obviously no guarantee but which is kind of the expectation). So, today for example, I am working at the office as always, but now I finally once again have a mask on. I'm wearing the disposable mask, which I find easier to deal with wearing all day, which seems ironic since people like to say these are more effective than cloth masks. Maybe because we throw them away? I don't know. My position as of yesterday afternoon was that, unless directly commanded that I have to work from home, I'll just work here masked. Again, hardly anyone else is here anyway. Also, I quite legitimately can't expect much in the way of sympathy for the vast majority of the work force, who have been wearing masks all day at work every day all along. (My office was only different because it is not categorized as an indoor public space, and the people who work here are vaccinated.) I tried talking about this with Ivan last night, and realized before he even had a chance to say anything how ridiculous it was for me to complain to him about it. He's a nurse who has to wear tightly fitted PPE over his face and even a face shield over that, for the duration of all of his work shifts. Hell, all of our store staff have been wearing masks every day for months too. There was a brief period over the summer where those who were vaccinated could go without one, but that didn't last long. However! Tracy did inform me a while ago that she figured out how to use her TV as an external monitor, and she helpfully clarified for me today that she uses an HDMI cable, of which I do not have a spare at home. I asked Andrew in IT about it over email, who referred me to Chris L who was still here, who hooked me up with an HDMI cable I can bring home. So, I still have made no definitive decision on this, but I do have a new plan now: assuming we come to the office for the fireworks tomorrow night, I will go ahead and bring my laptop, keyboard, mouse and headset home when we're done, and connect to the TV monitor using the HDMI cable. I will then work from home on Monday as a dry run, to see how comfortable that setup is. It still won't be dual monitors and won't be as workable and efficient as my office desk setup, but at least this way, a) I won't have to dismantle the monitors I have at work; and b) I'll still have a much larger screen to look at while at home, and won't have to squint at my tiny laptop screen all day. Also, this will make the transition from office to home and back an easier prospect, far easier than lugging all my equipment home like I did last year. Now, granted, I did work on only my small laptop screen for five months last year, from the time I started working from home in March 2020 until I finally got my at-home work desk I could put my work monitors on in August, but I have to tell you, once I had my dual monitors back, I marveled that I ever settled for just the laptop screen. I can't stomach the idea of going back to it again now. — पांच हजार एक सौ सात — — पांच हजार एक सौ सात — So anyway, I suppose I could mention last night. Ivan and I actually had an outing: we went to Neko Cat Café, a reservation I had booked for 7:00 on December 29 since the 14th. Visiting sessions are 45 minutes which is kind of the perfect amount of time, and right now they have twenty cats, all of them young kittens! Every time I've gone in the past, they were either all or mostly full grown. Being surrounded by so many kittens was amazing. God knows how effective it would be if Omicron were in the room (I suppose there's a fair chance it was), but everyone had masks on, and I double masked. I've taken to double masking on transit again too. I suppose it's also a fair point to note that if I work from home, I minimize risk by not taking buses or Light Rail. So, I don't know. I may split the difference and work some days at home and some at the office, just so I can work on receivers daily rather than only twice a week, as doing it the latter way really fucks up my work flow—another of many things that make it easier and more efficient to work at the office. But I digress! Back to the cats. I had been talking to Ivan about going back to Neko Cat Café for months, and I pressed the point about a month ago when I noticed, looking through the windows you pass by on Pine Street, that they had a bunch of kittens. While we were there, Ivan kept telling me to take pictures. He would pose and say, "Picture!" I took several but only kept ten; I went ahead and put them into a dedicated photo album on Flickr. This also allowed me to add that set to the collection of albums for each visit (now four sets, separated by year: two visits separately with both Ivan and Laney in 2017; subsequent visits with Ivan in both 2018 and 2019 during visits with me while he lived elsewhere; and now this visit in 2021—no visit in 2020 for obvious reasons). This was, of course, the first visit where any human in the shot had a face mask on. God, I long for the days when we don't have to wear masks anymore. Experts are still "hopeful" that the "worst of the pandemic will be behind us" sometime in 2022. One epidemiologist I follow on Twitter feels it's likely the virus will finally become endemic in the coming year. But you know, who the fuck knows? We've been given false hopes with this many times over now. I suppose I should look on the bright side: we remain in a far better position now than we were in March 2020. That cannot be disputed. Presumably we will be in a better position yet again a year from now. Hopefully less than a year from now. Maybe even weeks from now! I had been hearing Omicron is expected to peak in January; some people seem to be predicting February. Gah. Bleh. If it mirrors what happened in South Africa (and I realize there's no guarantee it will; it's a very different population), it should peak in January. I guess time will tell. That seems likely to be the overall theme of 2022. Time will tell. In any case, there won't be a DLU tomorrow. I get paid holiday time off for New Year's tomorrow since the 1st is not until Saturday. I do hope to post a finished "2021 in Ten Minutes" tomorrow morning though, so be sure to come back for that! — पांच हजार एक सौ सात — [posted 12:40 pm]

2021 at PCC

January 4 The year 2020 was, as we all know, a singular bummer of a year—having started with relative wide-eyed innocence, then ending with most of us stuck working at home and having done so for nine months in that calendar year alone. 2021 began with far more hope for the coming year, eventually quite tempered, resulting in a year that was decidedly a mixed bag. That still counts as an objective improvement over 2020 so I'll take it!  The above shot kind of serves as a metaphor for the year. It began more literally as a metaphor used by Tracy, whose desk is behind mine, in meetings wherein she characterized her hopes as "sheep, horses and rainbow unicorns." Apparently Eric then lined her desk with exactly those things the next time he was in the office.

January 5 I can't decide whether this screenshot of Noah in a glitchy Category Management Zoom meeting is legitimately frightening, or a masterpiece of high art.

February 11 Back when I was still working from home but coming by the office twice a week to swap out receiver paperwork, this was the Thursday that began our four days of snow in February, 8.9" falling on Saturday the 13th alone, Seattle's largest single-day snowfall since 1969. As I was only going to the office on Thursdays and Mondays at the time, this was the only day during that stretch that I could get a photo of the view from our office balcony. (I got a snowier balcony view during the second bout of snow we got in late December.)

June 25 Ah, remember the spring! When we all thought we were headed straight out of the woods with COVID restrictions! Government entities severely eased restrictions, something later revealed to be a deeply moronic move, and we all thought that as long as we were fully vaccinated we were scott free. I had my first vaccine dose in late March, the second in mid-April, and was thus "fully vaccinated" by the middle of my Birth Week vacation. I started going back to movies in theaters in early May. By late June plenty of office workers were now working regularly at the office, just with masks on, but I was waiting to return—as eager as I was to do so—until the all-day mask requirement was lifted. But now, as long as we were fully vaccinated the office reopened to unmasked working and I jumped at the opportunity to come back then, on the same day we had our first office social gathering in a year and a half. This photo is of me on my first day back working at the office, truly delighted to be finally leaving work-from-home, which I had finally been well and truly sick of, behind. 

And: what a truly beautiful day that was. We did make the conscientious decision to hold the bulk of the (ultimately ironically named) "Merchandising Post-Pandemic Party" out on the balcony, something known to be a wise decision even then—rumblings of the Delta variant elsewhere in the world were already starting at the time. Late June, this being the first day of a record heat wave (87° on this day, a Friday; June monthly record 102° the next day, Saturday June 26; all-time record 104° Sunday June 27; all-time record again of 108° Monday June 28). 87° is plenty warm (too fucking hot, as far as I'm concerned, always) but that Friday was downright cool compared to the weekend that followed. The Friday gathering with the Merchandising Department was easily the most pleasant of those days, and a fond work memory for the ages, being able to get back together after so very long a forced break.

July 15   "Hello, teammates!" Gack. I initially took this picture to make fun of the gratingly corporate catchphrase of our CEO at the time, a woman who quickly proved to be widely unpopular in the company—to be fair, I was relatively indifferent to her at the time, albeit with a definitive distaste for her initial penchant for all-company emails packed with fonts of varying sizes and colors, giving them a vibe of something forwarded by your great aunt. After the previous CEO, who had been with us five years, left for greener pastures mid-pandemic in the middle of 2020, this one was hired in December 2020 . . . and she lasted precisely eight months, before officially stepping down August 8. It was a shockingly short tenure, but no one missed being "encouraged" to say things like "Hey teammates!" anymore. PCC closed out the year still without an official new CEO yet hired, evidently taking longer to find a new one than we did last year—taking our time on such a critical decision probably being fine by most of us.

July 27 Tracy bought a letter board.

July 30 Is this photo safe for work? Check out my new series, Eggnog After Dark. Getting samples midsummer is my kind of "Christmas in July."

August 6 I might have mentioned to the broker for Guru Energy Drinks that I have a cat who shares their name.

August 11 And guess who else moved on to greener pastures this year? Our Titan of Community Building, our Queen of Earthly Fashions, the loved and dearly missed Claudia. PCC's greatest loss in 2021 was the Washington Farmland Trust's greatest gain, where she is positioned to thrive. I didn't take this photo, I think Bridget did—but it was included in the goodbye email sending off Claudia on her last day at PCC, and I think it may be the most beautiful picture ever taken of her on the job here, so I asked to be sent the original size photo.

September 21 [and August 4, 2016] September 21 was the day I made an odd realization: We’ve been at this “new” office location a full five years now, but it doesn’t feel like it because for a year and a half (30%) of that we were all working from home. (August 4 2016 / September 21 2021: the difference five years makes)

October 11 I later realized it had been left open for what appeared to be some kind of commercial shoot the next day, but having discovered the doors left wide open to the completely abandoned and empty huge office space on the third floor, naturally I went in to do a bit of exploring on my way out at the end of that work day. So, I’ll just be taking this corner office okay thanks.

November 3 To celebrate Kevin's 20th anniversary at PCC, Beth took the "Grocery crew" (Kevin, Scott, Noah and me) out for lunch at Willmott's Ghost, a phenomenal restaurant at the Amazon Spheres. This was one of the earlier times I had a restaurant check my vaccination card, which I did not find off-putting in the slightest (in fact I found it fantastic and comforting). This was our first "team outing" since returning from work-from-home, and how wonderful it was to be able to do such a thing with coworkers again really could not be overstated. 

October 29 And here I am, the Friday before Halloween, not only the only office staff person to come to work in any semblance of a costume, but one of just a handful of staff who even came to work at the office at all that day—thereby lessening the disappointing impact of there being no official office "Halloween celebration" for the first time in my nearly 19½ years of working here. I was intent on defiantly participating anyway! My goal for Halloween costumes is always "simple and clever," and I feel like I kind of got halfway there with this one. The idea, and the props, are still directly related to PCC, though, or at least my PCC contacts: when I made my Birth Week theme "boating and waterfronts" in 2019, and then-broker Heather took me out on Puget Sound on her boat, this mug and Captain's hat were what she hilariously gifted me for my birthday. As I tossed around ideas in my head for this year's Halloween costume, I figured, hell, why not make these props truly useful at least one more time? I also wore this outfit the following Sunday, Halloween Day, while in Las Vegas, even spending a bit of time with Tracy who just randomly happened to be there at the same time, also in costume.

 November 18 Our first in-office "Harvest Potluck" (a new name I much prefer, over the self-consciously generic "Holiday Potluck," especially for an office version of a Thanksgiving meal) in two years! Here Kwanteria and Adrienne carve up the turkey that I did not eat. They did provide a Tofurky veggie roast, though, which, although a bit too crumbly, actually proved pretty tasty under the mushroom gravy that was also provided. The gathering here was much, much smaller than in The Before Times, but that was just as well given how uncomfortable too large a crowd would be anyway. About 30 people actually showed up, and that was only about a quarter of total current office staff. Having a smaller event was, to my mind, a small price to pay for once again finally being able to have holiday events at the office at all.

November 22 "Holiday Helper" store shift #1, afternoon of the Monday before Thanksgiving, my last work day before a Thanksgiving trip to Palm Springs: Central District store. This was my third year doing these, and this year they didn't even bother pretending we were "volunteering"—it was declared that every office staff person was obliged to work at least one four-hour store shift Thanksgiving week and one Christmas week. Not that I resent that or anything! As always, doing this was hardly a big deal in the end. I survived.

November 29 When Tracy found out how much I love Christmas, she offered to bring one of her artificial trees to the office to share between our desks. She also brought the ornaments, and I hung most of them; Tracy spent most of the holiday season working from home so I was the one who got constant compliments on this tree, and I would have to clarify, "It's actually Tracy's, but I helped put it up!" I have a lot of other ornaments of my own that don't fit on my current tree anymore, so if we do this again next year, I think I will bring some of those to make the ornaments more of a mix between the two of us.

December 16 I don't think I have ever had Kevita. I don't tend to be interested in "probiotic drinks." Bleh. But! Instead of borrowing an "ugly holiday sweater" to participate in this at work for the first time, a brand came through for me. Or I guess Noah did, and Kevita through him. They sent him this sweater and matching socks, and he asked if I wanted them. I said, sure! And although it's definitively weird and no one around could help me figure out what the hell that little cartoon character is supposed to be, I actually can't say the sweater is "ugly." Honestly I thought the colors worked quite well on me. (Thanks to Steven for taking this picture for me. This was much better than I might have managed using the self-timer.)

Steven, Mackenzie and Kwanteria at the 2021 PCC Ugly Sweater Brunch. Kwanteria's sweater, by the way, could be swiped one way or the other to read NAUGHTY or NICE. ("I'm a GIF. I have officially made it," Kwanteria said.)

Fun group shot at the Ugly Sweater Brunch. My favorite part is how Marie is hilariously barely managing to inch into the frame at far left. This did not include everyone (Steven, Mackenzie and Tracy all appear to be missing, having gone back to their desks by this point), but it's still a great shot, a worthy addition to the ugly sweater group shots from over the years.

Lynne V. (front row left in the ugly sweater brunch group shot, in the santa hat) also left us this year, retiring this very week. She came by and bequeathed this plant to me, which had previously been left to her by Kim, the woman with whom she once shared a desk. So I guess it's been around a while. I was relieved to hear it only needs watering once a week, as I am otherwise singularly talented at killing plants. So, this plant now faces an uncertain future, as do the rest of us. 2022 is sure to be another mixed bag, especially as we head into it amidst yet another variant surge, but here's hoping that mixture still continues the trend of it averaging out to an improvement over the previous year. [posted 5:29 am]