Discussing The Library Book

— पांच हजार तीन सौ सत्रह — I had a quasi-surprise social event last night. This month's Book Club meeting had long been scheduled for 4:30 on Monday 11/28, but I totally spaced putting it on my calendar. So did Kara, apparently. And Mel forgot to send a calendar invite to the group to keep us all reminded, so they followed up with us all on the Teams group yesterday afternoon. And the core four of us—the last being Steve—still wound up meeting after all. I deliberately did not order anything. "To be clear, I have the money," I announced, arguably unnecessarily. "I just don't want to spend it because I didn't budget for this." Steve later tried really hard to buy me a drink, but I politely but insistently declined, rationalizing that a vendor is taking several of us Grocery people out for drinks after work on Thursday anyway. I'll also be having a drink at Action Movie Night tomorrow. That's more than enough for this week. The place we met at was new, called Buckley's on Queen Anne—our third try after our first two choices wound up being closed, one because it's Monday and the other apparently because of a "private event." The first was going to be a new idea, called Here Today Brewery, apparently a new place on Elliott Avenue. When that turned out to be closed, we fell back on the choice it's been every month so far, Queen Anne Beerhall. We all met there to discover it closed, so Steve suggested a pub two blocks away I had never heard of; that was Buckley's. They had excellent French fries and for that reason alone I would go back, even though it was a sports bar. At least it was not too loud, which itself was almost shocking. I didn't order fries, but I know they were excellent because Kara ordered a side for the table to share. Then Mel did the same thing later, wanting more, and also said they were to share. Mel also ordered pretzels and cheese, these not being anywhere near as big as the famous ones from Queen Anne Beerhall, but they ordered those because they were hoping for pretzels when we thought we were going to Queen Anne Beerhall. I had one bite of those. They were decent. We actually found plenty to talk about, including fun cities to visit and how good their public transit systems are. There was a good amount of discussion about Chicago, which Steve apparently lived in for a couple of years. When I brought up my love of skyscrapers and architecture therefore became relevant, he told me he had a good biography of Frank Lloyd Wright that he would loan me, and I could return it to him whenever, no matter how long it took me to finish. True to his word, he brought the book to me at my desk at work this morning. It's called Plagued by Fire: The Dreams and Furies of Frank Lloyd Wright and it was published fairly recently, in 2019. I may actually make it my next book I read. The book we discussed was The Library Book by Susan Orlean, which I read and truly loved last summer, and talked up so much that the Book Club took it on—I told Marie in IT about it a few weeks ago and apparently her book club is now reading it! I didn't need to re-read it because I finished it so recently; Steve had read it once a few years ago but was happy to re-read it; Mel managed to finish it and Kara was about two thirds of the way through. She wasn't finished with the last book either when we met, and I'm wondering if maybe once a month is too frequent. Mel decided we would skip December for the holidays, which will make it easier for me to try tackling this Frank Lloyd Wright biography, but it was also to give Brandy more time to finish the book and hopefully actually join us for our next gathering in January. Apparently she's still been reading along all along, but hasn't had time to join for the meetings. Shobhit got off work at 5:30 and texted to ask if I wanted a ride, so I said sure. I could have easily stayed to visit longer but I preferred the idea of getting a ride over taking transit home. And then, once he picked me up, I asked to swing by the Central Library downtown so I could finally return a DVD and pick one up that I had on hold, all of which we managed to get done with about two minutes to spare before the library closed at 6:00. It felt like a very efficient evening so far. — पांच हजार तीन सौ सत्रह — — पांच हजार तीन सौ सत्रह — We were a few blocks from home when I suddenly remembered: "Oh! Take me to PCC!" We needed to go to the Central District store because I was on the last can of cat food and still needed to buy more. After that, Shobhit decided we should also go to Trader Joe's, so we could get bread and cucumbers and cream cheese for our food offering idea for Action Movie Night this week. Once that was done, we finally came home, unloaded the groceries, and had naan with a leftover cauliflower dish Shobhit made that I had to admit was edible even though it was cauliflower based. He then spent the rest of the evening watching his news programs, so I was in the bedroom at my computer for the next couple of hours that basically closed out the evening. I updated my budget, caught up on social media, blah blah blah. Boring stuff. — पांच हजार तीन सौ सत्रह — It snowed a little this morning. Just flurries, really. Still, it was quite cold by Seattle standards: right at freezing, 32°, by midmorning. There's been all this hoopla about preparing for snow this week, and I've consistently greeted it with skepticism. Old habits die hard, I guess: the last couple of times I didn't take the "snow threat" seriously we wound up with real snow days. So far though, that's not happening this week, and as each day promising snow approaches, the high is always still in the upper thirties—very cold, but warmer than snow weather. It looks like we may yet get snow on Thursday, with a forecast high of 35° and a low of 28°, and moisture coming in. That's kind of perfect for snow, actually. Tomorrow we have our "Harvest Potluck," our traditional office Thanksgiving feast—we scheduled it this year for the week after Thanksgiving rather than before, which I was okay with since it's still November and we still have a separate holiday event scheduled in December—and the day is a break in precipitation forecast, which should bode well for attendance. I'm not making a dish but will help set up as I traditionally have every year. I'm really looking forward to it and am deeply grateful it's still happening at all. There are several holiday work events coming up, in fact. Office Harvest Potluck tomorrow; a UNFI rep is taking some of us in Merchandising out for drinks at a place called "Miracle on 2nd," apparently a "holiday popup," on Thursday. Next week, on Wednesday the 7th we're having our "Holiday Night Out" for the whole Merchandising Department, with a pasta cooking class and free hors d'oeuvres and wine. The week after that, Friday the 16th, we'll have our office PCC Holiday Brunch followed by a White Elephant gift exchange. That's just the work stuff. Lots to do through the end of the year, and I love it! — पांच हजार तीन सौ सत्रह — [posted 12:36 pm]

back to it and everything is fine

— पांच हजार तीन सौ सोलह — I returned to work today after a full week off facing over 300 unread emails. I'm not in the least bit stressed about it, though. If you're capable of thinking rationally, and there's nothing extreme going on like anyone's life or livelihood being in danger, stress is a choice. You opt into it. I choose not to. Besides, even though we have yet to come even close to the kind of topsy-turvy zigzagging decisions the disrupted supply chains of early 2020 necessitated, I continue to apply some critical lessons learned from that time. Namely: don't stress over the whole of your to-do list. Just figure out what is the highest priority, and get that done. For the time being, everything else is secondary. I'm applying the same philosophy now, even while I have a good twenty-some stupid fucking floral department skus to get entered so they batch for tomorrow, and already at least three of them I have had to send in immediate batches because stores already have them. I'm working from a list sent by the vendor contact on Tuesday last week; none of the backup contacts here at the office were able to get to it. And you know what? That's fine. They're just fucking flowers. I have to give credit to Amy, Cathryn and Amanda for all they did on my behalf last week; it seems in my email like it was more than usual. I just sent them an email expressing my appreciation. And, I still have a huge backlog to attend to even beyond what help they gave when they could. I did consider doing some work over the past week, a couple of times. Something like, say, coming in over the weekend to put a dent in the large pile of receiving paperwork I knew I'd have waiting for me. But, it didn't even go as far as my deciding against it! Both times it briefly occurred to me to think about doing any work while on PTO, I got distracted from my thought process and just by default stopped thinking about it. Ha! I honestly think I have a very healthy approach to this. — पांच हजार तीन सौ सोलह — — पांच हजार तीन सौ सोलह — On the other hand, it was very smart of me to make sure I posted real updates over the past week on my blog—hardly every day, but I did update on Monday to cover the prior weekend, when Shobhit, Alexia and I went to the Festival of Trees on Saturday and then Shobhit and I went to "Julefest: A Nordic Christmas Celebration" in Ballard on Sunday; then again on Thursday to cover comparatively uneventful Monday and Tuesday but mostly the party we went to at Sachin's on Wednesday evening; on Friday to cover Thanksgiving Day with Shobhit and Danielle; and finally on Saturday to cover Friday's Tree Lighting Celebration at Westlake Center with Danielle, plus a quick leftovers dinner with her and Shobhit at home afterward. This means, thankfully, all I have to catch you up on today is Saturday and Sunday, during which the highlights were just my going to see The Fabelmans on Saturday and then Devotion yesterday, both of which were excellent—even though the former will almost certainly be on my year-end top ten list and the latter is not likely to be, I still gave them both an A-minus. I had no socializing over the past two days otherwise, although I spent a fair amount of time with Shobhit. He did not join me for the movies because there has to be multiple good reasons for him to come along to a movie—and he generally skips those he is all but guaranteed to get a screener for when voting on the SAG Awards, as is certainly the case with The Fabelmans. Beyond that, it's preferable for him to join me on Tuesdays when possible, so that when I pay for his ticket on top of my monthly AMC Theaters subscription I can only use for myself, it will be half off. I did, however, book a full-price ticket for him to join me for Avatar: The Way of Water on Saturday the 17th, because that movie will be in 3D, won't likely get any SAG Award nominations, and thus needs to be seen in a theater. After re-watching the original Avatar in a theater a few weeks ago, I fully expect that to be a worthy theater-going spectacle. I did far less reading of my library novel over the past week than I might have considered ideal, mostly because of all the holiday events, socializing, movies and TV watching I, or we, did. Shobhit and I also binged the new Netflix series 1899, finishing that on Saturday night. In the end that show is not what it seems to be at the start, and I preferred what it seemed to be at the start, but whatever; I enjoyed it enough. Now I still need to get beyond the first episode of Wednesday and finish that as well. I wonder if Shobhit would get into that one. Maybe. Last night in particular, once I was done writing my movie review—it feels worth noting that in addition to the regular blog posts, I wrote four movie reviews during my time off, which means I still wrote something on two of the days I did not write in this personal blog, including yesterday—I went out of my way to be with Shobhit in the living room for the course of the evening. He's in an emotional downturn at the moment, feeling depressed about the state of his job, life and health, and I figured he would like me coming out of the bedroom to spend some time with him. He made a cauliflower dish that I had no interest in but I still helped him prepare it, during which he was open to my playing Christmas music, which was wonderful. Then, we watched the second of my "holiday series" of movies for this year, Hugo, my favorite movie of 2011 but which I hadn't seen in ages. It's not at all specifically a Christmas movie, but it's set in 1930s Paris during the winter with snowfall, and is thoroughly enchanting, so I still think it fits. Now that it's more than a decade since it's release, it holds up very well. That said, this TV we got handed down to us from Alexia seems incapable of displaying the picture from my Blu-Ray player properly regardless of the movie, but once I discovered Hugo is on HBO Max, I turned off the Blu-Ray and played the movie from HBO Max instead. I just wish the movie had been bigger when it first came out so that there could ever be hope of another 3D re-release, because in theaters it had been arguably the best use of 3D I have ever seen. Then we watched this week's episode of The White Lotus, conveniently also being on HBO Max, and I was in bed shortly after that. This morning was my first time having to get up at 5:15 in about ten days, and boy did I get used to sleeping until about two hours later than that. I had no trouble getting out of bed, but being out of practice combined with it being both an exercise day and a hair washing day meant I didn't even get out of the condo until well after 7:00. I caught a #8 down John and Denny from 15th Avenue where the Safeway is, so I could take a bus straight there instead of walking from downtown at 3rd and Pike as usual, which saved me some time and I still didn't get to the office until about 7:40. Not a soul was in the office yet by then anyway so whatever. — पांच हजार तीन सौ सोलह — [posted 12:29 pm]