oh, right -- gingerbread village!
After the huge amount of things I wrote in yesterday's post about Christmas Eve and Christmas Day -- and a little bit about Friday evening -- it seems I totally spaced writing anything about Saturday! And plenty happened that day.
First, Shobhit and Ivan and I all watched Shobhit's SAG Awards screener of Downsizing. I had actually been planning on taking myself to see that sometime this week, and now I don't have to. I'm kind of glad I didn't spend any money on a ticket for that one, actually -- but, it did become the rare instance in which I wrote a review for a movie I did not see in a theatre. It was playing in theatres concurrently, so that counts. Ivan was really into it at first, and about twenty minutes even commented: "I'm really enjoying this, by the way." He loved the concept.
I loved the concept, too, but then the movie kind of didn't go anywhere. A lot of talent went into it but then the majority of its potential was wasted. Too bad.
This was after I helped Shobhit fry some of his samosas, and then he worked from 3:15 until 11:45, the store was open so late for Christmas shopping that night. Once he left for work at about 2:00, I didn't see him again for the rest of the day. And I left to meet with Gina and Beth at the Daily Grill for Happy Hour at 4:00.
Actually I left at about 3:30, stopping at Mud Bay for stocking stuffers for the cats along the way. I got a text earlier than expected that they were already at Daily Grill, so I caught a bus to try and save time. The time it took waiting for that stupid bus and then walking from the bus stop took me just as long as if I'd just walked direct from Mud Bay. Oh well.
They were already mostly through a starter of bread and artichoke dip that was quite tasty when I arrived; Gina mostly through one drink, and I ordered a drink. But they wound up not super impressed with the menu options there and decided to let me choose another place for dinner -- I chose Palomino. But first, the Gingerbread Village.
This year, for reasons I have yet to discern after several Google searches, the gingerbread houses are set up around the ground floor of the City Centre building across the street. (The Sheraton Seattle’s own website just says it’s “to accommodate the visually striking display,” as if they weren’t visually striking any other year?) The last time they had to do that was because of the construction they were doing on the second Sheraton hotel tower, which opened in 2007. For our purposes, at least, it was actually kind of convenient: in years past they had a single file line snaking through the whole length of the Sheraton Hotel lobby, even with switchbacks, sometimes with a wait of an hour or more. Not so over in the City Centre lobby, where you just crowd up to the six or so different huge gingerbread displays spaced throughout the ground floor of that building. There was very little waiting to see each one.
In any case, in addition to the three shots you see in today's DLU, you can view the full photo set on Flickr here -- 28 shots this year; 26 photos and 2 videos. That's actually fewer than I've had since 2014, but slightly more than all of the sets before that year. This is the 12th photo set -- the 12th year -- I have of those displays.
It was nice to have it work out that way, though, so it didn't take up too much of our time just waiting around. Gina and Beth seemed to enjoy it.
We then went up one floor to Palomino for dinner. The wait in the dining area without reservations? Two and a half hours! Holy shit sticks. They noted that they serve the full menu at the bar, though, and we went over there and were able to sit down surprisingly quickly, even though it was really busy even over there.
It's the bar menu that has the amazing "Potatoes Gorgonzola" dish (waffle fries with drizzled gorgonzola cheese), though, so I insisted we get that. And we ordered two pizzas, one of them the Margherita so I could take slices of that. I also had the Lavender Cosmo they have there that I quite like. I don't think I had been there since having dinner there with Shobhit for Valentine's Day.
From there we headed over to Westlake Park, and to ride the Holiday Carousel -- again, much shorter line than I've experienced in years past. I was surprised. We bought our $3 tickets and got in line, and only had to wait two cycles of the carousel before we were able to get on it ourselves. The photos I took there -- or anywhere that day besides the Gingerbread Village, which gets its own dedicated photo set -- got added to the "Seattle Holiday Sights" photo set. Click that, scroll down, and you'll see some great shots of us on the carousel (especially this one) and also in front of the Christmas Tree at Westlake Center.
Gina wanted to go look at shoes at Nordstrom, and we wound up just marveling at the jaw-dropping prices marked as clearance prices -- as much as eight hundred bucks, for truly hideous shoes, no less. I kind of made fun of the two of them for acting like country bumpkin relatives laughing at big city prices, but even I was experiencing a bit of sticker shock there. Especially considering how awful a lot of those shoes actually looked.
Although neither the Gingerbread Village nor the Holiday Carousel took up a huge amount of time -- maybe an hour or a little more, combined -- we did spend plenty of time just visiting while at both Daily Grill and at Palomino. By the time we were all done at Nordstrom and I was walking them down to the Westlake Station Light Rail -- they parked at Angle Lake by the airport and took the train in, loving it -- a good four hours had gone by. That was basically what I was counting on.
Ivan was going to take himself to see The Last Jedi Saturday evening, but when I suggested perhaps we could watch a movie after I got home, he said he could go to The Last Jedi on Sunday instead, after Shobhit and I left for Olympia, which I thought was pretty nice of him. So when I got home, he and I watched his Netflix copy of Burn After Reading, and I was in bed not long after that.
Shobhit's got evening shifts twice in a row this week -- last night and tonight. I'm taking myself to a movie directly after work this evening; last night I was home and spent a little time working on drafts of my annual year-end journal entries. (The book log I posted this morning was already finished with its draft, as I have added entries for each book as I finished them throughout the year -- and haven't finished a book in a little while, both because I was busy and the books did not hold my attention well enough and so I gave up and took them back to the library.) I also watched a couple episodes of season two of Lady Dynamite on Netflix, and also made a quesadilla for Shobhit for dinner when he got home after I went to bed.
He, on the other hand, fried up a whole bunch more fresh samosas, three of them left for me on a plate for dinner. Holy fuck they were delicious. He had another 12 in a container for me to bring to work -- unfortunately, some of the people who would be most excited to have one (Claudia, Erica) are out all week and will miss out. I shared five of them this morning: one each for Scott, Noah, Bryan and Kevin; Darrell and Tracy opted to split one. I ate one myself, after reheating six in the oven this morning. The other six will also be mine: two each for every lunch between today and Friday.
I was supposed to have lunch with Karen yesterday but when I emailed her to confirm she said she forgot about it and wouldn't be able to get out of the house -- she was to leave today for a week in Massachusetts, which was why we initially rescheduled this week's Thursday lunch to yesterday. So much for that! I brought a container of leftover macaroni and cheese from Christmas as backup anyway, and this way I didn't spend that money, so it's all good.
[posted 12:14 pm]