Teddy Bear Suite
"Tuesday Downtime" turns into "Thursday Downtime" this week, because I was off work on both Monday and Tuesday and then of course yesterday's post was a semi-lengthy recap of the extended holiday weekend. Last night, once I got home, my evening was pretty packed, largely with year-end stuff I had to work on: creating and fleshing out the "Christmas in the Northwest" photo album on Facebook; tagging people in and captioning those photos; rearranging all said photos within said album in chronological order (this is very important); editing and uploading the 22 new photos from earlier that very evening; and finishing up the draft of this year's Book Log which I posted just this morning (13 books read in 2018, one more than I managed in 2017); and even working a little bit on the draft of the Top 10 Albums and Top 10 Podcasts for 2018 that I'll be posting tomorrow morning.
This was all crammed into the space of maybe two and a half hours, but dealing with the Facebook photo album took by far the most time out of all these tasks -- I created the album, moved all holiday-related posts that could be moved into it (photos from single posts featuring multiple photos won't move), added most of the photos that had already been included in the photo digest email I sent out Christmas evening, and added a few more new ones that had more relevance on Facebook than in the email as well. Luckily, processing, uploading and tagging the 22 new photos from earlier yesterday evening was done with surprising swiftness, although of course I haven't been able to caption any of them yet -- I haven't even been able to caption more than maybe a quarter to a third of the Christmas photo album shots either.
I'm too fucking busy! And I have only myself to blame.
By about 9:00, I was ready to come back to the living room to watch episode 5 of Killing Eve and it was spectacular. There's a moment where Villanelle suddenly pops up in the bathroom mirror a guy she's about to kill is looking into, and I just about shit my pants. I jumped so violently I started the cats, who jumped off the couch.
Anyway, before all this, right after I got home, Shobhit and I made this kind of orzo pasta stew concoction, which turned out to be quite tasty. I took it to the bedroom to eat while working on all that photo stuff and year-end post drafts stuff. And I had only a Zevia soda with my dinner; I decided, after eating like a giant pig the previous two days and that including several rum and eggnogs and hot buttered rums, I shall abstain from any alcohol until New Year's Eve.
So how about the photos in today's post, then? They come from the "Teddy Bear Suite" at the Fairmont Olympic Hotel, which I did not even know existed until Laney posted her own photos of it on Christmas Day after visiting there with her daughter, Jessica. Apparently they've been doing this for years! How many other fucking Christmastime events have I been missing out on all this time? Damn it!
So of course, I Googled it after exchanging a few emails with Laney in response to the photo digest I had sent out, and discovered it was only going through December 26 -- closing at 6 p.m. Perfect! I would just stop by there in the middle of my walk home from work. I would have loved having Shobhit meet me, especially since I am certain the line would have been longer than perhaps worth waiting through prior to Christmas, but now in the last hour of its presentation for the season, there was virtually no line at all, and although I did have to wait several moments a lot of times to get shots without other people in them of this stuff in one pretty small hotel room they decorate this way, I'm sure that would have been a hell of a lot harder to do with bigger crowds shuffling through there.
As it happened, I managed a photo album on on Flickr of 22 shots -- although, granted, only half of them (11) are of the actual Teddy Bear Suite. I also took two exterior shots of the hotel before going in, and there's a giant gingerbread house you can walk through right inside the front entrance. I got six shots of that. And then three shots of the giant Christmas Tree in their huge lobby one floor up. It seems there is also a "Festival of Trees" they do from mid-November to the very beginning of December, which I missed; I have marked my calendar for checking out next year.
This did make for eight separate Christmastime photo albums this year, now matching last year (the one difference being having gone to Snowflake Lane in Bellevue last year but not this year; but the new album for the Teddy Bear Suite this year). There's a slight chance I may yet go to ZooLights this week, although probably not -- if I were to, though, I would then match the record nine Christmastime photo albums, which so far I only managed in 2012. I'm beginning to think I should maybe be comfortable with fewer such albums in the future, though, circumstances depending -- I don't want things to get too overwhelming with this stuff, right? Eight photo albums for one themed collection is plenty, right? This year's eight photo albums account for a total of 307 photos and short video clips.
[posted 12:41 pm]