The Saga Concludes
So Shobhit came to pick me up at work yesterday afternoon at 4:30, and while he was waiting for me, he looked on Yelp to see if there were any Total Wine & More stores any closer than Northgate . . . and there was! Much closer, in fact: less than two miles northwest from work, on Armory Way right off 15th Ave W. So, we went to check for the Seleccion Suprema Extra Añejo Tequila there first.
We turned onto Armory Way and I was stunned to see the development there for the first time. First of all, the building nestled on the corner of 15th and Armory is Seattle Animal Shelter, where I got Peng (who died in 2008) as a kitten in 1998, back when they were Seattle Animal Control, and I remember it being a solitary building with really nothing else around it. Now, there are big box stores behind it: we pulled into the huge parking lot a bit further up Armory Way, and not only was Total Wine & More to the right, but across the parking lot to the left was a Michaels. When the fuck did all these things get here? Well, judging by posted Yelp reviews, the Total Wine & More has been there since at least October 2016; the Michaels since August last year. As you can plainly see, it is very rare that I drive up 15th Ave W to notice such changes.
The Total Wine & More did indeed have the tequila I was looking for, albeit in different packaging -- exact same value though. The product page on their company website shows the same packaging as what the broker brought me on Monday and I was asked to give back to her, but this store's stock had different packaging. The guy we spoke to at the store assured us it was the same actual product inside the bottle, just different packaging from a different year. He even said that even though there was different packaging online, if we went to the Northgate store where the online site said it could be arranged to be picked up, their store likely had the same box I was standing there looking at.
So, we just got that bottle there, and saved ourselves the time of driving all the way to Northgate. With taxes it came to $400.47, by a huge margin the most expensive single purchase of liquor I have ever made. Hell, it's probably more than double the amount I have ever paid for liquor in one transaction, when buying multiple liquors! I intend to savor the shit out of this tequila.
When we got back home, though, I emailed the broker again to ask: since I much prefer the design of the packaging she gave me, could we just trade? That way I actually still end up keeping the actual item she brought me, which has the exact same value, and "it's kind of a win-win, right? Right??" I wrote.
She replied within minutes, with, "You bet!"
So, I took what I purchased yesterday to work with me this morning, and for a few hours, I had not one, but two $330 ($400 with taxes) bottles of tequila in my desk drawer at work.
She had a meeting with Scott and Noah this morning, and when they were done, Scott came out and said, "We're done with her." And a minute later, the broker came to my desk, complete with exaggerated pouty-lip. I just opened my desk drawer and pulled out the box I purchased yesterday, not bothering to discuss that we were making a swap. Another woman from the brokerage who had come with her got a good look at it herself, and the broker opened the box to show her, as though that had been the actual box she brought me. It's literally the same product in the same amount for the same price though, so it obviously makes no real difference as far as that goes.
She even promised me she would bring me back a replacement "Happy New Year" gift that is under the gift value limit. And then she joked, "Damned morally upstanding spouses!" (I really did agree with Shobhit on this, though. Shobhit did tell me "Blame me if you want," but in my emails to her I made it clear we came to this conclusion together.) She added that she didn't know about this policy, and I noted that it's only been official since last summer. "Oh, then I should have brought you this last year, then!" Hmm, I guess so.
After she left, I did tell Noah that I bought my own bottle. "I like to have my cake and eat it too," I said. When I told him that with taxes it cost me four hundred bucks, his jaw literally dropped. I told him, "I plan to savor this over some years."
Oh by the way, I also emailed Laney links to my previous two entries about this (Tuesday and yesterday), with a brief update in the email. I did this because I figured there was a good chance it would come up over our scheduled Happy Hour after work today, and I didn't want to have to go through all the details verbally again, after doing it with Karen at lunch yesterday. I did like what Laney emailed back to me, though:
wow! that was a gripping tale.
I'm gobsmacked that Shobhit suggested you buy your own bottle.
Who is he and what has he done with the real Shobhit?
Ha! Now that's the $400 question!
What else, then? Not a whole lot! After Total Wine & More, where Shobhit signed up for the points program and is thinking now that we will now go there for all our liquor -- they match all Costco pricing but here we get rewards, and quite a few points for this initial purchase -- we considered going to Costco in Shoreline since we were already out. But, the estimated drive was 45 minutes, so we thought, no thanks! We did stop at Trader Joe's first on Capitol Hill before coming home, though, to get a few vegetables to add to the stir-fried rice we made for dinner. I also got a peanut vinaigrette as the closest approximation to peanut sauce for me to put on mine, and it worked fine to make it rather tasty, both for dinner last night and lunch today.
Shobhit has CNBC shows he likes to watch until 7:00 every day. He had been just listening to the audio online because our limited cable package did not include that channel, but now we have it since purchasing that package that quadrupled our internet speed (something I am not sure I'll ever notice so long as my iMac is slowing down, I need to get some Apple support help on that) and increased our number of channels to something like 160. It includes CNBC.
I've been thinking about this for the past day or so. I don't think I want to give up my subscriptions to Hulu ($13 a month to avoid commercials is totally worth it to me) or Netflix (that's just . . . not an option) or Amazon Prime (the streaming options there just come as a bonus where for lots of products on Prime you get free shipping) or, of course, HBO, which we added to the package we re-signed up for. The thing is, I think perhaps we're paying an extra $45 a month so Shobhit can watch CNBC for three hours every day.
But, whatever. I'll just fold it somehow into the new budgeting I have to figure out for 2019. I thought I'd easily be able to do that with today's paycheck, except that the pay period only includes four days at the new hourly wage increased at 3.5%, and the rest was still at the 2018 rate. The FSA has kicked in, though, so the net result was a take-home paycheck roughly ten bucks less than I had for my first check in December. That should change on my next paycheck, and I emailed Marianne in HR to ask what my default 2019 first and second checks will be this year. I haven't heard back from her yet, but I need that information to update my monthly budget expenses.
Anyway, at 7:00 I decided we'd watch Avengers: Infinity War since it just became available streaming on Netflix, and I was reminded recently that Black Panther had played prominently in it. I already posted about it on Facebook (and in turn made it a nine-tweet thread on Twitter, just so it would wind up in tomorrow morning's tweet digest), so you can go there to read more if you're really that interested, and I bet you aren't. I probably annoyed one or two people out there with that Twitter thread but, whatever. Long story short, it was better than I expected, still definitively not great.
Shobhit asked me several times who certain actors and certain characters were, and often I did not know. This actually gets further into what I find annoying about this whole "Marvel Cinematic Universe" nonsense, where there are details in every movie, no matter which specific superhero's dedicated movie series it is, that can only be fully understood if you've seen every god damned one of them (twenty since 2008, and counting!). I don't have time for that shit, and I go see movies in the theatre usually twice a week! Of course, I tend to choose the movies that are better.
It was 9:30 by the time it ended so then it was time to start getting ready for bed. Shobhit turned CNBC back on.
[posted 12:33 pm]