happy hours: laney and danielle
Lots of stuff to update you on! Such as the photo you see above, at the start of this post: those are Laney's (top), Jessica's (right), and my (bottom) hands, taken at La Cocina Y Cantina for Happy Hour on Friday. It was our standard monthly second-Friday Happy Hour; Shobhit was working so he could not join, but Jessica was not working so she did join; and I had some time ago suggested we do December at La Cocina, because they recently expanded their bar space out to the corner of Broadway & Republican, in what used to be a Starbucks. Apparently Laney and Jessica had already gone there to check it out but I hadn't had a chance, and I pretty easily sold the idea to Laney since it's only a couple of blocks from her apartment.
I walked directly from work that day, and I stopped at Laney's apartment building (even getting a picture of its decorations), and they came right out when I knocked on the door. So, we got over there by about 5:20 to take advantage of a Happy Hour that ended at 6:00. I got a $6 Happy Hour quesadilla (wanting to limit my food intake as Shobhit had fresh made samosas waiting for me at home) and I also drank two of their "Bartender's Margarita." I got plenty buzzed from that, and went out of my way to drink three full glasses of water and take Aleve before going to bed after walking home.
It was kind of loud there, which did not allow for quite as deep of conversation as I might otherwise have liked. It was still a pleasant outing as always, though, and we were there for a couple of hours, and we all got up to leave as soon as the checks were paid. The space is nice enough. The drinks are good, if not especially cheap, for Happy Hour. Laney said she's interested in going back to La Cocina Oaxaqueña, so perhaps we'll go there next month. I had made a couple of suggestions from a Yelp list of great "dive bars" and two were on Capitol Hill but she wasn't all that interested.
My plans deviated a bit on Saturday, which I had originally scheduled to watch The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, but I bumped that to Sunday when I asked Danielle if she was free on Saturday and I had a present for her. This resulted in a phone call Friday evening that lasted over an hour and a half, and was the first verbal communication we'd had since Shobhit and I dropped her off at home from the airport on October 1.
She told me she would be painting Rylee's room on Saturday and asked if I wanted to help, if not actually painting then taping the trim. I said sure. So, while Shobhit was at work on Saturday, I took the 101 express to downtown Renton and, as we've done many times before, Danielle came to pick me up there at the Renton Transit Center. I left only a few minutes after Shobhit left for work, and he was incessant that it made more sense for me to take Light Rail and have her pick me up at Tukwila Station, and it took me looking up travel times on Google Maps to prove him wrong. He didn't think it was that much farther out of Danielle's way to pick me up from Light Rail, but it was actually an additional 5.2 miles away from her place; that meant an additional 10.4 miles of driving for her, the time it would take to drive thus saving me no time at all by taking Light Rail instead of just getting on that express bus that gets me right into downtown Renton. As I said to Shobhit, when I did the Trip Planner, it told me to take the 101 bus, not Light Rail.
Except! I actually did wind up taking Light Rail part of the way both ways. I had gone to the post office to mail off Uncle David and Mary Ann's copy of this year's calendar (they said it would take 10 days to reach them; it went out on December 14 so if it actually reaches them on Christmas Eve that would be super lovely) and so I was already right by the Capitol Hill Light Rail Station. From there, the Trip Planner said to take Light Rail down to Stadium Station. And then—yes, still—move right over to the parallel SODO Busway and get on the 101 Express bus to downtown Renton.
On the way back, because of how long it took to get through a line just to pay for dinner at the otherwise quite lovely Imbibe Bottle House & Taproom (where we are in the photo below), we just barely missed the northbound 101 bus that would have me back to Capitol Hill by 6:19 as planned. Well, maybe not barely at first: the bus left downtown Renton at 5:25 and we were about 10 minutes behind that; we tried catching up with the bus along its route until it got on the freeway northbound, which was through five different bus stops after the Renton Transit Center, and we got so close to catching up with it by that fifth stop. But, we kept getting held up by red lights. In the end, Danielle drove me up to Othello Station, into south Seattle but not all the way home, and I got on Light Rail there.
I never did tell Danielle this but, in the end, I would have been fine just waiting for the next 101 leaving downtown Renton at 5:53. By the time I reached Capitol Hill and was inside the Broadway Market QFC where we planned to meet to do some grocery shopping, Shobhit called to tell me he was only just then leaving from Big 5 in the U District. On the other hand, I did get several of the things we were looking for while I waited for him, so we got out of there pretty quickly once he arrived.
Anyway, back to my Saturday afternoon with Danielle. I had suspected she had been avoiding speaking to me after we got back from Las Vegas because she was upset with something I had done or said, but I wasn't sure what. Did she have a problem with what I posted about it? Or maybe just something I said while we were together? There were so many things it could plausibly be. Or, it could even be nothing, and she was just busy, and I was being a narcissist thinking it was about me. The problem was, I had already gone through that exact same process when Gabriel spent something like three months not speaking to me in 2017, and in the end it turned out it really was about me. There was therefore every reason to at least consider it as a possibility here as well.
I texted Danielle every once in a while over the past couple of months, as though nothing was wrong at all. I never asked her direct questions so I'm not sure how significant it was that she never responded—except that she was still pretty pointedly incommunicative for two and a half months.
The thing is, I'm not certain Danielle even knows the URL to this blog. She was never a regular reader even when I was on LiveJournal (although she did get mad at me once for a crack I made about her behavior in 2003), and I never told her about the move to fruitcakeenterprises.com. I don't think she even really bothers to read the requisite photo digest emails I sent out after trips, although perhaps she's more likely to when it's about a trip I took with her. Still, the chances that she read my blog post about it were exceedingly slim. Nevertheless, just in case, I moved the post back to "draft" on about October 20 so it would no longer be publicly visible. According to my analytics all of 16 people looked at my blog on the day I first posted it, but most of them were in Washington State. Still, the chances that anyone who actually matters to Danielle saw it were also exceedingly slim. And there wasn't anything particularly offensive in it anyway; I was just afraid she was mad about my writing about how drunk she got.
Well, I finally got my answer when it was just the two of us in Danielle's house, the girls were over at Patrick's, and we had finished moving the last of Rylee's furniture into the room next door. Danielle had vacuumed the carpet in there, and we were both working on putting tape over the trim on the wall along the carpet on opposite sides of the room. So Danielle said, "So Matthew I wanted to talk to you about something." And I thought, Now here it comes.
It had nothing to do with anything I had written anywhere. I didn't even have to do with how much she drank—which, in a totally organic and non-confrontational way, we also talked out a bit over dinner later. We're all good, it's fine. It was about something I had said, basically calling her out on how she had talked about someone in her neighborhood. There's much more to it than that but I don't want to risk making this post more loaded and fraught than it needs to be. We still have differing opinions on the matter, and her bigger issue was less with my opinion than how forcefully I had expressed it to her. And to be honest, I completely get that. Gabriel has a history of being right about lots of things and yet alienating people (often me) not by the position he's taking itself but by how he expresses it. (He has massively mellowed out on this front since he's been with Lea.) In this instance I had been doing exactly that to Danielle—largely because I was annoyed with her drunken behavior, which wasn't fair. We pretty much talked through that too.
Honestly, every part of it was really nice, truth be told, by any standard of being confronted about something. Danielle and I never argued or got terse with each other, nothing ever got tense, it was all very relaxed and calm conversation. The way adults should talk to each other. Danielle even told me how Elise, whose wedding we attended in Syracuse in June (where Danielle had gotten really drunk with me the first time), had been telling her, "You really need to call him." She was clearly concerned about Danielle's and my friendship not getting into a place of being put at risk—something I was always confident would never happen, for the record; I figured whatever the problem was, Danielle just needed some time. In any case, Elise's concern over the matter was something I found to be very heartwarming and sweet.
Soon enough, Patrick brought the girls over, so I saw both Morgan and Rylee briefly, Morgan much more briefly, because she and Danielle can't seem to get along for very long and after Morgan mouthed off to her and even flipped her off, Danielle asked Patrick to take Morgan back to his place (where she's been living), and so he did. Morgan is 15 now and that's a difficult age, but Morgan has been a unique challenge for Danielle for a long time. That said, Rylee, now 11, did something pretty boneheaded herself. They had all started paining the walls, and just as Danielle began to paint over one of the palm trees Patrick had painted on the walls about a decade ago, Rylee asked Danielle if she liked those trees. Danielle was like, "Yep!" And then Rylee said, "That's not what you said before. You said they were stupid!" Commence awkward silence. Danielle was understandably quite annoyed with Rylee in that moment, but Patrick gamely ignored it and allowed other tensions to build up later instead.
That happened when Danielle started talking about needing to get me to the bus station but that there was another stop we wanted to make on the way there, and did they mind if we left while they painted. This essentially left Patrick to do the bulk of the painting, in the house he no longer lives in—although to be fair, it's still his daughter's bedroom. Danielle wanted a new paint job in a room for Rylee to recover in after she gets her tonsils taken out on Friday.
There's apparently a pub at the main building on a golf course something like 10 miles south of there, and they have Happy Hour at 3:30 even on weekends. Danielle was super interested in checking it out, and so we drove down there . . . only to walk in to a sign saying they were closing early that day for a private event. All was not lost, however, as Danielle bought Patrick a $100 gift certificate for a round of golf there as a thank-you for his help with the bedroom painting. I thought that should really make up for a lot of us leaving them there to paint without us. (I was not about to risk getting paint on the clothes I was wearing, as I did not think painting would even be done while I was there—but Patrick had brought the girls over because Rylee had said she wanted to help, and so the painting commenced. As I noted earlier, though, I did do a lot of the taping over the trim in the room. So I did help!)
With no Happy Hour after all, though, Danielle was still really hungry and so I looked up nearby high-rated places on Yelp. That was how I found this Imbibe place, which we both liked a lot. Their limited food menu was mostly grilled panini sandwiches, but one was vegetarian and it was very good; both our plates also came with a shit ton of ruffled potato chips. The mango hard cider I ordered (and am holding in the photo) was delicious. And we talked through some shit, and just visited otherwise, hung out, it was all very chill. And then came the whole mini-fiasco with trying to catch up with the bus, all because three people were waiting to pay their bills at the counter when we were set to leave, and they had only two staff on hand. It took a long time to get out of there.
Yesterday was far less eventful. I had hoped maybe Gabriel would have time so I could go down and watch the Star Wars movies with him, but in the end he wasn't. Shobhit worked at Big 5, 8 a.m, to 3 p.m.; then at Total Wine in Interbay from 4 to 9:15 p.m. I spent the time he was gone watching Friday's episode of The Mandalorian, then The Force Awakens on Disney+, then The Last Jedi on Netflix (currently the only Star Wars thing of any kind not streaming on Disney+). I really love both those movies, and they are actually a lot more fun to re-watch these days, just because I have seen them far fewer times than all the others. They are long, though, so once the second one was done, I had little more than an hour to make the macaroni pasta I made for dinner which yielded six leftover lunches.
And then, even though I could have waited until the 8:13 bus as originally planned, I caught the 7:41 #11 downtown from my building, and got right on a northbound Rapid Ride D bus to get to Total Wine & More nearly an hour before Shobhit actually got off work at 9:15. That's 15 minutes after the store actually closes, so I had about 45 minutes to do some liquor shopping . . . which took me all of about 15 minutes itself. Vodka, check; rum, check; tequila, check!
But, then I realized I had enough time to drive down to the office to pick up a tote bag full of samples Heather brought me at work on Friday, and this way we wouldn't have to detour to it on our way back from grocery shopping at PCC. I got back to Total Wine again right after 9:00, and just waited in the car for Shobhit. From there, it was only six-minute drive due north to the Ballard Bridge, and the new PCC store in Ballard which opened barely more than a month ago. I had yet to see it, and suggested we go there to get use of this week's coupon for a free 12oz bag of PCC coffee with any purchase. I got just a few other things, and we checked out the store, which was beautiful, had nice and wide aisles, and my favorite thing on the floor level was the motion sensor lights in the freezer cases, which stay turned off when no one is in the aisle.
My favorite thing overall, though, aside from the octopus art installation, was the rooftop deck. Amazingly, even at 9:36, the door was unlocked to go out there. The chairs were all put up so no seating was available, but it still made for a pretty picture, as you can see below (you can also see Shobhit if you look closely). Then we drove back home and I got ready for bed.
But there's still more for me to tell you! I didn't get to work this morning until 9:30, because I had an 8 a.m. doctor's appointment. I thought it was just my routine visit to get a refill of my Truvada prescription every three months, but I discovered when I got there that they had marked it my "annual preventative" visit—in other words, my annual physical. My last one was also in 2019, but in January, and they said I could do it a month early. This worked for me anyway as I had more questions for Dr. Brandon than usual anyway. Such as:
*My Aetna Health Evaluation had asked for my latest test results for cholestrol low density lipoprotein and for triglyceride, and as far as I could tell from my online account with Virginial Mason, these had not been tested from my blood samples since November 2010 and February 2016, so should I get these results again? Brandon was all for it. He said these usually ask for fasting before testing, which I had not done as I had no idea that was even a possibility (not realizing this would be my physical), but he was exceedingly impressed with my latest cholesterol levels overall so he said it would be fine to run the tests even without fasting, just so I have more recent figures to put on next year's health evaluation. He insisted my overall cholesterol levels are so great that there was no way these would have bad levels either.
*Of course, after weeks of it being there, the painful lump in my upper front calf suddenly, finally, started going away just yesterday—just in time for this appointment. I had talked a little about it with Nurse Danielle on Saturday, and she said more than once it was good I would be getting it looked at by a doctor. Shobhit kind of freaked out when I told him about it: "Is it cancer?" Uh, I doubt it. And Brandon was pretty convinced I had somehow sprained one of the thin muscles that goes up the side of the calf to the knee, and his only suggestion was, if the pain comes back again, take ibuprofen or Aleve twice a day to alleviate the pain. Works for me!
*He was about to suggest that I get both an anal swab and a throat swab to test for STDs, and I told him I hadn't had any unprotected anal sex since my last visit. He seemed thrilled. Actually he was very positive about everything, pretty much no matter what we discussed. He then said the anal swab wasn't needed, but I told him we should still do the throat swab. I tested positive for chlamydia in the throat the last two times I was tested, after all. I have a feeling I won't be this time, but you never know. It's not like anyone uses condoms for oral sex, because—get real. Why bother doing it at all then?
Then, when I went down to the phlebotomy lab to get my blood drawn, as usual I averted my eyes so as not to see the needle or the vials of blood. And I'm pretty sure this young woman actually tricked me! She asked if I had plans for Christmas, and a split second after I told her, I felt the prick of the needle into my vein, with no warning. Very effective strategy; I only hyperventilated slightly for a minute after getting pricked, and not at all before. I then went to give my urine sample, and that was it. Off to work.
[posted 12:40 pm]