seattle holiday tour
Hoo boy, do I have a lot to catch you up on, much of it from Friday alone! I really should have shared a post on Saturday, or maybe even Friday evening, about Friday alone. Laney even told me yesterday she had checked my blog to see what I wrote about "how much fun we had" on Friday night, but was disappointed to see I had not written anything about it. Shows what she knows! Or how often she checks this blog—as I explained to her, I rarely share regular updates over weekends and typically catch up in my Monday post. That said, it's also not uncommon for me to share an extra one over the weekend when I have an unusually long list of things to get through about the weekend, and honestly, under normal circumstances, something like Nancy's retirement party (at which the video above was taken; I actually think watching the whole three and a half minutes is worth it) would warrant its own post.
But, I was slightly inebriated when I got home from the movie Friday night—I'll get to that—and, in the somewhat limited time I had Saturday morning, that was the time I needed to take to write the movie review. (I'll get to that as well. Settle down!)
So anyway. Let's get back to Friday afternoon. Nancy's retirement party started at 3:00. It technically was scheduled to go through 6:00, and it probably did, but I left at about 5:20.
There have been retirement parties at this office for no fewer than six people since late 2016: Janice in September 2016; Randy after a record 46 years in September 2017; a double party for Mimi and Marilyn in December 2017; Trudy in April of this year; now Nancy in December 2019. With the possible exception of Randy, it feels like the biggest deal has been made for Nancy, who has headed HR for most of the 32 years she's worked here. From the office perspective, we can probably thank the HR department themselves for that, as they spearheaded the organizing and setup of the party, making it a very schmoozy, sort of "cocktail party" affair, with tall tables covered in tablecloths and three different food stations in the kitchen and the large conference room (the wall between which can be opened up to create effectively one huge room).
Somewhat curiously, more former PCC staff showed up for Trudy's retirement than for Nancy's, and I can't really account for that. Goldie (retired 2012), Janice and Mimi all showed up for Trudy's party last April; neither Goldie or Janice made it to this one. Mimi did, though, and as always it was wonderful to get to say hi to her. She has even invited Shobhit and me to come visit her at her new home in Mount Vernon; we just haven't yet had a chance to make it happen.
The bigger part of Nancy's party was the number of current staff, including from store leadership, who showed up. Nancy's departure is a particularly big deal because, although just a couple of people are still here at the office who started before she did (Kathy, who does payroll; and Lori, now VP of Store Development), Nancy is the last person at her level of management who has been here more than 30 years. Her departure is truly the end of an era here at PCC.
I did just notice though, literally as I was writing this and looking at the office staff roster, that Lori is part of "LT," the "Leadership Team," all of whom are regarded as one level below the CEO. Technically she is on equal footing with Nancy. I would argue that Nancy's departure still marks the end of an era more than Lori's will, though, because Lori is so much more "behind the scenes" in her work. Being at the top of the department dealing with personnel and all the human interaction at PCC, Nancy has been the face of the company for employees themselves for the longest time. She is beloved in a way few others have been, and probably only Randy himself could compare. Several people got up to speak at the party, and a whole bunch of them could not stop themselves from crying. When one person, I forget who—Jennifer B, I think—said raising your hand in the air helps keep you from crying, it became kind of a thing.
As for who I actually schmoozed with at the party, that would include Nancy herself, closer to the end (her last day full time is at the end of this month, but she said she'll be in a couple days a week for two months thereafter, effectively weaning herself off of us all); Mimi, of course; I chatted with Claudia for a while when the party first started; and when I found a table to stand at to eat my food, I was ultimately joined by Terry, Steven, Katherine, and briefly by Nancy herself as well. (I got a nice shot of three of them eating.) I got a nice amount of breads and crackers with cheeses and hummus; Lynne made a delicious lettuce wrap spread that included sesame sauced mushrooms that were to die for; and I had two of the tiny little desserts. Anyway, once I felt like I had taken enough pictures (the full photo album on Flickr includes 30 shots), I set about walking up to Capitol Hill on my way to meet Laney and Jessica for the movie.
So now I get to "how much fun" the three of us had on Friday night! We went to see Cats, which was both better than any of us quite expected, and was also still kind of terrible.
The original plan was for me to walk downtown from work, catch a #49 at 6:02 so Laney and Jessica could hop on the same bus at her stop on Broadway and Republican at 6:18, and then we all take the bus the rest of the way to the U District together. Laney eventually scrapped that plan because she has been avoiding drinking for several months—she usually lemon soda water with bitters when we go out to our monthly Happy Hours—but was deliberately making this a special exception, going to "the boozy theater" so we could get drunk while watching this fever nightmare of a movie. Because it had been so long since she drank, she was afraid two drinks now might make her more wasted than she wanted to be, and she felt safer having Jessica drive. So, I met them there.
Having no need to go downtown first, I decided I would walk up Denny to Capitol Hill instead, and just catch that #49 near where Laney lives anyway. This way I would still get an hour walk in. Then, I changed my mind about wanting to walk that much. Although I had my umbrella, it was super rainy, and by the time I reached Fairview, and I checked One Bus Away, I decided, fuck it, I'll take that #63 express the rest of the way, this being the full route I usually take to movies in the U District from work anyway. Except now I was getting there super early. The movie showtime was 7:15; we had agreed to meet there at 6:45; I was there by 6:15. It's never difficult for me to kill time, though, so that's what I did.
I was up in the lounge area halfway up to the bathrooms, with lots of cushy couches, when they arrived, also slightly early. Jessica bought me a present! It was a very cool, small zipper bag she sewed up herself, with a pattern of both cats and spiders! I love it, and it effectively gives me the "extra pocket" I always wanted inside my shoulder bag anyway. It's a win-win, for both me, and me!
Anyway. We all got two drinks, as you can see. I am very happy with that photo, I love it. I was the only one who drank extra booze, though, because I brought two extra shots of tequila, to pour one each into my drinks. I also had a little box of tequila chocolates Shobhit had brought home from work at Total Wine maybe a week ago. So, I got a pretty good buzz going on. I had listened to a podcast episode that very morning at work, a whole hour dedicated to Cats, in which one of the hosts called it "relentlessly boring," so that's what I had steeled myself for. Somewhat amazingly, I managed to stretch the drinking of both my cocktails out for about 3/4 of the movie, and I won't lie—the drinks did make the movie more tolerable. There definitely were multiple moments in the movie where the look on my face was essentially the same as it had been when I first saw the trailer. This movie does have a lot of "what the fuck?" moments.
But, because we all had gone in expecting the worst thing imaginable, it still exceeded all of our expectations. Still, by a wider margin with both Jessica and especially Laney than with me, it felt like. I'd still call the movie far from great; it just didn't make me angry or annoyed by how bad it was. It was either "what the fuck?" in a sort of banal way, or it was, indeed, just dull and tedious. The music, overall, is shockingly unmemorable, and it's astonishing that the live play—although I do understand actors in leotards is far different from CGI cat-human hybrids—was the longest one ever to run on Broadway.
In any case, you can read my review for the fullness of my thoughts on it.
I didn't hang out with any friends on Saturday, but still had a pretty busy day, mostly because I squeezed in a third movie in as many days. This time I took myself downtown to see the 11 a.m. showing of Bombshell, which I quite liked. I did not have time to write the review until yesterday morning, however, because of everything else I had to do on Saturday.
I did write a review on Saturday, in the morning: that was when I wrote the review for Cats. Then, after the movie, I took the Monorail to Seattle Center to get a few photos of the Winterfest Train and Village. I had another reason to take the Monorail down there: to swing by work, because I had a bunch of the draft of the Social Review I otherwise would have posted that morning, stuck in my drafts folder in my work email. I meant to send it to myself and forgot, and for reasons that escape me, even though my work email is programmed into the Mail app on my phone along with four personal email addresses (Comcast, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo), the "Drafts" folder is, for some reason, the single folder that doesn't show up in it. What the hell!
So, I went to work and I just wrote up an unusually brief couple of paragraphs for the Fall 2019 Social Review and posted it from there. That, essentially, became the "extra weekend blog post" in lieu of a post dedicated to what went down on Friday.
I had less than an hour at the office, and then I needed to walk back to Seattle Center, catch the Monorail back downtown, hop on the #41 express northbound to Northgate, and meet Shobhit when he got off work at Big 5 at 3:30. We spent most of the rest of the day together, getting some shopping out of the way, at both Costco in Shoreline and then Mud Bay on Capitol Hill. I finally found new collars to put in Shanti's and Guru's Christmas stockings. Later in the evening, we finished the last two episodes of the season we had been watching of the Netflix series from Spain called Elite. I really thought it would just be the one season and we'd be done with it; I did not discover until after the season finale that there's actually a second season too. Damn it! Oh well. I'm not sure we'll ever move on to season 2, actually. It was all right, but not that good.
I also processed as many of the photos as I could from Friday, as I knew I was headed into taking a lot more photos spending late morning and early afternoon with Laney on Sunday. Such as . . .
Gingerbread Village, at the Sheraton Hotel! This was my 14th year in a row going to it, and I have photos from every year. This year's theme was "Elf Life." For the second year in a row, although the long line still snakes through the hotel lobby, the gingerbread houses themselves are inside a room off the lobby that you walk into to see them, and they are not set up in the lobby itself anymore. I had thought maybe doing it this way last year was temporary, as the "Welcome to Whoville" theme was largely sort of deliberate illumination of the gingerbread houses in a dark room, which I thought was just the point with that display. I get the desire to get them out of the way out in the lobby, as they took up a lot of space, but I still miss the old way. You used to be able to circle around and look at the giant gingerbread houses from the back, and now you can't anymore.
Anyway we met at the Capitol Hill Light Rail Station at 10:30 so we could get to the hotel by 11:00 and hopefully not have too long a wait in line—when Shobhit and I got in line at 2 p.m. on a Saturday last year, we waited an hour and 50 minutes, probably a record wait for me. This time, we were told the line was about 45 minutes. That was a slight disappointment when we walked in the door of the hotel and at first it looked like there was no line to speak of, but I had forgotten the new way they're doing it, and the line was in switchbacks with velvet ropes essentially in the area where the gingerbread houses used to be displayed. I didn't time it, but the line seemed to move fast enough; I suspect we did wait about 45 minutes, maybe even a little less. In any case, it was totally worth it, and you can view the 35 shots I took of them here.
From there, we walked over to the Holiday Carousel, which I usually ride with one person or another every year, but never got around to last year, so it had been two years since I went on it. I last rode it with Laney in 2016, who had not ridden it since then. Being around noon on a weekend, the line was super short. I do prefer riding it at night, but this was still fine, and it was fun. I remarked to Laney while we rode it that, I really never tire of carousels. I love their antiquity, their simplicity, and how it's never not fun to ride them.
That cost us $4 each, half the total of our costs each for the day. The Gingerbread Village is free, as is the next thing we went to: Teddy Bear Suite over at the Fairmont Olympic Hotel. I got 15 shots of our trek over there and back; 9 of them inside the "Teddy Bear Suite" itself. I had suggested last year that we go to this together this year, and Laney had said then that it may become a Christmas tradition for just her and Jessica, and of course that was fine. But, Jessica had considered joining us yesterday and wound up having other plans, and since they were to be at Laney's sister's house for Christmas she didn't think they'd have time for it on Christmas Day like they did last year. (I assume that's the perfect day to go, though, as there would be far fewer people cramming into that little room on the 2nd floor of the hotel.) So, this being the only day available for Laney still to go herself, we went together. And it was pretty much identical as it had been last year, but it was fun to get pictures with someone who actually came with me, as last year I went to check it out by myself.
From there we walked over to catch the #49 bus on Pike and 4th, and we rode that up to Volunteer Park to go into the Conservatory—that being where we paid our second $4 each. Laney had been unable to join me for "Holiday in the Park" on the 5th, during which the Conservatory has free admission, but when I found out the "Holiday Express Train" display stays up all holiday season long, we made the plan to make this part of our "Holiday Tour" on Sunday of this past weekend. So, I just added the photos I took there yesterday to the Holiday in the Park photo set. I also included the photos from our carousel ride, and just called the set this year "Holiday in the Park / Seattle Holiday Tour 2019," even though I still had to make the Gingerbread Village and Teddy Bear Suite photo sets separate (mostly for organizational purposes).
Laney and I were actually done with our "Holiday Tour" relatively quickly, after about three and a half hours, so we were done by around 2 p.m. That gave me pretty much the rest of the day to myself, so once I got home I pretty quickly changed into my flannel pajama pants. I processed and uploaded the day's photos, captioned some of my now-long backlog of uncaptioned photos from the season, and also finally got around to watching this week's episode of The Mandalorian, which had been released on Wednesday instead of the usual Friday, just ahead of the release of The Rise of Skywalker in theaters. I made Shobhit a veggie burger that was waiting for him when he got home from work; I made myself a veggie chicken patty sandwich, having wanted a Field Roast veggie burger myself, but I forgot I had already eaten the last of them. I'll have to buy more when we next go grocery shopping.
Once Shobhit did get home from work, I spent a bit of time helping him fry up the first round of samosas, which he made first for us to take to our respective jobs—he took 24 to Total Wine today; I took 10 to work. A lot of people are gone at the office today, predictably, but I still made rounds and gave one to Eric, Jared (who I had to give one to after I asked Eric if he'd like one and Jared said, "Yes!"), Cathryn (who declared it "amazing), Rachel (the woman I had chatted a lot with during our mutual Thanksgiving Week shifts at the Columbia City store; she sent me a message on Skype also saying "This is AMAZING!!!!!!!"); Karen who does social media stuff ("this is delicious"); and, after finding out in email that Noah won't be in the office today so he can't have one (his reply: "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!"), I went and gave the last two to Marie in IT and Katherine the Facilities Manager, who used to sit behind me until everyone but me in this second was moved around. She had overheard a conversation about Shobhit's samosas not long ago and clearly would want one the next time I had any to pass around. I had the other three for lunch, and they really were fucking amazing. UPDATE: Katherine just came by my desk to thank me and tell me, "I don't even want to eat my lunch now, I want those flavors to stay in my mouth!"
Anyway! Last thing to tell you today: Eric, now my supervisor, had a quick meeting with me today to let me know I'll be getting a 3.5% raise as of 2019. A quick Google search indicates the U.S. inflation rate is less than that, so that's good. Seattle's is locally probably higher, but whatever. I'm happy with it. I'm a little bummed I haven't gotten a holiday bonus like I did last year, but that's hardly the end of the world. I'm not complaining!
[posted 12:24 pm]