Busy evening last night! And I need to write aboutit today because I have a busy day ahead of me, and I don't want to be stuck trying to write and post about it all on Monday.

So we start, then, with August Happy Hour with Laney, last night at a place called SPIN, which is a combination bar and ping pong joint! Laney, Jessica and I all walked past it months ago and, just seeing the sign called SPIN with a tagline "United by Ping Pong," I had to look it up. And thus we have been talking for ages about going there for Happy Hour, but it's just taken this long because we already had all the other months' Happy Hour locations chosen up to this point.

I had reserved a table at 7pm. It cost $39, "unrefundable," to reserve, which seemed pretty steep of course, but I decided it would be worth doing just this once. I'll get back to that.

We still arrived at 5:30 to have a sit-down Happy Hour at the bar, with honestly one of the best cocktails I have ever had (called a Trophy Wife -- "I'd like a Trophy Wife," I said when ordering; "There's something I have never said before) and actually surprisingly very good and reasonably priced food. I had met Laney at the Capitol Hill Light Rail Station at 5:15, after biking home from work in the heat and doing my mid-day push-ups. I was dripping with sweat around 5:00.

Shobhit was already at work and, I learned later, Ivan had signed up to do this thing called an "Orange Theory" workout. So no one was home for the five minutes or so that I was home, and I just fed the cats and was on my way.

SPIN was a lot of fun. The place has very fun decor; on our way out Laney got a photo of me bathing in a tub of ping pong balls. The bathroom walls are papered with face collages. Before playing ping pong, we spent an hour and a half chatting, eating, drinking, catching up, and it was lively and lovely as always.

Once we were at our reserved table, we learned a few useful things for future reference. They have servers who come around for people just at the ping pong tables. We could have ordered, and certainly had drinks, while playing. I limited myself to two drinks though and did not order anything more while we played; Laney did get a third beer which she just carried over to our ping pong table. Still, we got a new server, this time a guy named either Jed or Jeb. He even told us we could come back and pay $8 per person after waiting for a table to open up, without having made a reservation.

Wait, what? I was like, "Then why did it cost $39 to reserve online?" Evidently this place assumes a much larger party than two when reserving online, not that it still makes that much sense since I was able to click the number in my party when reserving -- it was still the flat fee of $39. I guess it's just the difference between reservations and not reserving. Well, tables were free when we came in. Now we plan to come back sometime and just not make a table reservation. $16 is a hell of a lot cheaper than $39 for the table alone. And we can just sign up for the wait list, if there is one, and hang out and drink until one opens up.

That was good to know for future referene, but then Jed or Jeb really came through for us: in spite of the "nonrefundable" label on the website, he offered to refund us that money and then re-charge us just the $8 each for the table, because of our clear confusion on the matter. I had initially been pretty irritated by the whole thing, but this move certainly turned me around. Talk about great customer service. Yay Jed or Jeb!

We didn't actually get to our table until about 7:10 because we decided to go use the restroom. So we played for fifty minutes, but we did pretty much straight through with no breaks. Ping pong is more exercise than you might think. I literally broke a sweat -- for the second time that day! I wasn't dripping with it as before, granted, but I did sweat. And even though neither of us were especially great at it, it was great fun.

Neither of us is competitive so we did not keep score, but rather tried to beat whatever record number of volleys we managed. We got up to forty twice.

And then we took Light Rail back up to Capitol Hill and I walked back home, where Ivan was back again, sitting on the floor just inside the door, petting the cats.

I sat down to pet Guru and Shanti for a few minutes too, but about five minutes after that, we got up and we walked down for our farewell visit to Neko Cat Café. This would be my fourth time there, and Ivan's third.

They had something new on their menu that I wanted to try: CBD infused apple cider. So I ordered a bottle of that to take into the cat room with us. It tasted vaguely like that semi-gross pot taste, so I wasn't crazy about that; I was interested in experiencing CBD without THC, though, and in the end it barely sort of relaxed me and made me kind of tired, and that was about it. I did kind of sleep like a log last night which I assume the CBD helped make happen.

Ivan was going to have the same thing but changed his mind and got a tea instead when it occurred to him he did not want to risk oversleeping this morning.

There are ten cats there right now, and I don't think any of them are the same as the ones they had last year. They have a little chalk board on display announcing they have adopted out 65 cats since they first opened a couple of years ago, averaging about one every couple of weeks or so.

Another new thing I learned last night: visiting Neko Cat Café is definitely best during the last bookable hour of the day. Last night our reservation was at 9:00, and nearly all the cats were either very active or outright feisty. It was the most action I had ever seen among all the cats there, and it actually made it a lot more fun.

You reserve for an hour, and it costs $11. So I was rather struck by how quickly other people left -- one guy left after only about ten minutes in there. About half the ten or so people who had booked the hour left by 9:30, and the last group left maybe ten minutes later. Ivan and I had all the cats to ourselves for the last fifteen minutes or so, aside from the young man working there, kind of as a standing monitor. It does not surprise me that we never see the same people working there; I can't imagine the pay is huge and presumably they have high turnover. I still hope the place lasts. I like it a lot. Ivan clearly does too; he's constantly asking me to take pictures of him. This "Ivan Visit" photo album includes 16 shots from last night at Neko Cat Cafe alone, and those are just the shots I kept!

We walked back home after, and as always Ivan asked if we were going to watch something. I wound up finally putting on the first episode of season 3 of Stranger Things, as neither of us had yet watched it. Shobhit got home from work during that, after which we watched a couple episodes of Cheers. Ivan, as always, just lounged on the love seat under his throw blanket (which has stayed atop the bed and linens in the guest room ever since he left them there after moving out early last year).

But, it was about midnight, and I was falling asleep. Guru barfed and I had to clean that up too. And Ivan had gotten up and was kind of hovering a little, and I said, "Is this goodbye then?" He gave me a nice hug, and just like when he moved out the first time, he said, "Thank you for everything." We are allowing him to store most of his stuff here while he's in New Zealand, but I'm sure he meant more than just that.

He does like to ask me, "Will you miss me?" Of course I will. "Are you going to cry?" he asked me in the elevator last night, and I was so matter of fact when I said no, he laughed a little. But as I explained, I've had too many goodbyes with him now; I don't cry about it anymore. Then he said, "What if I died?" Well of course I would cry if he died! Jesus.

Anyway, God knows how long he'll be gone this time. I'm kind of feeling the opposite this time around, compared to when he left for Europe. I love being able to hang out with him, but I actually hope he succeeds in finding a job that allows him to remain in New Zealand for a while, certainly longer than the three months he was in Eastern Europe or the three months he could only manage in Vancouver, B.C. I say this for his sake. I want this to work out for him. And we'll certainly remain in touch; I feel very confident about that.

His flight took off shortly after 9:00 this morning, so he's on his way to a layover in Hawaii as I write this. He was up and getting ready to go around 5 a.m. and Shobhit apparently actually got up and offered him a ride to the airport, which was incredibly nice of him. Ivan declined! He even said he thought Light Rail would be faster. At 5 a.m. on a Saturday? I don't think so! Also so what? Getting a ride would be a lot easier, with the huge suitcae he was pulling while also carrying a backpack. Maybe he felt awkward about riding alone with Shobhit for some reason -- I don't know. Or for some reason he thought Shobhit was just offering out of obligation but did not actually want to do it, which was absolutely not the case? I just think it was insane of him not to accept that offer; in his position I would have jumped at it. But then, it's been decades since I have felt self-conscious about accepting anyone's generosity. As far as I'm concerned, if anyone does not want to give something to me, then they won't offer it; if they don't want to then they shouldn't offer it. Either way, if generosity is on offer, I'm going to take it. Life is short, people!

And that's why, even if I don't see Ivan again until sometime next year -- which was what he was estimating last night -- it may be the longest I have gone without seeing him since we first met, but we'll still get to that point before we know it. Time flies. Also I want him to send me lots of gorgeous pictures of New Zealand. I'm lookingf forward to that.

[posted 10:31 am]