movie, movie, camera, actors
I had enough going on over the weekend to keep me busy, but did no real socializing to speak of; the weekend mostly consisted of going to movies, watching movies at home, and watching the SAG Awards. Shobhit had shifts each day this weekend, so I spent much of it just on my own. I did try to see if Gabriel was available to get together both on Saturday and on Sunday, but he had plans on Saturday and it turned out it was his one-year anniversary with Lea on Sunday. Anniversary of what exactly, I'm not sure; if I had to guess I would say of their first date, since that was the date Shobhit and I used before we got married. I'm kind of astonished Gabriel and Lea have been together a year already. What fun! Time goes by so fast you won't believe how quickly we'll all just be dead! All the more reason to make the most of every day in the meantime. Corny but true!
Anyway. On Friday I took myself to see Just Mercy, which didn't qualify as "great" but was still good. That was a 7:15 pm showing downtown at Pacific Place, and I had another movie fairly early on Saturday and since I did not want the Just Mercy review still to do in the morning, I stayed up relatively late Friday night to get that written up.
On Saturday, Shobhit's shift at Big 5 started at 12:45, and the movie I went to see in the U District's AMC 10 (formerly Sundance Cinemas, formerly Landmark Theaters's The Metro) began at 12:15. Shobhit decided to leave home at noon and I hitched a ride to the offramp on 45th St. I then went to see the quite good French non-musical film Les Misérables. By the time I was home and done writing that review, it was around 4:00.
I also did laundry on Saturday, which involved stopping and starting my spending the rest of that afternoon and evening watching Rogue One: A Star Wars Story on Disney+. Shobhit keeps wanting to tell me it's not worth paying for that service when I don't watch it enough, so I decided I'd start getting my money's worth again now that The Mandalorian is done for the year. I started listening to the Binge Mode podcast season that deep-dives on Star Wars, which Gabriel has been raving about for weeks, and I'm quite enjoying it. The hosts did a Q&A episode as early as episode 3 of the season and one of their questions was to rank the Star Wars movies from most to least favorite. Curiously, they both ranked Rogue One really high. I enjoyed that movie, but not that much; I decided a re-watch was in order to see if there was something I had been missing. Nope! The movie is perfectly re-watchable, but I still stand by the solid B I gave it back in 2016. That said, if Shobhit ever comes around to having any interest in seeing The Rise of Skywalker once it's available streaming, I wonder if I can convince him to watch all 10 other movies, including the "stand-alone" films, in story order beforehand. Probably not, but it's fun to consider!
I was going to try and stay awake for Shobhit when he got home from work Saturday evening, but, I just couldn't do it. I seriously zonked out, and was sound asleep in bed by 10 p.m.
I had actually started another movie on Saturday evening after I finished Rogue One, also on Disney+, but had only gotten about twenty minutes in before I got too tired: the Pixar film Ratatouille, which I'm not sure I had watched since first seeing it in theaters in 2007. That was the first Pixar film for which my reaction was notably different from that of other critics, who seriously love that movie. I, on the other hand, had given it a solid B: lots of great qualities, but hardly a "must-see." I have to admit, though, that this was only about a particular hang-up of mine: I did not care that they were all disinfected in a dishwasher, I could not abide by the thought of rats overrunning a restaurant kitchen. I happened to see that movie with Dad and Sherri in Olympia, along with my niece Becca, who was over from Spokane for her summer weekend that year. And keep in mind, Dad and Sherri were restaurant owners, so their reaction was similar: I remember leaving the movie and Sherri saying, "Well, I've seen that," or something to that effect.
Now, though, re-watching it twelve and a half years later, I would re-assess my grade and raise it at minimum to a B+, maybe even A-. The marionette business by just pulling a guy's hair is truly ridiculous even by cartoon standards (but definitely by usual Pixar story standards), but still, watching it this time, I was incredibly impressed by a lot of things. Top of the list was always what I was most impressed by it: the animation, which I gave an A even back in 2007. But the script deserves a lot more credit than the C I gave it at the time; the story beats and plotting are actually very well polished, and what it has to say about the emotional effects of perfectly flavored and balanced cooking is, by all accounts—including by actual chefs—very accurate. The truth is, once you let go of the hang-up about rats in a kitchen, that movie is spectacularly entertaining. I restarted it yesterday morning, and Shobhit was immediately sucked in, but he had to leave for work and now he wants to watch it himself. Because it's Disney+, I'm not sure he'll ever figure out screen mirroring with the Apple TV box while I'm not there, so I may just have to watch it again. And that would be fine.
But, there you have it. Not one, but two movies watched on Disney+ in one weekend. That's at least one week of getting my money's worth, so there! There's a bunch of other Pixar movies on there I'd love to re-watch as well.
Then, after processing a couple week's worth of a smattering of photos I have taken recently, I decided I wanted to take myself to the Apple Store in the U District, before I went to meet with Shobhit when he got off work, at his request. I wanted to discuss upgrade options since I am part of the iPhone upgrade program and I am now upgrade eligible. I got to a salesman to speak with pretty quickly, and in the end I decided I would not take any action right now, but I have still pretty much made my decision.
Unfortunately, the triple camera on the iPhone 11 Pro that offers a 10x zoom in addition to a wide angle, while easily the option for best-possible photos of wildlife I will no doubt be seeing in Australia, would cost me an additional $20 a month. I just can't abide by that. But! The regular iPhone 11, with its dual lens that even though it has the same 5x zoon as the XR I have now but also affords a wide angle option that I don't have now, has an option that doubles my phone's memory and would only be a couple dollars more a month. It took some explaining to Shohibhit, who thought it would be a waste of what I spent on the XR, but I don't "lose" what I paid for the XR. All that happens, aside from the slight adjustment in monthly payment, is my 24-month loan contract resets. Well, and I have a $30 activation fee by AT&T for the new phone, which is the biggest reason I decided to wait: I'm already some $75 over budget currently, and I want to wait until after my next paycheck so I can budget in that cost.
I'm still sold on upgrading to the dual lens camera, though, not just because the monthly cost difference is nominal, but because even without increasing the zoom capability, the camera features still come with many improvements, which would come in handy for the trip to Australia in their own right. I've still been waiting literally for years for a phone that truly gave me the quality photo I wanted using a full zoom, and the iPhone 11 Pro is a huge leap toward that ideal, but I'm still going to wait for the cost of that one to come down, which perhaps it will do in another year. I just can't justify jumping from $39.50 a month to $60 a month, that's stupid. And even if it does come down in cost next year, I may wait to upgrade for another year anyway, since I have nothing even remotely like the Australia trip planned for 2021. Honestly the only sensible time for me to upgrade to the 11 Pro is when I can get it at roughly the same monthly payment I'm making now—which is what I'll be doing by upgrading to the regular iphone 11, probably sometime next week.
Anyway! After this, for the second time (only this time flipping the locations), I went to meet Shobhit at the wrong spot. It was very weird, too, for several reasons. First off, I had actually commented on Shobhit's Total Wine jacket when he left for work. Still, because I had made the mistake of writing "Big 5" on my calendar for his shift (the timing of which I still got right), that was where I bussed to from University Village yesterday evening. I didn't even realize it until I walked in the door of Big 5, saying I was there to meet Shobhit, and his boss was like, "Shobhit didn't work today." Wait, what?
I did think it was odd that I could not see Shobhit's car in its usual parking spot. And then, this other car, the same silver color as Shobhit's but without the black front bumper, pulled into a parking space, and out came another Indian guy wearing a silver and black windbreaker nearly identical to one Shobhit owns. Even then, my brain did not bring up the memory of the solid black jacket I had actually noticed when he left for work. Also, this is not to say that all Indian guys look the same—in my defense, it was dark, it was from halfway across the parking lot, and the guy was wearing a jacket that was almost the same as one Shobhit often wears. I noticed another guy in the passenger seat, and still I started thinking, Is he helping some other person with his car? I even stopped and stared in their direction for a second, probably looking like some rando weirdo. For a minute there I kind of felt like I was in The Twilight Zone.
I had even texted Shobhit when he asked how far away I was that I was on a bus on Lake City Way. Only minutes later I just missed the connecting bus headed to Northgate, but I still had plenty of time to walk to the Northgate Big 5 by 6:00, having roughly half an hour. I was sort of confused as to why he never said anything when I told him that, and he later said he thought it might have just had to do with a circuitous route I had to take from the U District to Interbay. Curiously, I had already had a similar "missed connection" in text with him, when he had sent me a photo of a shelf tag advertising a bread sale, and I realized he must have gone over to Whole Foods for lunch—which means that in that particular moment, I realized he was at Total Wine.
But my brain seriously compartmentalized things here, because when it came to considering bus routes to meet him at work, I stuck firmly in the notion he was at Big 5, exclusively because that was when I had mistakenly labeled that shift's calendar event in my Google Calendar.
In the end, it mattered little. I caught a #41 back downtown, which is an express, and it got me to 5th & Union at about 6:20—ten minutes before the One Bus Away app was even predicting—and Shobhit just drove downtown and picked me up. He already wanted to go south of downtown to an Asian grocery store to do some shopping, so my bussing snafu cost him all of five or ten minutes at most. This was way different from the day I went to meet him at Total Wine and he was actually at Big 5; it would have taken me an extra hour to meet him there. In this case, we were already both going in the same general direction when I corrected course. So we shopped at the Asian grocery store, and then down at MacPherson's as well, and then even the Whole Foods on Broadway so we could pick up the aforementioned bread deal, so we went home with a healthy haul of produce and bread.
We had made omelets for breakfast yesterday, which we both decided to regard as "lunch." For reasons that still escape me, my weight was back up by 2 lbs Sunday morning. I never had any lunch yesterday, though, and once we got home from shopping, I observed that I really still wasn't hungry. Knowing that my weight would almost certainly be up yet again were I to have some dinner anyway, I decided I would just skip dinner. Once all the groceries were put away and Shobhit made himself avocado toast with near-expired avocados he got on deal at MacPherson's, I made us some chai and that stood in for my dinner.
And then we watched the SAG Awards, which I had recorded on the DVR. I had a pretty good time watching it, and although the film actor prizes were all completely predictable, the very last one wasn't: Parasite won Best Ensemble in a film, which shocked and delighted me, and immensely increases its Oscar chances. I still don't think it will win Best Picture, but it sure would be great if it did. We'll find that out on February 9.
Skipping dinner last night was an effective choice; I was back down nearly 2lbs this morning. On the other hand, I had the damnedest time getting to sleep last night, even getting back onto my iPad just to look up information about Sydney for nearly an hour in bed until after midnight, just to occupy my mind. In retrospect, I wonder if it was the caffeine from the chai tea? I don't usually get that effect from it, but I hadn't made chai in some time and I did add a lot of the tea to it. It's the only explanation I can think of. Presumably the result will be tonight, in contrast, I will zonk out early again.
[posted 12:20 pm]