now and beyond
One of the few genuine joys of working from home is having the cats around all day. It certainly feels as though they agree: once we get back to working in offices, hopefully next year, they're going to be bummed to be left alone so long most days again.
On the other hand, there are less joyful elements, even of being around the cats all day. For instance, I just held Guru over the litter box so he could barf three times into it.
Shobhit didn't work yesterday. He spent a good amount of time in the morning making a huge pot of sambar, so that should be feeding us for a few days. He also declared we would make baked cheese and basil sandwiches out of the delicious focaccia bread that Costco sells, and I had that with just a little bit of the sambar to dip into for dinner. It was delicious. Especially the sandwich, which included both cheddar cheese and cheese curd from Beecher's. I was delighted to have the leftover portion of the sandwich for lunch today, as what Shobhit made was rather too big and I only ate half my portion last night.
He also had a Braeburn board meeting, during which I spent time back in the bedroom. I spent time working on the calendars, and getting really frustrated by the limitations of Costco's online templates. The Apple templates I used to use had far greater flexibility, but that just barely gets outweighed by the cost savings of being able to pick them up after printing at Costco rather than paying shipping for Apple to mail them to me. We'll see if I still feel the same way next year, but this year in particular I want to save where I can—I'm already likely to have to mail more calendars than usual from the post office this year, just due to the pandemic. (Well, and also that we're not taking a winter trip to Wallace, Idaho, which will be a first for me since 2008.) Anyway, I had to redo the caption text I had put on the photos proper for each month's large photo, because of the formatting bullshit. The template forces fitting the image to fill the space, so for any photo with a wide aspect ratio, I'm just stuck losing portions of the images on either side. And the aforementioned text had to be moved because they were winding up located right under where the spiral punches holes into the paper, as shown in the image preview. What a pain the ass. Well, I'm glad I started working on these a lot earlier than usual this year as Shobhit suggested.
Incidentally, that also makes me think about Christmas, and how the hell we're going to deal with it. I don't really think staying overnight at Dad and Sherri's on Christmas Eve is in the cards, unless something truly dramatic changes in the next two months. Daily COVID testing? As if that'll be available that soon. I'd sure love to be able to do that, but I just don't see it happening.
I can't even see spending time inside Dad and Sherri's house on Christmas Day, even though the rest of the family almost certainly will, risks be damned. It's hard to say, since the "fall surge" that was predicted and we already see happening may very well force shutdowns again between now and then. So much is up in the air. My thinking right now, though, is that even if we can only stay briefly, and we only spend time on their back patio (which, thankfully, is covered), we will still drive down there on Christmas Day. My most persuasive argument for this is the calendars: driving to Olympia to hand-deliver them will save far more money than I'd have to spend sending eight of these calendars through the U.S. Post Office, which is a shambles this year anyway. That, if nothing else, will persuade Shobhit it's worth doing.
Beyond Christmas, at least, I'm happy to have several plans already in place for 2021. Assuming things are at least as open in late April as they are now—and there's no reason at this point not to think they will be—then, unlike last April, State Parks will be open, and I can proceed with my one-year-postponed Birth Week plan of a State Parks tour, including an overnight stay with Dad (in separate rooms) on Long Beach, where we can ride our bikes at Cape Disappointment State Park. We'll basically be in the same place Shobhit and I were at for our anniversary last June, but that's okay; Shobhit refused to pay for entry into any state parks because I had left the Discover Pass at home. That won't be an issue next year.
And then, beyond that, there are two family reunion events now planned (one for the Western Washington side and one for the Eastern Washington / Idaho side), in June and in September; and whatever Shobhit and I do for our anniversary—hopefully things will have mellowed enough, both in terms of pandemic and in terms of civil unrest, for us to finally make that two-night trip to Portland I've now been having to postpone for two years. This one is far more up in the air but I still hope to make my long-planned trip back to Denver to visit Sara (and also drive up to see my cousins in Wyoming) sometime in 2021. But, I'll bump that one another year if I have to.
[posted 12:29 pm]