rotten alarm
I never went anywhere or did anything of note yesterday. Unless you want to count when I took my carved pumpkin downstairs to the compost bin. The thing was rotting like you wouldn't believe, all of four days after I carved it! I can't decide if this was because Costco sold me a low-quality pumpkin, or because I took Gabriel's advice to rinse the inside of it out with water (something I never did before), or both. Let's just blame Gabriel, that sounds fun.
I really hoped I could still show people the pumpkin in person during our planned Zoom "Halloween Happy Hour" on Friday. So much for that! At least I got plenty of great pictures of it. It had been sitting on the dining table the past four days, and I just happened to see yesterday that a cobwebby mold was pretty much filling all of the carved-out spaces in it. I then tried to pull the cut-top out by the hand, and it literally fell apart. I really should have put it into a garbage sack, but like a moron I just carried it downstairs, getting dripping goo onto my shirt and all over my fingers and my keys.
Otherwise, Shobhit and I spent a fair amount of time making a gargantuan batch of pasta—when I put the leftovers into lunch containers, I managed to fill eleven of them. Oh, and that was after I took the car and drove to the office to swap out receiver paperwork. I happened to see Steven there, and he told me about how for Halloween he'll be dressing up as the Crypt Keeper from Tales from the Crypt, but with a name tag identifying himself as Kellyanne Conway. Ha!
That said, being at the office briefly last night really made me think about how long it will be before fully returning to working at the office for all staff can possibly be a good idea. Even the people at the office now, although they all do have masks on, do not maintain 6' distance from each other. I do, for sure, but while Steven and I were talking in the kitchen, another woman saw him and said hi, and they stood maybe three feet away from each other for several minutes. Steven also told me about how he and his husband are hosting a Halloween party on Saturday, with "only" eight people and in a covered outdoor space at their home. It seems clear to me that even outside they would not be maintaining proper social distancing. Maybe they're all getting tested as we speak . . . but I doubt it. I do wonder if he'll dress up in the same costume for Friday's work Zoom party. He may think it's too distasteful for work, but I don't think so.
Anyway, after we finished dinner we watched this week's episode of Fargo, which was quite good. Then a few episodes of The Mary Tyler Moore, given we were in the Hulu app already anyway.
I had a mini adventure this morning when the building's alarm went off. I was in the middle of a phone call with Cathryn, which had started about work but was not getting more casual and personal in nature, and I was like, "Our fire alarm is going off, I've got to go." I then quickly grabbed the cat carrier out of the closet, knocking a bunch of shit to the floor in the process, gathered up the cats and put them into the carrier with frankly surprising ease, and all the while I was wondering what the hell was up with Shobhit and why he wasn't saying anything. When I got to the front door with carrier in hand, he was just sitting on the living room couch, totally unperturbed.
I was like, "Let's go!" and then he reminded me that this was just part of the scheduled annual "fire confidence test," which we've had reminders of posted all over the building for, like, a month. There was no necessity for evacuation or this. Jesus Christ.
[posted 12:20 pm]