At this point it should come as no surprise to my presumably 3.5 regular readers that the first thing I want to talk about is this holiday's history of photo albums. That's precisely how I started last year's Thanksgiving post, after all—and indeed, how I start pretty much all holiday posts anymore. And bobody cares! Except of course for me—I care. So I'm going to mention it!

This is the thing. Probably for the indefinite future, my so-called "Thanksgiving Day" photo albums now include more than one day, mostly because of my two days of four-hour shifts working at a PCC store immediately prior to the holiday. That's why, last year, what otherwise would have been a by-a-large-margin-record small ten photos taken on Thanksgiving day, was expanded to a "Thanksgiving photo album" that included an additional fifteen shots, to create an album with a total of 25: I took a few shots each day on both Tuesday and Wednesday working at the Columbia City PCC. And actually, the PCC photos only numbered 7; an additional 8 were taken on "Thanksgiving Eve," six of those being from my brief stop over at Gabriel and Lea's nearby Columbia City apartment. Without stopping by their apartment last year, my Thanksgiving photo album, even including PCC shots, would have been a rather low 19 shots—and it would have been the smallest number of Thanksgiving photos I'd gotten since 2011 (that year, spent with only Shobhit in Los Angeles, yielding only 15).

With all that in mind, this year's whopping 38-shot photo set was a pleasant surprise for multiple reasons, not least of which was merely that this was 2020, in the middle of a raging global pandemic. As you can see in the photo above, I even managed one shot including Sachin, even though he's currently staying with cousins in Atlanta, as Shobhit spoke to him via Skype while making hot chocolate yesterday morning. I actually like the candidness of that shot; it turned out kind of better than expected.

Now, granted, Sachin actually came over for dinner last year—our only guest even then—and I got a mere three photos of him then. So his absence this year doesn't make that big a comparative difference. The key this year, really, is that Thanksgiving Day itself wound up being more photogenic than expected, with 26 shots total—far exceeding that of last year; and matching the specific-Thanksgiving-day counts of both the year before that (2018) and the year before that (2017); even 2016's photo album only had 25 shots total. I haven't had a Thanksgiving Day count that exceeded 26 shots since the 33 from 2014, when we met up with Dad and Sherri, Brandi and Nick in Phoenix. And that was a trip out of town—a trip out of town out of town for Shobhit as we drove from visiting Faith while he was living in Los Angeles; and thus a trip out of town out of town out of town for me, having originally flown down to L.A. from Seattle! Anyway that's ancient history and I don't know why I'm rehasing it now.

In any case, I got a good 12 shots yesterday just during the afternoon drive around town that Shobhit suggested.

First we drove briefly to Pike Place Market, parked, and walked over to his favorite park, Victor Steinbrueck Park, to look at the view he loves. There's still construction right over the railing where the Alaskan Way Viaduct used to be, and now they have a safety fence several feet away from the railing all the way down, so for the time being you can't quite get to where the view is optimized. Shobhit thought there might be parts of the Market actually open, but of course being Thanksgiving Day there weren't—although to our surprise, one chocolate shop across the street on Pike Place was indeed open. I think it was the only place open in the whole area.

So, then we drove to Kerry Park, where we took the above selfie. Shobhit suggested we even drive all the way out to Golden Gardens Park, which at the very least doubled our time out driving around. He wanted to kill some time and get himself a point on the next Social Review. I don't usually do Social Review points for holidays, but since the reason for that is how I separate family gatherings from standard socializing, I'm thinking this should qualify: we had no "gathering" and this was not at home (or anybody's home); we actually went out and did a thing that would net him a point on any other day, so, I guess he gets a point!

The holiday overall was rather pleasant, I must say. Excepting the two years (in 2017 and 2018) we went to Olympia to have dinner at Gina and Beth's, this was our first Thanksgiving dinner not to be entirely (or even majority) Indian food since 2004. Every other year, we've either made several Indian dishes at home, or we've gone out to eat at an Indian restaurant. It's certainlyt he first-ever Thanksgiving together at home with more traditional dishes, albeit vegetarian versions: Field Roast Celebration Roast with mushroom gravy; scallop potatoes from Costco (we had to bake that far longer than the directions said before it was no longer frozen); Pillsbury crescent rolls; PCC Deli potato salad; PCC Deli mushroom salad; and we still did add a bit of Indian flavor to the meal by adding small side bowls of the paneer vegetable dish with rice that was still leftover from Tuesday night's dinner.

I had bought the Deli salads at the Central District PCC right at the end of my shift on Wednesday, having completely spaced getting them at the end of my shift on Tuesday. I also grabbed the very last can of Field Day Sweet Corn, thinking I would like to have that as another side to this meal . . . and then I completely forgot about it once we made dinner yesterday. Otherwise we'd have had seven dishes instead of six! Maybe I'll have it alongside Thanksgiving leftovers for dinner tonight.

Speaking of Wednesday's shift, I never did write about my second day working the store, as yesterday being a holiday I just never had the time or the inclination to post about the day before. Last year I posted about "Thanksgiving Eve" late on Wednesday night, after having visited Gabriel and Lea (which was not possible this year for two reasons: COVID-19, and also even without a pandemic they are now living in their beautiful new house in Federal Way), but I spent Wednesday evening watching the new lesbian Christmas romantic comedy Happiest Season on Hulu and then writing my B+ review for that. I had actually thought I'd be renting and reviewing another movie on VOD, but that one got bumped to Saturday when I learned from a podcast that very morning about this movie—which had indeed originally been slated for theatrical release, and thus it was begging for a review. I really enjoyed that movie and may go out of my way to watch it again next year.

Anyway, I digress yet again! When I arrived at the Central District store on Wednesday, not in nearly as much of a rush as the day before as this time my lunch eaten just prior had only to be reheated in the microwave, I encountered both Store Director Tim and Noah just inside the entrance, standing in the Produce section. I had run into Noah the day before as well; he was "running product," as he put it, basically driving stuff around to stores that needed whatever. If I had a car I'm not sure I would mind that sort of a task, but Tim was happy to put me to work doing precisely what I had done the day before: walking the aisles, facing product, answering customer questions, and occasionally delighting people with my Pumpkin Pie Slice earrings. Those were a great investment! (I even got a great response on Twitter when someone I don't know but follow had posted a call for people to reply to him and he would give us all one compliment; the one he sent me, clearly after checking my timeline and seeing a photo I posted, was "Your pumpkin pie earring kicks ass.")

The key difference between Wednesday and Tuesday working at a store this year was that on Wednesday, Zaira, who is a Receptionist new to PCC this year, was working a full 8-hour shift that my shift was also in the middle of, and Tim had tasked her with exactly the same thing. We would occasionally pass each other doing little more than meandering the aisles, although both of us were clearly engaged regularly with helping customers find product. I would say that, predictably, I guided people to the baking aisle by far the most often, but also a surprising lot to the International aisle where people were looking for things like unsweetened canned coconut milk. PCC does cater a lot to vegans and vegetarians after all, and one memorably customer was a young Black woman telling me her boyfriend had just turned vegan three weeks ago and was very serious about it (this is absolultey a biased point of view, but it made me wonder if her boyfriend was white); I talked with her quite a lot about different veggie meat products, of which she bought a lot, probably more than she really needed. But then again, she can use it for other meals later!

I was surprised not one person asked me this year where they could find marshmallows. I got several people asking for that in Columbia City last year. I wonder if it's a difference of neighborhood community demographics? The Columbia City store serves the Jewish Community more than any other store; the Central District store, is now in the neighorbood with the largest Black community. I can't imagine Jewish people eat more marshmallows on average than Black people, though? This is all probably just random coincidence. Maybe Zaira got all the customers looking for marshmallows! I got the ones looking for condensed milk and, several times actually, applesauce.

I still wish I'd thought to take one or two photos at the store on Tuesday, but I only got any photos on Wednesday. I tried to get an exterior shot of the store from across the street, and only discovered on my computer later that I moved my phone too quickly after clicking and accidentally just too a shot of the crosswalk. I did manage to get this selfie in my new filtered mask that I took outside the store right after putting it on; Darrell, the VP of Merchandising, happened to be there briefly, shortly after I arrived, and he said he had everyone's mask (they bought one for all of us in Merchandising) in his car and would I like mine. Of course I said yes, and while I would say it was arguably easier to breathe through than the standard mask I've been wearing since it finally arrived from Amazon in May, it also has this vertical ridge in the center that I didn't even realize was rubbing my nose in such a way that, at the end of the day, the ridge of my nose was literally rubbed sore.

I'd say the shift on Wednesday went overall faster than Tuesday, but still how quickly the time passed depended on how busy I was, either pacing aisles or helping customers. Unlike last year, I never bothered taking a break during these shifts; I never felt like it was taking enough out of me. At Columbia City last year, I spent a fair amount of time fetching shopping carts from the garage and that was surprisingly physically taxing. I never did any more than walk the aisles facing product or helping customers this year, although just being on my feet for four hours straight did start to make my legs ache about halfway through Wednesday's shift.

I did have one moderately embarrassing moment, when I was attempting to face aseptic soups, wondering why the hell the shelf was so empty and what was left was all the way in the back. I started moving those forward, and a young man who works at the store came by with a cart full of product and told me he was about to stock it. Oops! I quickly moved out of the way, and just like everyone else who works there, he was incredibly nice about it: "Thank you though, I really appreciate it." So he was thanking me for my good intentions even though I was about to, unwittingly, make his job more difficult. At least he caught me just in time. I suppose after enough years of doing this I'll gain a better understanding of how these things work and will more easily avoid embarrasing myself.

That is, unless I can get out of it by taking time off to travel out of town for Thanksgiving! I have already made a commitment in my mind to go back to Palm Springs to have Thanksgiving with Faith next year. Realistically though, we'll probably fly down on Thanksgiving morning itself to save money, in which case I'll likely still work these shifts again next year and every year indefinitely thereafter.

It won't be so bad.

[posted 12:31 pm]