getting things done
Boy, am I glad I did so much work on my year-end posts over the weekend. I would otherwise really feel like I was scrambling right now. As such, by yesterday all I had left to finish up on my Top 10 Movies of 2020, which I posted this morning, was nine of the "What I said then" excerpts from the original reviews. I got that done by yesterday afternoon, and in the evening I spent about an hour just getting the photos ready for the "2020 at PCC" photo digest I'll be sending out tomorrow morning, creating templates for both the email and the html version I will cross-post here on this blog. Tonight I'll write up the captions, and then I'll be all set; I have half the "2020 in Ten Minutes" video to finish reviewing and editing how the photo images either zoom or fit into the frame. But once that's done, I can also send the finished video to my files and then post it to Flickr—it's already at precisely ten minutes in length so Flickr will accommodate it. I just have to make sure it's also sent at a resolution that keeps it under the maximum 1 GB in size as well.
My evening last night was otherwise sucked up by shopping and errands: as soon as I finished work, Shobhit and I left for Redmond to go shopping at Mauyri Foods, the Indian grocery store; we returned to Seattle to stop by the Costco on 4th Avenue; and then we swung by my office so I could swap out my next stack of receiving paperwork. Shobhit had initially suggested all the stops in the opposite order, but I preferred this so that the office would be emptier when we got there.
Speaking of the office, we got notice yesterday that a person on office staff finally tested positive for COVID-19. That's really all the information that was shared, aside from the fact that the few people who had been "in close contact" with said person have also been notified and asked to quarantine—and I was not among those people, so I am not worrying about it. I am glad they have us all sign in and sign out with the time of day, though, and they've been doing that for months. I am never in there for more than fifteen minutes, and never near a particular person, so I have little reason to worry. I will say, though, that a woman who was the only one in Accounting when I was there last week was hanging out at her desk with her mask pulled under her chin, probably assuming she was okay because she was the only one in that section of the office. Except hello, we're all still indoors here; and besides, I was then walking through that space to get to where I swap out the paperwork. If she were a carrier of the virus, it would therefore be well distributed throughout the air in that space. I really should have said something to her and, stupidly, I did not have the balls.
Anyway, I'm dying to know who the person who tested positive was, but as Sara noted, it's against HIPPA laws for them to divulge it.
It's going to be very interesting to see what 2021 has in store, which I expect to have some very dark elements but also a sense of hope that had been lacking in 2020. With vaccines in their initial rollout already (Danielle, a nurse, got her initial vaccine shot about a week ago), the coming year will have many similarities to 2020 but will still manage to look like no other year in our lives, to be sure, as we slowly inch back toward, if not "normal" quite like it looked before, a post-pandemic world with greater freedoms of movement again. We'll see how that transition crashes up against further and continued effects of climate change.
Anyway! We got back home, made veggie burgers for dinner, and watched the season finale of His Dark Materials, which was all right. The show has prompted Shobhit to get the first two novels from that trilogy from the library, though, and he sure did burn through them—he also just finished the second book yesterday. It was after that when I spent an hour assembling the photos I'll use for my "2020 at PCC" retrospective.
And now, I just finished with Zoom Office Lunch Meetup #22, four people in attendance, all the biggest regulars with the exception of Brent who did not make it this week: Rebecca, Noah, Adrienne and myself. It started, as usual, with just Rebecca and myself, and she asked how my Christmas went, and eventually we all shared. In fact we all took turns sharing the same thing several times today: how our Christmas went (Adrienne came in too late for that one), how we got our jobs at PCC, what our first job was. This provided lots of fodder for filling up the hour with things to talk about, as well as when I asked Adrienne about people who must still know from Tom Douglas restaurants, as she worked for him before getting her job as the Executive Assistant at PCC. "It's pretty grim," she said, noting that all but nine of his 800 or so employees were laid off at the start of the pandemic, the staff has regrown since to all of about fifty, and she knows a whole bunch of other former employees there who now work at other places, including several who have been hired at PCC stores.
We never did discuss movies or TV this time, which was actually somewhat of a surprise as I finally got Rebecca to email out her excel template she promised she would share several weeks ago, onto which we can put in our movie and TV recommendations, along with genre and brief note about what makes it good. And since I just posted my Top Ten movies of 2020 this morning, I went ahead and quickly plugged in at least those ten to start. But, then it never came up in conversation during the call.
I'll have the evenings to myself tonight and tomorrow night, both of which Shobhit works until 9:30, which should give me the time I need to finish up my year-end work and finally be done with 2020. I do have a movie I was going to watch and review, but it can also wait a few days if need be; I don't want to over-extend myself and I figure the year-end stuff takes higher priority for the moment.
[posted 1:11 pm]