my nutty valentine
Shobhit works tonight from 1:45 to 10:15 at Big 5 in Northgate, and I do plan to try and stay awake until he gets home, but it's not that likely that I will succeed. I also have Happy Hour with Laney this evening right after work—something I would have rescheduled for another date had Shobhit had the evening off, but there it is—and after having had some drinks, I am bound to be even more tired than usual. So, we'll see, but Shobhit is smartly expecting that I will be asleep in bed when he gets home. And so that is why, last night after he got home right after I got into bed, he suggested I skip my breakfast and computer time this morning so we could go out for a Valentine's Day breakfast.
At first I really resisted the idea. I was like, "I'd have to get up at four in the morning!" But that was when he suggested I just get up around 5:00, and go straight to getting ready. I realized, actually maybe that could work.
I did not make a truly final decision in my mind until I woke up this morning. Guru actually woke me up around 4:00, which was clearly too early. That made me realize I had to pee and there was no way I'd get back to sleep without doing that, so I got up to pee. Then it took a few minutes, but I fell back asleep, hoping I could still wake up by 5:00. I woke up at 5:10 instead. I also had push-ups and planks to do this morning, so I was not able to really get started on getting ready until 5:16. That still put me at half an hour ahead of schedule, though, so once I was done with brushing my teeth, flossing and shaving and was about to get into the shower, I woke Shobhit up to tell him we could go out for breakfast if he wanted.
He got up not long after I got out of the shower, and he looked up places to go eat. He found a place on Lower Queen Anne called Mecca Café, which is all of about half a mile from my office. I also offered up Lost Lake Café on Capitol Hill, the only 24-hour diner on the hill, but in the end we agreed the location of Mecca Café was better because that way he would not still be driving me through downtown the morning of a weekday after we were done eating. This way, once we were done, it was all of a five-minute drive.
Also, protip! I great way to stretch your dollar for Valentine's Day is to use a Groupon for breakfast! It was just kind of a lucky break that I found a Groupon deal for this place: $25 value for $13.40. There is always "fine print" with all sorts of restrictions, including for federal holidays as well as breakfast on Easter. But, Easter is a big "brunch" day for restaurants, but nobody goes out for breakfast on Valentine's Day. Except us! So, Valentine's Day morning was not included in the deal's predictably many restrictions.
Mecca Café is on Queen Anne Avenue, right across the street from SIFF Cinema Uptown Theatre, which means I have looked at it many times from across the street while in line for movies. But, this was my first time eating there, and it has a lovely old-school diner vibe, the kind both Shobhit and I have a bit of a soft spot for. This joint is not especially large, though, although it does go deep from the front door: a narrow space with one row of booths along the wall to the left, and bar seating most of the way down on the right. They opened at 6 a.m. and we were there just after 6:30 and were the first customers of the day. By the time we were done at around 7:15, two other booths had people in them.
Honestly, I found the menu to be surprisingly pricy for the type of place it is, even by Seattle standards: Lost Lake is definitely cheaper. The entrees at Mecca average around $15 a plate, and the serving sizes are not huge. They are not small either, mind you; technically they almost certainly still have far more calories than one should eat at one meal. Shobhit ordered a build-your-own omelet with three vegetables, and I ordered a Californian Benedict with the avocado on the side—the waitress was so attuned to what we were doing, after Shobhit noted he would just take my avocadoes, that when she delivered the plates, she tilted the side-plate of sliced avocado right onto the top of his omelet. Still, he moved them aside to cut the omelet in half and give me half of it, and I shared one side of my benedict with him. We both made an effort not to eat all of our hash browns even though they were delicious. As were the dishes overall: the food was impressive enough that it made the price feel a lot more worth it. Much like Glo's on Capitol Hill. (Lost Lake may be cheaper, but their food is also not nearly as good.) We both liked the food here so much we will probably be back.
We did make sure the waitress got a tip that accounted for the entire value of the check, not just what we paid after applying the Groupon. I'm sure people make that mistake constantly, and the service here was so good that I encouraged Shobhit to give an even better tip than normal. Which he actually did, albeit by only a little. He even factored in the free coffee he got by checking in on Yelp, the kind of social media coupon restaurants don't do nearly as much as they used to anymore. Without that coupon and the Groupon, our breakfasts for two this morning would have easily cost close to $40.
On our walk back to the car, Shobhit asked, "Are you glad we did this?" After initially resisting the idea, I admitted I was indeed glad. Shobhit made several kissing noises. Then he drove me the rest of the way to work.
And that was when the weird part of this morning happened.
Shobhit pulled up in front of my building, I got out of the car, and went to the building entrance. A guy on a bicycle rode right up to the door as I walked through, and he came in behind me, following me into the elevator I took. I truly thought nothing of any of this. Why? Because it's a weekday morning at a building with offices on six of its seven floors, each of which would have at least 100 employees, more on the lower floors (the square footage shrinks slightly as the floors go up, due to the stair step-like setbacks of each floor's patio on the south end). At 7:20 a.m. THIS IS NORMAL. People come to work! Seriously, Shobhit is the only person on the planet who would have looked at this scene and interpreted it to be dangerous.
I really had to use the bathroom when I got to my desk. So after I booted up my computer, I went to use the toilet, which took several minutes. I forgot to bring my phone with me. A lot of people think you should not have your phone with you in the bathroom anyway, although I usually do. This time, it was in my jacket pocket. There is a little table outside the men's room door where you can set certain things you don't want to bring into the toilet with you, like paperwork or dishes, and I set my PCC tumbler there. So after using the bathroom, I went straight from there to the kitchen to pour myself my usual morning tea.
I finally got back to my desk, pulled my phone out of my jacket pocket, and the latest text from Shobhit was visible even without my unlocking it: I'm gonna call 911. What the fuck?!
I unlocked the phone to view all four of his texts, which appeared like this:
7:20: Did you know that guy?
7:21: Pop [this would certainly be a typo of some kind]
7:26: You okay?
7:35: I'm gonna call 911
First, a couple of quick notes. No, I did not know that guy. Not that it matters; I only know people on one of the six floors people work on in this building, and I don't even know all of them! Also, I believe he even used his own key card to access the 4th floor in the elevator, which the building requires anytime earlier than I think 8 a.m., for not all floors but for some of them (including mine).
That last text came only moments before I finally saw my phone, thankfully, and it seems to have been an idle threat; he did not actually call 911. I'm a little annoyed he texted that at all, as it made me worry, quite obviously, that something terrible was happening either to or near him!
But, I called him and it immediately became clear that this was all just about that cyclist who came in the door behind me, without me letting the door close behind him. The building door's locks, requiring a key card even to get in there, usually don't come undone until 7:30; lately they've been unlocking a few minutes early. I tried to explain to Shobhit that the doors were unlocked anyway but he was too worked up to listen, gasping for straws, as he often does when irrationally angry, to justify his upset: somehow in his mind the fact that the guy had been riding his bike without a helmet made him more likely to be some kind of criminal. Okay, so let me say this just once more: What the fuck?
I had to explain to him three times that there was no reason for me not to assume he was just some other person who works in the building. It's not like I was coming into the building with some rando following me in at midnight. This is the start of a work day. For like ten minutes though, he was just beside himself about this. I was telling Scott about it and he said, somewhat facetiously, "Aww, he's concerned about you!" I replied, "And that's sweet, I suppose. But there's still a line, and this was beyond ridiculous." Which remains true. There was truly no rational reason for him to think there was any reason to call 911 over this.
There was a pause on the phone. He finally just said, "Okay," and we hung up the phone.
Happy Valentine's Day!
As for last night, I left work 15 minutes early to walk straight to the AMC at Pacific Place (they closed the midblock back entrance on Olive Way, which was annoying; the new snazzy entrance on the corner at 6th is a lot bigger and nicer but I had to walk another half block to get to it) to see the strange fantasy-horror movie Gretel & Hansel.
I then walked home from there, wrote my solid-B review, and spent some time after that trying to find the shoe glue Shobhit asked me to look for but I could not find it anywhere. I did find, however, the old yoga mat Shobhit actually did have after all, in the entryway closet, which he had flown off the handle at me about back in September when we thought, seemingly too late before he had a yoga reservation, he did not have a mat at home after all. I had looked everywhere, I thought, including the guest room closet, the storage room downstairs, and our master bedroom closet where I could have sworn I had seen it in the past—for some reason I never thought to look for it in the closet by the front door. I don't even know which one of us put it there, but it would have been a lot more likely to be found had Shobhit bothered to help me look for it, but he did not, because he was mad at me about something else that day (and his feelings there were actually somewhat justified, but his behavior still was not). Every once in a while, though, a discovery like this comes to light and, months later, illustrates how it's never constructive for him to throw a conniption fit over anything at all.
He wound up buying another yoga mat last fall. Well, now he has two of them.
[posted 12:20 pm]