detour
Whoa. I let my morning get away from me today. I got distracted! By doing actual work!
I did not walk home yesterday, as I bussed down to the 4th Avenue Costco to pick up a digital print from a sort of design I made for Uncle David and Mary Ann, a gift as both a thank you for their generosity and also a slightly belated birthday present for Uncle David, as his birthday will be two days before we fly out to Adelaide from Melbourne. Stupidly, I did not check the print until I was out at the bus stop and the bus was in sight, but I had to go back inside and see if the woman could fix it. She gave me this "for future reference" spiel as though I had not done the online order correctly, even though the online order had zero clarity as far as what I ordered, and the online preview had not been with the bottom portion of the image cut off. She did reprint it for me, and so the bottom portion was ideal, but it still put the text I had at the top right along the white bordered edge even though the original image was not that way. I find this very annoying and keep thinking about sucking it up and paying the price that's twice as much (but still only, like four bucks) at Bartell Drugs. Except, Bartells has fewer print size options and that will result in the overall image being smaller, so I'm kind of screwed either way. I'm thinking I will stick with the print I've got and just see how I might be able to mitigate that with the custom framing I also intend to pay for.
In any case, that detour meant that even though Shobhit worked at Big 5 in Northgate until 6:00, he still got home before I did. He decided he wanted to use up the bok choy we still had in the refrigerator, but he also wanted to go to Trader Joe's and get a few other vegetables. We came back and made a gigantic pot of orzo pasta with the bok choy and a bunch of other vegetables, peanuts, and tofu. I'm never that crazy about bok choy but this dish was still actually pretty good, and we're also set for lunches for the rest of the week.
That still took up a lot of our evening, and Shobhit was otherwise absorbed with news on the Iowa Caucuses. I needed to do something for Sherri anyway, so I spent the better part of an hour working on that: identifying and finding the original photo files for the best photos I could find of both the Shipwreck Café restaurants, for a local article being done about Dad and Sherri and their recent retirement after 24 years as Olympia business owners. I found about eight of them, although I don't know that maybe one or two of them are even that likely to get chosen for a news story. I really wish now that I had taken any exterior shots of the old restaurant on Martin Way that did not have Shobhit or another family member (like Nikki, in two of them) in odd spots in the foreground. I have no photos of just that restaurant alone from the outside, which is kind of surprising in retrospect. I have a few such photos of the Mud Bay location.
And, that about did it for my Monday this week. Just three more weeks and we leave for Australia! Of course we'll only even be there for two weeks, 12 days actually on the ground in that country. Funny how you spend exponentially more time looking forward to an experience than you do actually having that experience. On the upside—and not long ago I actually read that there is research data on this—the time will feel longer, because of the constant state of our brains taking in entirely new information. Time speeds up with routine, such as the daily grind of jobs and such, because it's the same thing over and over again. No wonder I love traveling so much!
[posted 12:17 pm]