— चार हजार सात सौ इक्कीस —

Holy crap, what a stressful morning at work this has been. Or this morning at home, doing work. From home.

I'm already on an unusually tight turnaround schedule for the June ads, for which the deadline would normally have been Friday, but because of another processing schedule that every few months creates this issue, I was unable to tend to those retails until today. But, there's also this major project regarding bulk items going on, for which I have very little detail but I know it has to do with the pandemic making it so all bulk items now need to be sold pre-packaged for the foreseeable future. Beth from Category Management sent out this file with 96 skus on it that apparently she needed me to add to the system with new versions of codes for scales . . . but, that was sent at 5:09 on Friday, 39 minutes after I quit work. I didn't even know about it until she IMed me this morning to ask what the status was, something she is seriously annoyingly wont to do, constantly asking the status of tasks I could not possibly be done with yet. In this case her instant-message was my first notice of it at all.

Breathe. I still have a job! My job is secure! That woman annoys the hell out of me! I still try to keep in mind that from her point of view, she is still literally just doing her job. You see? I try to be fair!

I wound up on a Zoom call with Eric (my boss, the Pricing Manager), Jared and Cathryn, for us all to discuss how we could divvy up this bulk task so it gets done much more quickly. The last time I did Zoom on the work laptop it worked fine, but for some reason the sound was only coming through my headset, which took me a few minutes to figure out, after which it took me another couple minutes to figure out I had myself muted. I finally got my shit together though and we made a plan, and got to work. I wanted to finish with that before writing up today's DLU though, and that's the solitary reason why this is getting posted a little later than usual.

And that's after taking a brief break to still eat a baked frozen burrito for lunch, because I insisted on still eating at noon as usual, and then adding another 10 skus after returning to my desk. I took 10 of Cathryn's list because Eric gave me a list of 30 and a full third of those ones had already been done last week; I only had to correct retails and case packs on those.

Anyway, I'm feeling more relaxed and like my work load is manageable(ish) now.

— चार हजार सात सौ इक्कीस —

I guess now I could tell you about my Virtual Happy Hour with Laney on Friday evening—now the second one we've had to do that way. There's a sort of upside to doing these now, as Laney plans to retire next year and go traveling in her van for a year or two around the country, during which she still wants to do our monthly happy hours, and we had already talked about doing them via Skype. So, last month and this month are serving as dry-runs of something we planned to be doing by next year anyway. And, it's working out quite well under the circumstances.

This did just occur to me: she might want to consider specifically waiting to embark on that adventure until she's had access to a COVID-19 vaccine. And that should happen sometime next year, but probably not until several months into it. I should mention that to her and see what she has to say about it.

I decided not to make my cocktails too complicated this time around: just rum in Zevia Cherry Cola. I had two of those, two shots each, and got a pretty good buzz going on. After the whole weekend has finished, I'm beginning to feel like vodka gives me more of a hangover than rum does. That's kind of bummer, I like vodka. I may test that more deliberately again, say, next weekend.

This time, instead of getting on Skype with her on my desktop computer like last month, I used my iPad. This way I could set the ipad on one of the end tables out in the living room and sit on the love seat in the brightness of the day's early evening sunshine. Laney still sat in her bedroom like before; Jessica only came in to say hi as she was apparently watching some show on a computer out in their living room. So, Laney gets a Social Review point for this but Jessica doesn't.

Of course most of what Laney and I talked about was coronavirus-related. What the hell else is there to talk about? Still, we stayed online together a full couple of hours, which was nice, and longer than the 90 minutes she had managed last month. We both felt like it was great to get to see each other's faces again, and we'll do it an extra time for my Birth Week in a couple of weeks.

— चार हजार सात सौ इक्कीस —

— चार हजार सात सौ इक्कीस —

Then, on Saturday, when Shobhit had another 11-7:30 shift, I managed to make my day feel pretty full: I did laundry that morning, and then soon after Shobhit left for work, I rode my bike to the office to swap out back door receiving paperwork. I might have otherwise done that Friday evening, except I spent the evening drinking with Laney on Skype.

I did not stay at the office long, but I did stay long enough just to kind of take it in and appreciate what I always loved about it. Namely, the views. I also made myself a London Fog tea latte, so I stayed long enough to finish that as well, although that was not difficult. Filing away all the receiving invoices in their proper store folders takes several minutes. I then grabbed the next stack of paperwork representing unreconciled receiver discrepancies, and I rode my bike back home again.

That bike ride alone gave me some real joy. It was my first bike ride since putting the bike away for the winter in the fall. And Seattle had some beautiful weather this weekend—to such a degree that the city went out of its way to close its largest parks, just to prevent crowds from gathering in them.

Once I got home, I watched Onward, the latest Pixar movie, on Disney+. It's the first movie by that animation studio that I did not see in theaters since Cars 3—and that movie I had deliberately avoided; I really wanted to see this one in theaters, although I knew it was not going to be one of their best. Every time that happens I spend arguably too much time in my review discussing that, but, whatever. This was also unique in that I decided to go ahead and write and post a review of this movie, which was my first posted review since February. It gave me something to do to pass the time on Saturday, and it was fairly easy to rationalize knowing that if the pandemic were not happening, that movie would still be in theaters and I would have seen it and posted the review already weeks ago.

Studios are offering several other first-run movies as streaming options right now too, but at insanely stupid prices: even if it means a long and unprecedented hiatus in my writing and posting movie reviews, I cannot justify paying twenty bucks to watch a single movie, when prior to all this I was paying AMC Theaters $24 a month to see up to three movies a week. I just don't see a workable return on investment for paying twenty bucks to watch a single movie.

After Shobhit got home and we made dinner Saturday night, we watched Defending Your Life on HBO Go.

Beyond that, I already posted an entry to tell all about yesterday, a rare Sunday blog post, so that I would have a stand-alone post detailing the Easter holiday. It's been interesting over the past four weeks, discovering how well we all adapt to this new reality, after initial weeks of some level of mixture of worry, depression, anxiety and despair. Several of those words I think are too strong to apply to me quite accurately, but for a few weeks there I was certainly closer to all those things than has been my default state in many years. I was certainly lonely. Spending time on video chats with friends and family really makes a massive, monumental difference. And given the circumstances, and all the attendant disappointments (not least of which was the inability to get together in person with family yesterday), all in all I actually had a pretty good weekend. It may have all been virtual, but I did see Karen for lunch on Thursday; Laney for Happy Hour on Friday; Gabriel for a few minutes yesterday afternoon; and I did hang out with family on Zoom for over an hour. I also spoke to Mom on the phone yesterday. Come to think of it, all these things combined to make it probably the best weekend I've had since self-isolating began. One more time: I have all that to be grateful for, at least.

— चार हजार सात सौ इक्कीस —

[posted 1:31 pm]