It's Memorial Day.

This is the first time I've had a holiday-pay three-day weekend since working from home started. When I'm stuck at home for a "holiday" without any real means of making it anything really like a holiday, well . . . turns out it doesn't work that well for me. I've spent a lot of the weekend feeling an uncharacteristic amount of melancholy, what with all this time to myself while Shobhit has continued to leave for work shifts every day, and I just have a lot of time to reflect on how shitty a state the world is in, at least when I'm not watching endless episodes of television.

I mean, I did take the one day off for my birthday at the end of April, in the middle of my Birth Week. But there are four key differences between that day off and this one: 1) that was a voluntary PTO day when everyone else on PCC office staff was working; 2) it was midweek, on a Thursday, so this is my first consecutive three days of not working since the Australia trip in March; 3) Shobhit had also taken the day off on my birthday so he could spend the day with me, and today he is working; and perhaps most notably, 4) the day off for my birthday was full of planned activity, even a short drive a short way out of town. Today, I'm writing this post that's not even a regular Daily Lunch Update (DLU) more as just to give myself something to do than anything else.

I've spent more time than I've cared for this weekend just feeling kind of lonely and sad. Not to any major degree, mind you—but it's there. Feeling such things at all is unusual for me.

That said, I am also deliberately writing about the weekend today to save myself tomorrow when I will no doubt be catching up, at least to some small degree, for having taken today off. Still I am refusing even to open my work laptop today. That would be stupid considering I am getting holiday pay for today whether I work or not. I wouldn't be so stupid as to make that a waste.

Somewhat of a side note: all of the above, and a bit more to come, I am re-writing, because Firefox fucking crashed, I had to restart my computer to make the browser work at all again, and not one bit of what I had written could be recovered because Squarespace, annoyingly, does not have an auto-save feature. As a result, I'm going to wind up posting this around the same time I usually post a DLU anyway. I'm still not numbering it in Hindi script like I usually do, and will include only two photos istead of three.

Anyway! Alexia had canceled joining me for a walk to my office on Friday night, and so I didn't bother going after work that day myself either; I just stayed home and finished the last two episodes of Undone—which I loved—on Amazon Prime, finishing just as Shobhit got home from work around 8:45. Since then, every night I have made chai and had it ready for us to drink as soon as he got home. I have typically put booze in mine.

So, on Saturday I rode my bike to the office and back instead of walking. That saved some time and gave me a better workout, particularly on my ride back—riding back up the hill on Pike and Pine really knocked the wind out of me. I have no idea why it was so much more of a challenge than the previous couple of times I rode down there and back, but it was. Also I stopped at Bartell Drugs to buy a photo frame, to replace the one Shobhit broke several months ago when he knocked an old photo of the two of us off the wall next to the guest bathroom door. Except when I got home I discovered I bought the wrong size frame. Oops. I found another frame to put this photo in, and will just use this new frame for something else one of these days.

When I arrived at the office, I happened to see Sue coming out of the building, when I was still maybe thirty or forty feet away from her. She had a mask on; I did not have mine on, as I don't wear it when cycling. But, I wasn't hear anybody. I called out to her, "Hi Sue!" She called back at me, asking how I was doing. When I said, "Good, how are you?" she had a perhaps more honest response: "Hangin' in there." Aren't we all.

After that, I came home and then finally started the HBO series that ran 2014-2017 called The Leftovers. I've had it on "My List" in the HBO app for ages, especially after critics have hailed seasons 2 and 3 as some of the best television ever made . . . I just always avoided it after reading a review of season 1 that called it "relentelessly grim." I was like, No thanks! Why would I want to watch somethng that was "relentlessly grim"? Well, the world is so grim now in real life that, so far at least—I'm slightly more than three episodes in—the show hardly seems that grim by comparison. If I ever got around to watching the show, I suppose now is the time. In fact, the stay-home orders, and all the business closures, have become the one scenario in which I am consistently able to get to shows I always had on "my list" but just had no time to watch them all. Maybe now I can finally watch Dear White People or Atlanta or even The Sopranos or . . . all of them?

I did kind of hang out with Danielle over dinner on FaceTime Saturday evening, again before Shobhit got home from work. That was nice. I just wanted to talk to a friend for a while. Danielle is a working nurse so she hardly has time to get bored or cabin fever or anything like that. She takes her kids to places they can go hiking sometimes.

She was making soup, and I was using the last of a kind of soup as well—Shobhit's "sambar," which we had been living off the leftovers of for something like four days. We chatted about the usual stuff, much of it COVID-19 related, and kind of caught up otherwise. We weren't on for even an hour, I don't think, and there was a brief break so she could take soup over to Patrick's to feed him and the girls. Danielle later posted nice photos of the girls and her having a bonfire in their yard at Danielle's house. Patrick does not live far from them and so she was back and calling me back within minutes, but after a while she got off so she could watch a show of her own.

Then, yesterday, I texted Alexia next door to ask if she wanted to join me for a walk to Volunteer Park and back. This is a walk she takes herself often, and she was up for that, as round trip it's about half the distance of walking to my office. She even said specifically she wasn't up for the longer walk, and she told me while we walked about how she was so tired from the previous work week that not only had she canceled walking with me on Friday, she also had to bow out of the 15-mile hike she had planned with a friend on Saturday. But, thankfully, she felt much better yesterday.

She's also been doing a lot of cooking, and had literally minutes before we left, finished backing a batch of snickerdoodle cookies. She offered me some and I texted back, Absolutely!! I don't know how safe that was, accepting food from a neighbor, but at least they had just finished backing and so they hadn't sat inside her condo outside the oven for any real period of time, and she had a mask on when she delivered them to me. There were six cookies, and I ate one very soon after I got back, and had another two with last night's chai. They were excellent and wonderfully chewy. She had even told me they were chewy and I told her that's the only way cookies should be.

It was a rather nice day yesterday, and even though this was an easier walk than any other walk I have taken since "lockdown" started, I had not been to Volunteer Park at all since before all this. And it's spring, so there was a lot of flowers in bloom there, as you can see from the photo at the top of this post.

Alexia even suggested we climb to the top of the water tower. I was surprised it was even open. Sometone had marked the two entrances on either side as one-way up or down, and I did not realize until we came back down that we had gone up the down-only staircase. And we did pass someone coming up when we were on our way back down, who then was going the wrong way while we were going the right way, but we had done the very same as him on our way up. Also, chance of infection from just passing someone is very slim, especially with masks on, which all of us had. This was my first time going up those stairs with a face mask on—it never would have occurred to me there would come a day when such a thing would become necessary—and climbing it without a mask is hard enough. We really had to pace oursevlves.

I can never resist the view from up there though, which you can see in the photo below.

I spent the rest of yesterday either watching The Leftovers, or zonking out to take a nap on the couch in the late afternoon, or finishing up the Amazon Prime Original series Hunters with Shobhit after he got home from work. We also did the Washington Post online crossword puzzle.

Oh, another thing I had written in my draft that got lost: I am also writing this post now to save myself the time of writing about my whole weekend tomorrow while I'm working, as I'm sure that to at least some degree I'll be catching up from another day off of work. I refuse to even open my work laptop today, because I get holiday pay for today no matter what and it would be senseless to make that go to waste. And, it did give me something to do for a bit today.

Now I need to come up with some other ideas, besides watching more TV, which I am sure I will also do. Before Shobhit left for work he suggested starting work on my 2021 calendars, which I may actually do, either today or soon. I do also need to make Mom's birthday card, I just remembered. I do have things to get done. Still, I remain grateful I have a job, as my life would feel so much less purposeful right now without it.

That reminds me, Ivan has been messaging me about how we'll be coming back to Seattle soon-ish. He's definitely done with New Zealand but wants to give the pandemic a bit more time, and also still visit a friend in Australia first, so he seems to be thinking late summer. That would leave him having been in New Zealand one full year, which was what he was intending from the start anyway; I had actually been assuming the pandemic would keep him there longer. But, lockdown there has been pretty pyschologically hard on him, it's been very difficult for him to find work there, and he wants to have a job again too.

We haven't talked yet about whether he'll just move back in with us again, for a third time, which I am basically expecting since all his stuff is still here. What we'll do about him paying rent and the like will still need to be ironed out, but I am assuming he'll prefer to stay here over trying to find some new place to live, especially in the middle of a pandemic. That part was also concerning me: every job he had in Seattle while living with me was at assisted living facilities, the very places the pandemic has hit hardest! That worried me, but he seems intent on finding a job scenario where he does in-home care for just one person, and he says there are plenty such jobs available. I'm much more comfortable with that. So, we'll see. Also, we have until July or August to worry much more about it.

So I guess that about covers the weekend so far. Shobhit's and my anniversary is June 14, but Shobhit already knows he has to work that day, so at the moment we are looking at Sunday-Tuesday the following week, June 21-23, for our "anniversary trip" renting a yurt at Kayak Point, as Karen had suggested. I'm concerned about King County, and probably also Snohomish County (where Kayak Point is), not likely to be able to move to "phase 2" of reopening the state economy by June 1 as initially hoped, but the "Yurt Village" is indeed open for reservations as of June right now, so for the moment I guess we're just assuming it'll be okay. Shobhit major concern this morning was about getting bored . . . I mean, jesus. It's clearly a very pretty area, and I just want a change of scenery for a couple of days. There are parks all over, but I also don't want to be on the go the entire time. I'd love to just relax in a natual environment for a bit.

[posted 12:23 pm]