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I guess I'll have to make this quick today. I'm on deadline with August ads and I have a lot of work to get done in the next couple of days, what with my taking Monday and Tuesday off so Shobhit and I can take a short trip to the ocean. I may wind up working on some back door receiving stuff on Saturday but hopefully not, we'll see.

I was going to embed photos into today's DLU of the new Central District PCC store which had its opening day yesterday, but after I briefly forgot about that and did all the formatting for these photos instead, I decided against it. I mean, the store is great and all but the photos themselves are really not DLU caliber. But hey, you can check out the photos here: they include "before" shots I took during a brief visit to the space back in January with Scott and Noah. I think I did a pretty damned good job of realigning the "after" photos to make them nearly the exact same spot.

Of course, when I took those photos in January, I thought the "after" photos would be taken after store opening in April. That got delayed two months thanks to COVID-19. It's been a wild three months, has it not? Even with the delay, this remained an unusually quick turnaround between store location announcement and actual opening date, thanks to the abandonment of the space by New Seasons, which had already constructed most of the fixtures quite a while ago, something like a year or two.

Anyway! I spent part of my lunch break yesterday to ride my bike down there to check it out. I had been thinking I would wait, but then Scott emailed me to ask if I was going to. And when I said I was afraid of contributing to crowds, he said there was not a huge crowd there. It actually was kind of surprisingly busy by lunch time, but it still wasn't too bad. Oh, that's the other thing I never would have thought to expect when visiting in January: that the "after" photos would include customers who without exception were wearing masks.

I emailed the "before & after" photos to the "All Office" email alias shortly after returning, and it sure has been appreciated—maybe because so many others are not as close as I am and don't have as easy access to check it out in person. Thus far I have received responses from 22 people thanking me for sending those photos out, including Scott, Eric (my boss) and even Justine (their boss), who said she should do the same thing with the opening of the Bellevue store later this summer.

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As for the rest of the evening last night, before Shobhit got home I watched the very sad, insanely critically acclaimed anime feature film Grave of the Fireflies on Hulu. Karen who used to work at PCC emailed me about it literally two years ago, in 2018, and we discussed it for a bit; it's been on my list to watch but I didn't get around to it until now. It didn't bum me out as much as I thought it might, and although I usually dislike anime without exception, this one became an exception: it has unusually straightforward storytelling in it. It wasn't quite as impactful as I expected, and it probably would have been maybe twenty years ago (although it was made in 1988), but I actually still would recommend it. I had to email Karen again to let her know I saw it.

I made myself a mini quesadilla for dinner. It had two kinds of cheeses, sliced tomato, and mushrooms that had been sliced and sautéed in olive oil. It was both simple and fucking fantastic. Shobhit had leftovers of what he made the previous night when he got home from work.

And then we watched another couple episodes of season three, definitely officially now my favorite season, of Ozark. Four episodes left!

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[posted 12:41 pm]