bread, etc
Shobhit and I went out for dinner last night! He gets a Social Review point! Woo hoo!
I suppose I should say we "sort of" went out for dinner. We did get food from a restaurant, but we did not eat at the restaurant. It was Shobhit's idea to order from Pizzeria Pulcinella, which we had eaten at twice before: with Mimi during my Birth Week in 2018; and then with Danielle after we joined her to go to the Museum of Glass in Tacoma in September that same year. Shobhit has mentioned returning there in passing several times since, but only this time did we actually go. It is indeed in Seattle proper, but still a ways away from home—in terms of drive time, in fact, it's as far away from our condo as it is from Danielle's house in Renton, right in the middle. I thought about seeing if Danielle wanted to join us last night but I never did, I decided to keep the evening for just Shobhit and me.
Also, thanks to the lockdown-necessitating measure of virtually all restaurants offering online ordering for takeout, I didn't even have to place a phone call: I made the order for two pizzas on their website using my phone, only a little ways into our drive down there, and the pizzas were actually ready for pickup as soon as we arrived.
Seward Park is not far from there, so that's where we took our pizzas, conveniently having the blanket tote still in the trunk of our car. Seattle parks remain closed to car traffic, with their parking lots blocked off except for disabled parking, so we did have to find street parking a few blocks away and then walk. But, that was fine. And as you can see, we found a lovely spot to sit in the grass and eat our pizza for dinner, right next to the waters of Lake Washington, where we hung out and just basically chilled for maybe an hour. I was actually ready to leave even before Shobhit was, as the bugs were coming out in force as the sun began to set.
There was also a group of kids (kids, to me . . . probably in their twenties) shooting a rap video near us, which was more amusing than annoying. They had what looked like pretty nice camera equipment, not just using a regular camcorder or phone. One of them was using a vape of some kind, producing lots of smoke, presumably for effect.
We had also stopped by the Central District PCC on our way down, and did just a little bit of shopping. We had two BOGO coupons for bread to use, and now we have more bread at home than I think we may have ever had at one time before: four new loafs as of last night, in addition to the probably four bread items we still have leftover from the six we got at Great Harvest Bakery Co. in Bellingham at Ivan's suggestion last Friday. I should start eating more sandwiches for meals for a while, or else some of this bread is going to go bad, even with bread-hound Shobhit around! At least the fresh breads we got at PCC were sealed in plastic even inside the paper sacks, clearly a COVID-19 precaution.
Thanks overall to our lovely, very pleasant outing with pretty perfect weather (I just barely did not need a jacket, although I did bring a hoodie as insurance), we really did not spend any time watching TV last night. Or at least, we didn't together—Shobhit did for a bit after we got home. I needed to process a few new photos and update my budget, after spending a combined $81 on groceries and dinner. I had not expected that, but it's all good.
Speaking of finances, I don't think I have mentioned this yet: Shobhit and I—or if you want to get really technical, I—covered the cost of Mom's cremation. We paid for cremation itself (by far the majority of the cost); the cheapest urn option since even Christopher already acknowledged "she'll eventually be planted as a tree"; and two death certificates—I decided we should get two so I could keep a copy and Christopher could keep one. The total came to $1,817; $1,750 of that was just for the cremation.
Now, Danielle has already told me she "shopped around" for the best pricing for cremation when her dad died in 2015, and she texted me last weekend that "If I recall dad's cremation was under $1k," so there is little doubt in my mind that had I really wanted to find it, I could have gotten Mom cremated for less. But! The way I see it, I had a lot of good reasons to just accept this price, not least of which was that I was not actually over there dealing with any of this in person; Christopher was, and he had far more than enough to deal with, without me penny pinching the cost of Mom's cremation. Secondly, this funeral home in Kellogg, Idaho is by far the closest one to Wallace, where Mom and Bill's house is. I did find a couple of places with lower listed cremation cost in Coeur d'Alene, and although that was literally the city in which Mom died and Christopher drives through it regularly on his way to Spokane to see Christian and Braeden, I still felt it would be easier for him if the funeral home that took care of things was closer to home, especially since he would have to go back and forth for things like getting documents for Bill to sign.
I have found some information online to suggest that cremation is actually on average more expensive in rural areas. They did drive to Coeur d'Alene and to Kootenai Health to pick up her body and bring it back, after all, and Kellogg is about 40 miles from there. And since I never actually went over there through this entire process of Mom's hospitalization and death, I felt I had no justification for getting invasive in any other way. Shobhit and I talked even while we were at Long Beach about how we will probably need to cover cremation expenses, and after I told Christopher to let me know if we can help in that area because I did not want Bill to have to worry about it, he told me all he had was what was left of his stimulus check. I didn't want him to have to use any of that for this either.
Besides, over the past several months I had already been setting money aside from each paycheck, both for "possible emergency mortgage payments" and "future travel expenses." As it happened, the amount set aside from that was more than enough to cover this expense, with still enough leftover to cover our hotel when we stay in Wallace next month. I didn't even have to cut into my savings account, which I really thought I was going to have to do. And when I am that well positioned financially, there is truly no reason for me to expect Bill or Christopher to cover that cost, when they really can't afford it at all.
That said, I did get an email from Uncle David in Australia, offering to cover half the expense. I never did tell him how much it was, and I assured him it was no hardship for us to cover it, but if he still wanted to contribute anything then he was welcome to. I wanted to leave that option open just in case the issue was that he wanted to feel like he helped in some way, which is often the motivation in things like this. I haven't heard back again about it though so I'm going to assume that's the end of that, which is fine.
[posted 12:34 pm]