long distance happy hour
Well, shit! I just noticed this morning that the VOD price for Tenet is finally down to something reasonable: $5.99. I guess I know what I'll be watching tonight. In the old world, I would never in a million years review a movie this long after its initial theatrical release, but in the new paradigm this is literally my first chance to see the movie in any reasonable way—it was a quasi-failure as a kind of test release in theaters as the first blockbuster in the COVID-19 era, and I actually could have seen it myself, as at the time even local theaters were open at 25% capacity. I just wasn't stupid enough to put myself at risk for a movie. I love movies and I love theaters but not enough to risk catching (or spreading) a potentially fatal disease. And that was back in August. And then they released it on VOD last month, but at a cost of $19.99, which is like, fuuuuck that! I never even paid that much to see movies in theaters!
The lower price of $5.99 for VOD releases I really want to see, however, is well within my range of acceptability (though even a couple dollars more might make me think twice). And this being one of the most talked-about movies of the year, for a whole slew of reasons, really means I should see it. I never thought it would make it into my top ten for the year under any circumstances anyway, so it's really no loss to me that I've had to wait until January to watch it. Honestly I'm surprised the price has gone down even this soon.
I have a digital SIFF advanced screening tomorrow night, and at least one other major streaming release to watch and review this weekend—possibly two. So between now and the weekend, I now have either three or four movies on the slate to watch and review. One upside to the typical movie release schedule being totally upended by COVID: January is no longer the dumping ground for the unforgettable crap. Everything remains in the Oscar conversation at the moment, with release deadlines having been postponed, which means I'll still get to see plenty of good stuff this month.
In other news, Laney and I had our first Happy Hour of the year last night, and also the first since she retired and left for her full-time traveler life in her van. Her last day at her job was about halfway through December; she got rid of nearly all her stuff, packed her van, and set out on the road New Year's Day. It was super rainy for most of her drive down Highway 101 along the West Coast, and when I asked her how far south she had to get before the weather actually got nice, she said it was not until she got to the Bay Area!
The last week or so, maybe even week and a half, she's been hanging around towns right along the state line between California and Arizona. So last night she was in her van in a parking lot in Lake Havasu City, Arizona, using the wifi from a recently-closed Starbucks to talk to me. She wedged her phone into a spot among her visor and sat in the driver's seat of the van. Lake Havasu City is about 300 miles east of Los Angeles; 194 miles northwest of Phoenix; and 305 miles northwest of Tucson, where she next plans to drive, as that's where one of her sisters lives and she will visit her and her husband for a few days. She doesn't know exactly when she'll go; Laney is doing a lot of this playing it by ear.
Somewhat unsurprisingly, we were unable to make it a very long Happy Hour over Skype; we started at 5 p.m. my time—giving me thirty minutes to prepare and bake my nachos for dinner, which I managed just under the wire, along with making myself one cocktail for the occasion—but that was 6 p.m. her time, and she has been so tired from this new, surprisingly active way of living, she says she's lately usually in bed by 7:00 or so. In fact she even said around 6:00 my time (7 p.m. Mountain Time) that "I'm fading," although new topics kept coming up so we didn't actually hang up for another 45 minutes or so. Strictly speaking, according to Skype, the video chat lasted an hour and 43 minutes.
She told me about how her life of basically full-time camping actually leaves a lot less time for leisure than expected, as so many things that are simple in an apartment are much more involved and time consuming: half an hour just to make a cup of coffee, for instance. She has this bag thing that heats a couple gallons of water for three hours before she can then set it up to use as a shower at her campsite. That kind of stuff. When she's actually traveling, the back of her van is so packed with her stuff that there's only about a foot and a half square of floor space for her to put her feet if she wants to sit up in bed; the van is too small for her to stand up fully inside it. Apparently another longtime full-time traveler in the next spot over at her campsite asked why she didn't get a larger van, and Laney noted that this one drives much more like a car and gets 25 miles to the gallon, whereas larger ones get something like 15 miles per gallon. I think she made the right choice. And as long as she stays where weather is reliably decent—which is her plan—then she only ever spends her time inside the van either to drive or to sleep anyway.
I guess she does already have a kind of ongoing sunburn, even though she already uses sunscreen, so she'll need to figure out how to deal with that. And her being exhausted all the time is largely just because of a new routine that is very involved and probably just needs more time for her to settle into. I suspect that with our next Virtual Happy Hour in February, she'll be much more used to her new life and less exhausted. She is hoping to find a campground somewhere that has its own wifi so she can do Happy Hour without having to drive into a town (Lake Havasu City was larger than I might have assumed, by the way; about 52,000 people; 203,000 metropolitan—by both measures relatively comparable to Olympia), and thus can actually have a drink herself. As it was, since she had driven to the Starbucks, she just had coffee.
It was great to see and talk to her though, and genuinely exciting to talk about her new life and live vicariously through her adventure. I think this will be fun as it goes on, indefinitely.
Aside from that, I just finished with our 25th Office Lunch Meetup on Zoom—and our first on the new weekly day of Wednesday. We actually had seven people on the call today! Maybe switching it to Wednesdays made a difference. We haven't had that many since early November. Granted, we never had seven all at once, but that's okay: Adrienne, Molly, and Brent all had to leave the call before we hit the halfway mark at 12:30, but
the four leftover at that point (Rebecca, Michelle, Katherine and myself) wound up in such deep philosophical discussion covering both politics and religion, it was a bummer when Rebecca had to end the call at 12:58 so she could make it to her next meeting at 1:00.
I'm just glad I have no work meetings this week. Just the Office Lunch Meetup today, and then on Friday my FaceTime lunch with Karen—postponed from tomorrow because of her own meeting conflict. In spite of the broader craziness in the country at the moment, this week has been pretty nice and chill so far.
[posted 1:05 pm]