and that's all the weekend events
I had quite the eventful weekend, two days of which yielded their own photo albums on Flickr, so I'm rather glad today that I went ahead and posted separately about both those days already: on Saturday I posted about the Virtual Pumpkin Carving Party with Gabriel, Lea, Tess and Mandy; including myself that meant five pumpkins—or more accurately, I should say, "pumpkin projects." Only Lea and I did a straightforward carving of a pumpkin; Gabriel did not hollow one out but he used two pumpkins and an accessory to create a sort of pumpkin creature based on Morris the Hundun from Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings; Tess actually hollowed out six separate tiny pumpkins to turn them into the "Infinity Stones" (also from the Marvel Cinematic Universe); and Mandy merely had a sort of felt pumpkin pouch to present us after she joined the call, as she never managed to find the time to go buy a pumpkin from the store. Shobhit did join in on the conversation for a while near the end of the FaceTime call, but he did not carve a pumpkin.
I do love the idea that this Virtual Pumpkin Carving Party might become its own new annual tradition, especially after my previous, long-running "Matthew's Friends Pumkin Carving Party" lasted from 2004-2014; the tradition was abandoned for five years, between 2015 and 2019. But, with the pandemic in full swing last year, I had come up with a virtual version of a pumpkin carving party and had suggested it to Gabriel, and off it went. My Flickr collection of pumpkin carving parties used to be called "Matthew's Friends Pumpkin Carving Parties" (thus named because it was an invitation to my friends, but in the first four years it was held at Laney's house), but after last year I finally renamed it just to "Pumpkin Carving Parties." Since 2004, there have now been 13 of them.
As for Saturday: yesterday (Sunday) I posted about the Northgate Link Light Rail Extension tour that Shobhit went on with me, to explore the three new light rail stations beyond University of Washington Station: U District Station; Roosevelt Station; and Northgate Station. I never did get around to captioning any of those photos yet—the pumpkin carving photos are all captioned—but I still hope to. It's hard to know when I'll find the time, given how many more photo albums I'll be creating quite soon: the Van Gogh "interactive experience" I'm doing with Danielle this afternoon; the Halloween Season walk through Capitol Hill probably on Friday; four days of Las Vegas (probably three photo albums, as the last day is just the travel back home) starting Saturday. Sheesh! I was just thinking yesterday about when I might actually start slowing down again in my life—barring being forced to by something like a pandemic, as happened in 2020—but the thing is, I so love doing all of the things I do!
And, incidentally, Shobhit gets a Social Review point for all three days of the weekend (counting Friday)! Because yesterday, he went ahead and joined me for a movie at Pacific Place, going to see The French Dispatch with me at noon. I liked it fine, as I tend to with all Wes Anderson movies; Shobhit guessed I'd be giving it either a B or a B+ (I gave it a solid B). Interestingly, though, he really seemed to have a good time at that movie, which honestly surprised me. He either giggled or outright laughed way more than I did, throughout the whole movie but especially in the segment starring Frances McDormand and Timothée Chalamet, which he immediately proclaimed his favorite: "That one was hilarious," he said.
The movie is just under two hours long, but between trailers that run beforehand, and the time it took to get home afterword, it was nearly 3:00 by the time we got back. We actually tried to run for two blocks just to barely miss the #11, so we caught the #49 that came just a few minutes later, but still had to walk the last six blocks from Broadway. It was raining rather hard; I opted not to bring my umbrella but was relying on my new North Face rain jacket. It works well, except that as windy as it was, I was still getting whipped in the face with rain (which would have made holding an umbrella unduly difficult anyway).
In any case, I had written by blog post about the light rail tour in the morning. Then we went to the movie. Then we came home and I wrote the review. Then, I went ahead and finally watched the fifth of the six Las Vegas movies (now that I had gone ahead and added Ocean's Eleven) I had listed to watch before our trip this weekend: The Hangover. It was a fun watch, much of it still very funny, although some of it has aged very badly—two different moments of casually homophobic dialogue (one of which uses the word "faggot" as a punch line—twice) and another one in which the word "retard" is used twice. Shobhit commented on how all of this was effectively used to cater to the movie's target audience at the time, but that doesn't change the fact that, were that movie made today, none of that stuff would have been in it. It's really amazing how much actually has changed in our culture in just a decade, how much less we're willing to tolerate anymore. Well, those of us with any decency, anyway; the conservative right has really taken a willful turn in the other direction.
The Hangover had come out in 2009. Our next, and last, of these Las Vegas movies is the 2013 movie Last Vegas, which is basically The Hangover but with old people. I'll be interested in seeing if anything is in that, that has aged as poorly. I actually don't expect that one to be as bad. It won't be quite as funny otherwise either, but that's okay. I remember it even at the time being basically generically amusing, and I expect the same when we watch it again this week.
I had thought I might finally go caption photos after that, but then I realized we had this week's episode of Succession to watch. Shobhit didn't think it was as good an episode as last week's season premiere, and I felt the opposite.
[posted 12:27 pm]