— पांच हजार इक्यासी —
More than once yesterday, Shobhit mentioned that we were going to Palm Springs "next week," and I kept get thrown for a loop, at least momentarily.
Next week? No, it's the week after next! Except, no, technically Shobhit was right, since the conversation was happening on Sunday: we leave a week from Tuesday.
Tuesday next week. As of now, that's a week from tomorrow.
What this means is that I have a ton of shit to get done between now and then, both outside of work but especially at work. And even though I am "working" on Monday next week, I do not plan to go into the office, as I have to fulfill the obligation—an obligation I deeply resent—to work a four-hour shift as a "holiday helper" at the Central District store that afternoon, and so I will bring my laptop and keyboard home on Friday so that I can work from home in the morning, focusing mostly on the December 1 Market Specials ad copy that I'd normally have to get finished by Tuesday or Wednesday, except, again, I'm on PTO those days.
Anyway, briefly, back to the conversation about it being next week. I found this amusingly ironic, given that Shobhit and I recently had a conversation about what day is officially the "first day of the week," because his work place time sheets all start with Monday. Apparently he never noticed how on every single American wall calendar, the week begins with Monday. But, I digress. Having learned this, I guess, he knew that speaking from yesterday, Sunday, that being the beginning of the new week, Tuesday next week is indeed
next week.
And here I am kind of wasting time with this babbling when I really want to try and get through the largely social weekend I just had, as quickly as I can, because, as I said, I have a lot to do this week.
— पांच हजार इक्यासी —
Friday evening was Virtual Happy Hour with Laney, who was near Pinnacles National Park, a little ways west of Fresno and kind of southeast of the Bay Area in California, where cell service was so bad that Skype was out of the question, and although last month we had managed to make Facebook Video work even when Skype wouldn't (when she was on the Oregon Coast), and this time she did manage to create a "room" via Facebook Messenger, we just couldn't make it work because her signal was so weak . . . so, it was just another phone-only Happy Hour. She was even concerned about the call not dropping because her bars were so low, but the phone audio quality was always great and we never got disconnected at all.
Besides, she'll be in the Palm Springs area
next week as well, and we'll be meeting for another in-person Happy Hour, probably on Wednesday. This means both that we get two Happy Hours in November, and that since I'll see her in person next week, not getting to see her virtually last week was even less of a big deal than the no-big-deal phone Happy Hours have been to begin with. I took a selfie with her name on my phone screen, and had her text me a selfie with her drink, and it still made for a
nice social media post.
I can't even remember much of what we talked about. We did talk a little bit about my experience with a trans man at the bathhouse two Fridays ago, which had left her understandably curious. She had a canned wine that had eyes on the can in her photo I found to be amusingly similar to her actual eyes, and I had hot chocolate spiked with three shots of peanut butter whiskey. It's never peanut-buttery enough when I put that whiskey into hot chocolate, but I sure like the idea of it.
Laney never stays on very long when we do our long-distance virtual Happy Hours. We chatted away on that call for an hour and 19 minutes. Later that evening, Ivan had the night off of work and so he was all about watching the tenth and final episode of
American Crime Story: Impeachment, which we did in the living room while Shobhit studied for his PMP exam in the bedroom.
— पांच हजार इक्यासी —
— पांच हजार इक्यासी —
Shobhit took that exam on Saturday morning, according to him barely finishing before the time was up after four hours at noon, and he passed with flying colors. He had been rather concerned because in the several practice tests he took at home, he kept failing by getting a score just under passing.
The kind of ironic thing is, his prep textbooks had been based on a different style of project management than most of the test was apparently based on. I actually saw a text from one of his friends from the most recent class he had taken, in which he told her it was "mostly agile," and I was just like, what? Turns out that is the
name of a project management style. The irony is, although most of his prep work had been based on another style, having the test based on Agile apparently helped him: he didn't just barely pass; he was in the "exceeds target" category which is the highest of them; he would have passed in the next one down, which was labeled "meets target." In other words, he did exceptionally well on the exam.
Not that his percentage really means much in a real-world context. Either way he can just say on his resume that he is up to date on training and is PMP Certified.
Anyway, there was apparently a downtown location where he could have taken the test, but he chose the one in Northgate because they have free parking. So, at Shobhit's request, I rode Light Rail to Northgate Station and then walked up to the testing location on 107th just to the west side of the freeway. This gave me a chance to walk the full length of the new pedestrian bridge over the freeway. And this way, we could drive straight from there to the Costco in Shoreline to do a bit of shopping. We also got some kitty treats at the Petco across the other side of that parking lot.
And then, we drove downtown, in search of the French bakery whose owner apparently regularly comes in to Total Wine & More for supplies. Shobhit thought it was on 1st and Vine, and we finally found it on
Fourth and Vine, realizing Shobhit must have misheard her from her French accent: it's called
La Parisienne, and I figured they might have sandwiches so we could get lunch there, and I was right.
Shobhit bought several other things, all delicious. We ate the sandwich at a table in the shop, which I realized I had passed on my bike several times riding up Fourth Avenue on my way to work over the spring and summer; they open quite early. When I passed them on my bike, they were clearly just open for the day, as they were never busy. Mid-afternoon on a Saturday, however, they were
very busy. We then ate the brioche bread while walking to the car, also delicious; and saved the little dessert (which was good but the least delicious) for when we got home, when we also realized the baguette Shobhit had purchased evidently got left in the store on their counter. Oops. Bummer.
— पांच हजार इक्यासी —
I spent a lot of my free time over the weekend working on this year's calendars, which does indeed take a lot of time, especially the number of photos I need for the calendar grid for birthdays and anniversaries. I need to make a note of how I can approach this next year so that the photos I need are there for each subsequent version of the calendar for the year that I create; I did this in a sequence this year that means I have to populate every calendar manually, which adds to the time it's taking. Oh well.
I had to leave the calendar work for the rest of the day in the early evening yesterday, as Shobhit invited Sachin and Kimberly over for dinner, to be guinea pigs for the
made-from-scratch calzones he made.
This idea sprang from the calzone Ivan had brought home from Palermo's for dinner on Friday, which he ate while we watched
Impeachment. This struck a desire for calzones on the part of Shobhit, who decided he'd rather try to make them than buy them from a restaurant. To be frank, the Palermo ones would have been better,
but that certainly does not take away from Shobhit's accomplishment, as they were pretty incredible for his very first hand at making them. He did learn a few lessons for the next time he does it, including using fewer ingredients; he has a propensity for really loading up dishes with lots of vegetables, which he did here as well, but he admitted that it resulted in not being able to pick up on any particularly individual ingredient flavor very well.
He made four of them, for himself, Sachin, Kimberly, and me; we baked them all together in the oven for 17 minutes, just a couple minutes longer than the 15 suggested by the online recipe I found. We kept them in the oven another minute after turning off the oven. They came out kind of perfectly cooked and browned. Shobhit then offered to bake one for Ivan when he came out of his room after sleeping for the day (he works nights, remember), and Ivan accepted, especially after Shobhit noted it would be easy to do since all the ingredients were still laid out to add to the dough, which he just needed to flatten with the roller and then fold over. We decided to put that one in for slightly less time, 17 minutes without leaving it in longer, and that was too much for cooking only one of them: it was a bit burnt. Shobhit and I both felt so bad about giving Ivan a burnt one after the others had come out so well, but Ivan kept insisting it wasn't that bad and that it was very good. He clearly didn't hate it; these calzones were pretty large in size (large enough that I cut mine in half and brought the other half to work for lunch today) and he ate the whole thing.
I was the only one who didn't, in fact. Shobhit at all of his and then complained about being so full it was making him feel abdominal pressure. Sachin's was the largest, as it was the first Shobhit made—he put bitter gourd into everyone's but mine or Ivan's; blech—and although Sachin, a very slow eater, took by far the longest to finish, he still ate all of his as well. Kimberly was the thinnest of us all and I was almost shocked she also ate hers in its entirety. I was literally the only person who didn't.
While Ivan sat and ate his dinner, the rest of us played three rounds of Yahtzee, something I had not played in a few years, I don't think, but I still picked it up again pretty quickly; as did Kimberly, who learned to play for the first time. Shobhit and I will surely be playing it again with Faith next week in Palm Springs.
Later, after Sachin had so many glasses of wine he was more visibly drunk than I had ever seen him, we decided to go down to Regents on the ground floor of the west building to get some dessert. This was Sachin's idea, but Kimberly and I went down to choose four slices of cake and bring them back upstairs. There was a whole lot more to the whole process of getting dessert, which honestly probably would have been better skipped altogether, made far more frustrating by Sachin's drunken stubbornness in his insistence that he was going to buy all our dessert but he didn't want to go downstairs and wanted Kimberly to use his card but she was uncomfortable with that, but I don't have the time or the bandwidth to get into detail about it now. It hardly matters anymore; we all got a nice, light, fluffy bit of cakes for dessert.
That said, I was relieved once they finally left—Sachin would mention getting home, acknowledging Kimberly's need to by at work by 7:30 in the morning, only to sit down again and reignite conversation. I swear the process of him leaving took like an hour. Ivan had even left for work by the time Sachin and Kimberly left. And then they finally did, there was no time left to watch
Succession. Dammit! Tonight, then.
— पांच हजार इक्यासी —
[posted 12:24 pm]
