notes on an excursion
I have so many photos on Flickr to caption now, it's ridiculous. One photo album each for the Northgate Link Light Rail Extension and the Van Gogh Immersive Experience; three lingering Halloween photo albums; nine more for the trip to Las Vegas. 482 photos in all, although at the very least the photos I had put in my email travelogue have their captions pasted in—and, I did get all the Las Vegas photos appropriately tagged on Flickr yesterday.
I don't particularly want time to pass to the extent that I never get to captioning them—as happened with the majority of my Christmas season photo albums from last year. Some of the Halloween photos are still of a bit lesser priority, as a lot of those quite easily just speak for themselves. But, I do want to get all of the 318 photos from Las Vegas captioned. So, I do have a new approach: aim to caption at least 20 of them each day. At that rate, I should get them all captioned in little more than two weeks, and thus have them done before they get pushed even further back by our trip to Palm Springs over Thanksgiving week. I expect I'll still get them done in fewer than two weeks, actually, as the weekends should allow me some time to work ahead. I just want to set twenty as a minimum—particularly if I do them while at work, when I should be doing actual, you know, work.
Side note, I really don't understand Shobhit's insistence that he wants to keep working until the day he dies, because he's convinced he wouldn't know what to do with his time in retirement. To me, that's insane. I could quite easily, if nothing else, completely fill my time with traveling, taking photos, and when not traveling, editing and captioning photos, and writing about the travels. I could do that truly endlessly. I'd also kind of like to get a fair amount more international travel under my belt before the greenhouse effect fully trashes the planet irreparably. I already feel like our aim to return to Australia in 2023 could be a last chance before everything there is just on fire all the time. Hell, it could even be too late by then. It kind of felt like that even in 2020.
Ha, I just realized "the roaring twenties" could take on new meaning in the 21st century. Everything is on fire! Either that or flooding.
Okay, back to thoughts on the trip to Las Vegas, my first time staying more than only two nights since Shobhit's and my first trip there together, back in 2005. Oh hey, wait a minute! I just checked my records, and this was literally my first time ever staying there for three nights—it's just that the 2005 trip basically qualified as a "three nights" trip because that was how it had been booked. But, due to torrential rains causing flooding and flight cancelations, our originally scheduled evening flight that year got postponed until the next morning, and Shobhit and I actually just stayed overnight at SeaTac Airport before catching at 6 a.m. flight the next day—effectively still giving us two full days in Las Vegas, just as we had this year. For some reason I have been remembering that 2005 trip as having been longer, but as it turns out, Las Vegas 2021 was easily the longest I have ever stayed there.
And? After several years of declaring two nights in Las Vegas is all I ever need before I am happy to come home, I'm thinking now that whenever I go back again, I will again aim for three nights. It turns out it makes a huge difference when you can fit in some time just to relax and read and lounge by a hotel pool. I really loved that, even in spite of only having time to do it for about ninety minutes before they closed the pool due to off-season hours at 4:50 (we would have stayed longer otherwise). Next time I may need to make a note of going when it is still peak season hours, while still not at the very hottest time of the year. May might work better, I suppose.
Of course, we only went in October this year because of Sachin being there for a poker tournament, so who knows what random reason might take me there again next. I've been to that city eight times now, and there are plenty of other places to go. I like to return to Vegas after something major and new has been completed on the Strip; in 2015 the High Roller ferris wheel had been finished; this year the ResortsWorld complext was done, having opened only this past summer. I have not found anything of equal significance currently in the works, so it could be another three to five years before I go back again, which would be fine.
Unless some random opportunity arises again, which I would take as well. The truth is, my biggest Las Vegas dream now is to go there with Gabriel one day, and have him show me around "old-school," mob-history Las Vegas, and see the city through truly different eyes. Given Gabriel's current reticence about travel in a pandemic, and his inaccessibility of co-travel even under the best of circumstances, I don't particularly regard that as much of an attainable goal in the remotely near term. Once Tess has fully grown up and is living on her own, it may be an easier idea. That itself could be in another five years, though.
As for last night? Tracy picked me up from work at 4:30, drove me over to Pacific Place, and we went to the AMC Theater to see Spencer, which I truly loved—solid A from me. First one of the year! Any other movies between now and the end of December are really going to work hard to beat it as the best movie of the year in my mind. Granted, that director's last movie, Jackie, I had also given a solid A—and it still ranked #2 that year, because Moonlight surpassed it, quite effortlessly I might add. That was possibly the only year in history in which my pick for the best movie of the year actually won the Academy Award for Best Picture.
Anyway. The movie took up the vast majority of my evening. Tracy gave me a ride home, but continued chatting with me, alternately about the movie and about her parents, in her car after she pulled up to the curb in front of my building. I went inside, made myself a sandwich for dinner, and went to the bedroom to write my review.
After that, there was barely enough time before bed, finally, to watch last Sunday's episode of Succession. The best of the season so far, in my view.
Shobhit and I have seen very little of Ivan since we returned from Las Vegas on Tuesday. According to him, after I finally messaged him last night to ask if he was feeling okay, he's been "just fatigued and lethargic ever since getting my vaccinations on Monday." He had already told us when we came in on Tuesday night that he had gotten both his COVID-19 booster shot and his flu shot the day before, and that it was really hitting him. To my surprise, he still went to work that night, but he hasn't since. He was already scheduled off on Wednesday night, which had made me think we might have time to watch this week's episode of American Crime Story: Impeachment that evening. But, he must have been really wiped when he got home from work Wednesday morning, because he was in his room with the light off, presumably sleeping, when I got home from work that day—and he stayed that way clear through to yesterday. I found myself wondering morbid things like, what would I need to do if he croaked in there? I don't even have an emergency contact for him. I suppose it might be a good idea for me to get one, although I actually have no idea how comfortable he would even be with the idea. I never got one for any of my roommates, and if nothing else, I could find family of his through Facebook in an emergency—even though he now keeps his friends list private. It's still not that hard.
Anyway, he was still in his darkened room even when I got home from the movie last night, but later I saw his light was on, and so that was when I finally decided to text to ask how he was feeling. I mean, what if he actually tested positive for COVID? I don't even know how we would need to deal with that, as there is no escaping shared space. Maybe masking until he no longer tested positive? Ditto whether it happened to Shobhit or me. At any rate, so far so good; Shobhit and I don't get tested regularly but Ivan does weekly where he works as a nurse. Plus, all three of us have now gotten the booster shot. I've just never heard of a vaccine's side effects lasting for fully three days. (Well, maybe it's just that people like Shobhit and me were lucky: the CDC website does note that side effects should go away "in a few days." So maybe Ivan's experience was closer to standard than I've been realizing.)
He did message me this morning, I am feeling better today actually, so that's a relief. Particularly for him, but also for all of us.
[posted 12:30 pm]