Return to Pie Bar
Shobhit and I kind of spontaneously went out for dessert last night. Had I known we would, I would not have already eaten the last of my Righteous Dairy Free Chocolate Peanut Butter Gelato that I had taken home as a sample from work. It was probably at the very least a quarter left of the pint, maybe a third. Dammit! And the thing is, that gelato was very good, but, it was truly nothing compared to the dessert I had later. I should have only had the dessert I had later.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Shobhit had his Project Management Class, so between 5:30 and 8:15 or so I just hung out in the bedroom. Mostly just farting around on social media, even though I knew I could have been spending the time captioning photos on Flickr, or more importantly, filling out my primary election ballot. I finally did the latter between 7:30 and 8:00 or so, looking between The Stranger endorsements and what other organizations and people have endorsed them. I'm pretty ready for Seattle to get another new mayor, honestly, and as frustrating as City Council has been for many, having a competent person jump from there to the mayorship strikes me as potentially useful. Jenny Durkan has been far too much of a police apologist.
Anyway! After Shobhit's class ended, I noted to him that the ballots say if we want to mail them in they should best be postmarked by the Friday before election day—which is, as I write this, today. This convinced him to go ahead and fill out his ballot, which he basically did just aligning with my choices after I told him why I made them. I don’t think he's ever happy to vote for a measure that will increase property taxes, but, oh well.
Then he suggested we walk to the ballot box down on Broadway, just as we had done for last year's general election. He always trusts that more than sending by mail, even though mail would have been totally fine. The upside now, I suppose, is that we'll be able to track the ballots online a lot sooner. So, I was like, fine.
And the thing is, Shobhit would have gotten a Social Review point for that alone. I won't count going out just to run errands, but to me this was a choice to go for a walk that happened to include dropping off our ballots, and I do always count going for a walk. But then, in a sense, Shobhit doubled down on the socializing aspect, as he decided he wanted to go over to Hot Mama's Pizza on Pine and get a slice of their pesto pizza.
He wound up changing his mind on that, for a pretty naïve reason. Hot Mama is still not allowing people to come inside the space, and they're just serving out a window fashioned out of their front door; we can see the pizzas being sold by the slice on display behind a window. Shobhit got all perturbed by the lady using the same pie server spatula for meat pizzas as for the vegetarian ones. I was like, I guarantee you this is what they do at all pizza places. He tried to argue with me at first, then finally admitted that just seeing it turned off his appetite for pizza.
So, we then meandered further west down Pine, until we go to the takeout window of the Mexican place called Mercado Luna. He ordered just one $5 mushroom taco, which we each got two bites out of but was still delicious. I'd go back again for a full dinner just based on it. Still, we had to wait several minutes for it to get prepared, during which Ivan walked right past us. He was on his way to work; I learned recently he doesn't bother taking a connecting bus from home to the #5 downtown, and instead just walks downtown first. It's been rather warm this week, was still warm at dusk last night and even humid, so he was walking down the street with no jacket, and not even a bag: he just had a stack of papers he apparently needs for writing stuff down during his overnight shift. He told me last night he carries around a clipboard, which he presumably gets at work. Anyway, he walked swinging his hands pretty wide, kind of flapping those papers back and forth in one hand. He waved and smiled as he caught my eye as I was leaning against the wall of the building, before saying "See you later!"
And then, after we got the taco, Shobhit said, "You want to go to Pie Bar?"
I really should have said, "We really shouldn't." But, I kind of love Pie Bar! So, we walked over there, eating that delicious small taco along the way.
We wound up sitting inside. We did have to wait a while after ordering, when the guy who took our order said "Someone will let you inside"—the regular entrance was otherwise blocked off; the ordering is still done at an outside window—because there was apparently a pipe leak and the guy had to spend a several minutes and countless towels to mop up water from all over the floor.
The table right there would have been perfect, right next to the open door and not too close to other patrons. Instead, we were directed to the end of a tightly packed space where people sitting at bar seating behind us were barely more than two feet away. Not ideal in these pandemic times, honestly. We were facing a window so we could see outside onto the street, but in our spot there was no open window, literally no ventilation whatsoever.
Shobhit actually kind of knows the guy who owns the place, his name is Patrick, as apparently he regularly comes into Total Wine to stock up on liquor. I guess he also bakes all the pies himself. He was very thin, graying beard, and wore a sarong. Shobhit says he does a lot of yoga. The two of them had a fair amount of friendly chat, as they hadn't seen each other in a while I guess.
We shared a slice of pie, but still ordered two cocktails. The cocktails, we really should have skipped. But damn, the Butter Baby was tasty: hot chocolate with butterscotch schnapps. I should make that at home. Shobhit had the Apple Pie Mule, the alcohol in that one being apple moonshine. I wasn't as big a fan.
The pie, though? Holy shit. We had a slice of the "Desserted Island Crumble," which has apple, blackberry, strawberry and raspberry all blended. It was one of the best pies (or crumbles, whatever) I have ever had. I told Patrick it was like having a religious experience. That was the one spot where I don't give a shit how many calories it was, every single calory was worth it. I was kind of annoyed that Shobhit kept prolonging our time away from home when it was so close to my bedtime and I had left my phone charging in the bathroom (thinking it was just going to be a quick walk to the drop box), but damn, the pie at the end made it all worthwhile.
In other news, I found this article yesterday about how bad we might expect the Delta variant spike in the U.S. to get. Granted, we won't truly know until we are over yet another spike hump, so it might be interesting to consider today's conjecture once we get to that point. But for now, actually, even with the expectation that it is indeed going to get bad, I found a fair amount of it comforting. At least, as a person who had the good sense to get vaccinated the second it was available to me to do so.
For instance: Delta spikes have already happened in India (where this variant originated), in Israel and in the U.K. The latter two are among the most-vaccinated countries in the world; India is much lower and was particularly low when it was in the midst of its stunning peak a couple of months ago—which, by the way, has since dropped dramatically. The point is, these other peaks serve as case studies we can learn from, and extrapolate what we likely can expect in the U.S. Namely—and critically—that because half our population is now vaccinated, the hospitalization and death rates will be far lower, proportionally speaking, than previous peaks that occurred when few to none of us were vaccinated.
Seeing it contextualized like that did make me feel better. The working idea right now remains that when it comes to spending time with people outside your household, you're by far safest if you are all vaccinated. I mentioned to Shobhit on our walk back home last night that until further notice, we should stop allowing anyone unvaccinated into our home. (The only example I can think of right now where we did allow this previously, was when Sachin and his girlfriend came over. Sachin is vaccinated but she was not.) I really think that's the safest thing right now. Ivan is vaccinated of course—as a nurse, he's had his since February—and that cousin of Shobhit's who came to visit a few weeks ago is as well. Shobhit noted last night that Indian people generally are going to be all for getting it, especially if it's free.
The sense I am getting from current data, at least as it's being reported, is that if we hang out with other vaccinated people, risk is still quite low (though not zero, as it never will be). Before Delta, hanging out with unvaccinated people from only one other household, if you were vaccinated, we also considered very low. But now, a lot of vaccinated people are getting infected when they hang out with an unvaccinated person who has COVID, especially when it's indoor, prolonged exposure. So to me, having an unvaccinated person over is something now considered high risk. As I noted to Shobhit, symptoms, if we had them all, would likely be mild thanks to our being vaccinated—but I still want to avoid getting it. Any other point of view would basically akin to deliberately visiting someone with the flu just for fun. Which as we all know would be boneheaded.
In any case, reading that article made me feel a little less despairing in all this. I feel like that's a good thing. God knows what the holidays are going to be like. I really want to be able to go back to having a normal Christmas at Dad and Sherri's house, which before Delta came along was what we were all envisioning. But now, it feels a little more up in the air. How willing will I be to spend a whole day in their house if people who are unvaccinated are in there for hours as well? It will be interesting to see how Dad and Sherri approach it themselves. Honestly, the safest thing would be for them simply to ask unvaccinated family—and there will be unvaccinated family—not to come to the house. Dad and Sherri themselves would be the most vulnerable in that scenario, even as vaccinated people themselves. But, they are also older and with certain other comorbidities.
But, who knows what the recommendations will be by then. If the spike has passed and transmission rates and test-positivity rates are super low again by then, even I might have a different attitude about it. But the data absolutely has to be looking far better than it does right now, when things are getting bad.
[posted 12:26 pm]