My second and final September Happy Hour with Laney occurred last night. I actually would have been open to Shobhit joining us, but he did have his final Project Management class after all—there seemed to have been some question as to whether they would actually all get online for the final night or not, but in the end I guess they did. They may not have stayed for the usual 5:30 to 8:00, I actually don't know, but the class did happen. And so, I went to meet up with Laney on my own this time, which did work well for me as I was able to hang out as long as I wanted without Shobhit getting eager to leave after only sixty or ninety minutes.

And, Laney and I did stay there for quite a while. She texted me right when I was getting home on my bike, saying she could meet at 5:15 instead of 5:30 if I wanted to get there early. I thus had to drop off my stuff, feed the cats and head right back out again; I walked and made it there at about 5:19.

We then left at around, I'd say, 8:30 or so. So, we spent about three hours and 15 mintues together last night, at La Cocina Oaxqueña, what in practice has become our favorite local Happy Hour Spot; if you click "show more" under the subtitle at the top of the page there where it says "location index," you can scroll down to see that we have now gone to that restaurant for Happy Hour 10 times—eleven if you count when I took a takeout order from there to meet Laney at Cal Anderson Park in August 2020, although she did not have food from there too so I am disinclined to count it. We ate La Cocina Oaxqueña food together for Happy Hour ten times, since 2014. Granted, that's stretched over 7 years so it averages 1.4 times per year. But, it's still a far higher frequency than anywhere else we've gone.

Once upon a time, Rooster's Bar & Grill, another Mexican place on Broadway very close to Laney's old apartment, would have been the place we frequented the most: seven times between 2016 and 2019, which at that time was an average of 2.3 times per year. But, Rooster's closed, and we couldn't keep going there.

The only other "location" that gets listed more times is simply virtual: our Skype or phone call, distance / virtual Happy Hours have now occurred 11 times, 7 of them in 2020 when Laney was still in Seattle but the pandemic kept us away from each other physically while we were still unvaccinated, and then 4 more times in winter 2021 for the same reasons plus her being out of town for her retirement travels. As of October, though, her return to traveling will have us back to virtual Happy Hours again.

My "Happy Hour with Laney" photo album on Flickr is getting so big, in fact, that I really need to create separate albums to make them more manageable, maybe by year, and also perhaps one just dedicated to virtual ones.

As for last night specifically, we spent a lot of time talking about the pandemic and vaccines, as we tend to every time we get together. We talked about plenty of other stuff too though; we were together for over three hours, after all. We do love the Quesadillas Fritas dish they have, especially priced lower for Happy Hour; I had two margaritas and she had two beers. My total bill before tip was all of about $25. We also talked about the possibility of getting together one more time between now and October 1 when she plans to head out of state again. I hate the idea of her being here another three whole weeks and never getting together again. She's going to be at a state park on Bainbridge Island next week, she said, and I do like the idea of using the Discover Pass to go there—although, I just did a bit of research and I could wear she said Fay Bainbridge State Park and I can find nothing on the Washington State Parks web page to indicate Fay Bainbridge is actually a state park. Oh well, I think we could still make it work.

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Laney and I hugged and went our separate ways, thinking we would likely see each other at least one more time before she leaves town again, either at the aforementioned park next week or, sometime the last week of September in which she currently has days open on her calendar. So, we'll see.

I'm trying to remember what I did after I got home. Not much. I saw Ivan only briefly as he was heading out for his overnight work shift. I know I ate a cookie, one of a surprisingly large batch of peanut butter chocolate chip cookies I absolutely do not need but which I had once told Alexia I love and so she made me a bunch and brought them over the other day. So now I have to eat them, I'm obligated! I should tell Ivan to help himself too though, and I haven't done that. (Shobhit won't eat them because he hates peanut butter.) Plus, I keep eating way too many snacks throughout the day at work, which is getting ridiculous; that combined with two cocktails last night had me weighing in at 163 lbs even this morning, which is a jump of more than two lbs fro just the day before. That's getting really out of hand; it's the heaviest I've been literally all year, although I came within half a pound of it in both May and January. I'm not certain I've been this heavy since I started the daily tracking, and it's really got me concerned. I've actually managed not to snack on anything in between snacks at all today. So far, at least.

I will have at least one of those cookies when I get home. They're small. Having a cookie isn't the issue. It's that I keep shoving shit into my mouth throughout the day. It's easy to go back and forth about this because I feel like I am increasingly more comfortable with my paunchy body, but I still don't want to gain a bunch of weight. Also, if Dr. Brandon's theory is correct that my chest pressure is acid reflux, he said losing some weight could make a difference—although weight being a cause is usually among people far heavier than I am; he acknowledged that I would not have much weight to lose, and didn't seem to think it was especially important, necessarily, for me to lose any at all. I just want to. My dream is getting back down to 145ish again, but I'd settle even for 150. Too many of my shirts are way too tight now and I do genuinely hate that.

Anyway. Oh! I went into the bedroom and I did finally watch the first episode of Reservation Dogs on Hulu, a comedy about and made by Native Americans which many people are raving about. I found it . . . pretty good. It's just one episode so far, though, and I'll watch more. Shobhit and I both got unusually tired and went to bed early enough that an unusual thing happened in that when we both woke up this morning we had each gotten a solid seven hours of sleep. So that's good.

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[posted 12:36 pm]