— पांच हजार दो सौ नब्बे-चार —
I spent so much time
in yesterday's post writing about Matthew and Jennifer's visit, I never got around to mentioning the social activity I had on Friday: Happy Hour
with Laney!
This time we were back to virtual, connecting via Facebook Video, her in her van in a grocery store parking lot with wifi (or maybe she just had more bars there on her phone), in Eureka, California. (That's a small city of about 27,00 on the coast of Northern California.)
As it happens, this may be the only time we do a Virtual Happy Hour through the course of fall and winter: she was talking about how any consideration of driving further south this time—and she left to spend winter in warmer areas to the south twice now, in both January 2021 and then again last fall—she just wasn't feeling good about it the way she did the past couple of years. She has enjoyed a lot of the traveling, it seems, but she really misses being at home in Washington, being closer to her daughter Jessica (who now lives in Bremerton) and to her friends (including me!). She was even really spending a lot of time debating with herself whether to head out again this fall, and in the end it was just the end of a subletting opportunity and then the end of a string of pet sitting gigs, followed by an inability to find another more permanent place to rent, that forced her hand.
But, her sister has a house in Enumclaw (the town Sherri was born and grew up in, in a somewhat wild coincidence) which will be vacant for all of November while Lorrie and Richard will be traveling themselves; they offered to let Laney stay there next month. Laney is considering it, as although it's a bit further away from Seattle than she would prefer, it would give her a month to try and find another more permanent solution, where she could find a small place with a modest rent she can afford to pay on a part time job salary combined with retirement. And even in Enumclaw, she could drive at least once that month to come for an in-person Happy Hour somewhere.
Well, theoretically. Laney still doesn't want to do drinks or meals indoors anywhere public, so we'd probably either have to find a place still doing outdoor seating (with space heaters and such) or just meet at my place. We'd figure something out.
I'm thinking right now that, if by chance we
do have to stay on Virtual Happy Hour in November, maybe we should switch it from a Friday to a weekend day, so it can be scheduled earlier. We didn't connect on Friday until 6:30, and because it started to get dark and she wanted to get back to her campground before the sun set, she needed to end the call after little more than an hour. Just one hour is too short with Laney, dammit! Oh, well—as we discussed even during this conversation, at least we have long had this as an alternative whenever she's been out of town, and we have kept up our monthly (and sometimes even more frequent) Happy Hours ever since we started them
since 2014.
In fact, we acclimated to virtual Happy Hours well before she even left town for the first time: the pandemic in 2020 forced that on us, and we did it virtually for the first time
in March of that year, ten months she started her first round of retirement travels. With the exceptions of in-person but socially distanced Happy Hours at parks, our Happy Hours were all virtual until July 2021, when we went back to La Cocina Oaxaqueña for the first time post-pandemic—and all Happy Hours since at an actual restaurant have been at places where we could sit outside. And even by the time Laney and I had our first Virtual Happy Hour with her out of town, in January 2021, we had already had eight Virtual Happy Hours with her still in town just due to the pandemic.
At least now when we have Virtual Happy Hours, it's due to something a lot more fun—leisure traveling—than something like stay-at-home orders.
— पांच हजार दो सौ नब्बे-चार —
— पांच हजार दो सौ नब्बे-चार —
So now that I've dutifully noted what I did on Saturday, that brings me to
last night, when I met Tracy for dinner. This might be the first time we've gotten together for something other than either going to a movie or seeing a movie at my condo theater since we had our first socially distanced drinks & snacks in a part not long after the pandemic started.
But, Tracy had said she wanted to just hang out on Capitol Hill, so we planned to meet for dinner last night. I wanted to browse shops on Broadway too, which we really should have done before dinner rather than after, because by the time we finished dinner (and then, at Tracy's suggestion, dessert at another place), the shops that might have yielded anything helpful had all closed, at 8:00 at the latest—and the earliest we meandered to any of them was at about 8:15.
Oh, well. Just as I suspected she might, Tracy actually helped me finally come up with a Halloween costume idea, which is perfect and very on brand for me, and best of all, won't even necessitate buying very much I don't already have. I'm thrilled I finally have a plan and an idea I'm really happy with. I'm not ready to spoil what it is yet; it's too early. But, I do still need to do a bit of shopping for smaller accessories. On the upside, the urgency has waned since the things I still need are not so specifically Halloween themed that they will be sold out by the end of October.
Anyway, we met at Lost Lake, the 24-hour diner on 10th and Pike. This was honestly my fifth or sixth choice, but Monday turned out to be a less-than-ideal day of the week for this, as many places (including some of the shops I want to browse!) are closed on Mondays. On the upside, Lost Lake is conveniently located right across the street from Neumos, the venue where Tracy invited me to join her and her sister for a Halloween event on Friday the 28th. She bought tickets for herself and her sister, while I bought tickets for Shobhit and myself, even though Shobhit might be too jet lagged to go. But he did tell me when I ran it by him that, if he's not too tired, he might want to go.
It is sort of late for me: 9 p.m. But, at least it'll be a Friday night. I suggested we go over to buy tickets in person to save on service fees; it was a surprisingly low-fi scenario to do so, ordering the tickets from the literal bartender at the adjacent bar called The Runway. And, there were still higher service fees than I expected: they amounted to an extra $10 on top of base ticket prices for two $10 tickets online; in person, it came to $6.50 in service fees. I saved three and a half bucks. Every dollar counts!
(I asked Tracy later how much an Uber ride usually costs her between home and my place—she took one both to come meet me and to go back home again. Her first response genuinely shocked me: "I don't know." What the fuck? Shobhit may get annoyed by the way I spend money sometimes, but I would never, ever
not know something like that. Tracy makes a good amount more than I do, but I still think of that as pointlessly throwing money away. And then! She told me the estimate for her ride back home when we later parted ways was about $16. Holy shit. What a horrible value! I mean, there is the argument for a living wage for Uber and Lyft drivers, sure. But as a value for the consumer? To get a ride
about a mile and a half? I would opt instead to walk or take transit, every time. To me, that's nuts. But, how Tracy spends her money is really none of my business.)
When we left The Runway tavern, Tracy noted that the clientele in there "had a very specific vibe." I hadn't really noticed, as we were only in there a few minutes, but I still chuckled because I had felt exactly the same way about the few other people who had been in Lost Lake—it's arguably the only old-school diner on Capitol Hill, and the people in there had a very "old-school diner" vibe of their own, including our waitress. The service was decent; Tracy declared her burger "fine"; the order of nachos we shared only about half of was in the running for the worst nachos I've ever had, every single element utterly bland and haphazardly assembled and presented. My own order was a different story: the tater tots I got subbed for fries were perfect, and the BLT with veggie bacon was almost shockingly tasty. I would go back just for that.
Tracy had been excited to see how close we were to Molly Moon's Ice Cream, so we walked down to the other end of that block to get dessert there. The $8.50 I spent for a single scoop of ice cream in a waffle cone seems exorbitant, so well, I guess now I'm the one wasting money. Except! Two things in my defense: 1) at least I still
know the amount and keep a record of it; and 2) the seasonal flavor I got, Pumpkin Clove, actually was delicious enough to make it worth that price. I was even surprised by that, as I have not historically found Molly Moon's flavors to be that great. I do like their "Yeti" flavor, though (it has fun chocolate covered granola chunks in it), and I really expected that was what I would get, even when I asked to sample the Pumpkin Clove, totally expecting it to underwhelm me—and I was practically bowled over by it. Holy shit, it was good!
Tracy got two scoops of Vegan Cookie Dough in a cup; I had my single scoop of Pumpkin Clove in a cone. And at my suggestion, we ate while walking up Broadway, hoping to find a store I could browse in, and finding most of them closed. We actually did find some possible contenders inside the still-open m2m Asian Market, though they were too pricy for just one use on a costume. We discussed looking for what I need at thrift stores on another day when they are open. Later when I got home I figured out I had a lot more of what I need than I realized.
So otherwise, we then just slowly walked together up to the north end of Broadway and back, walking into the few stores that were open (including the QFC; Tracy had no idea they have their huge non-grocery section of housewares in the basement) or otherwise window shopping. The whole evening we only occasionally touched on deep topics of conversation, and otherwise just basically spent the evening shooting the shit. It was kind of wonderful.
After she finally got into her Uber home, after I hung out with her for several minutes as she caught Pokemon characters from my building's location on her phone app, I went back up to the condo to get ready for bed, and get on Skype briefly with Shobhit in Delhi. He was researching flight options for a return to India, with a likely four- or five-week stay to get all these share transfers taken care of with his mom. It's looking more and more likely that a) Shobhit's mom will not be visiting Seattle after all; and b) Shobhit will be back in India through all of the holidays. The latter part will be confirmed as soon as he actually books his next flights.
He's going to get really bored. He's already getting there even during this visit. I don't think he's ever gone to India three times in the same calendar year since I've known him, and that's now been eighteen years.
— पांच हजार दो सौ नब्बे-चार —
[posted 12:32 pm]
