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I returned to work today after a full week off facing over 300 unread emails. I'm not in the least bit stressed about it, though. If you're capable of thinking rationally, and there's nothing extreme going on like anyone's life or livelihood being in danger, stress is a choice. You opt into it. I choose not to. Besides, even though we have yet to come even close to the kind of topsy-turvy zigzagging decisions the disrupted supply chains of early 2020 necessitated, I continue to apply some critical lessons learned from that time. Namely: don't stress over the whole of your to-do list. Just figure out what is the highest priority, and get that done. For the time being, everything else is secondary. I'm applying the same philosophy now, even while I have a good twenty-some stupid fucking floral department skus to get entered so they batch for tomorrow, and already at least three of them I have had to send in immediate batches because stores already have them. I'm working from a list sent by the vendor contact on Tuesday last week; none of the backup contacts here at the office were able to get to it. And you know what? That's fine. They're just fucking flowers.
I have to give credit to Amy, Cathryn and Amanda for all they did on my behalf last week; it seems in my email like it was more than usual. I just sent them an email expressing my appreciation. And, I still have a huge backlog to attend to even beyond what help they gave when they could.
I did consider doing
some work over the past week, a couple of times. Something like, say, coming in over the weekend to put a dent in the large pile of receiving paperwork I knew I'd have waiting for me. But, it didn't even go as far as my deciding against it! Both times it briefly occurred to me to think about doing any work while on PTO, I got distracted from my thought process and just by default stopped thinking about it. Ha! I honestly think I have a very healthy approach to this.
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— पांच हजार तीन सौ सोलह —
On the other hand, it
was very smart of me to make sure I posted real updates over the past week on my blog—hardly every day, but I did update
on Monday to cover the prior weekend, when Shobhit, Alexia and I went to the Festival of Trees on Saturday and then Shobhit and I went to "Julefest: A Nordic Christmas Celebration" in Ballard on Sunday; then again
on Thursday to cover comparatively uneventful Monday and Tuesday but mostly the party we went to at Sachin's on Wednesday evening;
on Friday to cover Thanksgiving Day with Shobhit and Danielle; and finally
on Saturday to cover Friday's Tree Lighting Celebration at Westlake Center with Danielle, plus a quick leftovers dinner with her and Shobhit at home afterward.
This means, thankfully, all I have to catch you up on today is Saturday and Sunday, during which the highlights were just my going to see
The Fabelmans on Saturday and then
Devotion yesterday, both of which were excellent—even though the former will almost certainly be on my year-end top ten list and the latter is not likely to be, I still gave them both an A-minus.
I had no socializing over the past two days otherwise, although I spent a fair amount of time with Shobhit. He did not join me for the movies because there has to be multiple good reasons for him to come along to a movie—and he generally skips those he is all but guaranteed to get a screener for when voting on the SAG Awards, as is certainly the case with
The Fabelmans. Beyond that, it's preferable for him to join me on Tuesdays when possible, so that when I pay for his ticket on top of my monthly AMC Theaters subscription I can only use for myself, it will be half off. I did, however, book a full-price ticket for him to join me for
Avatar: The Way of Water on Saturday the 17th, because that movie will be in 3D, won't likely get any SAG Award nominations, and thus needs to be seen in a theater. After re-watching the original
Avatar in a theater a few weeks ago, I fully expect that to be a worthy theater-going spectacle.
I did far less reading of my library novel over the past week than I might have considered ideal, mostly because of all the holiday events, socializing, movies and TV watching I, or we, did. Shobhit and I also binged the new Netflix series
1899, finishing that on Saturday night. In the end that show is not what it seems to be at the start, and I preferred what it seemed to be at the start, but whatever; I enjoyed it enough. Now I still need to get beyond the first episode of
Wednesday and finish that as well. I wonder if Shobhit would get into that one. Maybe.
Last night in particular, once I was done writing my movie review—it feels worth noting that in addition to the regular blog posts, I wrote four movie reviews during my time off, which means I still wrote something on two of the days I did not write in this personal blog, including yesterday—I went out of my way to be with Shobhit in the living room for the course of the evening. He's in an emotional downturn at the moment, feeling depressed about the state of his job, life and health, and I figured he would like me coming out of the bedroom to spend some time with him. He made a cauliflower dish that I had no interest in but I still helped him prepare it, during which he was open to my playing Christmas music, which was wonderful.
Then, we watched the second of my "holiday series" of movies for this year,
Hugo, my favorite movie of 2011 but which I hadn't seen in ages. It's not at all specifically a Christmas movie, but it's set in 1930s Paris during the winter with snowfall, and is thoroughly enchanting, so I still think it fits. Now that it's more than a decade since it's release, it holds up very well. That said, this TV we got handed down to us from Alexia seems incapable of displaying the picture from my Blu-Ray player properly regardless of the movie, but once I discovered
Hugo is on HBO Max, I turned off the Blu-Ray and played the movie from HBO Max instead. I just wish the movie had been bigger when it first came out so that there could ever be hope of another 3D re-release, because in theaters it had been arguably the best use of 3D I have ever seen.
Then we watched this week's episode of
The White Lotus, conveniently also being on HBO Max, and I was in bed shortly after that.
This morning was my first time having to get up at 5:15 in about ten days, and boy did I get used to sleeping until about two hours later than that. I had no trouble getting out of bed, but being out of practice combined with it being both an exercise day and a hair washing day meant I didn't even get out of the condo until well after 7:00. I caught a #8 down John and Denny from 15th Avenue where the Safeway is, so I could take a bus straight there instead of walking from downtown at 3rd and Pike as usual, which saved me some time and I still didn't get to the office until about 7:40. Not a soul was in the office yet by then anyway so whatever.
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[posted 12:29 pm]
