I keep on not updating this blog, because this week so far has been like one long weekend, and I rarely update this blog when I am not working. I mean, I do each day of my Birth Week every year, but that's by necessity, when I have a major event of one sort or another to share about every day.

I actually do have something to share about every day this week, just nothing that necessarily qualifies as a "major event." And I have to tell you, after only working Monday and then taking the rest of the week off—including refusing to sign up for a holiday store shift—I have an even deeper conviction now than I did after taking Thanksgiving week off: holiday staycations are the shit!

Even Tracy is basically encouraging me to do this every year, store shift sign-ups be damned. "You've been there for so long," she said, "you have to have some seniority." Maybe, I suppose. We've had no fewer than four separate emails at work last week, coming from the CEO (Krish) and the VP of Merchandising (Darrell) and the Senior Director of Merchandising (Justine), increasingly desperate in tone, begging us all to sign up for a shift. There was one saying there was particular need for people to sign up on Christmas Eve! Fuck that; they should be auditing people who don't celebrate Christmas for that, or at least offering massively extra wages (bait I still wouldn't take). Christmas Eve and Christmas Day are a package deal. They are the holiday. And I need to catch my first of two buses down to Olympia shortly after noon.

It's interesting how differently Eric has approached my attitude about this this year. Last year and the year before, he joined right into the messaging that I was basically expected to work at least two four-hour store shifts, one for Thanksgiving and one for Christmas. This year, I think perhaps his more permissive attitude had to do with my knee-jerk response to the announcement in July that we could no longer cash out PTO, and for a few days we all were under the impression that we had to use up our balance of any PTO above 80 hours by the end of the year. So I was like, Fuck you then, I'm going on vacation for a week for both Thanksgiving and Christmas. Eric took a few weeks to approve my PTO requests, and I really thought it had to do with the idea that they would want me to work at stores. Instead, his only concern was that enough other people would be working while I was gone so that there would be sufficient coverage. And there was; and there is: I double checked on that last week as well. In any case, even though they backtracked on cashing out PTO, for this year only (meaning this was my last chance to do it—and they did still stick with a new policy of not giving us PTO accrual on cashed out hours, which no one bothered to tell me, which means I wound up overestimating how much I should cash out; I'll just wind up with a negative balance in March, which is still allowed, but the whole thing remains annoying), I so quickly got so used to the idea of this extra time off that I did not cancel all of the PTO I had submitted to schedule. I still canceled something like 10 days, which allowed me to get a nice cash-out check last month. But I clung to my Thanksgiving and Christmas vacations like a junkie with heroin.

And so began my first-ever, just chill, "staycations," taking time off of work just because. Although it must be said: I remain very busy every day, just with my own interests, and the time off is particularly helpful for creating space to work on stuff I spent a lot of time on every year. The first few days of the Thanksgiving vacation, I spend many hours on this year's calendars. And this week, I have been able to set aside time I would otherwise have been working for everything from annual holiday outings to simply going to the movies in the afternoon. Combining that with getting to sleep until usually between 7 and 8:00 every morning, this days off have really been kind of a dream.

So let's start with Monday. Because you know what else this week has brought? This season's first multi-day winter weather systems, starting with snow on Monday night and ending with a legit ice storm this morning. Shobhit and I went to the Costco in Kirkland on Monday night after work, and that was the day the snow started—at very different times depending on the location, with a stunning difference between Bellingham, where it was already dumping snow and in the mid-twenties mid-evening, and Olympia, where it was just raining and hovering near 40°.

Side note: I got on the phone with Dad for a few minutes on Monday. I wanted to get an update on his tests. "I figure no news is good news," I said, "but I should probably still get an update." He'd had the tests that did indeed confirm the prostate cancer had not spread to any of the rest of his body. He had another appointment scheduled for Tuesday, presumably to discuss the next step.

Anyway. The very pretty photo at the top of this post was of the brief period of huge snowflakes falling in the Kirkland Costco parking lot. We went there because they have more Indian food products at Eastside stores, with a larger South Asian population over there, but in the end Shobhit didn't find anything there he couldn't have just gotten at the Costco in Seattle. Oh well.

On Tuesday, while Shobhit was at work, I took Light Rail through the snow to Northgate, so I could get stocking stuffers for the cats at Petco. At least a couple of inches of snow had accumulated in Seattle overnight. Snowfalls, while still infrequent, seem to be a lot more common now than they were the first decade or so after I moved here in 1998, which means I've taken about all the novel snow photos I can already. But, I've never taken photos of snow in Northgate, so that gave me plenty of fodder for my latest Snow Day photo album on Flickr—27 shots so far, six of them taken in Northgate, including a fantastic selfie on the John Lewis Memorial Bridge, the pedestrian crossing from North Seattle College across the freeway to Northgate Light Rail Station. There's a "Campus Pond" on the west side of the freeway which is quite pretty even in warmer seasons; I thought it would make a nice wintery sight as well. I posted both to my socials for comparison.

Then, I took the rather irritating walk from there to the Petco across the street from Northgate Mall to the north—irritating because of the way the complex is designed now, what used to be a long stretch of an indoor mall you would walk through indoors, now split in half by the Kraken Community Iceplex. The south end of the former Northgate Mall, with the Red Robin still there on the second level and the Nordstrom Rack on the lower level, and the north end, with the Azteca Mexican Restaurant also still there, are closed off now, no way through on the inside. I first went through the parking structure to the south of the mall, thinking I could cross the pedestrian bridge over to where the Red Robin is—that bridge has now been removed. I tried to walk through Nordstrom Rack, only to find it self-contained. It would make way more sense for there to be an indoor pathway from there up to where the Red Robin is, but instead, you have to go out and walk all the way around the entire mall structure.

This whole complex is now legitimately hostile to pedestrians. You cannot go from one store, restaurant, or place of business to another without having to go all the way outside and either walk or, clearly the bigger expectation, drive around.

I walked through the parking lot to the east, a lot of it still barrieried with construction, up to Northgate Way. I found a few treats and a couple toys for the cats at Petco, then went over to the north entrance of Northgate just to get a look out of curiosity. This end still looks the same as it did before, and even has the same inner mall pathway—just with a dead end after maybe four storefronts down. Even more irritating: there is no exit down there, only an emergency exit. There are footpaths on the outside around the whole Northgate complex; you would think they would make it easier for people to get through that way. Honestly, I think Northgate Mall officially sucks now.

Oh, I almost forgot. The Lescrafters where I usually get my eye exams done is also located in this complex. Back in the day, they might have had an entrance from inside the mall as well as outside. I was waiting to hear back from Aetna that day because they had said they need a "diagnosis code" from Dr. Nevett to process my reimbursement claim after I ordered my next year's supply of contact lenses through Costco. The guy from Aetna was so bad at explaining why this was necessary, we escalated the call to his supervisor, who told me she would call Dr. Nevett and get back to me that day. After walking past that very office by coincidence, I knew it would be at least the next day before she got back to me: there was a sign on their door that read CLOSED FOR WEATHER. That's how it goes in Seattle when it snows.

After I finally got back home again, I spent the afternoon and evening watching and reviewing Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio, which I enjoyed even more than I thought I would.

On Wednesday, I walked downtown, some snow and ice still around but it wasn't too bad—I got a photo of an adorable tiny snowman—and went to the Sheraton Hotel to see that they finally returned after two years skipped: their traditional Gingerbread Village.

And it was . . . fine. Honestly, a slight letdown, at least as compared to the excited anticipation I had for it. There's a lot of really great design detail as always, but there were also two things going against it. First, its size was pared down from usual: normally they have five or six gingerbread structures, and for this year's return they only had four—a fifth "piece" being this odd little display of five action figures. Second, I was not particularly excited by the chosen theme of "Toy Story," or more specifically with an emphasis on Buzz Lightyear, calling the gallery "BUZZING BACK." Get it? Well, I suppose they felt they were being topical given the release of the film Lightyear this year, except that it technically qualifies as the fifth movie in a franchise now rendered stale, thanks to this particular movie being not very good. And honestly, although Toy Story 4 was good but wholly unnecessary, that franchise hasn't truly affected the zeitgeist since the phenomenal Toy Story 3 came out in 2010. In other words . . . I just rather wished they had picked a different, better, more successfully contemporary theme. Or maybe I am just being a geezer: Lightyear did perfectly well at the box office, even in the challenging environment of a post-covid world. I guess I'm just one of the few who are over it. I want more original Gingerbread Village themes!

On the upside, this was the first time I had gone to the Gingerbread Village midday on a non-holiday weekday, and damn, do I recommend that! After years past in which I stood in line for as long as nearly two hours (one hour and fifty minutes was the record, in 2018), it was fantastic to walk in there and see no line whatseover. A little girl handed me a mini candy cane as I walked right in.

Now, slowpokes ahead of me once inside did still hold me up a bit, and then I had to wait several minutes several times for people to clear enough space for me to get unobstructed photos. Still, had it been evening or a weekend, so many more people would have been in there that it would have been even more of a challenge. I really should just do it this way every year from now on. Another reason to take time off from work the week before Christmas!

I've been going to see the Gingerbread Village every year since 2006, incidentally—never missing any year that it's happened since then. If 2020 and 2021 had not been canceled, this would have been the 17th one I have seen. As it is, it's actually the 15th. They've apparently been doing it since 1993, which means I missed 13 of them prior. They're calling this year's the "28th Annual," even though 2022 would be the 30th year since it started. What a pain in the ass when a pandemic fucks up any intuitive way of counting annual traditions. I rather wish they would have just found a way to do it virtually in 2020 and 2021. Then the numbers would work right!

Oh, and the two other things I did on Wednesday: in the morning, I posted the Fall Social Review, having finished up the draft of it on Tuesday night. That would qualify as the only other non-Twitter-digest post I've shared since Monday's DLU the last day I was at work.

In the evening, I went over to Alexia's condo, finally getting back to our plan of watching a holiday movie: Scrooged. This was for many years my favorite Christmas movie, but I think I'm finally ready to downgrade it. It seemed to hold up well, at least for me, for a great many years after its initial 1988 release; I've seen it many times. I'm pretty sure I've figured out the last time I watched it before this was in December 2017, which I am amazed to realize now was fully five years ago. I watched with with Ivan, who was in his second stint living with us at the time, as well as his then-casual boyfriend Drew (the closest thing to a legit boyfriend Ivan has had the eight and a half years I've known him), and Shobhit was . . . well, he was in the room too, not so into the movie. In fact, this portion of my blog post about it at the time has stuck with me after re-reading it:

[Ivan] and Drew sat snuggled together on the love seat, most of the time all of their limbs either wrapped around each other or intertwined in some combination or another. I only realized later that this was actually kind of a new experience: two gay couples watching a movie in our living room, both snuggled together -- Shobhit was largely in my lap as well, although he spent more time commenting on how awful he thought the movie was. Oh, shut up! I admitted later that it doesn't play as well today than it did in 1988, but I still love it.

Well, while watching it with Alexia, I looked up Scrooged on MetaCritic: a 38/100 rating! Holy shit. Critics did not like this movie. I almost certainly wouldn't either if not for my years of nostalgic affection for it. There's a deeply homophobic line in it that would never fly today. In another scene, a guy actually kicks one of his cats—not literally, it's offscreen, but still, a moment of animal abuse played for laughs. There were plenty of parts I still found funny, as did Alexia, but in the end even Alexia characterized it as a movie that was fun to watch because it was bad.

I think I need to choose a new favorite Christmas movie.

It's remained quite cold all week, well below freezing the majority of the time—yesterday morning we had a low of 19°. This has kept the snow from fully melting all this time, or even melting very much. I decided to go see The Whale at Pacific Place yesterday late morning at 11:20, and I had to be quite careful as I rushed across Cal Anderson Park to the Capitol Hill Light Rail station that time, so much of the snow now foot-packed into very slick ice. I kept imagining myself slipping and falling on my ass, which thankfully never happened.

Also: Tracy joined me. This was truly a last-minute plan, as she would normally have been working at that time herself. She texted me Wednesday afternoon by referencing the movie herself: Have you seen The Whale yet? I told her I plan to see it tomorrow afternoon. To my surprise she responded with, Oh really? What time? I told her 11:20, and she replied, So I quit my job.

I responded: You did?? Like without.2 weeks notice?

Tracy: After I put in my two weeks notice while WFH and then when I showed up to work they were like today's your last day.

I was like, Jesus. Is that legal? And she replied: They're still paying me for two weeks. Oh. Well all right, then. Win-win, I guess. Also: so much for her career at Funko. And then when I asked if 11:20 was too early she said she could make it. She even suggested we get lunch at the Nordstrom Cafe where we found the food surprisingly good, but I had to decline because my budget is just too tight this week and I don't need to be overspending, especially when we have plenty of food at home. I packed a sandwich and a soda to go, and ate during the movie. Tracy ordered mozzarella sticks, and offered me one.

As for the movie, which I already told her I wasn't really expecting to like (there has been way too much discourse about the "fat suit" of it all though and I wanted to make my own opinion, especially knowing even the critics were acknowledging Fraser's great performance), I sort of . . . thought it was fine. Solid B, which I stand by, even though it has a C+ script at best. I really felt like Tracy liked the movie more than I did, which was interesting because she's an actual fat person. (Kind of. She basically self-identifies as such, but because she is so short, it's easy for me to read her as "small.") All my complaints about how they coded the Charlie character as "fat and disgusting" she would defend: in the pandemic lockdown, staying at home alone all the time, she said, she got very slobby and disgusting. Okay, sure, I guess. I still think the criticisms of this film's depiction of fatness are valid.

She gave me a ride home after the movie, as per the usual. For the first time, our long chat in the car pulled up outside my building occurred in daylight. We talked for a good while, a lot of it about the circumstances of her leaving her job, some of it about our mutual friend I loaned a large sum of money who is now giving me radio silence (probably everyone else too—they've gotten off social media—so although it means my finances took a significant hit, I am truly not taking it personally, and just allowing them however much time they need). I could have stayed to chat even longer, but the heat in her car was killing me and I had to get the hell out of there. For once the freezing air when I opened the door was actually a refreshing relief. It was like stepping out of a sauna and into the winter air.

Then, we were promised snow for many hours last night that never materialized—only freezing rain and sleet, in spite of the temperature being well down into the twenties, which I found baffling. Searches online revealed it has something to do with multiple layers of air where one layer is above freezing and thus melts what otherwise might be snow on its way down. They were actually also predicting this ice storm all week, and the ice storm, actually, very much materialized.

I honestly can't remember the last time I saw the city so completely iced over. Shobhit had a work shift at Total Wine & More in Interbay starting at 8:00, and it was nearly that time before he fully got out of here. He actually tried to leave closer to 7:30, and after a few minutes, when I thought he was well on his way, he called me on FaceTime to ask me to get dressed and come downstairs to let him back in the garage. His tires were skidding too much on the ice of the garage ramp up tp the sidewalk, and his fob wasn't close enough to the garage door to get it open so he could back in.

He had even already tried pouring down some salt, apparently. Somewhat to my surprise, he wasn't quite going to give up just yet: he would make one more attempt at getting out before calling in to work that he wouldn't make it. There's another bucket down there in the garage, full of litter, and he took that and scattered a bunch of it all over the ice on the upper portion of the ramp, on the sidewalk, and even some out on the street. After he did that, I returned the bucket for him, he got back in the car, and drove with a bit of momentum back out the gate and up the ramp, and this time he made it. He turned right onto 15th Avenue with no trouble at all.

I quickly went through the front entrance lobby and out into the "canyon" between the two Braeburn Condos buildings so I could see him driving down the hazardously steep hill if Pine Street there on that side of the building. His car was just sliding down the hill without the wheels even really turning, going much faster than I found comfortable. I really worried about him making it to work without incident, and I don't usually worry about these things.

In the meantime, realizing I had quickly thrown clothes and my coat on, I went inside to fetch my phone and then come back down to take a few photos. I really wished I hadn't left my phone charging in the condo upstairs, as otherwise I could have gotten shots of him spreading the litter or of his car sliding down the hill. I still got some revelatory shots though, including one of the "canyon" completely slicked over with ice. I even took a brief video clip of a U-Haul truck driving down Pine, although that went far more slowly and really didn't slide much at all. You can still see how iced over the street was, though. I also got a shot of a kind of icicle stalagmite formed by a leaking faucet just outside the building entrance, and later I got shots of our building manager Alan breaking ice off of the sidewalk with a shovel.

I told Shobhit to text me once he got to work, and when he called me instead, my heart sank, because I was really afraid it was because his car had gotten stuck somewhere downtown along the way. But, he was telling me he had made it. Whew! I was audibly relieved. When I asked about his car sliding down the hill, he said he had done that on purpose, deliberately not pressing the breaks in an effort not to skid out of control.

So, there we are, all caught up for the week—updated on the first three days of my one-week Christmas vacation. The next four days, including today, are going to be even busier, so long as everything goes to plan. Late this afternoon Alexia and I are touring holiday light displays in three different neighborhoods. Tomorrow morning will be Shobhit's and my traditional Christmas Eve morning gift exchange, before I head down to Olympia on the bus. Tomorrow Jennifer's family will finally once again join us for Christmas Eve dinner at Emperor's Palace, the Chinese restaurant, while at about the same time Shobhit should be picking up his niece, Shivangi, from the airport—assuming this weather mess doesn't fuck up flight schedules tomorrow as well. (I'm hopeful that it won't; we expect a dramatic warm-up this weekend, bith forecast highs of 50°.) Sunday is, of course, Christmas Day; Dad and Sherri will drive me from their place over to the family gathering at Gina and Beth's, where Shobhit and Shivangi will drive down to from Seattle as well. The three of us will drive home Christmas evening, and then on Monday Alexia and I will take a day trip up to Skagit Valley for some after-Christmas shopping, with Shivangi welcome to join us if she wants to.

Then: back to work on Tuesday, The fun thing about the next two weeks, though, is that there are holidays "observed" two Mondays in a row, for which I get holiday pay, so the next two weeks are four-day work weeks. I don't even start another five-day work week until January 9. Fun!

[posted 1:43 pm]