— पांच हजार तीन सौ इक्कीस —
I kept myself busy all weekend, but, kind of amazingly, it was a lower-key holiday season weekend, with no major holiday events attended. This after I did plenty such things both of the previous weekends—and likely will next weekend, but maybe not the weekend after; the rest of the major holiday stuff to be done is largely either on weeknights or during the five days I'll have off, including the four days prior to Christmas Eve and the day after Christmas.
How a lot of that goes remains to be seen; I only know there will be a lot. It sounds even more likely now that Shobhit's niece will be visiting, so maybe I'll do some stuff with her during my PTO that week. Shobhit felt a little better about that idea after I had to share with him the bad news I got last week, that they still changed policy this year on accrual of PTO on cashed-out hours—which I did not know. Shobhit and I had budgeted how much I should cash out based on the expectation of some 24 or so hours getting accrued on those cashed-out hours. Now, without that, my PTO balance at the end of our trip to Australia is going to be more than 16 hours in the hole. It will then go negative again after my Birth week, by about 13 hours.
Sara in HR assured me last week, however, that we can go up to 40 hours in the hole with PTO. So, I'm not panicking about it. It just means I won't be obligated to take quite as much time off over the course of 2023.
I probably won't be able to weasel out of holiday store shifts next year like I did this year. I suppose we'll see. I got anecdotal evidence this year that, in some cases at least, office staff at the stores over Thanksgiving week felt redundant and not particularly needed. Hearing that only makes me resent being told it's an obligation of all office staff even more. Well, an obligation for staff bot on PTO, anyway—and I took care of that this year!
Anyway. There's nothing of note really to tell you about Friday, but on Saturday I actually managed to convince Shobhit to join me to see
Violent Night at Pacific Place downtown. When it finished, Shobhit made his usual guess of what grade I would give it, but for some reason didn't stick with his first guess, making a second and third guess before I could even respond: "B-minus? B? B-plus?" His first guess was correct. Some of the movie was fun, but I really wanted the whole thing to be better than it was.
We actually walked downtown, because Shobhit wanted to do some browsing through shops. We went into Nordstrom briefly, then into a couple of shops at Pacific Place itself, and browsed one of the restaurant menus on the fourth floor where the AMC Theaters are located, before going in to the movie. Afterward, Shobhit wanted to walk over to Pike Place Market, which we also did, stopping at Nordstrom Rack along the way. I found a shirt on clearance that I really wanted, but this was why I don't like browsing shops (aside from it usually boring me half to death): it creates a real challenge when I am trying not to be spending any money at all. Sixteen dollars may be a great deal on a new shirt originally marked twice as expensive, but it's still sixteen dollars I'd be out if I spent that much.
We walked to Victor Steinbrueck Park, historically Shobhit's favorite spot but disappointingly still featuring a fence barrier a few feet away from the railing that used to look over the Alaskan Way Viaduct and now looks over construction on a
new roadway as part of
Seattle's new waterfront project. I only just realized I don't know what the name of this new stretch of street, connecting Alaskan Way to Western Avenue, will be called. A lot of it is still confusing because nothing has yet changed on Google Maps and these renderings on the Waterfront Project website don't label everything in detail.
Whatever the case, we walked over to the Pike Place MarketFront expansion (opened in 2017) where you can get easier views currently. Then we made our way back though the Market and then up to catch a bus back home.
— पांच हजार तीन सौ इक्कीस —
— पांच हजार तीन सौ इक्कीस —
Yesterday I took myself to see
The Inspection, which I somehow both had mixed feelings about and liked a lot. Going there and then coming back to write the review took a huge chunk of my afternoon. I brought a sandwich to eat in there with me.
I had the whole theater to myself, so that was cool. I didn't feel the need to wear a mask through the movie then. About twenty minutes into the movie I thought I saw a couple of late-comers arrive and so then I did put my mask back on. When the movie ended though, and I looked behind me, there was nobody there. What the hell? Maybe it was a staffer checking something, who left unnoticed as I was absorbed by the movie. When they arrived I heard whispered chatter but maybe they were speaking on an intercom or something.
Either way, I always find it kind of fun when I get a movie theater all to myself.
As for the rest of the weekend, there's not much more to tell. I helped Shobhit do some cooking, both Friday and yesterday; there's now a whole lot of leftover pasta as well as leftover lentils with vegetables and rice. We watched the penultimate episode of
The White Lotus season two last night, and also over the weekend watched a bunch of episodes of
Night Court on Prime Video.
That about sums it up, really.
— पांच हजार तीन सौ इक्कीस —
Oh, wait! Ha! As soon as I finished writing the above section, I remembered I was supposed to be on FaceTime with Karen today. Der!
I quickly heated my lunch and then got into the phone room to get on FaceTime with her, and we had lots to talk about. I had a good amount of news to share with her, from family updates to the likelihood of Shobhit's niece visiting over Christmas to the finished product of this year's calendars. She had a good amount of news to share herself, and even suggested that if Shobhit's niece does visit, maybe she can get Anita, who wouldn't be much older than Shobhit's niece, to join and we can all get together sometime during the visit. I was somewhat reticent at first, I don't know why, but then I thought: maybe we can all go out to dinner at Saffron Grill sometime? That could be fun.
We ran long, and hung up at like 1:08. I totally forgot I had a Zoom meeting to join at 1:00. So I'm finishing this up while that's going on. And I still have other work to do so I guess I'd better sign off.
— पांच हजार तीन सौ इक्कीस —
[posted 1:14 pm]
