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Today is the first weekday after Daylight Saving Time starts, and guess what? Even though I very diligently set my alarm on my phone last night, I forgot I had the volume turned all the way down. Shit! So, the alarm went off, but I never heard it. I overslept for . . . precisely one hour. I hauled ass to get ready and was at work only half an hour later than usual. It would have been even less, if the bus had actually been coming when I left my building, but it had just passed and the next was not for another 15 minutes. So, I walked roughly 10 minutes to Capitol Hill's Light Rail Station. That train arrived within about four minutes; it got me to Westlake Center right at 7:30, which is when the Monorail starts—perfect! Except it was at least another five minutes before the damned thing arrived, so by the time I was at the office after walking from Seattle Center, I might as well have just walked all the way from downtown. Whatever.
When I got to work, Noah and Shelley were here, back from Expo West in Anaheim last week. "Guess what I did this morning!" I said. Noah quipped, "Uh oh, what?" I said, "I overslept, for precisely one hour!" Noah was like, "Nobody cares." Not in a dismissive way, he actually meant that it didn't matter, because no one at work gives a shit if I come in so-called "late." And yes, I already knew that to be true, but I still have to adjust to the new time regardless, and as of this morning, I have not done that at all!
I really wish we would just get rid of Daylight Saving Time. It's so stupid. And even though most people seem to want to make DST permanent, I feel strongly that only the opposite makes sense: make
Standard Time permanent! Why do we need the sun to shine clear until 10:00 pm in June? We don't. And if we made DST permanent, we'd be dark in the dead of winter in the mornings until, like 9:30 a.m., which would be dumb.
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I've got a lot to do today and tomorrow on a tight deadline turnaround at work, so I'm going to
try and get through a rundown of my weekend as quickly as I can.
I had my monthly Happy Hour for March with Laney on Friday, and we went to La Cocina Oaxaqueña, clearly our favorite spot on the hill given the
record twelve times we've now gone there for our monthly Happy Hours—and that's not even counting the few times we've gone there when it wasn't an official "monthly Happy Hour" date. I just have the Happy Hour photos from twelve of them.
I left work early at 4:00, so I could get home by around 4:35, in time to feed Cassie, my neighbor Alexia's cat; feed my own cats; and then get picked up by Laney at 5:00 in her van, to maximize our time before Happy Hour officially ended at the restaurant at 6:00. And indeed, it was close to 5:30 by the time we actually found parking.
I might not have done this otherwise, but because I had just spent a couple of hours at Steamworks the night before, I was diligent and wore my mask when I got into her van. She said, "Oh let me put on my mask too, since you're being so diligent." I mean, I already had it on to go through the common spaces in my building, so it wasn't a big deal to me. Then, after hitting my head on a storage thing she has hanging from her sun visors—she said she actually had emptied a lot out of that camper van, but the front cabin area was still pretty tight with stuff, and she's much shorter than I am so she never hits her head on anything—I rode shotgun while we tried for a while, and failed, to find street parking.
I offered to pay for parking in a lot. She has done that more than once in the past, so it seemed only fair to me. She somewhat reluctantly accepted, and pulled into a lot half a block from the restaurant. And guess what? A car full of people was leaving the lot, and the passenger shouted out the window at me, "Do you want our parking space? It's good until 8:00 tomorrow morning but we're leaving early!" Well, hell yes I do! They just saved me twenty bucks! How awesome was that? Laney pulled her van out of the spot she had initially parked in, and went to the spot they had just vacated. "Now we can stay as late as we want!" I said. "We can stay all night!" Laney said.
We only stayed a little over a couple of hours, which was fine. Laney didn't want me to tag her in
the photo I posted with my requisite check-in, in spite of our cute little "toast" with tortilla chips that had been her idea, because she thinks her puffy jacket makes her look too large. We had the young waitress take the photo.
Anyway, it was lovely as always. Laney also drove me home. And, there happened to be someone else about to pay for parking in the lot when we got back, so we paid it forward and gave them the ticket that was still good until 8 a.m. It felt pretty good to be able to do that after someone else had already done it for us.
We actually made a plan for me to come down to see her new place on Sunday (yesterday), but then she realized she had too much she needed to do and asked to postpone. So right now the tentative plan is to do it after work on this coming Friday.
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— पांच हजार एक सौ सत्तर-सात —
I spent much of the rest of the weekend on movies, having reviewed two of them, both streaming from home: I watched the new Pixar movie, released straight to Disney+, on Saturday:
Turning Red, which I
really enjoyed—I would have given it an A-, probably, if not for the animation style I kind of felt was not to the usual Pixar standards. But I was really, really impressed with the story.
And yesterday, I actually signed up for a free trial of Showtime—the third time I have ever done so, now using a third email address—just so I could watch the new Colin Farrell movie
After Yang, which I felt was . . . pretty good. Solid B. Not sure it was worth the trouble of a trial subscription (which I already canceled to make sure I don't get charged in a month, don't worry!). But, I did also really want to see that new documentary
We Need to Talk Abou Cosby, and that's on Showtime, so I have that to watch now at least.
I may sign up for yet another trial subscription later this summer so I can see that upcoming show called
The First Lady, which is star studded and about several of the country's most famous First Ladies. We'll see what the reviews are looking like, though.
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Beyond that, though, Alexia returned from her week-and-a-half trip to visit friends on Long Island, New York, on Saturday; I only looked after Cassie over the one and a half weekends she was gone, and fed her for the last time Saturday morning. I texted her that I was free for our next Movie Night sometime over the weekend if she was at all up for it, and she texted on Saturday, "tomorrow for sure." So, I went over to her place next door last night and we watched
Mission: Impossible - Fallout, which she agreed (with critics) was the best one.
Ghost Protocol is still my favorite, though.
Anyway, she also bought me dinner, as a totally unnecessary thank-you for looking after Cassie, but you know me, I have no problem accepting people's generosity. We ordered delivery from Polermo Pizza, and I got a calzone, half of which I saved for lunch at work today.
Beyond all that, I spent the weekend doing a lot of finishing work on updating and recreating my Apple Music playlists. And I finished last night! All this time I have guessed I have dozens, if not maybe hundreds, of playlists, but it had been hard to gauge because of the way some mistakes I made with it resulted in tons of playlists getting duplicated a bunch of times. I now have all duplicates deleted, and the remaining ones restored. I finally counted, and there are
333 of them! Holy shit. No wonder it sometimes is so hard just to decide what playlist to listen to. I have too many, and we're veering into
the paradox of choice. Too many choices! Oh well. A lot of times I let my mood dictate the choice, especially for thematic playlists, like the one I have dedicated to mourning the loss of a loved on ("In Memoriam") or my "For Mom" playlist. I even now have playlists dedicated to specific people in my life, including Shobhit, Mom, Gabriel, Barbara, Laney, and even Ivan. (I created the Barbara and Ivan ones just within the past couple of weeks.) I keep thinking about making one for Sherri; I just don't know if I can fill the standard 80 minutes with songs that remind me of her. (I generally stick to the 80 minute limit if I can, for no other reason than burned CDs used to have that limit, and it was a run time that I felt worked well for most playlists.)
Anyway, that's one huge, weeks-long project down. I'll have to come up with another one now.
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[posted 12:25 pm]
