— पांच हजार एक सौ अस्सी-दो —
I hung out with Laney on Friday, and I didn't post any pictures at all! Well, until right now, although this isn’t really social media: the above shot is the house Laney now lives in. It was the one photo I took, and I did not share it on Friday.
This time was not a monthly Happy Hour, though. It was the one time we could find that worked for both of us, without having to wait several weeks, for me to come down and check out the new place where she's subletting a room. She's kind of sub-subletting, actually, and I just realized I should get clarification on whether the owners of the house, who are currently in New York City, know she lives there. I am almost certainly safe in assuming they do. But, the woman she moved in with, whose name was given to me and I even repeated it out loud and I still can't remember it, is actually renting it—temporarily—from the New York people. There's a separate apartment made out of the basement of the house which someone else also lives in. I guess the owners are expected to come back in spring 2023 so Laney expects to be able to rent out that room for only about a year.
It was a lucky find for her, though. Laney went back on the road for her retirement travels last fall, September if I remember right, and after having been in the Seattle area over the summer she was finding herself surprisingly homesick. So, she decided she'd come back for a while. Being on an extremely limited budget, she really assumed she'd have to find a place in the suburbs or on the outskirts of Seattle just to be able to afford a place to sublet, but she had put out feelers, and the woman living in this house is a friend of a Seattle Women's Chorus friend, who thought she might be a good candidate.
I left work at 4:00 on Sunday, so I could stop by the downtown library first. The new David Sedaris book was available for pickup and I was not about to let that hold expire and have to wait in the holds line again. I walked that far, then caught Light Rail from University Station to Capitol Hill Station, walking home from there. That whole process alone took nearly an hour, which made me really glad I left at 4:00. I then quickly made myself dinner before heading back out to Light Rail, which I then rode down to Mount Baker Station. It's a 17 minute train ride there from Capitol Hill Station.
Laney's new place is even closer to Mount Baker Station than mine is to Capitol Hill Station, but it did still involve a good amount of walking, both from home to the train (10 minutes) and from the train to Laney's house (9 minutes). So the full trek door to door is about 36 minutes. I really found the neighborhood familiar, and Laney had asked if I had ever gotten off that stop and walked around the neighborhood at all. It took me a minute and then I realized that indeed I had: when Gina and Beth came up to see the Blue Angels with me,
in 2019. We walked the roughly one mile from Mount Baker Station to Mount Baker Beach—walking right past Laney's current house, incidentally. That was also both the last Blue Angels show I went to watch,
and the last one to happen at all, as the pandemic canceled the shows in both 2020 and 2021. I figure it will be back this year.
Anyway, that would be why the area looked so familiar to me. This time, though, I paid much closer attention to the houses—because they are surprisingly big. I talked to Laney about how, as opposed to Capitol Hill where the blocks with huge houses are clearly occupied by rich people, this one had big houses but did not feel like a rich neighborhood. (Of course, "rich" is relative: Zillow lists this house as being worth $1.4 million. Granted, real estate is nuts right now—it sold in 2014 at $660,000. Hey, what's our condo worth right now? $696,700, Zillow estimates. Well, that's not anything shocking . . . although it is notably higher than the 2020 tax assessment, and 63.5% higher than what we bought it for in 2007.)
Laney's room is past a very large living room from the front door, past a spacious dining room (where her roommate was sitting), to the left and then a quick right to a door that’s at the end of a long hallway separating rooms on the north side of the house. He room is quite small, but compared to living in her van, quite spacious. We sat and chatted for a few minutes, then took a walk. We wound up hanging out for a little while in what I realize now was the south end of Mount Baker Park—exactly what Gina and Beth and I had walked through to get to Lake Washington for the Blue Angels show in 2019.
Her knees weren't up for a walk all the way to the lake that day, maybe another time. We found a fun "sway" thing to sit on that was part of a truly fantastic playground, which even has something kind of like a zipline. Then we walked back to her place, and hung out just long enough for her to read me the children's book she's working on, which I really liked. Then it was time for me to go back home.
— पांच हजार एक सौ अस्सी-दो —
— पांच हजार एक सौ अस्सी-दो —
Saturday was the day I drove Shobhit's car down to Federal Way to hang out with Gabriel and Lea. Inside the house! Unmasked! This was only the second time we did
that since the pandemic started—the last time was with Shobhit, in July of last year, just before the Delta wave.
This time, though, they just asked that I take a home test before coming. They would do the same. It seems this is standard procedure for them, and a way that at least one of Tess's friends often comes over and is allowed to visit unmasked. As it happens, I did this on Friday too, also at Laney's request, before I went to visit her. I don't think she tested, as she hasn't even bothered yet to get the free tests from government sites, although she acknowledged it would be a good idea so she probably will soon. She never spends time indoors with people, or at least she didn't until I came over. She's easily the second-most strict with covid precautions among all the people I know, the most strict being Gabriel. Laney still won't dine indoors anywhere with me, which is fine; even I will actively choose patio seating if it's possible. I just won't necessarily reject indoor dining if patio seating isn't available.
In any case, back to Gabriel: barring any new massive surge (which is
probably coming, to some degree at least), the thinking is that I could even come and visit again relatively soon, provided we all test beforehand. I'm fine with that. So, I actually did a home test two days in a row over the weekend, on Friday—another thing I needed to go home first for before heading down to Laney's—and on Saturday. The two tests were only about 17 hours apart, actually.
It was nice to visit with them again in a way that felt semi-normal. I even rode with Gabriel to the store when they spontaneously decided we would make pizzas for dinner, and we were in the car together without masks on. These sorts of things have been re-normalized for many people for months now, but not with Gabriel. And even when we got to QFC, I was just walking toward the store, casually slipping my mask on, and he was like, "Hold on a minute. Walking into a store for me is like walking into a war zone."
He keeps his keys and things in one pocket and will only touch things in the store with one hand. When we were coming back out, he had a bag of groceries and two shrink-wrapped bundles of firewood to carry, and he carried them all on his own, carrying the two bundles of wood with one hand. In the Before Times I would have offered to carry something for him, but he was being so conscientious about what he touched and with what hand, I couldn't imagine he wanted my hands added to the mix. (In retrospect, I have no idea if this would have made any difference to him, but I hadn't touched anything in the store. Maybe I could have carried something?)
Side note on the QFC in Federal Way: with masking mandates ended, the vast majority of shoppers were walking around with no mask on. I'm nowhere near as strict as Gabriel but I remain stricter than most, and I do still mask when going into stores. PCC in particular still has probably 90% of its shoppers masked. And even my local QFC probably has at least 75% of its shoppers masked. "That's Seattle," Gabriel and Lea tell me. Very different from Federal Way, and certainly from Tacoma, which technically the QFC was in. Still, it felt kind of jarring to be in that store where the maskers were now very much in the minority.
I did wash my hands as soon as we returned to the house. Twenty seconds! That's one thing I remain truly militant about. I did use the hand sanitizer Gabriel offered me in the car, so it was less imperative in this case, but, I don't want to break out of that habit.
Lea made
hamantaschen cookies, she said slightly late for Purim, hers filled with either poppyseed or Nutella. Either way they were incredible and she later sent me home with six of them. I wound up sharing half of them with Ivan. I'm wishing now that I had taken my own picture of them. Lea posted a photo but only in "stories" so they post was temporary and there's no permanent link I can share. Her posts tend to be friends-only anyway so it wouldn't have made any difference.
— पांच हजार एक सौ अस्सी-दो —
— पांच हजार एक सौ अस्सी-दो —
We had briefly talked about watching a movie, but then Gabriel said he wanted to play a board game. I liked this idea, and I even liked the idea of playing his new "DUNE IMPERIUM" game, which someone had given to him as a gift. I think it was from Stephanie and Tess, for Christmas. He hadn't had a chance to play it yet. The rules were insane, though. There are so many pieces and so many moving parts to this game, you have to be a military strategist for House Atreides to understand them. The game rules book, which is several pages, includes a QR code to an instructional video—Lea played it on her phone, and we had to pause it after a minute and a half so Gabriel could jump in with information from his pages. I went to look at the video again and only then realized it's fucking thirty minutes long! Christ.
After quite some time, we gave up on that game, as Gabriel was having trouble making full sense of it himself, and went for another game instead. I did say, and even reiterated over text later, that I seriously do want to come back and play the Dune game sometime. He'll just have to spend some time ahead making sense of the instructions, and I'll actually watch that half-hour video before coming over. My only moderate concern is that in the future, if Shobhit is available and he comes, whether he'll watch the video ahead of time too. It would certainly be helpful if he did, if all of us had it watched beforehand. I won't retain it all by any stretch, but there's no question it will still be helpful.
So the game we played instead was a movie guessing game, which of course gave me very much the upper hand. I think maybe only one movie got mentioned during the whole game that I did not recognize. This game was a lot easier to understand and get a sense of the rules quickly, and I thought it was a lot of fun. Also I won! Gabriel is competitive in a way I have never been so he really tried, but, I'm the only one who spends his entire life watching movies. The game was about eight years old so no movies any newer than that were ever mentioned, but it was still relatively easy. "Relatively" is still a key word here, because sometimes I, quite frustratingly, would plank on a film title I absolutely knew. That’s just my own memory issues which are irritating in their own right.
I spent about five hours there and had a great time. It really was nice being able to visit and actually go inside—I had hung out with them on New Year's Day too but we all sat outside, even in the snowy cold that day, because case numbers were climbing and already way too high at that point. I really hope we can do something not too restrictive for my Birth Week, which feels very much up in the air right now. The onset of spring always comes with a sense of hope, but that could also be when a new surge is cresting in the U.S. So, who the fuck knows.
Possibly, it will make a difference that we can so much more easily test before visiting now. All I have ever thought about was getting the free tests from government sites, and I was kind of struck at the Tacoma QFC to see literal
bins full of those tests. Do you have to pay for those? I don't even know how much they cost. Why buy them when you can get them for free? They were the exact same boxes I got sent from both the federal government and state government sites.
The other game we could have played was a Fast & Furious board game, but we never bothered with that one. Maybe we should play that one next time just to be fair—Gabriel will have just as much advantage with that one as I had with the movie one we played. Also, he had a Fast & Furious Lego car all constructed and on display in their dining room, which had a level of detail and mechanical functionality that was
genuinely impressive.
Oh! One other thing. I actually kind of hoped I'd get to see Tess, but she was getting picked up by Stephanie at 5:00, which was why Gabriel asked that I arrive shortly after that. This way they wouldn't have to ask Tess and Stephanie to test as well, just for what would inevitably be brief exposure to me. It was an efficiency thing. So, I just hung out at home the rest of the day before leaving at about 4:30 Saturday afternoon. I'm trying to remember what else I did. I don't think I watched any movies. I listened to music and dinked around, I guess.
It was about 10:37 before I was even starting back home from Gabriel and Lea's house. I could have stayed later, actually, partly because of the chai I made and brought down—which both Gabriel and Lea openly very much enjoyed. Note to self! Maybe I'll just start bringing that all the time. As I said to them, it's the only authentically Indian thing I know how to make (which I make with loose tea, sugar, ginger, cardamom, and mint, as taught by Shobhit) and I am now almost always the one who makes it at home rather than Shobhit. Anyway, I was less concerned about how late I would be there than how late I would get home. It was still a forty minute drive, and it was probably around 11:20 by the time I got home. Quite late for me.
Ivan was still up, having slept all day after his overnight Friday shift, but he had Saturday and Sunday off. I gave him one poppy seed and one Nutella (the last of the Nutella ones I had! and I liked those best . . . I am a giver) hamantaschen cookie, with which he was suitably impressed.
— पांच हजार एक सौ अस्सी-दो —
I finally took myself to see a movie at the theater yesterday, the first I reviewed from a cinema viewing after five reviews of quite, on average, mediocre movies streamed from home. This one was . . . fine:
Compartment No. 6, a solid-B Finnish movie about a student's gradually developing relationship with an emotionally repressed Russian man on a train ride from Muscow to Murmansk.
Ivan has a long history of fascination with Russia and Russian culture, so I kept assuming he'd totally want to see this with me, even though he forgot about each conversation we had about it after talking about it like three times. He never expressed any enthusiastic interest so I should not have been so disappointed when he opted not to join me yesterday. I took the bus to Lower Queen Anne and saw it at the SIFF Cinema the Uptown. I used my SIFF Member free popcorn punch card and got a small popcorn, but could barely eat half of it because even though I asked for only a little butter, the guy fucking drenched it. I love that they use real butter, but that amount of it? Gack.
Also, a bit of mixed feelings about SIFF Cinema moviegoers in the wake of mask mandates being dropped. SIFF Cinema has long been the most strict, which I always appreciated—when the vaccine mandates were in effect, they included exceptions for people with a proof of negative test within the previous 48 hours, but SIFF Cinema would not accept negative tests. It was proof of vaccination or nothing, which I always appreciated. And now, after the mask mandate has dropped, they still have signs up asking people to keep masks on throughout the theater. All of their staff had masks on, and properly fitted. It was great, or so it seemed.
No shade on the staff at all; they really were great. (Except for Butter Guy, of course, but that's a different issue.) The problem was with the patrons, who basically completely ignored these signs. Now, you don't have to be a SIFF member to see movies at their theaters—you just get a $5 ticket discount if you are. So, I might very well have been the only SIFF member at this screening, and I have a feeling SIFF Members would on average be more conscientious. But, I was one of probably 20 people in this theater, and although I did take my mask off to eat popcorn and drink the Zevia soda I brought from home, I was literally one of only two who kept my mask on the rest of the time. Most of the others weren't even eating. They just sat through the whole movie without their mask on. Which, technically, was their choice when it came to county policy right now—but it was in flagrant disregard for what SIFF Cinema themselves was asking for. And I found that actively annoying.
So anyway, I thought the movie was good, if not great. Took the bus from there downtown to Target so I could get some travel sized toiletries for my trip to Louisville on Thursday. Caught a bus from there home. Wrote the review.
And then, at Ivan's suggestion, had and I watched a movie at home in the evening. It took some time to find one we agreed on, but I had recently added Tim Burton's
Big Fish to my Netflix queue as I had not seen it since it was released in 2003 and I remember loving it. That movie hasn't aged nearly as well as the films from earlier in Burton's career, but, I still enjoyed it. Ivan seemed to as well, at least until he fell asleep. He only missed the last ten or fifteen minutes, but whatever. We had both seen it before, albeit not since 2003 in both cases—I was 27 and he was 18—so I didn't care that much that he fell asleep. I enjoy his company either way.
I then got on Skype with Shobhit from India for about half an hour. I had to approve his access to Amazon in India because, understandably, Amazon's algorithms were suspicious of attempted access from India. He's buying his mom a new TV, because it's such a huge part of her daily life and I guess the one she has now has some lines appearing on the screen. They then needed to head out to run some errands—it's morning in India when it's evening here—so we logged off.
— पांच हजार एक सौ अस्सी-दो —
[posted 12:27 pm]
