— पांच हजार एक सौ बहत्तर —
My quite-busy weekend started with a brief, unexpected but pleasant distraction: I left work early on Friday, at 4:00, so I could get home as early as I could to let Jennifer and Matthew into the building and into the "Guest Suite" I rented for the night for them. To save even more time, I took the Monorail and Light Rail, because they had left Shelton so early with the intent of bypassing any huge traffic that they were actually in town an hour or so before I got off work. But then, as I was walking from the Capitol Hill Light Rail Station through Cal Anderson Park, I was stopped by a seemingly random, gray-haired lady who said, "Hi Matthew!"
Huh? "It's Sue," she said. "From PCC." And I still didn't quite get it right: "Sue M?" I asked (using the full last name, actually). Nope, Sue R, from the View Ridge store. We've exchanged many, many emails. I even asked, like an idiot, if we had ever met in person before, and she said yes. I learned she actually lives on Capitol Hill, which rather surprised me. I should have asked how long she's lived on the hill, but I was pressed for time. I should email her again. Anyway, I said, "I can't believe I've never run into you before." I mean, sure, Capitol Hill alone, the most densely populated neighborhood in the entire state, has a population exceeding 32,000 people—nearly the same population as Pullman, where I went to college! (I just figured that out.) Among Seattle suburbs, it's roughly the same size as the city of SeaTac. Anyway, my point is, it's a densely populated neighborhood and I don't suppose it should be such a shock that this was the first time I ever ran into her. Hell, I've only seen Tommy, my roommate from 2015-16, once on the street since he moved out. I don't even know if he still lives on the Hill anymore though.
After just a few minutes I had to tell Sue that I had guests from out of town waiting at home, so we said our goodbyes and I moved on. Jennifer and Matthew had been waiting in the parking lot across the street from my building for close to an hour earlier in the afternoon, but I figured out only just as I was leaving work that I could message her a screenshot of the email with directions on how to get into the Guest Suite: it included a one-time-use code to get into the building, plus the code to open the door to the Guest Suite itself, with a set of keys waiting inside, which would then allow them to get in and out of the building on their own. I felt bad, because had I thought about this earlier, they could have gotten into the building on their own as soon as they arrived. I was just still thinking about the way it had worked when I last had guests stay I the Guest Suite, with Dad and Sherri ringing in the year 2017, when I had to come and pick up the keys from the building manager earlier in the week during his open office hours. It's quite nice they have the building buzzer code and Guest Suite door keypad options now.
So, they actually got themselves inside while I was in the middle of my commute home, and then they came back out to their car in the parking lot across the street when I got there—they still needed me to get into the garage off 15th Avenue, so they could park in Shobhit's spot. Because we have a neighborhood pass for street parking as residents, Shobhit parked on the street overnight when he later got home from his work shift.
I got into their car, and guided them into the garage and parking spot. And at first we went to the Guest Suite, both so Jennifer could pick up an extra jacket and so I could finally do what I stupidly did not do when Dad and Sherri stayed there: I took
several pictures. Whew! Now, if and when someone else comes and stays overnight in that room in the future, I'll have these shots to give them a pretty good sense of what the room is like.
And I must say, it is
tiny. It's like an incredibly small hotel room. It does have two windows and a full bathroom, but some of the photos, even without using a wide angle lens (which I only used once, for the shot in the bathroom showing the shower), make the room look bigger than it really is. I had been thinking that we might eat our takeout dinner planned for after dinner in their room, but the small size just made it infeasible. We went up to the condo to eat after the show. I don't know what the square footage would be in that room, but combined with the bathroom it's probably a bit smaller than the middle third of our condo—the guest room plus the guest bathroom.
We went upstairs to the condo for a few minutes, to pass the time for just under an hour. Ivan was still sleeping (he works nights, remember) and I actually had never told him Jennifer and Matthew were coming, so I had them come with me to go next door to feed Alexia's cat Cassie while Alexia is on a trip to Long Island, New York. I didn't want Ivan to get up to use the bathroom or something and get surprised by unexpected guests without me even in there. I think Jennifer felt slightly imposing by coming with me into Alexia's condo, but I know Alexia wouldn't really care, and what difference does it make, anyway? Also, Jennifer paid more attention to the details of the directions left out for Cassie than I did: the cat gets pumpkin powder with her dinner food, and Jennifer was like, "I think you're supposed to mix it in." She was right: the directions did say "mix in." Still, I said, "Sheesh, you're like Shobhit." Which cracked her up a little bit.
Cassie taken care of, we went back to my condo, and shot the shit for a little bit until it was time to walk downtown. Matthew had gotten his Covid test on Thursday morning as early as possible, but the results still hadn't come, so it was pretty clear he wasn't going to be able to come to the show, and his ticket would go unused. He really should have gotten the test done at the end of the day on Wednesday, but hindsight is 20/20, I guess. As long as we're talking "what ifs," he should have just gotten vaccinated to begin with and we would not have been in this situation.
Now, this does mean that, yes, I did let Matthew into the condo as an unvaccinated person with no recent negative test. That was a first, since the Delta variant happened. Now, I did let Sachin's girlfriend Kimberly into the condo a couple of times unvaccinated, but that was, again, before Delta, and when official guidelines were just saying no more than "two households" together at one time. And last week, King County's Covid dashboard web page updated their criteria to the new system the CDC adopted, so it no longer had categories of "low," "moderate," "substantial" or "high." Two weeks ago, it had just been downgraded from "high" to "substantial." Well, now there are just three categories for "Covid-19 Community Level": "low," "medium" and "high," and when I checked on Friday it was down to "
Low." Basically, that made me more comfortable shifting my boundaries to what they had been before Delta (let alone Omicron). In order to be in the "Low" category, King County has to have fewer than 10 Covid-19 hospital admissions per 100,000 people over the previous 10 days; and few than 10% of staffed inpatient beds occupied by Covid-19 patients. They are no longer using daily case counts as criteria, only hospital stats. For transmission rates, which they do still show on the dashboard, there were 90 per 100,000 during the week ending on 2/28, which is lower than it's been since December 2—a few weeks before the Omicron wave even really hit.
In any event, allowing Matthew into the condo was, like so many things, a calculated risk, but far less of one than had I done it in, say, mid-January. Also, he
had just gotten tested, so even though he didn't get the results by showtime Friday night, we would know his status soon enough, and in all likelihood he was indeed negative. (His results finally came at something like 4:30 Saturday morning. He was indeed negative.)
I suggested he walk with us, though, on the very unlikely chance that his results came in while we were walking. They didn't, of course (he even checked once we reached The Moore Theater; I wanted him in the selfie I took of us anyway, as I didn't want to be deliberately exclusionary—he'd still come with Jennifer for the visit, after all), but it would have really sucked if he hadn't walked with us and then gotten his results just in time for the show but when he was still back at the Guest Suite.
I have a tendency to make some relatively harmless but still boneheaded mistakes, such as assuming all this time that the show was at The Paramount Theater, which I kept having in my mind because that is the location of the Seattle Theater Group box office. But, the e-tickets themselves did say The
Moore Theatre (Seattle's oldest theater, incidentally;
opened in 1907), which I did not figure out until Jennifer asked for clarification as we were just about reaching the Paramount, walking down Pine. I had even told her the theater is several blocks away from Third and Pine where flagrantly drug using transients have been massing recently, even with a few recent broad-daylight shootings. But! The police appeared to have just cleared the block out of those people a day or two before, so that was convenient. We wound up walking further down Pine and I even pointed out the notorious (still closed) corner McDonald's like a tour guide. The Moore was just a couple of blocks north on 2nd Avenue.
The show was great. We saw Fortune Feimster, tickets for which Jennifer and I purchased all the way back in May 2021, when we truly had no idea what Covid would look like by March 2022. There were high hopes back then, especially given that May of last year was in the early days of huge vaccination programs. Back then, we thought we might not even be having to wear masks anymore by now, although I acknowledge then that it would be better or it could be worse by now. I think a lot of us had this naïve notion that it would be something steady: either getting worse, or getting better. Instead, it's been very much up and down, with the likes of the Delta variant and then the Omicron variant. There's now a general idea that maybe we'll never see another wave like that of Omicron since it ultimately resulted in a majority of the population getting some level of immunity (between vaccination, infection, or both—luckily I still haven't gotten it), but really, who the fuck knows? People also talk about how this virus has been underestimated at every turn.
And now, as of March 1, businesses are no longer required to ask for proof of vaccination; and after March 12, masking wearing will also become optional again. Interestingly, Seattle Theater Group sent out a release on March 1 asserting that they will retain the same Covid protocols at least through the end of May, both requiring either proof of vaccination or proof of negative test within 48 hours, plus required mask wearing. I'm totally on board with that decision, but it also meant that the hoops Matthew would have to jump through would not change either.
I only just realized this morning that the Fortune Feimster show was the
second live indoor theater event I've been to since the pandemic started. The first one was only a week ago! That being when Danielle and Morgan and I all went to that improv hip-hop comedy "Freestyle Love Supreme" show on February 16, merely six days prior. I don't have any other tickets to anything else coming up soon, but I do have the trip to Louisville booked for the last weekend of this month. Anyway, it felt like everyone and their mother went to the Fortune Feimster show; I only learned afterward that Mandy had also been to the 7:00 show I was at, as was an old Facebook friend named Carrie Ann, who had been in the Seattle Lesbian and Gay Chorus with me back in the day.
Fortune Feimster did a great show, following an opening act whose name unfortunately I can't remember, because she was
really funny—and raunchy. This was all after we stood in an insanely long line that wrapped around the building, but moved almost shockingly fast given that everyone's vaccination status was getting checked, and then we went inside and I was absolutely in the most crowded space I have been in since probably 2019. To be perfectly honest, the fact that everyone in there had masks on was a great comfort—I wasn't as triggered by the crowd itself as I would have by a thick crowd with no masks on.
Jennifer and I misunderstood directions on where to go, went up the ramp to the door to the balcony our tickets were bought for, then found out there was a line already formed and we had to go back to the main floor to get to the back of it. While we were there, Jennifer went to a concessions stand and use the bathroom; the ladies in line ahead of us tipped her off that the bar downstairs had no line at all. I was getting hungry and asked her to find something with any kind of protein in it. The best she could do was come back with a packet of Rese's Peanut Butter Cups. Way too much sugar, but, oh well. It did effectively tide me over, at least. The most astonishing part of this was that she bought two cocktails, the peanut butter cups, and a bottle of water, and those four things totaled over $45, which was nuts. We each got a souvenir sippy cup, though. Now I have two of those, the other one from the Tacoma Arts Center from when Laney and I went to see The Kinsey Sicks in 2019—the last live theater show of any kind I had seen before the pandemic (not counting the play Shobhit and I went to see in Sydney).
We found a row about six or seven rows from the front of the lower balcony, and sat on the end by the aisle, which was a smart choice for when the show ended. I
got a photo that indicated the view was still really not bad at all.
Jennifer was pretty quick to get out of the theater once the show was done; Fortune Feimster was still taking her own photo of an applauding audience when we made our way out, getting ahead of most of the crowd. We then walked all the way back to my building together, even though Matthew was worried about her feet. I guess she has a toe with bones growing sideways or something weird, and it gets to hurting when she's on her feet too long. She said it mostly happens when she's standing all day at work, and she wasn't worried about the walk. By the time we were getting closer to home, she was getting a little out of breath, but I think that was just because of the long walk.
Matthew walked down and met up with us around Broadway, then at my suggestion, we went to Manao Thai Street Eats for the aforementioned takeout dinner. I tried texting Shobhit to see if he wanted anything, but predictably he had his phone charging and didn't see the texts. I just decided, fuck it, I'd get him the so-called "Spicy Eggplant." I knew it wouldn't be spicy enough for him, but nothing is. They did provide me with a side of a kind of pepper flakes they assured me were very hot. Shobhit had most of the vegetable rolls they gave us on the house (no idea if they do that for everyone or if this was because of the kind of long wait), but waited on the Spicy Eggplant until the next day, as he'd already had his dinner.
We brought our dinners up to the condo and Jennifer and Matthew ate at the dining table while I ate at the coffee table, the cats looking upon them with an evident mixture of curiosity and suspicion.
— पांच हजार एक सौ बहत्तर —
— पांच हजार एक सौ बहत्तर —
Shobhit had to get
his Covid test on Saturday morning—required for travel to India regardless of vaccination status—and he reschedule it for a place in Ballard at 10:00 Saturday morning. I had previously scheduled him for a Curative test at The Parmount at noon, but after there were some erroneous charges and a rejection of a claim by Aetna, Shobhit rescheduled for a testing site he felt was more reliably going to go through insurance. He also asked if Jennifer and Matthew wanted to come to Ballard and have brunch with us there, and Jennifer was indeed interested in doing that.
In the end we decided we'd all just go in our car, and Shobhit would drive us. This way I could maximize my time with Jennifer, and we wouldn't have to find parking for two cars instead of one. We went to the testing site first, and testing centers are far less busy now than they were two months ago, so he was basically in and out of there. I was legitimately shocked by how quickly he came back into the car. So then we went to the place for brunch that I had found and suggested, mostly because the menu worked and they have heated outdoor patio seating: The Egg & Us, which is in the same complex as Trader Joe's literally across the street from PCC Ballard, in the cutely named "
Ballard Blocks." (Shobhit did ask if Jennifer and Matthew had been to the Ballard Locks, and they had not; sometime when she visits again I'll have to take her there.)
There was available seating inside, and I think without my intervention even Shobhit would have been happy to dine inside. But, right now, I'm still more comfortable with outdoor dining whenever possible, especially if they have heaters, and especially while with someone unvaccinated. So, we ate outside. We did have to shift our tables around so that the heater was more evenly centered between our two 2-tops, but it was fine. Shobhit and I split an order of a Mediterranean Omelet and a vegetarian eggs benedict dish; the former was too heavy on the sauteed onions but the latter was genuinely delicious.
We went across the street to PCC so Jennifer could see a PCC store for the first time. We did that while Shobhit went into the Sephora to look for a specific lipstick his mom asked for (it wasn't there but he later found it at Bartell Drugs), and then I bought a few things. We then drove back home, and once we reached there, Jennifer and Matthew, who had already left the keys in the Guest Suite and taken their stuff back to their car, just switched out to their car, drove off, and we were able to park our car back in our spot.
Ivan did see them, very briefly, when we were just leaving for brunch. He was arriving home from his overnight shift at Foss. Ivan was amused to learn that Matthew is 14 years younger than Jennifer, and he told me that before I introduced him as her boyfriend, he totally thought he was her son. Ha! I had to message Jennifer that, and at first she just wrote back,
Thanks.
She then messaged me again last night that she found out Matthew put a temporary tattoo of a penguin on his thigh while we were at the show.
So maybe he is my child, she added.
— पांच हजार एक सौ बहत्तर —
I had most of the rest of Saturday to myself. Ivan and I had planned to watch a movie in the evening, and we eventually did, just later than usual, because he hadn't gone to bed until well after noon, and he zonked out until well after 8 p.m.
In the meantime, I worked on updating Apple Music playlists, and then in the afternoon, seeing that the VOD price had
finally gone down from $19.99 to a reasonable $4.99, I rented, watched and reviewed
Red Rocket, which was very good.
Shobhit got off work at 10:15, and it was about 9:30 before I finally started the movie I watched with Ivan:
Cruel Intentions, from 1999. We decided to watch that after we had watched
Dangerous Liaisons a couple of weeks before, and he said
Cruel Intentions had been a modern retelling of it set in high school. He remembered loving the movie, but after we finished it Saturday night, we basically came to a consensus that it had not aged that well. (Check out
this line about email.)
Dangerous Liaisons was a far better film, and aged way better. And that one was from the eighties!
Shobhit got home in the middle of
Cruel Intentions and, while he ate his Spicy Eggplant, remarked on how corny the movie was. He was not wrong.
— पांच हजार एक सौ बहत्तर —
As for yesterday, I got to be part of Karen's first foray out to a movie theater since before the pandemic—her beloved Peter Dinklage brought her out. I had actually planned to see
Cyrano the previous weekend, when it actually opened, but she was unavailable then, and when she had asked if I had seen it, I said I would wait to see it with her this weekend if she liked.
We met for the 12:10 pm showing yesterday at Pacific Place, not long after Shobhit and I did some walking errands to Walgreens, Bartell Drugs (where he found the lipstick) and Mud Bay. I had my lunch at the theater: wanted to see how the Impossible Nuggets were. Mmm, they were so delicious! I had them with a Ranch dip. Shobhit suggested I just bake the Field Roast veggie nuggets I already have at home and take those. Except, you know what? They would not be as freshly warm, although I do think the sweet and sour sauce I had at home would have been a better dip.
Karen declared she was going to do "the full movie theater experience," and got herself popcorn and a soda. This being a week after the movie opened, which I always expected would not be any huge box office hit, there must have been maybe five or six other people in the theater. So, quite socially distanced by default. We still kept our masks on once we were done eating.
The movie itself
was fine—solid B. Flawed, but entertaining enough. I didn't get to hang out with Karen much otherwise, as we both arrived just in time for the movie, and then talked about it for maybe five minutes outside the theater when it was done. We took the elevator together until I had to get off on the ground floor before she went further down to the garage level, and I walked home to write my review while Shobhit was working.
Karen evidently liked my review. After I posted the link to Facebook and she read it, she
posted the comment, "I agree on all points."
— पांच हजार एक सौ बहत्तर —
Shobhit got off work last night at 7:00, and after he got home, just when I was encountering a brand new issue wherein my playlists have all disappeared yet again (what the fuck!—but, because I now have a subscription, I feel pretty confident it's just a matter of time before I'll get them easily restored; I just don't have access to them for a day I guess), we watched a few shows: one episode each of
Raised by Wolves (a season finale I found honestly frustrating);
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel; and
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. Tonight, we'll have one more episode of
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and then tonight's episode of
The Gilded Age. After this, though, everything we're in the middle of together will have to wait a month: he leaves for a nearly four-week trip to India tomorrow.
And I still have a few more things to tell you about today! Shelley, the new Grocery Merchandiser, started today, her first day at PCC. She's sitting just to my left in Scott's old desk, making it the first time Scott's absence feels slightly weird to me. Because he worked from home or toured stores so much, I was used to his desk being empty. But with a new person there, his departure, a little more than a month after the fact, suddenly feels more real than ever.
She seems nice enough so far. It took me about half an hour to figure this out, but she looks like she could be Edie Falco's sister.
Tracy had told me she wouldn't be in the office today, but she came in after all. I arrived at 7:30 as usual, but Shelley, Noah
and Tracy were all here already. That was very weird. "Why is
everybody here this early?" I asked. "I feel like I'm in
The Twilight Zone!"
I then said, "You must be Shelley," and we introduced ourselves, said "Nice to meet you," and the like. And then Tracy, who seems to get jealous of everyone she thinks I'm nicer to than I was to her when we first met (and I dispute the idea that I was unfriendly to her, but whatever), had to chime in: "Why are you so much nicer to her than you were to me?" or something to that effect. Oh my god Tracy, get ahold of yourself!
Something did occur to me, though, a key difference between when I first met Tracy and my first meeting Shelley. First of all, Shelley is to be a Grocery Merchandiser just as Noah is, which means I'll be working directly with her a lot more than I was ever meant to be with Tracy—she was a known entity, and she probably knew about me already as well. She and Noah and I were even taken out for lunch by Justine today. When I came to work after returning from Australia in March 2020, Tracy was just here, and I didn't know who she was. In her defense, she did roll over and introduce herself to me, but we didn't talk a lot those very first few days. And Shelley and I didn't talk a huge amount this morning either, but Tracy likes to characterize me as being socially aloof when we very first met, as though I reserved that behavior just for her. I mean, in all likelihood, Shelley will also find herself thinking
What's his problem? soon enough, about something I'm totally unaware of. We'll see, I guess!
Anyway, I'm back from lunch now—it was originally just going to be Justine, Noah, Shelley and me, but since Tracy was here Justine invited her too. Justine had asked for suggestions of restaurants and she liked me suggestion of Wilmott's Ghost at the Amazon Spheres, which had been where Beth took Scott, Noah, Kevin and me for Kevin's 20th anniversary lunch last fall. I loved the food there, and was bummed to find it closed when we got there. Even though their website says "Now serving every day" and the door even says they're open on Mondays, they weren't open after about ten minutes of waiting. Maybe their chef wasn't there yet or something, who knows?
We moved down a block and went to the Skillet Diner. I thought it would work for me fine because the Skillet on Capitol Hill that's all of two blocks away from home offers a great veggie burger. Well, this place is set up more like "fast casual" and their menu has no substitution options, no veggie burger patties. My options were either a salad or the grilled cheese sandwich; I picked the latter. It was very good, at least, especially choosing the tomato soup as the side.
A lot of the work related talk, fairly obviously designed for Shelley's benefit, had little to do with me. But then Justine told me to say something about what I do at PCC. I said, "I change prices." Justine laughed and suggested I say a little about the
history of what I have done at PCC. So I said, "I've been changing prices since 2002!" I was kidding around a bit; I did get into more detail about all the
ways I change prices, or enter new item information, or key promotion data, etc etc. Eventually Shelley will be sending me new item information to enter, which I think she started to get an idea of.
Justine ordered an Uber for us to take there as well as take back. We were done at the restaurant by 12:45 which was how we got back here, and me back to my desk, right around 1:00. Pretty good timing, all things considered. On the way back Justine suggested maybe we could make a "Center Store Team lunch" a monthly thing. She'll have to look at the "meals budget." I really like the idea though.
— पांच हजार एक सौ बहत्तर —
[posted 1:11 pm]
