— पांच हजार एक सौ तिहत्तर —
It turns out today is a day of transition from many angles and avenues. Most notably for me personally, Shobhit is at SeaTac Airport as I write this. He left quite early just to give himself some extra time, but his nonstop flight from Seattle to Paris is scheduled to depart at 1:15. It should then land at 11:10 pm my time, 8:10 am Paris time.
His connecting flight to New Delhi leaves Paris at 10:25 am local time (1:15 am my time), barely more than two hours later; it lands in New Delhi at 11:20 pm local time (9:50 am tomorrow my time). This across-the-globe international flights are a bit of a mind fuck with their time changes. If you include his early departure on public transit from home to SeaTac Airport this morning, his total travel will have taken nearly 26 hours. Initial airport departure to final airport arrival will have taken him 20 and a half hours.
Anyway, that's Shobhit. The other transitional elements have to do with work. Expo West in Anaheim is happening this week, and for the first time since 2019 we have a
lot of PCC office staff traveling there today, to be checking out products and networking with vendors for the rest of the week. Noah, Shelley the new Grocery Merchandiser who started yesterday, Tracy, Steven, Mackenzie (I think), Amanda the new Associate HBC Merchandiser who just started about two weeks ago, and even Justine are all flying out today. A bunch of them will even be at the airport at the same time as Shobhit, although Shobhit will be in a different terminal as he's on an international flight. I think most of them were on a 10 a.m. flight out to Orange County, though. Anyway, there might even be some other office staff I'm unaware of who are going.
You'd think this would make the office feel even emptier than normal. And true, the four-desk-square "Grocery pod" (as Justine referred to it yesterday) currently has only me sitting in it because Noah, Shelley and Tracy are all traveling, but there's an unusually large number of people here at the office today otherwise, including a lot of people in Accounting for some reason. That department is right next to my "Grocery Pod" desks. It probably has something to do with these four temporary accountant workers at the table in the small conference room on the other side of my desk; there must be an audit of some sort happening. Those people are also making the office fuller than normal.
Also! We've got a kind of rush of new staff onboarding this week. I already mentioned Shelley's first day yesterday, and the same day we had a new Associate Produce Merchandiser named Elliott introduced around. Today, a new staff person hired to be of assistance to Eric (Pricing Manager) as well as Produce has her first day today; her name is Amy and her title is "Pricing & Promotions Analytics Specialist." She may even take on a few tasks to lessen my work load, but in the meantime I have promised Eric I would spend some time familiarizing her with HQ, our pricing maintenance system I spend time using every day and have been since 2004. (I can still remember when Jennifer G first called me one of the "Power Users," a phrase I kind of loved; I'm now the one person left here who has been using HQ for by far the longest time, making me a quasi-expert by default.) Eric usually works from home, but because of Amy's arrival he's in the office until early afternoon every day the rest of this week as well—another unusual addition to the daily office population.
I just checked the office staff roster, which has been updated since I last looked at it—and yet it still doesn't have either Elliott or Amy on it. Or hell, Shelley either! It currently lists 25 people in Merchandising but still needs to add at least another 3. Last time I checked, there were 22, I think. Within just a couple of weeks, we grew our department 27%. This is very much a good thing, in my mind, as only now is it feeling like we're getting reasonable growth in Merchandising in response to the 16 stores we now have in operation. (We had only 7 when I started in 2002, and only 10 as recently as 2015. Adding another 6 stores over 6 years has been overwhelming in many ways, and I'm ready for at least a little relief—and I've needed far less relief than most of the other Merchandising staff.)
So, we've got more people at work, and fewer people at home. It'll be just Ivan and me for the next nearly four weeks; Shobhit's scheduled return is on Saturday, May 2. That being a weekend, I should be able to drive and pick him up. The previous weekend will be when I go out of town myself, to visit Barbara in Louisville.
— पांच हजार एक सौ तिहत्तर —
— पांच हजार एक सौ तिहत्तर —
As for last night, I walked home from work, and it was a pleasant walk. Shobhit was still out running last-minute errands when I got home, but he was home not long after. I threw what was left in the laundry basket into the washing machine so Shobhit would get the last of clothes he wanted to pack clean in a timely manner. I also cleaned up some cat puke and I made us some chai.
I assisted, slightly, with some last minute online forms, and we went down to the West Building common area where there's a color printer we can use to print things. Maybe Shobhit should use that a little more in the future instead of constantly sending me stuff to print at work. I guess in most cases it's not that big a deal for me to print stuff out for him; last night this was just an option that prevented us from having to drive all the way back to my office.
We then spent the rest of the evening watching TV. The latest episode of
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel on Prime Video, and last night's episode of
The Gilded Age on HBO Max. There are two more episodes of the former, both to be released this coming Thursday; and three more episodes of the latter, all on the next three Mondays while he's gone—I'm going to wait to watch them until he comes back. I have plenty of other things to watch on my own.
I'll continue watching
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver in real time. Those are far too timely, regarding current events, to get a backlog over the next four weeks.
Tonight, I have a fairly long movie commitment: I'm going to the showing of the Oscar-nominated Documentary Shorts. Ideally I would have gone to see this last Saturday, but the showing was too early and Jennifer and Matthew were still with us and we all went out for brunch. So today, I'll leave work a fair amount earlier than usual, at about 3:45, so I can make it to the 4 pm showing at the Uptown. And because these are by far the longest "shorts" on average, the combined run time is 160 minutes. I'll likely get out of the theater at about 6:45.
This will be the start of a busy week. Tomorrow I have another movie I want to review but that one I'll watch VOD at home, and then on Thursday I think I'm ready to go back Steamworks Bathhouse, my first time back since early November. Friday should be my first in-person Happy Hour with Laney since she was back in Washington last summer; I only just got confirmation via text that last night she arrived at her new place where she's subletting a room in Seattle. I don't know yet for certain what I'll be doing with the rest of my weekend, though. There will be one more movie at the very least.
I did get a surprise visit at my desk from Kwanteria, whom I hadn't seen since before the holidays. She apparently currently lives in Renton and has really liked working from home without the commute, but her whole department was asked to come in today. I had a very nice chat with her, though, and learned for the first time that she'd love to be invited to movies I go see. Well, shit! Yet another potential movie buddy! I asked if she'd come all the way into town for a movie and she was just like, "I've driven into Seattle for more mindless things. Yesterday I came for doughnuts." All righty then.
— पांच हजार एक सौ तिहत्तर —
[posted 12:26 pm]
