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I was very pointed about not taking on anything too overwhelming or stressful this week, but this morning has been legitimately too stressful. A huge batch of items had to be sent to stores today to correct things that got missed last week while I was out sick, and now I've undergone a bombardment of POS emails about inconsistencies that need further corrections, now in several different immediate batches. The app I use to send down immediate batches, keeps erroring out which is driving me fucking crazy.
Okay, it finally worked literally while I was writing this.
Plus I found about 95 more items that still needed promotion pricing batched on them which weren't even keyed to begin with to need correcting like those that went down today. Something like 320 corrections went down today; another 85 are now keyed to batch for tomorrow; an additional 9 have to wait until Monday to accommodate regular cost/price changes.
I'm hoping to get the 5/11 ad copy done today, which I'd have been doing next week except I'll be on vacation. I probably still will but it's frustrating to have gotten so little of it done this morning due to all this other stuff. I have other things to work ahead on tomorrow, before I leave for vacation early at 3:00 to meet Tracy at the Sounder Train station.
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Speaking of Tracy, she and I went to see
The Northman at Pacific Place at 6:00. And between my getting off work at 4:30 and meeting her there, I wound up having to rush way too much and kind of exhausting myself. I'm mostly over covid but there remain some residual effects.
I actually thought at first that I would bus down to the office, leisurely reading my library book along the way, swap out my paperwork, then go straight to meeting Tracy at the theater. I probably should have stuck with that plan. But, Shobhit was coughing too much at work yesterday so he came home early, and he got here minutes after I finished working. I even had an early dinner nuking in the microwave, but when I saw that he was home, I thought I would take the car and drive instead, eating when I got back.
Getting there was easy enough. About 15 minutes. Another 10 minutes or so to swap out the paperwork and leave again. I looked at the Map app's suggestion of routing back home, and it suggested taking Broad up to 5th Avenue to cut through most of downtown. I should have paid closer attention to where it suggested I first turn left, because I fucked myself by trying to drive 5th Avenue between Olive and Pike Streets during rush hour. That's just two blocks, but I must have had to wait four or five light cycles just to get through the first block, and another three or so to get through the second, before I could finally turn on Pike and head back up Capitol Hill.
I got home at about 5:35 and took roughly 5 minutes to eat my dinner that I didn't even have time to reheat again. I really thought I was going to have to walk all the way downtown and be there five or ten minutes late (which still would have been fine with the extensive trailers they played), but I lucked out here and found the #11 bus to be running 3 minutes late and so I barely managed to catch that. I still had to get off at 9th Avenue and walk to Pacific Place, getting to where Tracy was already waiting for me, right at 6:00.
It all worked out. I was just tired as fuck by the time I got there. And then the movie elicited mixed reactions. I think I liked it better than Tracy. The movie is still very weird, but in the end I decided I really liked it.
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Tracy always gives me a ride home after movies at Pacific Place, so I just took the elevator down to the parkin garage with her without even discussing it. Once we reached my building, we got to talking for a while in her car. That was when I learned the BIPOC Conversations Committee-organized Merchandising Team Event we have scheduled for Thursday next week is likely to be postponed,
again. This is already at least the third set calendar date we've decided on for this thing, and the first time we actually put it on the Outlook calendar at work—but, that was before I was out with covid. I was committed to coming into the office Thursday next week just for this event though, because I felt it important that I be there.
But, I've also been working from home all this week; apparently Eric still doesn't know if he has childcare lined up for that time; and most significantly, Tracy is feeling really overwhelmed with her job and for that reason more than anything, I guess Justine was the one who suggested another postponement. I'd just like to get a definitive answer on that, so I know whether to make more Birth Week plans for that day instead. Danielle's and my conversations about an Amtrak day trip on Monday fell through when she just remembered she actually took on some extra hours that day, so now we're back to my long-ago original plan of just going to Renton to have dinner with her at a place that's right next to railroad tracks. But, with nothing else planned on Thursday next week, I am now seriously considering just doing an Amtrak day trip to Portland and back, just by myself. Why not? Shobhit has a work shift that day, and it'll be the only way I can make Amtrak run of the trains I ride for my "trains and railroads" theme.
So, we'll see. Thursday is really up I the air right now.
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In other news, we are entering a phase of finality when it comes to Ivan's departure this weekend. I actually took him down to the storage unit this morning, and literally for the first time since he actually moved in the
last time (in November 2016), he's actually removed all of his stuff from there: three boxes, and a shoulder bag. I carried the one lighter, larger box for him up the elevator while he carried the two heavier, stacked smaller boxes. He was going through them and discovered several things he seemed to have forgotten he still had: a jacket he now declares will be good for his two-week cruise to Alaska next month; a black and red striped scarf he is apparently very fond of.
He gave me a ring light he found in his boxes. Interesting that this should be from back before Zoom or even TikTok became huge. People use ring lights a lot now.
I'll never understand Ivan's persistently nomadic existence. I don't think he has lived in one place even for a full two years since he left home as a young adult. On Saturday, the day I will turn 46, he will be 37. When I turned 37 (in 2013), Shobhit and I had already been living in this condo six years! Hell, we even got married that year. When I was 37, Shobhit and I had been together nine years. Since his divorce with a Scandinavian husband (I can't remember from which country anymore), he hasn't even been with a boyfriend for more than just a couple of months. And inevitably, he moves on to some other location, just as I knew when he moved back in with us last summer he would again probably sometime this year. For some reason I assumed he'd be here at least a year, but in the end he limited this stint to nine and a half months. A bit longer than the 8 months he lived with me in 2014, but not as long as the 14 months he lived with us from late 2016 to early 2018.
But, different strokes, I guess. Ivan is never in the same place long enough to amass very much stuff. He's shipping some stuff this time back to his parents' house, though, which is a relief so now we don't feel like we're offering him free storage space indefinitely. I'm sure he'll be back to visit again, just as he did multiple times between 2018 and 2019, before the pandemic hit. He'll always be welcome to. I'm going to miss him, but there have been enough goodbyes with him now that I don't expect it to be all that emotional at all this time around.
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[posted 12:34 pm]
