— पांच हजार दो सौ सोलह —
I just finished a three-day holiday weekend which was actually pretty eventful; I'm glad I already
posted about two thirds of it on Sunday evening—something I might not normally have done, except that I did my last belated "Birth Week" activity with Laney on Saturday. That necessitated a standalone post, but since it was on Sunday, I figured I would reference the things I did on Friday (dinner and watching
Jurassic World with Alexia at our place), and also on Sunday (watching
Paddington 2 at my place, again with Laney) since that was already also done by the time I was writing.
Incidentally, when Shobhit got home from work on Sunday evening, the HBO Max landing page for
Paddington 2 was still up on the TV screen, so he asked me if it was good. I said, "It's wonderful," but also noted that I was pretty sure he had already watched these movies with me before. "I don't remember," he said, and I let him know the first one is on Netflix. (Why one is on Netflix and the other is on HBO Max, I haven't a clue.) I later searched my blog just to confirm: Shobhit and I did indeed watch
Paddington together, four years ago,
July 18, 2022 to be exact—then we watched
Paddington 2 the very next day. Apparently, even rewatching the movies this past weekend did not jog the memory for Shobhit. What I will say though, based on my 2018 accounts, is that Shobhit followed a similar track: generally amused by the first one; getting a lot more genuine laughs from the second one. I still find the two about equally charming, personally.
Anyway! Today I only have yesterday to update you on, which is nice because it means I don't have to spend an excessive amount of time updating today. We went over to Abhishek and Vinaya's in Bothell for lunch, our first time seeing them since
late November 2018 (that year again!)—three and a half years ago. That was when another cousin was here visiting, Anubhab, who Shobhit and I took to Snoqualmie Pass so he could see snow for the first time. We went back to Abhishek and Vinaya's that evening and watched
The Incredibles.
I actually had been interested in getting together with Abhishek and Vinaya again sometime in 2019, but Shobhit wouldn't get on board. I can't remember the details now, except that it had something to do with something Abhishek had shared with either Anubhab or other related family members back in India, something I felt was not a big deal but Shobhit was insanely petty and grudge-holding about it. Whatever the fuck it was, Shobhit seems to have forgotten about it now; by the time it was much more than a year after Anubhab's first visit (he visited again in 2019, I think, that time with more family members, and we never met up), the pandemic had hit.
Vinaya had reconnected with me last December to suggest getting together over the holidays. We had it all set, but then I got a message from her that their trip to Cabo "had to be extended" and so we'd have to reschedule sometime in the spring. She never offered more details at the time, but Shobhit and I both assumed it must have had to do with covid; we learned yesterday that this was indeed the case: Vinaya tested positive while they were there, and had to isolate and stay an extra five days in the hotel they were at. Later Ishita, their youngest, also tested positive, but I think that was after they got back home. Apparently, Abhishek lucked out and never tested positive. I guess they had also gone on that trip with some family friends, and some but not all of them tested positive too, if I remember right.
Speaking of their kids, Laney had just asked last weekend—remembering them from Shobhit's and my wedding, when Nikita was 11 and Ishita would have been 5 (she turned 6 in October that year)—whether their oldest was in college yet. My instinct was to say she must not be yet; I didn't realize until talking to Abhishek and Vinaya yesterday that Nikita was born in 2022 . . . which means she's 20 now (holy shit!), and not only that, but she's about to finish her
second year at the University of Chicago. Damn. Also, this would be why Ishita was there yesterday but not Nikita. Ishita is now 14. There are actually more than five years between the two of them.
Ishita was pretty teen-like yesterday, coming downstairs from her bedroom to say hi when we arrived, and back just long enough to eat lunch with us. But most of the rest of the time we were there, for maybe about four hours, she was out of sight.
The new member of their family who was almost shockingly social, though, was the new kitten they just got last January: an incredibly cute tuxedo cat they named Lois and often call "Lolo" for short. (I think that might just be an Indian thing. Many of them have similar nicknames for family, such as calling Abhishek "Shanoo." I think I remember that right. There was one for Anubhab too but I don't remember it.) The photo at the top of this post was the only picture I took while we were there, which I did partly just to make it easier to look up when I last saw them later, doing a search in my Flickr account. But also, as you can plainly see, the kitty is plenty photogenic in her own right.
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— पांच हजार दो सौ सोलह —
Vinaya's mother was also there. I can't remember her name. I had apparently met her before, which she remembered but, of course, I did not. She was very involved in the cooking of the many things to eat, including snacks beforehand, plus both idlis (a kind of boiled bread) and dosas (basically a South Indian savory crepe, usually stuffed with something, in this case spiced potatoes) as the main dishes for lunch. The idlis were soaked in a coconut sauce, something new even to Shobhit. Shobhit had told them I don't care for the consistency of idlis but Vinaya kind of insisted I still try one, which was fine. It actually wasn't half bad in the coconut sauce, which thankfully was just sauce and not full of coconut shreds which is the thing I usually hate about coconut. I still much preferred the dosas, and I had two helpings of that.
Abhishek also made me two cocktails of lemonade and vodka. He gave Shobhit a small glass of whiskey, neat, as a suggestion for soothing his throat; he continues to cough regularly, although it was much less frequently while we were visiting, thankfully. The visit really just consisted of sitting around their family room catching up and chatting, both before and after sitting at the dining room table for the relatively elaborate lunch. I semi-committed to skipping dinner after that, but then let Shobhit convince me to make us bagels with butter and jam later in the evening. My weight was the same this morning as it was yesterday, but at least it wasn’t up yet again.
We drove from their place to the Kirkland Costco, only to discover . . . they were closed for Memorial Day. I was so convinced they would be open: it's a grocery store, of course they're open! Well, I guess I keep forgetting that Costco is more decent to their employees than most: they close for
seven holidays out of the year, including Memorial Day. Ironically, this is something they have over PCC: our office is closed all of those same days (Easter by default as it's always on a Sunday), but we only close all of our stores two days a year, Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Unfortunately, this meant that even their tire pumps were unavailable. I figured we could at least use those, and Vinaya had noticed the front-right tire was looking a little less full than the others when they had come outside to say goodbye to us when we left. Shobhit figured he would get it pumped on the way to work this morning, but apparently went downstairs to go to work and found the tire fully flat. He took the bus to work and will likely call AAA this evening to get it fixed.
We did still drive to Amazon Fresh to take advantage of our third $20 off $40 coupon in the Central District location on South Jackson Street. There was a CD street fair happening, which to my genuine surprise, blocked any parking garage access to Amazon Fresh. We found other nearby parking and decided to check out the fair, and actually bought a couple of things. Shobhit found a $10 bracelet he liked, and I also bought us some pudding from one of the seemingly countless vendors who sold pudding. What was with the pudding? Well, the "
Red Velvet Cake" flavor from
Tasha's Puddinn' Palace was incredible, I'll say that much. We ate it soon after getting back home.
Shobhit made more than one comment about valuables in our car or where I had my wallet, as though we might likely get robbed, soon after we arrived. I found this deeply annoying: "Are you asking me that because this is a Black neighborhood?" I asked. When we left and were back in the car, Shobhit quite defensively laid into me about it being about just the fact that it was a crowded event. Except, we've been at plenty of other events just as crowded when he did not focus so much on the risk of getting robbed. Frankly I felt safer at this event than I do at most. I was one of only a handful of white people even wandering through, and the vendors were nearly uniformly super friendly. Well, the women mostly, but still. I never felt unsafe. Honestly, it was a little weird to experience Shobhit's defensiveness, which usually qualifies as "white fragility" but he isn't white either; he's brown. There's no question he has more privilege in America's hierarchy of racial divisions than Black people do, but also less than I do as a white person. It's an odd sort of middle-ground he occupies, with intricate nuances he has never really bothered to interrogate. I don't even think he was consciously meaning to be prejudiced; it's simply another example of unconscious bias, which is hardly exclusive to white people (as opposed to racism, which has a distinctly different definition, of which far too few white people bother to gain a real understanding).
We got back home and put groceries away and spent some time trying and failing to get web pages to work for him to enroll into his employer's benefits package now that he has been getting more than forty hours a week. After that, we watched
Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, which as of last night was available on HBO Max. I'm actually glad I never went to see it in theaters. Many people are asking that audiences boycott the movie due to JK Rowling's defiantly TERF anti-trans rhetoric, which I have mixed feelings about; I have a hard time declaring that anyone who simply goes to see a Wizarding World movie is by definition anti-trans, at least in the context of a long history of widespread love for the Harry Potter franchise. Still, personally, I'd rather not help line her pockets anymore, and I already pay for HBO Max regardless. Besides, the movie was okay, but not particularly good enough to warrant seeing in a movie theater anyway. It's been definitively diminishing returns with each of these newer movies as they've come along. (The irony was not lost on me, however, when characters in the film spoke out against bigotry—in a script co-written by a woman who is plainly bigoted against trans women.)
The movie is two hours and 22 minutes long, and we paused it several times, so it was around 10:00 by the time it was done. Then it was time for bed.
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[posted 12:14 pm]
