who the hell knows

— पांच हजार दो सौ अठारह — I spent much of the evening last night with Tracy, leaving work early at 4:15 with her with the intent of getting to Pacific Place one hour before the 5:30 movie so we could get dinner. Yesterday was her first day after a two-week vacation, during which she managed to get a job offer somewhere else. She loves PCC but finds the state of her position here unsustainable and untenable, so actually Thursday next week is her last day, she told me. The whole brief history of her time here at PCC is odd, as she articulated to me yesterday: she started in February 2020, and as such, she never had a real opportunity to make this place feel like "home" to her—certainly not the way it long has for me—because the whole time, either she has worked from home, or a good majority of the rest of the office has continued working from home. You just can't forge the same kinds of personal relationships with people in that scenario compared to when everyone is at the office every day. She theoretically would be working closely with the Marketing Department in the development of Private Label products, but that department in particular has had the vast majority of them working from home nearly full-time all along. This is in sharp contrast to someone like me, who has worked daily at the office, with a couple exceptions (riding out the Omicron wave this past January; actually getting sick with covid in April), since the end of June 2021. But, Tracy and I forged a friendship outside of the office even while stay-home orders were still going on. I'm really glad I took that initiative, and feel confident we'll still go out regularly even after she's no longer working here. She's being very cagey about where she's been hired, so I won't reveal that here. She wouldn't even tell me while we were at the office, but she did tell me while we were in her car. I will say that, apparnetly, she'll be working this job from home three days a week, but expected to come into the office twice a week, in Everett. She doesn't even understand fully herself why she doesn't want to broadcast where she's going yet, though she kind of ruminated out loud and landed on a conclusion: she's sad about leaving. She didn't actually want to quit this job. The problem is leadership that won't provide the resources she needs to do the job they are asking her to do. Apparently, if certain specific personnel changes were to occur, she would be happy to get asked back. By then, of course, we might very well have landed on some other strategy and direction for Private Label. So that seems relatively unlikely. On the other hand, stranger things have happened. It's certainly not unheard of for people to leave this company and then come back again later. Anyway! We intended to go to the Thai restauant on the fourth floor of Pacific Place, but as soon as we walked up to the entrance, we were met with an apology and an explanation that they had to shut down due to a burst pipe in their kitchen. They may be open by 6:00, we were told, but we had a movie to be at by 5:30. This turned out to be a stroke of luck in our favor, because Tracy suggested we go to the Nordstrom Café, just one level down and then across the skywalk. The café is right there on the other side of the skywalk, actually, and I'm not sure I've ever eaten there before this. It's pricey, but I wound up so impressed I felt it was totally worth it, and I would absolutely come back again. I ordered the portobello mushroom ravioli and I literally grunted in esctasy as I ate it. Holy shit that dish was good. We also wound up splitting two cookies. This was not my decision; at this café you order and pay first at a counter, and when Tracy ordered after me, she just turned and asked if I like lemon. "Depending on the context, yes," I said. I didn't even know until it was brought to our table that Tracy had ordered two cookies to share: a frosted lemon cookie, and then a chocolate chip cookie as a "backup" in case I didn't like the lemon one. All of this was wholly unnecessary—and, combined with the pasta, the reason my weight was kind of dramatically up again this morning—but damn, those cookies were also good. Both of them, high quality stuff. I also loved that we had already paid, which made it easy just to leave when we were ready, just in time to cross the skywalk back to Pacific Place, go up one level to Pacific Place and make it for the movie. — पांच हजार दो सौ अठारह — — पांच हजार दो सौ अठारह — We saw Top Gun Maverick, which we both thoroughly enjoyed, as evidence by my B+ review. Before we found our way to the screening room, we managed a selfie with the poster (actually a huge cardboard display), resulting in a photo that really cracked us both up. You can read my review for details about my reaction to the movie, which was such a blast that I will likely watch it again. I will just add my one real complaint, which I didn't get around to in the review: Jennifer Connelly's character just owns a bar, and she can afford both that super slick car and a sailboat? I liked what one of the cohosts of a podcast I listen to said: "Is she like an oil heiress or what?" A good question. The movie is 130 minutes long—which fly by, no complaints there—so combined with the trailers (several of them I had not yet seen, very exciting), it was about 8:00 by the time the movie let out. As usual, Tracy drove me home, although we got very confused trying to find her car in the parking garage after getting off the elevator on the wrong level. This took several minutes, so by the time we finally found the car, and chatted for a few minutes by my building as usual before I got out, it was closer to 8:30 before I was actually home again. I barely had the time to write and post the movie review before bed. Tracy is always perfectly content to pay for parking, incidentally. She is in no way a penny pincher—hence the cookies added on a whim to her dinner order. She is technically in a management-level position so she definitely makes more than I do, but still, I kind of wonder if she does much in the way of saving. We've never talked about it. It's not really any of my business, but I'm always struck by how willing she is to spend money in certain contexts. Shobhit has really conditioned me to be much more of a tightwad. But, I'll spend where it counts, such as my insistence of going to Denver next month, even if Shobhit doesn't want to come with me. — पांच हजार दो सौ अठारह — Ivan returns, for one last short visit, this evening. He's here for two nights before he flies to Philadelphia on Saturday and then makes his way back to his parents' in Lancaster, PA just long enough to get a nice visit in with his parents (about whom he historically spoke almost exclusively with contempt, but getting older seems to be softening him) and get a planned Lasik surgery. After that, he still doesn't know what his plan is, beyond what he spoke about a month or two ago, the idea of just raking in some cash being a travel nurse for a while. He had his sights set then on New England, specifically Vermont (or was it New Hampshire? one of the two), but the way he constantly changes his mind, who the hell knows. In the same vein: I fully expect that, after this visit, it will be many months, if not a few years, before I see him again. He fully expects he will visit Seattle again, and so do I, and presuming no one else is living in the guest room, he'll stay with us as usual. Whenever that might be, again: who the hell knows. I'll just appreciate this last visit for what it is, with the next time I see him being wildly unknown. In any case, I kept my calendar free both tonight and tomorrow for this very reason. I do have plenty of plans already for the rest of the weekend, though. Saturday is the reinstated Pride in the Park at Volunteer Park, and Laney is set to come over Sunday to watch the original Scream, which she's apparently never seen. We decided to go trough them all and finish up with the sequel/reboot Scream that just came out last year, the only one I have yet to see but which I've heard good things about. Of course, the same was the case for Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers and that wasn't all that great. We'll see. Say it with me: who the hell knows. — पांच हजार दो सौ अठारह — [posted 12:32 pm]