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I had a lot of social activity over the weekend, but none of it super interesting, so I'll try to move through them quickly.
Friday evening was our next Star Wars Movie Night with Alexia, to watch
Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith—still flawed, of course, but in my opinion by a wide margin the best of the sequels. It's never dull or brought down by dialogue that is too clunky, at least. I mean, the Darth Vader "
Nooooo!" remains stupid, but that's kind of just a quibble at this point.
Eddie, the Lithuanian guy staying in our guest room for a week, had just arrived super late on Wednesday night (really Thursday morning), and we wanted to give him time to settle in without any guests, so we suggested watching the movie this time over at Alexia's place next door. Shobhit kind of went back and forth as to whether he would join, and I basically convinced him to come when I said I would make popcorn. I finally made some from the bag of popcorn kernels I brought home as a sample from work many weeks ago. We used just one cup and it still was a bit much; it totally filled an entire large pot on the stove, and we brought it over in a huge collapsible bowl, with salt, pepper and butter added. Alexia had two helpings herself, in one of her bowls. The rest was still a bit much for Shobhit and me, but we ate it all. By the end of this weekend, the surprising several pounds I had shed during my trip to Denver the previous weekend were easily regained again. I live my life thinking I need to get my shit together with food intake, and not succeeding.
I think Alexia's TV screen is slightly larger than ours, the old TV she handed down to us after she bought this new one, but we all sit further away from it so it looks slightly smaller. The better thing about watching at her place is the surround sound system she has, which make it very much feel like we're sitting in a theater.
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I had a busy day Saturday in particular. Shobhit worked from 9 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., during which I took myself downtown to Pacific Place to see the new Jordan Peele movie,
NOPE, which I had difficulty getting into or fully appreciating, but knew it would stick with me and still stand by the solid B I gave it. I came home and easily had time to finish writing the review before Shobhit got home, mostly because he had decided to stop at a couple of stores on his way home. He and Eddie actually got home at the same time in that particular moment.
Then, because we are leaving for a couple of days to Vancouver, B.C. next weekend and Shobhit wanted to burn through the majority of the produce we still had left in the refrigerator, we made a dinner of two dishes, one eggplant based and one bell pepper based, to bring with us to a bonus July Happy Hour with Laney, this time back
at Volunteer Park.
I loved it in older, pre-pandemic times when Laney and I would hang out for Happy Hour for up to four hours, and that seemed lately to be a thing of the past, with Shobhit typically wanting to go home after only a couple of hours of he joined us, and even Laney rarely sticking it out for more than two and a half hours or so. This time was a throwback, though, and I even got the best of both worlds: I do like it when Shobhit joins, but I also like getting one-on-one time with Laney. This time around, I got both: Shobhit actually hung out for a good three hours, which was surprising on its own, even though he did wind up snoozing for a while in his lounge chair in the sun, which was fine, and probably pretty pleasant for him.
He decided he wanted to go home around 8:00, though, and so he packed up our lounge chair and blanket tote and insulated bag for the dinner we brought. The day was quite lovely and a perfect temperature though, and both of us liked the idea of hanging out a bit longer; she said she would give me a ride home. It was after Shobhit left that Laney offered me a Cutwater Lime Margarita can, even though I had already had one (12.5% alcohol) in addition to the straight up margarita I already made with 2.5 shots of tequila in it. Laney and I chatted for another hour, had a perfectly nice time, and according to her I wasn't even visibly drunk through the time she gave me a ride home—even though I do remember commenting on how buzzed I was once or twice.
I think the alcohol level didn't truly hit me until after I got home. Some of that time, between getting home and going to bed, I blacked out. I actually don't even remember getting out of Laney's van. I drank some water, and should have drunk a lot more (it probably would have made a huge difference to the hangover I wound up waking up with yesterday morning), and also took two Aleve. I had my AirPods in and was listening to a podcast episode about
NOPE that I only retained the first five to seven minutes of. For some reason I sat on the floor to pet Shanti—and proceeded
to pass out. As evidenced by the time stamp of where I had paused the podcast, it played up to about the 42-minute mark before Shobhit found me, evidently with Shanti still under my arm. I clearly put my AirPods away after that, even set my sleep tracker app before going to sleep, and got into bed—and I don't remember any of that.
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— पांच हजार दो सौ चौवालीस —
So that brings us to yesterday, when I hung out with Laney yet again. This time we did have a guest over, but Eddie actually left for his day of activities before Laney arrived at 1 p.m., so there was never any crossover between them. She brought us some cheddar cheese rice chips which Shobhit discovered tasted very good with the fresh burrata cheese we bought at the Capitol Hill Farmers Market late in the morning, and I ate way too much of it. I should have skipped dinner but still took Shobhit up on his offer of a small burrito made of the leftovers from Saturday. By this morning my weight was right back to where it was a week ago, which is both frustrating and my own fault. I know that logically I should just stop worrying about this weight shit and let it go, but I also don't want to wind up having to buy a whole new wardrobe because I keep gaining weight.
Anyway! Shobhit and I actually walked for a pretty long while in the morning before the movie, intending to go to the farmers market and discovering they did not open until 11 a.m., and we were there shortly after 10. We killed time by walking and window shopping along Broadway to its north end and back. We got back to the market at 10:53, and waited in line at a bakery booth for the market bell announcing that everyone could start selling. I don't have a clue why, but that's a Farmers Market rule: no sales before 11 a.m. And then we bought a bunch of pastries, including two oatmeal raisin cookies for Shobhit; a chocolate chip cookie bigger than my face; and a scone. We got a few other things at two other booths, including the aforementioned cheese (at a booth with a super friendly and animated Mexican lady with fun, bright eye makeup on), before walking back home in time for Laney's arrival.
We all three of us watched
Scream 4, which I rented from Prime Video. All of us were impressed with it, particularly for a fourth movie in a franchise like this. Every one of these movies has exceeded our expectations, and I had particularly low expectations for this one, the first of them that not even I had never seen before—I saw all of the first three in theaters (in 1996, 1997 and 2000), but didn't bother with this one when it was released in 2011. It was really fun, though. And I only watched it now because I keep hearing good things about the
Scream "reboot/sequel" released just this year, and I didn't want to watch it without having seen all the previous ones. Curiously enough,
Scream 4 was released 11 years after the previous film in the franchise, and then it was another 11 years again upon this new one's release. What I didn't realize was that even
Scream 4 has a lot of meta-commentary on over-extended franchises and even "reboots."
Best of all, as Laney noted, if you've never seen these movies, they make it impossible to predict who the killer is. Shobhit was certain for three quarters of this one who the killer was, or killers were, and in the end not one of his confident guesses was right. I also liked the final climactic sequence of
Scream 4, set in a hospital room after we think Sidney might have died, after getting stabbed far more severely than she did in any of the previous films. (Spoiler alert! I mean, get over it. It came out eleven years ago.)
Laney plans to get back on the road to warmer pastures as of September, and it felt like a slight challenge to schedule just two more movie-watch dates. We wound up settling on an unconventional one for the 2022
Scream, on Tuesday August 2, when I will be taking my "buffer day off" after returning from Vancouver. So that's a week from tomorrow, when I will be taking the extra time off to deal with my trip photos and travelogue email. It shouldn't be quite as much work as I had after the trip to Denver and Cheyenne, though, so I think it'll be fine to take a break from it for a couple of hours in the afternoon. Shobhit will be working though, so if he wants to see the new
Scream he'll have to watch it on his own time. I'll likely rent it from Prime Video just like all the others, which will give him a 48-hour window.
I also learned, with a shock, that Laney has never seen
Knives Out, which must be rectified, so she will come on Sunday, August 21 to watch that one. And that, I think, will be it for movie watches with Laney before she's back on her retirement travels in southern states for the fall and winter.
Once we were done with the movie and I walked Laney out of the building, I spent the rest of the day either updating my budget or eating dinner and/or watching yesterday's episode of
Westworld on HBO Max, which I think is better this season than it's been since season 1. They're taking some huge swings with season four which, so far, are really paying off.
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I only worked two days last week. I have a full, five-day week this week but feel confident I will be productive. Next week comes back down to three weeks due to taking Monday and Tuesday off for the trip to Vancouver. After that, no time off again until September, first for Labor day but then a full week late in the month for the combined trip to Wallace, Idaho for Christopher's 50th birthday, and to Leavenworth for the "Family Vacation" with family from the west side of the mountains.
I had to do a bit of coordinating with Dad last night, in light of all this stuff, especially after Shobhit asserted that he can't take the whole week off and will only come to Leavenworth. This means I won't have access to the car for getting to Wallace, so I'll do what I've done in the past and take the bus down to the 512 Park and Ride where Dad and Sherri will pick me up and I'll ride to Wallace with them. Plus, unfortunately, it turns out the Hercules Inn is already booked that weekend! Shit. So, we're in the process of finding another vacation rental, but assuming availability, we may have found a new house that looks really cool. There's a surprisingly large number of vacation rentals in Wallace, it turns out.
They also don’t want to stay in Wallace three nights, though, and with me riding along with them, I'll need to book in the same towns the same nights: Wallace on Friday the 23d and Saturday the 24th; then a hotel in Moses Lake on Sunday the 25th; then we'll drive the rest of the way to Leavenworth on Monday the 26th, which is when Shobhit should be joining us. He already has Sundays and Mondays off typically, so he should only have to take off Wednesday through Thursday as extra days, and maybe even pick up a shift that Sunday if he wants.
I'm kind of relieved that, although I have two trips planned in the meantime, they are all driving trips, and right now at least, I have no flights planned until Australia in February. I took a home covid test before leaving for Denver a week ago Saturday, and took another, also testing Shobhit, yesterday morning before Laney came over. I actually have an exposure notification pinpointing "July 18 or 19," which is odd because it came from the Washington State Department of Health but July 18 was the day I drove from Denver to Nebraska to Cheyenne and then back to Denver. It must have been sometime during my air travel back home on Tuesday the 19th that I had this "potential exposure," which I seem to get notified of after every single time I am around large groups of people: it happened after Seattle Pride; it happened after the Fourth of July; and it happened after flying home from Denver. But, yesterday Shobhit and I both tested negative, thankfully. I assume we still have some added immunity from our infections in April, but differing variants are still a concern, and we are now past the 90-day window of unlikely reinfection. I'm really glad I wore straight-up N95 masks on the planes, both to and from Denver; I never even took it off for a couple of minutes on the way back, because those Frontier Airlines tight-asses don't offer any complimentary snacks. I had a chai with some cookies at the airport in Denver instead, before we left.
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[posted 12:28 pm]
