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I've got a lot to cover and not a lot of time to do it in today. I spent most of my morning actually working! Granted, an hour of it was also spent on a very informative, and for many people (but not really me) challenging, All-Staff Town Hall over Zoom. That took up time I might have otherwise been working on this blog post.
Anyway, last night was the first time Shobhit and I joined the biweekly "Action Movie Night" group in the Braeburn Condos theater. Tony, who lives one door down on our same floor (just in the opposite direction from Alexia, who is our neighbor on the other side), started it ten years ago now. In the beginning it was with just a group of his friends, a couple of whom have participated all along. But then they opened it up to the whole condo complex. Tony even keeps a log of the now-245 total movies watched (no repeats! but remakes are allowed) as a Google Docs link from the calendar page of the Braeburn Condos website. I already found a title I'm shocked has never been chosen. I'll probably have to keep coming consistently for a long time before I can get put in the rotation for choosing a movie, which I already figured out will take about five months.
The theater has 14 theater-style seats in it and I asked if they ever exceeded capacity. Tony said maybe once or twice. Last night was an unusually high turnout, and what Tony said was maybe the most extensive array of food ever brought. Shobhit and I used four pitas to make mini pizzas with, adding tomatoes and basil from his own garden. It proved pretty popular and they did turn out really well—but
three other people also brought pizzas from places they bought it from, one of them a particularly gigantic (and honestly not particularly good) one. Another person brought a box of tacos from Taco Bell. Amazingly, all of the people who brought pizzas brought vegetarian ones. I ate too much.
We also brought chopped watermelon, which several people ate as well.
Anyway, the total count of people present last night was 13. Only one spare chair. The guy whose turn to choose was named Derek; according to the log, he's been coming since 2018. I mentioned more than once that this was Shobhit's and my first time back for this since
March 2017—more than five years ago—so that would have been before Derek started coming. We never did return again after that and I'm not sure why; the 2017 choice had been
Aliens which is a reliably fun choice.
I did look at Derek's history of choices though and really liked slightly over half of them. His choice this time was a 2008 Belgian/French movie called
JCVD, in which Jean-Claude Van Damme plays himself (hence the title), an actor roped into a bank robbery hostage situation. I didn't think the movie was great, hindered further by the fact that it had to be played with English dubbed dialogue rather than in original French with subtitles. Derek tried to fix it but couldn't figure it out and so we had to settle for that.
The movie was not as action packed as anticipated. It had some interesting ideas that I didn't think were executed very gracefully. But, whatever. It apparently got moderately positive reviews at the time. As Tony later said over email, "It was not the best movie we've watched, but not the worst." I could certainly see that from their list.
I do intend to keep coming back for these movies this time though. Hopefully the choice two weeks from now will be better. Shobhit liked this movie better than I did; he actually thought it was good. But, we won't get into all the movies he's happy to watch.
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— पांच हजार दो सौ चौंसठ —
And now, I just finished with the latest FaceTime lunch with Karen. Our last one had to be rescheduled to Tuesday August 9, from its original time on Friday the 12th; this week's was rescheduled too, when she found out yesterday she needed to, but this one was only pushed back from Friday to Thursday—which used to be the day of the week we always did anyway.
We did have some technical difficulties at the start of our call. I actually thought to bring my iPad, but for some reason it was refusing to connect to her properly. It would say we connected, but only show her initials in front of a black background. I couldn't see or hear her. Not until I finally tried calling her on my phone, which I then leaned against the iPad. So in the end all my iPad was good for was as a little wall for my iPhone. Wonderful. I added weight to my shoulder bag for this! I think I'll strap it to my bike rack for the ride home tonight, so I don't fuck up my back straining as I pedal up the hill.
Anyway. There wasn't a lot of note to discuss. I told her about how I'll be going to Olympia for Gina and Beth's housewarming on Saturday; getting together with Danielle the next weekend; the whole schedule for Christopher's birthday in Wallace, Idaho and then the Family Vacation in Leavenworth in late September. (Shobhit won't be joining until Leavenworth; he's not taking the extra time off work for Leavenworth.) And Karen told me about a stressful trip to Portland with her friend Diane and Diane's teenage daughter Charlotte. They go there every year because both Karen and Charlotte are part of a "longitudinal study" for people with OS (Osteogenesis imperfecta). I guess Charlotte has a lot of anxiety in medical spaces—understandable after her many stints dealing with doctors; this condition makes it very easy to break bones—and she became a lot to handle.
Anyway there's more I could say about that but I'm short on time now. Back to work!
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[posted 1:15 pm]
