Halloween 2023

— पांच हजार पांच सौ तीन — I have a record 106 shots from yesterday alone in my Halloween 2023 photo album, which includes photos I took at work, which for Flickr collection purposes I also have duplicated into their own "Halloween 2023 at PCC photo album, that number being far from a record—the most Halloween photos I've actually gotten at work has been 48, from just last year. I have also gotten as few as 3 in the past (2004) or as few as 16 in a non-pandemic year of the past decade (2017), so this year's Halloween at PCC album is pretty middle of the road in terms of size. It actually matches the photo number I got in 2020, when everything had to be done virtually and most of my shots were screenshots. Anyway! In any case, yesterday was fun, as Halloween pretty much always is. And: my "costume reveal" was alread done yesterday on my socials. Whether people "get it" by sight really seems to hit about half the time. I dressed in all black, but being a "cereal killer" only makes sense whe I am holding the cereal box impaled by a plastic knife—that being the accessory I took Light Rail to the U District and Spirit Halloween to buy, for all of five bucks, on Saturday night. It might be the cheapest and least-effort Halloween costume I've ever done. Some people found it hilarious. Others found it utterly dumb (Gabriel) or, as was the case with Noah when I showed it to him at work yesterday morning, groan-worthy. He groaned so loud he just about blew out all the office windows. It certainly amused me, anyway. And the idea didn't even come to me until Thursday last week, with five days until Halloween. Even last year, when Tracy suggested I be a "crazy cat lady," I had gone a long time having no idea what I would dress up as for Halloween but the idea was finaly given to me about a week beforehand. I really cut it close this year, and was really glad to have come up with something easy, (in my opinion) clever and simple to do at such late notice. Thankfully, I've already come up with an idea for next year, which I have written down. It's not my first choice, but I haven't come up with a first choice yet, and this idea is workable as a backup. Hopefully I'll come up with something good next year—although I would still want it to be just as simple and easy, or at least close to it. I keep thinking of my cousin Toni Marie, who came to family Halloween parties in the past with similar premises: A sponge on her chest in 2004 ("I'm self-absorbed") or a construction paper cutout "chip on her shoulder" in 2018. Gabriel has shared multiple times with the group chat that he is "mosscore," wearing a ghillie suit covered in grass. I think he is of the mind that the only way to impress with a Halloween costume is for it to be elaborate, expensive, or both—mine was none of these things. But the thing is, I'm just as happy with mine as he is with his! Win-win! He clearly is on the same page with Noah but I don't care. Anyway, back to work yesterday. Mel is the Office Manager now, and has been tasked in the past with spearheading the organization of social events, an anxiety-inducing exercise for them, hence the creation last year of a "social committee," which I was on. Ryan has been hired on as our new Receptionist since then, and it appears he has been perfectly happy to take this over, which presumably left Mel much relieved. So, we had a "Halloween Happy Hour" scheduled yesterday from 3:30 to 5:00, and I'd say somewhere between 25 and 30 people attended. Mind you, we have an office staff of around 135, or 112 if you exclude Repair & Maintenance, Store Development or Store Operations staff who really never spend any time here. Even at that lower number, at most we had about a quarter of the office staff in attendance at the event yesterday. Which was fine, as few of us want an oppressively large crowd there in the office kitchen anyway. Either way, Ryan did a good job. He had prizes ready for the winners of four different categories in the costume contest—the Finance department's "Safari" handily won the "Best Group" award, as they were the only group costume this year. They didn't do a theme last year as I recall, and we didn't even have an office Halloween event in 2021, but they still have a storied history of fun group costume ideas most years in the previous several years. There was also the wonderful return of the traditional pot of hot apple cider and fresh popped popcorn, along with some baked treats, altough only two people brought any: someone brought matcha brownies with edible googly eyes on them; and Ryan himself made pumpkin flan. I don't usually like flan—too slimy—but these were super tasty. We're now in an era where many of the coworkers I once spent a lot of time with have moved on, either switching jobs or retiring, so I spent a fair amount of time at the table, eating my dessert and decorating a miniature pumpkin, kind of silently. Noah did join us all briefly and he sat across the table from me. Later, Bridget took his spot and she asked if I'd watched any good horror movies lately. I brought up Barbarian, which I watched with Laney last weekend, and got into a fairly engaged discussion about horror movies with both her and a woman in Store Operations (oh well, I guess she works at the office) named Avalon, who I don't think I'd ever had a conversation with. Did I mention there's been a lot of turnover in the past few years? I don't even know who half the people here are anymore. I'd say that was about the extent of any legitimate socializing I did at the Halloween Happy Hour. I had brief exchanges with Marie in IT and Michelle in Finance, who told me how funny she thought my "costume" was. (Middle-aged white women, they think I am hysterical.) I complimented Ryan on his flan but declined the blanket offer to take leftovers home, as Shobhit and I still have cake at home. I got out of the office maybe ten minutes later than usual. — पांच हजार पांच सौ तीन —
— पांच हजार पांच सौ तीन — I had a standing invitation for Laney to join Shobhit and Alexia and me for the walk through North Capitol Hill Halloween decor—and a stunning crowd of trick-or-treaters—but, somewhat predictably, Laney texted me yesterday to bow out. She only recently finished unpacking and needed to go easy on her knees. It's possible, though by no means guaranteed, that she'll join next year, not having just engaged in the activity of moving. Still, she already lives half a mile from our place, so even walking to meet us at our place adds a full mile to her round trip, which would mean a good four miles at least, for her to join us. I could understand her changing her mind. As it happened, even though I started this new traditin with Alexia in 2020, she was unable to join in both 2021 and last year when a work dinner came up. This was her first time walking with us since she and I did it in 2020. Walking north along 17th Avenue East, Alexia and I both remarked on how we felt like we usually saw more stuff before getting as far north as we got. And then? We reached a block that literally had the street blocked off, with most of the houses elaborately done up, and truly throngs of people moving through—both trick-or-treaters and adults alike. According to Alexia, it was much more like what the area was pre-pandemic, and it made her happy to see things finally looking the way they did before 2020. Honestly, on some blocks, it was kind of nuts. It sure made for a whole lot of great photo opportunities, though. A good number of houses had the very same thing going on as they do every year, so there was no need to take pictures of those. But plenty of places mixed things up; there's a couple of houses that do something similar every year but kind of change the theme each year. Some houses recycled popular things (like blow-up lawn ghost trees) from recent years, and some houses had entirely new stuff. I don't think this walk will ever stop being fun, and in the absence of any other social obligation on the evening of Halloween, it's a really fun, eminently photogenic thing to do every year. The three of us left at about ten after 7:00, mostly making our way north on 18th Aveue to Highland Drive, and then working our way back down 17th Avenue. There was almost certainly some good stuff on both 16th and 19th that we missed, and I really need to figure out an optimized route for future years. Still, it was clear the vast majority of the great stuff was on 18th in particular, and also on 17th. By the time we got back, it was about 8:45. So, our walk lasted about 95 minutes, give or take. I spent the rest of the evening editing and uploading photos. I naively thought I might finish my "Halloween 2023" photo digest email, but even under the best of circumstances it was too late and I was too tired. But also: I have no idea how this happened, but I already had a draft written with about seven photos with captions, and somehow an earlier draft got re-saved, I think maybe because it was inadvertently opened on a different device, such as the Macbook. When I next looked at the email draft, all of the captions were gone, and it had only the photos. Fuck me sideways. I re-wrote all of the captions this morning—but not before I encountered even more ridiculous technical issues in Gmail, not least of which was Gmail's bizarre behavior of opening an email draft on a mobile device with the photos themselves rearranged, but not the captions. Then that got re-saved, and when I opened it up on my desktop computer, the wronly ordered photos had gotten preserved! I never had that happen before. I cut and paste all those photos into a new email draft, now in the right order—only to find that, when I refreshed the page, the embedded images disappeared, with just a file name in the draft email body. What the fuck? So, I had to find all the photos on Flickr again, from which I could copy and paste the images directly. Again. What a wild pain in the ass all of that was. At least I have the draft finished now, with 19 photos from all my Halloween events, ready to be sent either later this afternoon or this evening. I was really proud of a lot of the original photo captions and am not as happy with the ones just rewritten as best I could remember, but whatever. Readers won't have anything to compare them to and presumably will enjoy it. — पांच हजार पांच सौ तीन — [posted 12:32 pm]