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We're now down to less than a week before Shobhit and I leave for Australia! Our flight leaves SeaTac for LAX at 1:55 in the afternoon on Sunday. Then, our 14-hour flight from LAX to Brisbane leaves at 8:35 Sunday evening, and lands in Brisbane at 5 a.m. local time. Fun!
I'm still super excited.
I did have to suck up a bunch of time this morning at work because of it: I had a half-hour meeting with Gabby about coverage while I'm out, and was kind of barely able to scratch the surface. I did go through the rather detailed email draft I had to send out to several people, and she had some suggestions for clarifications I could add, which were very fair. I then spent a good amount of time after the meeting polishing up the email as best I could, and then sent it out.
The biggest concern is that Amanda is set to cover the most critical task, which is only done once a month, and I've only gone over it with her once. Gabby suggested I go over it with her once more sometime this week, but guess what? Amanda is on PTO this week, not set to return until next week. So, hopefully she, with some possible assistance from Eric, will be able to get the coverage done and not have anything blow up while I'm out. I'm not going to spend any time fretting about it while I'm traveling, I can tell you that much.
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Anyway, I still need to get to telling you about my weekend . . . which was actually a lot less eventful than it could have been. But, I didn't want to be spending too much time with too many people this close to our flights anyway.
Laney and I have decided to switch our monthly Happy Hours from every second Friday of the month, to every second Saturday. This way we can more easily meet in the afternoon, and have more time to hang out before Laney feels obliged to drive back home to Renton before dark.
Even though Shobhit is not working weekends these days, he opted out, and it was just Laney and me. At her suggestion, we went to the place near Barbara's old apartment building, called Chuck's Hop Shop, at 20th & Union. Ever since the pandemic created lots of outdoor seating space at restaurants and bars (which is apparently only recently officially
here to stay), Chuck's Hop Shop has had outdoor, canopied seating covering the entire parking lot outside its building. They only serve drinks and ice cream, and the drinks are limited to beers and a few ciders; food is available from food trucks that park outside during scheduled times.
The Chuck's Hop Shop website shows a schedule, and so I looked up the menu online for a breakfast taco truck that was supposed to be there, thinking I'd get a mushroom one for like four bucks. But, when we got there, the food truck parked was called Sunny Up, and they offered breakfast sandwiches for about $9.50 at the cheapest. We both got the one vegan option, but I asked to have an egg added. It was fucking delicious, and they looked great too, as you can see in
the photo I posted to my socials.
I also had two ciders: one a Honey Crisp Cider (to this I added one shot of Green Apple vodka that I brought from home; it markedly improved the drink) and one a Huckleberry cider. The latter was actually tastier, but in the end I kind of wished I had ordered only one. Those jars hold a lot more volume than they appear to. They are still pretty weak in terms of alcohol content, so I didn't even get buzzed. I just had to pee several times.
In any case, it was a beautiful day, especially for February: only partly cloudy, albeit still a bit chilly. With our jackets on out at those picnic tables, it was still barely tolerable. It would have been a different story had it been raining.
And, as always, we hung out for about four hours without ever running out of things to talk about. It's amazing how that can continue with the best friends you have, no matter how long you've known them.
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Laney picked me up at my building to drive me over there, and gave me a ride back when we were done. And that was the extent of my socializing over the weekend.
I did go to two different movies over the weekend otherwise, starting with
Close, the solid-A French film about friendship between adolescent boys that I saw right after work on Friday. That movie will definitely be on my top 10 movies of the year, unless by some miracle I see another ten solid-A movies, which never happens.
I saw that at the Uptown, which made it easy to get to after I finished work on Friday. I then caught the #8 bus home.
Yesterday, I went to see the 25th anniversary re-release of
Titanic, which, I have to say, was quite the thrill, still, to see on the big screen. The 3D treatment was even pretty impressive.
I found myself wondering how many times that movie has been re-released. In addition to its initial release in December 1997,
according to Box Office Mojo, it's had four re-releases: a 3D release in 2012; two regular re-releases in 2017 and in 2020, although both of those show very little box office revenue so they must have been in a very limited number of theaters ($691,642 domestic box office in 2017; barely more than $71,000 in 2020 with releases only in Iceland, Australia and New Zealand); and finally this 25th anniversary release right now.
I had no idea the current release was also in 3D until I got to the theater yesterday, and the lady who scanned the ticket on my phone gave me glasses. Nothing in the app said anything about 3D. But, I was like, Oh well: fine.
There are two lines in the script that I think have aged especially poorly, even since the last major re-release:
twice people use the Titanic as a metaphor for a "slave ship" in reference to their personal social and familial circumstances. Both characters were White, so I cringed a bit at that.
The script is otherwise as dumb as it ever was. But also, the last hour, when the ship is sinking, is still as thrilling as it ever was, and I delighted in seeing it once again on the big screen.
For at least the third time! To my surprise, I had actually
reviewed the 3D release in 2012; I didn't remember that I had done that. I was thinking I had thus been mistaken when I said I never re-reviewed a movie until I posted a new review of the original
Avatar with
its re-release last year, but I'm realizing now that it's still technically true: I don't review re-releases as a general rule, but the difference between this and
Avatar is that I actually do have two reviews of
Avatar, as the original came out in 2009, when I was well into my movie reviewing. I was a long way from it when
Titanic came out in 1997, so when I reviewed the 3D release in 2012, I had never actually reviewed it before.
As for the "25th anniversary," that technically would have been two months ago, December 19th, when the movie was released. But, the movie did not become a bona fide phenomenon until into 1998, so maybe that's why they're commemorating its 25th anniversary now.
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[posted 12:32 pm]
