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We had our latest Book Club meetup with people from work yesterday, and even with Kara unable to make it for the first time, we had more people in attendance than ever before, with five total thanks to two new people: Francine, who works at the front desk at Reception alongside Mel; and a much newer person from the PCC Cooks department whose name I only learned yesterday as we were leaving: Deena. The rest of us were the regulars from day one: Mel, Steve and myself.
We went to a new place, though still close by so all of us besides Deena (who caught up with us later) walked down there together:
Here Today Brewery & Kitchen, which is all of a third of a mile southeast of the office, right down Elliott Avenue. It's actually in the new addition to the structure that used to be
The Old Spaghetti Factory, and even had outdoor seating that we managed to move to after a table cleared out only a few minutes after we arrived.
The book we were meeting to discuss was
The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green, a recommendation by Mel, which I actually finished all the way back on February 8. Thankfully I had a whole Notes App page of notes about it to reference—an amusing detail given that the Notes app is one of the things "reviewed" in the book.
I've actually read a novel on my own since (
Under the Skin by Michel Faber) and am about a sixth of the way into
It's Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution, and Future of HBO. I actually had a separate recommendation for our next book to read, which, to my surprise, they all accepted:
The Greatest Hoax on Earth: Catching Truth, While We Can by Alan C. Logan, which I had learned about on a podcast and thought sounded interesting, as it exposes the bullshit everyone thought was true, told by the guy the movie
Catch Me If You Can was based on.
I just discovered the Seattle Public Library doesn't carry it. What the hell? Well, the last time I requested they carry a book, they went ahead and ordered it and I had it with surprising swiftness. It may have been some weeks, so I don't know how well this will work out for me now, but I just filled out the online form to request this one too. We only meet every other month now anyway so there's some time yet. And I need to finish this book about HBO in the meantime anyway.
As for the place we met at, the food and drinks menus are both limited. I tried one of their four cocktails they have on the menu (I probably could have just ordered some other basic cocktail, come to think of it), all of which contain some kind of tea, and it was very weird. I had a burger with an Impossible patty substituted, and it was fine; not really worth the fifteen bucks it cost. The burger itself was actually kind of small, like what you might expect from a place like Dick's. If I'm paying that much for a burger I think maybe it should be of a bit higher quality.
It was fun just hanging out anyway. Steve told two different stories about run-ins with cops from his younger years that were quite entertaining, including one in which he was strip searched by Canadian border control north of his home state of Minnesota. The only story I told was the
saga of the "Holiday Fuel" canisters, and I was only able to regale Steve with that one while Mel and Francine were still ordering at the counter.
I might have ordered a second drink, except I was so dissatisfied with the one I got. And since I didn't, after I got home I made hot chocolates for Shobhit and me, and put peanut butter whiskey in mine. I discovered two episodes had already aired of the second season of
Perry Mason on HBO, and I hadn't even known a second season was coming. So we watched one episode of that before I did some work on my photos before going to bed.
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I'm still slowly slogging through my photos from Australia, adding tags where I can and even occasionally adding captions here and there. For example: the photo below, at the bottom of this post, which is from Adelaide, and thanks to some internet research this morning, I figured out it’s called the
SAHMRI building, which stands for
South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute. It's apparently been there ten years, since 2013.
I got that photo while Shobhit and I were walking from Rundle Mall to the Adelaide Parklands on the west side of the CBD, but I also got
this shot, using the zoom, from our 15th-floor hotel room at iStay Precinct Adelaide. That was where we first noticed it—in fact, Shobhit pointed it out to me.
And, since I was in the mode to look up information on distinctive buildings I got photos of in Australia, I also figured out that
the building across the street from us at The York hotel in Sydney during our second weekend stay there, which had nine floors of modern residences built atop a clearly very old building, was called the Portico Apartments, which were built in 2005 atop what remains Scots Church, which currently still functions as a chuch. (According to Wikipedia it was just empty and derelict for many years, but the current congregation has been using it as a church since 2017.) I find every detail about this fascinating.
Incidentally, I've been typically using photos from Australia for these Daily Lunch Update (DLU) posts since I've been going back to work, which you may even have noticed. Whenever I do that, I try to make sure the photos being used have captions, in case anyone ever clicks the image to view it on its original page on Flickr. It's by virtue of that alone that I've been writing up to three captions every weekday, at least, on my photos from Australia.
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[posted 12:27 pm]
