— पांच हजार तीन सौ सत्तर —
Well, I got back to work facing just over 800 emails today, and . . . I don't even care that much. A lot of those were to aliases I am on but don't have to pay attention to. A ton are emails I will eventually have to do something about as well, of course, but as I write this I'm already down to just over 600 unread emails. More importantly, the frenzy of activity we had the week before my vacation began seems to have paid off, and the time-sensitive, deadline-driven stuff that was of highest importance seems to have actually gone off without a hitch thanks to the coverage I had in my absence. There was a slight snag in the organization of coverage when Cathryn was suddenly discovered to be out of office March 1-8, but even that seems to have been handled pretty well.
There's a lot of stuff I'll be way behind on for a while as I catch up, but the most pressing stuff seems to have been taken care of, leaving me with maybe my most comfortable return to work after an extended vacation, ever. Nice!
All that said, as I write this, this blog itself was not only neglected, but entirely abandoned for the past two and a half weeks. I never even bothered to update the daily Twitter digests while we were traveling, and once I get time, I will have to backfill those. I did two of them this morning. What I would consider to be of far higher interest, though, would be any actual accounting of my travels, which, just like previous vacations (and particularly, the last trip to Australia, in 2020), will involve formatting my travelogue emails into posts, rather than re-writing everything for this blog. I don't even know when I'll get all of that done, I just know there will be five such posts, as I sent out five emails: Brisbane and Gold Coast; Kangaroo Island; Adelaide; Sydney; and Sydney World Pride.
I do have over 1500 photos from the trip uploaded to Flickr, however. None of them have any captions yet, and only some of the tagging is done, with a ton of tagging left to do. Still, should there be any interest before I can get all the blog posts backfilled, the photos can be browsed through
here.
It was a pretty good amount of work just curating the photos for all the five travelogue emails, which had about 20 each, and captioning all of them, including a lot of hyperlinks to websites and/or other photos I have on Flickr. And I still have a ton of work left to do on them, from the formatting for this blog to the many, many tags I need to put on them still.
Back in 2020, the pandemic had one real silver lining when it came to dealing with this work: it gave me time to do it! I spent days, maybe even weeks, writing captions for
every single photo from our early 2020 trip, because I had nothing else to do. Getting all these ones captioned probably won't ever get done, although in the end I'll at least caption the photos used in emails with the captions from the emails, which will provide enough detail coverage of the trip on its own.
— पांच हजार तीन सौ सत्तर —
— पांच हजार तीन सौ सत्तर —
I guess if nothing else right now I can catch you up on everything since we got back, so that it just flows chronologically without any holes once my travelogue posts do get backfilled.
Check this out: our flight out of Sydney left at 11:20 a.m. local time on Tuesday, March 7. That same flight landed in Los Angeles at 7 a.m. local time on Tuesday, March 7. What-whaaat? We traveled back in time! Of course, not really; this is just how time zones work, every place on the planet existing at the exact same time, just in a different position in relation to the sun, and different names given to different slices of land from pole to pole. I wonder what looking at the sun move across the sky from the Arctic looks like? It must be very weird.
I did do some calculating: from leaving our hotel room in Sydney, to arriving at the door to our condo in Seattle, we spent
25 hours traveling in one way or another. This included a thirteen-and-a-half-hour flight from Sydney to L.A.; a roughly three-hour layover in L.A.; and then a two-and-a-half-hour flight from L.A. to Seattle. Getting rest on the Sydney-L.A. flight was a lot trickier than going the opposite direction, as on the way there, I stayed up as late as I could, slept as long as I could, and then it was just super early when we landed, local time. But, our flight left Sydney coming back not long before noon, which meant I'd have to sleep unnaturally early in order to get much sleep before we landed. I managed it, kind of.
But, taking yesterday off work even though I was home was clearly the right decision, as I was exhausted. Even after zonking out at a perfectly reasonable time on Tuesday night (well after Shobhit did, actually, as I was engaged with collecting key photos into their own album on Flickr to share with Alexia as a trip slide show tomorrow night), I was super tired all day yesterday. I got the Sydney World Pride email travelogue done yesterday, which involved a surprising amount of work even after I had written up all the captions as drafts on my iPad while on the plane from Sydney, which killed a good amount of time in that flight. But now I needed to copy and paste those captions into the email draft, as well as add a bunch of hyperlinks. My fucking computer freezing up for often more than 30 seconds to a full minute, seemingly every 1-3 keystrokes, certainly didn't help. I'm about ready to throw that computer into the garbage, but I really need to get connected to an Apple Care agent for some pointers first.
Shobhit and I also needed to do some grocery shopping. Every time we go on a trip, he makes sure we use up all the perishables before we leave, which was especially critical this time—things like fresh produce or milk. We thought we might go to Costco this weekend, but now don't think we need to: we went down to Hau Hau Market in the International District for produce; and then we walked to QFC at Broadway Market and discovered they had a digital deal for half-gallons of milk for 99¢ each if you buy at least 5. So, we got a total two and a half gallons of milk out of that, and wound up with five new loaves of bread thanks to a similar deal (those were $2.99 each, regular price $5.99 if I remember right). The tote bags were heavier than expected for our walk home, but we made it.
I made us some chai, and that helped perk us awake for a while. Or it helped me, anyway.
— पांच हजार तीन सौ सत्तर —
Until Tuesday itself, when Shobhit mentioned the confirmation emails that went out, I had forgotten that last night was Action Movie Night at the Braeburn Condos theater. We decided to make pasta as usual; we had vacillated between that and pizza but I suggested pasta when I noted that someone else always brings pizza. (This time it was only Tony, though, and it was pepperoni. He said he would be happy to eat whatever meat was taken off the pizza for us to eat it and I was like, "We don't do that." Yuck! Pepperoni-flavored cheese pizza? I'm going to puke. At least we had plenty of our own pasta to eat so it was fine.)
We missed the previous one, which had been on Wednesday, February 22. I looked up the movie they watched and it was a great one, which I was sorry to have missed:
No Country for Old Men. This week was Derek's choice, taking us through one full cycle since we started attending regularly last August: it had been his choice when we came for the first time last year. This time he made a better choice, the 1969 film
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, starring Robert Redford and Paul Newman. If I had ever seen it before, it had been ages.
When it ended, Shobhit declared it hadn't aged well. He may be right. I fell asleep through a lot of it, jet lag still catching up with me. I seem to be fine as I write this, but we'll see how I feel tonight. I'm leaving work a little early to catch a movie, the first one I'll have gone to see in three weeks. I also have a lot of movie catching up to do, but I was relieved to see
Cocaine Bear is still playing.
Anyway, the movie last night had a bit lower attendance than usual, only seven people: Tony, Jake, Derek, Sean, Ryan, Shobhit and me. I don't think I've forgotten anyone.
Shobhit actually made the pasta on his own, which was nice of him to do, while I worked on my slide show photo album to show Alexia. After the movie was over, we went back upstairs, I washed the cups I had made our cocktails in, and I promptly set about getting ready for bed.
— पांच हजार तीन सौ सत्तर —
[posted 12:49 pm]
