better than hoped

— पांच हजार तीन सौ अठासी — Things are going well enough better than expected at work so far this week, with my Birth Week vacation next week, I'm beginning to get suspicious. Am I forgetting something? On the upside, our two-hour virtual training sessions for Promotion Analytics each day, it turns out, were only scheduled that long out of an abundance of caution. All we're really doing this week is testing functionality, basically for every single one of its many functions. Actual training will be happening next month. Yesterday, we were all done within 25 minutes. When it became clear we can expect that kind of thing for most of these sessions the rest of the week, much of the stress about my work load evaporated. I even got my work email inbox down to 20 emails this morning. I could actually see them all! Whenever this happens, I feel like doing cartwheels. I had gotten there shortly before leaving for Australia, knowing that would reverse to a huge degree over the time I was gone. Of course I was right: I came back to several hundred emails. We got back from Australia six weeks ago, so it took me that long to get back to this point. That trip had been two and a half weeks. This vacation is only one week. So, judging by that, I should be able to get back to this point again in about three weeks after I return, if that. Usually a week off is such a pain in the ass after returning, but comparing it to a recent vacation two and a half times as long, this will feel like a walk in the park. — पांच हजार तीन सौ अठासी — Today is Gabriel's birthday. He's 46. We'll be the same age for the next 11 days. I cropped and sent this photo from our college days at Orton Hall in 1996 to our group chat, adding, Our baby is all grown up! 😭 On my socials I decided to play into the perception of how I make things all about me, and posted a photo of myself, taken on his birthday in 2004. So far as I can tell, I didn't even see him that day. It's also the one-year anniversary of when I tested positive for covid, having caught it from Shobhit, who tested positive on April 18, 2022, the very day after he also passed it on to both Dad and Sherri at Sherri's 70th birthday Easter celebration. I saw the photo of my positive test result in my Facebook Memories this morning, an unusually kind of eerie thing to revisit. It was a strange experience, knowing I had it, was not sick yet, but knew the likelihood that I would soon be very much so. And by the next day, I was in bed most of my waking hours for about three days straight. I keep thinking of the virtual doctor appointment Shobhit and I had with a doctor neither of us liked much, who actually said to us, "Just expect to get this again in a few months." I always hated that he said that, because saying something like that would only encourage people to throw their hands up and feel like they shouldn't even bother with precautions. (To that point, too many people think exclusively in terms of precautions being a protection to themselves, as opposed to protecting others from their own possible infection.) I suppose I should knock on some wood (except I don't have a superstitious bone in my body): that doctor's prediction never came true. Not even after I had prolonged, unmasked, indoor exposure to Beth's covid at the Leavenworth vacation house in September; or to an as-yet-unidentified person's covid at the Ugly Sweater Brunch at work in December; or to Gina's covid at Dad and Sherri's house on New Year's Day; or, most dangerous of all, to Sean's covid in the Braeburn Condos theater during Action Movie Night in March. My working theory, totally pulled out of my ass as I am neither an epidemiologist nor a scientist, is that these exposures have actually helped me avoid infection. I know it all depends on a host of factors, including duration of exposure and viral load being expelled by the infected person, but maybe this has helped keep my immune defenses up? I remember reading something similar about people being out and about with masks on at the height of infection rates, getting very tiny but consistent exposure: this is how immunity gets built. Plus, I continue to have the added protections of being totally up to date on vaccine and booster shots (four total), and having already gotten sick from it once. I kind of cling to this theory only because of all these factors combined, with perhaps the more recent exposures helping to keep the immunity defense stronger. I suppose I can just keep thinking that until I do indeed get sick with it again. If I'm very, very lucky, that will be never. — पांच हजार तीन सौ अठासी — — पांच हजार तीन सौ अठासी — In other news, I kept my schedule open last night so I could be home when Shobhit presented his case as a Seattle City Council District 3 candidate to the monthly meeting of the 43rd District Democrats, still being held virtually. So, we both logged in from home, although he dressed up, and was even the sole candidate who put a name tag on his chest with his full name and his website address. I really should have taken a screenshot. Fuck, why didn't I think of that! Well, if he does something like this again, then I'll do that. He was actually one of several candidates, for several local positions, given two minutes—a timer was put onscreen for each person in turn—to make their pitch. This was all done in the first hour of a two-hour virtual meeting. Shobhit was one of five candidates for Seattle City Council's District 3 alone, and he was slated last; I kept waiting, with some anxiousness, for his turn to come up. He sat at his laptop on the dining table out in the living room. To prevent any possible feedback, I watched on my iPad at my desk in the bedroom. After he was so convinced he did incredibly poorly when he pitched to the latest Braeburn Condos board meeting (which I did not see so I could not judge), he really kicked himself over it, so I was really hoping he would do well here. And, even though it was pretty clear on the video that he was reading from a pre-written speech, it was also very concisely written and laid out his agenda very well, and he finished right on time at the two-minute mark. He clearly felt good about his performance after it was done. He was not just smiling, but downright giddy. Having gotten some more Democracy Vouchers, signatures and donations from residents of the building earlier in the day certainly didn't hurt, rather actually priming him for a positive experience. He did ask what I thought of the other candidates who spoke—and by the way, Joy Hollingsorth, who remains by far the frontrunner in this race, did not bother attending. But of the five District 3 candidates who did, I had to be honest with Shobhit that I found at least two of them to be very strong: Efrain Hudnell, who had seated himself next to Shobhit and me on the same church pew at the 43rd District Town Hall meeting on March 2 but did not bother to tell us he was running; and Alex Hudson, a woman living on First Hill with a compelling backstory and clear passion for making her local community better. The others, including a genderqueer person who has a single episode acting credit on the HBO series The Gilded Age, I didn't find quite as strong as candidates, whether it had to do with their ideas, or how they presented them. I honestly felt that Shobhit held his own well against the strongest of them, even being not the only one, but one of two immigrants of color vying for the position. There were only around 30 people in the Zoom meeting, so a pretty tiny percentage, but when it comes to things like endorsements, the 43rd District Democrats clearly possess some influence. Every candidate who spoke (including King County Council candidates, and others) was invited to join for an "endorsements meeting" in June, which I then became slightly worried to discover is occuring on Wednesday, June 21—the day of Lynn and Zephyr's wedding, or "handfasting," ceremony, deliberately scheduled in Everett on the Summer Solstice. At first I thought the meeting was to choose which of these candidates to endorse, but I looked up the calendar event on their website and it appears to be when they will vote on which candidates in statewide offices to endorse. So, some time will have to pass before we know whether Shobhit actually must be there (it probably is indeed in his best interest to be regardless, although if it is again virtual then he could theoretically do it from somewhere in Everett), or if even I might have to sacrifice attending the wedding in favor of this. My position right now is that I will attend the wedding—especially after I discovered what the meeting appears to be really focused on. That's a bridge to cross later, though. For now, Shobhit was feeling really good about how the evening went, and honestly, I loved to see it. We then made his sandwich for dinner, after I had already made mine, the first we made in the tiny panini press I got, actually at White Elephant gift exchange at the aforementioned Ugly Sweater Brunch at work last December. The sandwiches were amazing, mostly because of the "1000 day Gouda" cheese we got shopping at the Edmonds PCC last weekend, which we only bought because they had samples out and it was amazing. And then we caught up on Barry and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver on HBO before I went to bed. — पांच हजार तीन सौ अठासी — I've also started researching for my Birth Week in 2024, even though this year's Birth Week hasn't yet even started. I am likely to take the advice of a broker I had lunch with last year, who suggested I make islands one of my themes. Even though this will make that year similar to the State Parks year I did (2021), I really like the idea. So, I've been looking at islands of all manner of distinction (largest in the state, northernmost in Puget Sound, closest to my condo, etc) and creating a list of contenders. I love doing this kind of stuff, and now that Australia is over and I have no more need to research anything to do there for at least a few years, this is why I've moved on to. — पांच हजार तीन सौ अठासी — [posted 12:35 pm]