— पांच हजार चार सौ नौ —
My Memorial Day weekend was plenty eventful, if not especially different from any other given weekend, aside from getting an extra day added to it. Still, I'm glad I
already posted about hanging out with Alexia, both for a movie night on Friday, and then our guided tour of the Bullitt Center on Saturday. That's going to save me a bit of time telling you about the rest of my weekend now.
Which means: I start
today's post with Sunday, when, once again, I accompanied Shobhit at his campaign table at Cal Anderson Park—and, for the second weekend in a row, no one else joined us. Shobhit got a couple of people to sign Democracy Vouchers, and he just spoke to several more about his platform.
This week we returned to our usual spot at the Cal Anderson Park footpath at the park's northwest corner, right by the Capitol Hill Sunday Farmers Market. This in spite of the fact that, as usual, we arrived earlier than any other City Council candidate, and we even found a parking spot on Broadway itself, right next to where Andrew had his table set up last week, on the northeast corner of Broadway & Denny Way. We very nearly set up there, but, seeing the footpath spot free of the Seattle Subway people this time, we walked the block over to our usual spot anyway.
Efrain wound up setting up at
his usual spot, on the southeast corner of Broadway & Denny, right outside the Light Rail station entrance. As usual, he arrived maybe an hour after we did; we always set up at about 10:30, roughly half an hour before the Farmers Market officially starts—even all this after going to the Red Balloon Company on 15th Ave E to pick up some balloons. (We are also the only candidate table that ever has balloons.)
Shobhit tires of this table campaigning each week much more quickly anymore, making the whole endeavor more tolerable for me. No longer do we wind up setting up at 10:30 and then waiting to break down until 3:00. We broke down on Sunday this time at about 1:15. He's not sure he'll do the tabling at the park for abother two weeks, and I have a feeling even next week is iffy. He is at a point where knocking door to door is a more effective use of his time.
His primary concern right now is getting a campaign staff—and volunteers—beyond just himself and me, and I am getting the sense that he is starting to feel some burnout. He's officially taking a sabbatical off of work as of this week though, just to focus on his campaign for the next couple of months, and hopefully he can use that time effectively. Beyond the tabling on Sunday, he never really went out again, even though he intended to. He was going to do door knocking while I went to a movie yesterday but that wound up not happening.
There's a lot of events already scheduled this week, though, including a coffee meeting with a woman that he already did on Sunday afternoon; a "D3 Candidate Walk" through Capitol Hill with Central Seattle Greenways tonight, which I will be joining; a studio recording of his candidate video for the City of Seattle Video Voter's Guide tomorrow afternoon; and an endorsement interview with the King County Democrats over Zoom on Thursday evening.
Anyway. The one thing I recorded on Sunday was the video at the top of this post, of the street musician who returned—he said he had gigs elsewhere last week—to perform near us, and I just had to whip out my phone to record a few seconds of when he played the
Succession theme music.
— पांच हजार चार सौ नौ —
And that was largely the focus of the rest of my Sunday: that evening was very dedicated to the finales of three different HBO shows: the very well done, 90-minute series finale of
Succession; the series finale of
Barry which unfortunately got very overshadowed by
Succession but was still excellent on its own merits; and the season two finale of
Somebody Somewhere, which was actually two episodes. (I actually don't know whethere or not there will be more seasons of that last one.) That made for a solid three hours of television. Now I'm spending a lot of time listening to podcast recaps of
Succession.
— पांच हजार चार सौ नौ —
At my suggestion on Sunday, because I had seen the new space and signage right there by the farmers market for the past few weeks, yesterday Shobhit and I went out for brunch, at Glo's Cafe, which just
re-opened at their new location right by the Light Rail station two weeks ago, on Monday the 15th.
I'm pretty sure the first and only other time Shobhit and I had ever eaten at Glo's was at their old location, with Dad and Sherri, Gina and Beth,
back in February 2019 for a super early breakfast before we did our bike ride through the then-new Highway 99 tunnel beneath downtown.
The new location is much bigger, but with a very classic diner design, and I really wanted to eat there. Their dishes are quite expensive, like $19 for an omelet—but, that's not super shocking either, considering rents on Capitol Hill and other expenses small businesses face. Besides, they not only let us split a single dish, but they brought it out to us on separate plates, with large servings of hash browns with it for both of us. The food was plenty filling for both of us, and cost far less than if we had ordered separate dishes. That would have been too much food as well.
The food was tasty too. I would definitely go back.
— पांच हजार चार सौ नौ —
I mentioned already that I took myself to a movie yesterday afternoon, mostly because I had the time and I just wanted to go to a movie. I actually had three very well-reviewed movies I could have chosen from, all of them playing at SIFF theaters. I chose an Italian film about two men who are lifelong friends called
The Eight Mountains, mostly because that was playing at The Egyptian six blocks away, as opposed to the other two being at the Uptown all the way over on Lower Queen Anne. Luckily, the movie was really good, well worth going to see.
I walked home from that, and banked out a reciew of nice and standard length pretty quickly. I've had some reviews recenlty that were much shorter than usual, so it was nice to have a bit more to say about something.
— पांच हजार चार सौ नौ —
So that brings us to the Big News from last night: shortly after I finished writing, Shobhit and I went to the Apple Store at University Village . . . and I bought a new computer!
A Macbook Pro, to be exact: a 14" laptop. There are actually many reasons for this, the germ of it being the insane glitchiness of the Photos app on Shobhit's PC laptop, which was all I had to use for processing photos while we were traveling in Australia. It forced me to take Shobhit's access to his laptop for extended periods, those periods ridiculously lengthened by the stupid glitchiness of the program. Now that I can travel with my own laptop, and process photos with the same Photos app I use on the iMac, this will no longer be an issue.
There is also the issue of how old my iMac is. I bought it the last weekend of November in 2015, and it's already just too old: too many advances have left it incapable of running too many programs at once, and I regularly need to use, say, Music and Photos and Chrome at the same time. Sometimes Excel as well. I'm not going to ditch the iMac because I still want access to its much larger screen, but I can start doing other things on the Macbook instead. Photos, for instance: the program opens instantaneously, like magic. Every fucking app on my iMac takes several seconds, sometimes several minutes, just to open.
It's costing me. This part was what made me feel like it was bonkers Shobhit was so on board with me buying a new computer, but he's now seen the real limitations of the iMac and seems to understand all the reasons for the need. He even had helpful suggestions for budgeting.
We did decide to go with the monthly payment route, spread over twelve months, although we did not learn until we were actually at the Apple Store that signing up for an Apple MasterCard was required in order to do this. But, this card also gives 3% cash back on Apple purchases (including on this laptop) and apparently 1% on other purchases, which has me wondering if I should just switch to this card overall. My Visa has none of these perks, and I only maintain it as a means of keeping my credit score up.
I got approved immediately, anyway. I still need to rework my budget for the rest of the year, but I think it'll be fine. Shobhit had questions about the computer itself, and its processing capacity, that I would not know to ask; he even asked if he was overbearing about it when the purchase was done and I honestly said no. Having him there was very helpful.
The only slightly annoying thing once I got home was the discovery that the Macbook has no USB port, something that it would have been nice for any of the sales people to point out. Now, if I want to connect my external hard drive—where I save all of my photo files—to the laptop, I need to get an adapter. That's kind of a pain in the ass, but not the end of the world, I guess. (After some online research, apparently this change was so that the Macbook could be thinner.)
The best thing is that now I have what I need to process photos while traveling—the next big trip being to the Twin Cities in August. I'd still like to go somewhere for at least one night for Shobhit's and my anniversary in June, but whether that can happen remains to be seen.
[posted 12:30 pm]
