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I had a very busy evening last night, the first portion of which was not nearly as fun as I was hoping it would be: I took myself to the 4:45 showing of
Biosphere at SIFF Cinema at the Uptown, and I didn't like it nearly as much as I wanted or expected to. I did have some very delicious popcorn, though, so that improved the experience a bit.
I rode my bike home from there, and Shobhit was nearly finished making a very tasty garbanzo bean dish with rice for dinner. In the meantime, I whipped out my movie review fairly quickly, which I initially planned to grade a B-minus and later downgraded to C-plus, after all the things I complained about it in my review.
I'm not even sure it was worth the nine bucks I paid for the movie ticket. The popcorn was worth the additional six bucks. Was the whole experience worth fifteen bucks? That is, at best, up for debate.
Anyway! Shobhit and I then headed down to the Amazon Fresh store on Jackson Street, to take advantage of a plethora of Prime Day deals on products we were happy to purchase. Some of it we got a little too much of—six pints of Ben & Jerry's ice cream, for example. They were BOGOs, though, as were a ton of the things we bought.
The grocery bill once we were done was about $36, for roughly $75 worth of product. This is only possible because of the wildly exploitative labor practices of Amazon, of course. What fun! I mean, hey, we're saving money, right?
We got home and I still had another task to do, in addition to putting the groceries away, which I did while Shobhit had to make a phone call. I was able to get a 25-foot HDMI cable out of Tony's condo next door, and I took that and my laptop to test down in the theater, to make sure we wouldn't have a receipt of our last Action Movie Night two weeks ago, when my laptop would not connect to the public wifi from within the theater room, resulting in a limited selection of movie options that were on a flash drive Ryan happened to have with him.
It works now! With the HDMI cord I can stretch the laptop out through the theater door into the Community Kitchen, and there it connects better to the Cascade Public Wifi. (There's an internal wifi network we're
supposed to be able to use, but it's been down now for months, and Alan the building manager confirmed that he has "no idea" when it can get fixed. At least now I know how to solve this same issue when having movie watches with Laney: I need to buy my own, long HDMI cord.)
Tony and his wife are on vacation in England and Ireland, and he actually emailed me the passcode to his door lock so I could go in and fetch the HDMI cord he has that is exponentially longer than the one I have. I then had this whole issue on Monday evening when I went to get it: I found the cord itself fine, but did not know how to re-lock the coded deadbolt when I left. I emailed Tony three different times before, after getting back home from seeing a movie—and then chatting for more than an hour—with Tracy, I managed to use a YouTube video tutorial I found for the exact brand of lock to learn how to re-lock it. That condo door was totally unlocked on Monday night for probably four hours or so. It's locked now!
He also had a skeleton sitting at his dining room table, which was amusing.
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— पाँच हजार चार सौ पैंतीस —
That brings us to today, and now, why I'm posting later than usual: a "Team Lunch" with Category Management and Merchandising, eight people who overlap their work between both: Beth, Kevin, Mackenzie, Amanda, Shelley, Noah, myself, and also Justine, current acting co-Director of Merchandising (we're still on the search for a replacement for that role). The only person who didn't make it was Steven, the HBC Merchandiser, who turned out to have a conflicting meeting scheduled.
We took a Lyft—actually, we wound up having to take two Lyfts. Beth had hoped the other seven of us could fit into one large vehicle she ordered, with Justine getting there on her own, but the vehicle that arrived could only accommodate six. Mackenzie ordered a second car so we could split up.
We all went to a place called
Champagne Diner, on Elliott Ave, barely under a mile north of the office, on the same street. (I even offered to just ride my bike, which would have been super easy, but Beth wouldn't hear of it and insisted on ordering the second car.) I had no idea there even was a diner there, which is just over a mile
south of Total Wine & More—Shobhit would have been passing it twice a day to and from work before he started his hiatus. Plus, he loves diners!
Granted, this is a pretty high-end diner, with expensive plates. Denny's, this is not. It's not even like, say, Glo's on Capitol Hill, whose prices really aren't significantly cheaper than this place. I will say, though, that the food was magnificent, and I really loved the chilaquiles dish I ordered, even though it was fully twenty bucks. Not that I had to pay for it! PCC Covered the bill.
It was a nice outing for lunch, in any case. Lots of discussion about our "team social" being hosted on Wednesday next week at the farmhouse Justine lives on, on Whidbey Island. It's also a partial potluck so I need to think about whether I can hack signing up to bring anything. I should probably do something. As Justine noted, I
was on the event planning committee.
Anyway now I need to get back to work.
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[posted 1:27 pm]
