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My two or three regular readers may have noticed I had no Daily Lunch Update (DLU) yesterday, and that was because I was out of the office all day, at a team barbecue, out at Justine's farmhouse on Whidbey Island, which she only moved to from Seattle last year. More days than not, she works from home, and I'm sure this is the biggest reason why. I suspect that it won't be too many years more before she retires. (Her history with PCC dates back to the eighties, although not continuously; there was a period when she was away and then came back. I don't remember the dates of those changes, but she's been back at PCC for the current stint for a good while, probably close to as long as I've been here, 21 years as of August 5.)
It should come as no surprise to you whatsoever that I took a lot of photos.
42 shots total, as a matter of fact, at least that I kept—five of them video clips. I even went through and captioned them all last night after getting them all edited, uploaded and tagged on Flickr. I wanted the captions to be there for when I shared the link with Merchandising this morning. Other people took photos too, but I don't think any one person besides me took any more than one or two. I'm the one who truly documents these things. I even transferred the photo files to OneDrive so I could download them to our shared drive at work this morning.
I also realized last night that I had not quite kept up to date with my collection of photo albums for
Merchandising Team Events, and updated that as well. I created separate sets for both "Spring Social" we had in April, having forgotten then that I was maintaining these separate photo albums for them (the 9 shots from April had previously just been placed in my overall "2023 at PCC" photo album). I also added last December's "Merchandising Holiday Night Out" to the collection, which meant adding three albums to the collection last night—which previously had not been updated since the Merchandising Post-Pandemic Party from June of 2021. Get your shit together, Matthew!
Anyway. We have 25 people in Merchandising currently, and 23 of them were able to make it yesterday. The only two exceptions were Tristan, our Deli Retail Merchandiser who was at some kind of cheese trade show in Wisconsin; and Ryan, our brand-new Meat Merchandiser as of just this past Monday, who was too new to have known far enough in advance to plan for it. Apparently his son had a doctor's appointment.
This had been at my own suggestion some time back: family was welcome to join for this event, including spouses, significant others and children, although no one brought their kids. At least three people were there with a spouse: Justine, whose house we were at, had her husband Brendan with her; Shelley brought her husband; and Steven brought his husband, David. So, that took the number of people present up to 26.
It was meant to be 27, as I had really hoped Shobhit could come out and join us. The only problem with that was, he had a candidate forum event from 1 to 3 in the afternoon; it included at least 16 candidates from multiple districts and went long, forcing him to leave before it was even over; and traffic was so bad that it took over two hours for him to travel the all-of thirty miles from the location of the event (Seattle Labor Temple, where another previous forum had been held) to the Mukilteo ferry terminal.
By the time Shobhit got there, he called to tell me there was a line of cars waiting for the ferry that stretched a mile and a half long, and there was n way he'd get a ferry any earlier than the 5:30 one. This was close to 5:00, which had been the initial ETA at Justine's house when he first headed out, and that just kept creeping later and later.
Several people carpooled into this, and this is what I did as well: Noah, Benny and I all met at the Northgate Light Rail station at 9:30 a.m. to get into Amanda's car, and she drove the four of us to the ferry and to Justine's farm house. With the plan being that Shobhit would come and get me and then drive us back home, Amanda, Noah and Benny left without me to head back for the 4:05 ferry. Shobhit called shortly after this to see if anyone could drive me to the ferry and I could ride the ferry back to mee thim on that side, and thankfully Steven and David had room in their car. Cathryn had carpooled with them on the way out in the morning: they are all island-dwellers and had two ferries to take. Steven and David live on Vashion Island; Cathryn on Bainbridge Island. Cathryn came in early and went to the office for a bit, where Steven and David picked her up.
Steven and David drive
an electric vehicle, not a Tesla but a Ford Mustang. This was the first time I had ever ridden in one, and it was a strange mixture of feeling like I had been ported into a science fiction movie from twenty years ago, and it feeling totally normal—because so many people drive EVs now that it actually is normal. It just isn't normal to me. And that screen on the dashboard sure is huge.
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— पांच हजार चार सौ चालीस —
For me, the highlight of the day, which actually was really fun and I really appreciate that we had it, was the "Yard Yahtzee" that Shelley brought. When Center Store people and Category Management went out for lunch on Wednesday
last week, Shelley mentioned that her daughter had hand made it for her, just taking a sharpie to create the dots to make five dice out of wooden blocks. I was delighted by this, told her Shobhit and I play Yahtzee relatively regularly, and figured he would happily play that with us if he made it out to join for the barbecue. That had been the hope, anyway, but he never made it.
Once it was clear Shobhit would not make it, Justine suggested she host another event in the fall, a "Fall Harvest," with things like apple cide and maybe a stew. Sounds great to me! Plus, we talk about doing these "team socials" on a quarterly basis, and this sounds fantastic as a fall idea, if she's willing to host yet again. Hopefully Shobhit can actually make it next time.
In the meantime, there were still fully six of us who played, which ultimately kept a bunch of us occupied for a good while through the afternoon. We played in this order, after throwing the dice on the ground to determine who went first: Amanda, me, Brandy, Shelley's husband whose name I forget, Shelley, and Leon. In the photo above, the only players visible are Leon (far left) and Brandy (standing with a cup in her hand). Cathryn volunteered to keep score, and she's in the foreground sitting on the bench. Sitting in the chairs are Amy, David and Steven. Also at the table on the other side from Cathryn, not really visible except for a bit of his back in a red shirt, is Kevin. I took that shot as it was one of the few instances where I could get a good shot of a lot of people in one photo.
We all had a really good time playing it. I really hope we can do it again sometime in the fall, and that Shobhit can join then too.
That said, although I have no idea when we'll have occasion to be on Whidbey Island again otherwise, Justine offered an open invitation for any of us to come by if we happen to be up there. To call this a "farm house" is hardly an overstatement: they literally have chickens and
bunnies and cows and
three goats named Ramona, Beatrice, and Bill. They have a beautiful house, as seen in several of the photos I took, and a ton of space on their property all around it. In semi-secluded spots they even have two diffeent "
nap tents." I had Amanda take
a photo of me lounging in one of them, that one even having
a sort of tent foyer complete with a carpet. Justine later emailed us all that she and Brendan partook in one of the nap tents after we all left yesterday.
Our carpool with Amanda aimed for the 10:30 ferry in Mukilteo, which got us to Justine's house at about 11:10. Leaving with Steven and Cathryn, I got back to the Clinton ferry terminal at 4:30, so it was about a five-hour stay on the farm. I left the condo in the morning at about 8:50 to catch Light Rail to Northgate. It was nearly 7:30 before Shobhit and I actually got home, so all told it was a ten-and-a-half-hour day.
It could have been a couple of hours shorter under other circumstances, but two things prevented that. First, the traffic driving back home from mukilteo was
nuts, because of a host of factors, including it being during rush hour; the Montlake Bridge was closed and that diverted traffic to other already-overburdened routes; and an alternate route we
attempted to take in order to save time as compared to the packed freeway backfired, because of a car accident at the north end of the Roosevelt Bridge.
When we first headed out from Mukilteo, the GPS ETA said 6:36. Once we got to the U District on I-5, Shobhit suggested getting off the freeway and getting onto Roosevelt. This alone added about forty minutes to our ETA, and staying on the freeway almost certainly would have been far better. We had no idea about the car accident, though, and how long it took us just to get down to 40th Street, down further to NE Pacific St so we could get around and under the freeway, and especially turning right back onto 40th St from Pacific (an already awful intersection as it's five-ways with 7th Ave NE), was fucking bonkers insane. Shobhit had asked me to drive because he'd had a beer at Ivar's in Mukilteo while waiting for me, but for a whole lot of the way home, especially this endless stretch, we were practically at a standstill. And that five-way intersection was terrible because the vast majority of the cars from any other direction were trying to go the same way we were: eastbound on NE 40th St to get onto the Roosevelt Bridge. And that was before we got to Roosevelt Way a block later where there was even more merging traffic coming in from NE Campus Parkway. And the wrecked car was right on Roosevelt where NE Campus Parkway merges into it.
Once we finally got to the south end of the Roosevelt Bridge, it was basically smooth sailing from there. But, we got home an hour later than we should have, and the drive back without that added delay was avbout ninety minutes just due to traffic alone already—again, just to drive thirty miles.
Shobhit had already driven two hours in crap traffic on the way
up to Mukilteo. I felt bad about him coming up so pointlessly when I could have carpooled back, and I even offered that as an option when I found out the forum was to go until 3:00. He said he'd still come and I was like, "Are you sure?" Thankfully he was incredibly chill about it and not really irritated by the driving at all. Instead, he got mad about plans I already had for this weekend.
Overall, it was just a relief once we were finally home. I fed Shanti and Guru and then Cassie next door, a couple of hours later than anticipated in all cases. I then got to work on the photos, and still had plenty of time to get that done to my satisfaction. And now I'm pretty well rested and have sufficiently posted about yesterday's events, so it's all good!
— पांच हजार चार सौ चालीस —
[posted 1:42 pm]
