— पाँच हजार चार सौ अड़तालीस —
For the few of you who read this blog and are interested but are
not on my 71-member recipient list for "travelogues," my two adapted travelogue emails are finally posted (though backdated) to this here blog. To make things a bit easier, here's a handy list of links:
Twin Cities 2023, Part One: Saint Paul / Co+nvergence
Twin Cities 2023, Part Two: Minneapolis
My Suitcase Went on a Bender
That third link is just to yesterday's Daily Lunch Update, and will take you to about halfway through the post, when I provide more detail about how my suitcase got sent to Las Vegas instead of Seattle on the way home. It doesn't otherwise provide any further detail about time actually spent in the Twin Cities, but I included it in the links because it was still about the overall trip.
And there you have it. I'd say I am all up to date with accounting for that trip, except I am still four days behind on my daily "Threads digests." That'll get up to date by sometime this weekend. All those posts would have already been seen on Facebook anyway.
— पाँच हजार चार सौ अड़तालीस —
In other news, I have very little more news to share today, which honestly kind of just gives me a break and I'm fine with that. I rode my bike to the library to pick up a DVD copy of the 1999 movie
Tea With Mussolini, which I decided to watch again after Shobhit and I have been watching the nineties British sitcom
As Time Goes By on PBS Saturday nights, because it stars Judi Dench—who was also in
Tea With Mussolini, alongside Maggie Smith, Lily Tomlin, and Cher. I remember the movie being just okay, but it has a great cast so I've decided to watch it again.
I'll do that tonight, I think, instead of going out to a movie. My only real option for a new one this week is
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, which I'm actually kind of neutral about seeing even though it's getting good reviews. Laney and Shobhit and I are all going to see
Barbie tomorrow morning anyway (re-watch for Laney and me; Shobhit will be seeing it for the first time), and then Laney and I have a Braeburn Theater movie watch on Sunday. Chilling at home tonight without anything on a to-do list sounds appealing to me.
— पाँच हजार चार सौ अड़तालीस —
— पाँच हजार चार सौ अड़तालीस —
Last night, therefore, was spent almost exclusively on adapting my two travelogue emails (one on Saint Paul and Co+nvergence; one on Minneapolis) into backdated blog posts. I also did laundry, of which we had a lot, now a few days after getting back from our trip.
Speaking of the trip, as of my paycheck last Friday I have a balance of 35.8 hours of paid time off (PTO), and right now I've budgeted another 80 to take by the end of the year. We're actually allowed to carry over as much as 120, and that's about how much I would have if I didn't take any more for the rest of the year, although I don't really want to do that—I'd rather take all I can of the massive amount I get each year, every year, so I don't get stuck with more than I can take in a given year. I think I will still lean into attempting to take the holiday weeks off again, Thanksgiving and Christmas, which alone will burn through 32 hours each time. Oh, except the Christmas week PTO wouldn't get reflected until the first paycheck of 2024. Damn.
Anyway! I'd had a temporary place holder for a trip to the Albuquerque International Balloon Festival in October, but the idea of doing that with Danielle has been pushed out to some other year due to other events she has going on at the time. It's just as well: after paying for Shobhit's plane ticket out to Minneapolis, for the first time since before the pandemic, my "future travel expenses" budget line item has been wiped out completely to zero. Not only that, but I saved a lot on that trip thanks to the Co+nvergence Conference, which covered both my airfare and my hotel in Saint Paul. If I'd had to pay all the expenses for that trip, I'd be at least a thousand bucks in the hole. (I could manage that, but I'd rather not.)
I'd hoped to take some other kind of trip once more before the end of this year, but with the budget like this, it seems less and less likely, unless I can save fairly quickly. I may be looking at taking some PTO just for the hell of it, more specifically just to burn through some of it, without actually going anywhere. We'll see. I'd love to go to Palm Springs to see Faith for Thanksgiving at least one more time before she finally sells that house.
I mean, between two and a half weeks to Australia, short trips to both Shelton and Port Townsend, and now Twin Cities, I've already racked up 30 days of travel in 2023. That number on its own is already higher than it's been any year since I was regularly going to see Shobhit every month in L.A., and that last happened back in 2016. Taking a few months off from travel wouldn't be the worst thing.
It's still weird to look back on the "lockdown" days of the pandemic, no travel at all for the first few months, only sporadic and very careful travel for a good year and a half, working from home for fifteen and a half months. Time really seemed to slow down to a crawl at the time. It still feels weird to me that I spent the entire year I was 44 years old under those circumstances. But, in the big picture of time, it was all but a blip, much as it seemed impossible we'd ever see it that way—it's been over two years since I've been working back at the office, and time is back to rushing on by as fast as it ever has. I've finally reached a point where I regularly look in the mirror and think about how, after this not being the case for so much of my life, I've kind of gotten to a point where I actually look my age. I have to say it's not really my favorite.
— पाँच हजार चार सौ अड़तालीस —
[posted 12:20 pm]
