— पाँच हजार पाँच सौ पैंतीस —
I don't have a whole lot to update you on today, and yet I felt mightily productive after work yesterday.
This is because, instead of taking myself to see
The Color Purple as I have been intending to for days but keep postponing (and, after listening to a podcast reaction to it this morning, I'm honestly not sure I'll keep it high on my priority list), I spend the evening at home, alone while Shobhit was working, dismantling all of the Christmas decorations.
After having some leftover dinner with a couple of rotis Shobhit fried up for me before he left for work, I took all the ornaments off the tree, took all the strings off lights down from the windows, too the lights off the tree, packed all of that stuff into the two boxes I have for Christmas decorations, and dismantled the tree and put that into its box as well (
Guru helped).
In the past, I have taken everything down to the storage unit in the parking garage on level P2 at once, just going back and forth with all of the stuff in stages: condo to elevator; elevator to secured door to storage units; that door to our storage unit. This is a real pain in the ass though and this time I just decided to go all the way down in two rounds: I carried the two boxes of decorations, stacked, all the way to the storage unit. And then, in the second round, I carried the box with the Christmas tree, plus the four rolls of gift wrap I still have—I had a lot more leftover gift wrap than I expected; one of them isn't even yet opened from its cellophane wrapping.
I listened to Madonna the whole time. I'm burning through all of her releases in chronological order, because I'll be seeing her in concert next month. I listened to her self-titled, 1983 debut album on the way to work yesterday morning, and then listened to
Like a Virgin (1984) on my walk home—although I paused it when Gabriel called and we chatted for most of my walk.
As I took down the decorations, I listened to the
Vision Quest soundtrack (which I had not listened to since . . . 2010!);
True Blue (1986); the
Who's That Girl soundtrack (1987), and about half of her first remix compilation,
You Can Dance (also 1987)—which I finished listening to on the way to work this morning.
Madonna has released fifteen full length albums of original material. The Wikipedia discography page says fourteen, but that's because they are not counting 1990's
I'm Breathless as an album and thus categorized separately as a "soundtrack," except I call bullshit on that because every single song on it is a Madonna song, and they were all originals, thus, a full-length album. (Not even all the songs were from the movie; the subtitle was
Music from and Inspired by the film Dick Tracy). It was also the album that included "Vogue," one of the most iconic singles of Madonna's entire career.
Anyway! Fifteen albums. But, if you could greatest hits compilations, remix collections, soundtrack collections with multiple Madonna tracks, and live albums, there are fully
thirty releases for me to burn through. I've made a nice head start, having already gotten through five of them.
And: the living room is back to normal again, the way it looks 11 months out of the year. Without the Christmas Tree stand behind it, the love seat is pushed further back against the bay windows, which are now fully unobscured. The living room feels more spacious again.
After that, I spent a bunch of time copying and pasting captions from email travelogues as far back as the Thanksgiving trip to Palm Springs, onto their photo pages on my Flickr account. I like to do this because, even if I can't find the time to caption every single photo on Flickr, at least a summary of the story of each outing or event is found under one or more photo in each photo album. I was still working on that when Shobhit got home from work, and then I set about getting ready for bed.
— पाँच हजार पाँच सौ पैंतीस —
— पाँच हजार पाँच सौ पैंतीस —
I have
six meetings scheduled today. One of them is a lunch, but still—what do they think I am here, a manager? I don't get paid enough for this shit! This is why this is getting posted late today, because we had an all-team Merchandising meeting right after lunch.
We also had our regular Wednesday Pricing & Promotions Team meeting this morning, with Gabby and Amy. They talked about their experiences working at stores the days before Christmas, which I did not do. Gabby said, "We should work at a store together next year," and I was like, "We'll see. I might be on PTO." She gave me a look of mock-disapproval, which I suspect had some truth to it.
It gave me the sense that, it's possible next year I might get more directly pressured to work store holiday shifts again. I mean, whatever. This is the one issue where I absolutely own my bad attitude: I have a bad attitude about it, and will continue to. If I can find a way to get out of it I will. But, if push comes to shove and someone (Gabby or otherwise) puts their foot down and says I have to do it . . . I guess I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.
I guess I'll note that the meeting I had at 11:00 was to be introduced to Bob, who is replacing Katy at UNFI, who was the one who took several of us out to "Miracle on 2nd" at Rob Roy in December. She was in the meeting too, and she's scheduled several meetings today, with several different sub-departments of Merchandising, to introduce Bob to us all.
Bob then took us all out to lunch, the vast majority of Merchandising, actually—nearly all the Merchandisers, and many others besides—at Gourmondo, just up the street. I'm going to call this a social outing, which will give Social Review points to Katy, Bob, Beth, Noah (who sat across from me), Amanda (who sat to my left and with whom I chatted by far the most), Tristan, Benny, Michael, and a few others I won't bother mentioning for no other reason than they were too far at the other end of the table and thus there was no real interaction.
Gourmondo was already pretty picked over when we got there, even though it was only noon. Tristan got the last tomato bisque soup they had, which I really wanted. I wound up with a small frittata, which was fine. I only really went along because UNFI was buying us lunch anyway, so it's not like I'm out anything.
We all walked back to the office just in time to attend the all-team Merchandising meeting, which let out slightly early, at about 1:45. So that, right there, is the only reason I am only posting this entry right now.
— पाँच हजार पाँच सौ पैंतीस —
[posted 1:57 pm]
