— पांच हजार छह सौ तेईस —
I had an unexpected day off on Monday last week, to grieve the loss of Shanti as she did horribly the night before. This proceeded to seriously fuck up my work week, putting me behind and multiple things at work, exacerbated by an unusually large number of meetings and trainings on the four days I did work.
And this week? Monday was Memorial Day, no work again! Not that I'm complaining. I'll happily take a holiday, especially one I knew was coming and could prepare and plan for as well as I could. That said, it does mean I once again have only a four-day work week, with another two hours of meetings in the morning: one a one-hour meeting and one a one-hour training. Still, I'm
pretty sure I can spend this weekend catching up on all the shit I fell behind on, plus hopefully work ahead on some things—as I have only next week for up to 10 hours of user acceptance testing (UAT) on a new price generation application we're soon rolling out, plus only next week and the two days after to get the August ads ready for the Grocery Merchandisers (Noah and Frank). And I've got to tell you, I am really looking forward to the evening of Tuesday, June 11, when Shobhit and I will head to the airport to fly out to Toronto. Hooray new direct flights from Seattle! (When Danielle and I went there in 2019, we had to fly to Vancouver B.C. first.)
Anyway. My Memorial Day Weekend 2024 was fairly eventful, but few of those events should involve a great deal of detail I need to share so I am aiming to get through them quickly.
— पांच हजार छह सौ तेईस —
On Friday, Shobhit and Laney and I all went to a movie together. I even left work an hour early so we could make it to a 4:00 showtime. Shobhit, ever obsessed with getting his steps in, actually walked to meet me at my office at 3:30. He arrived a few minutes early, texted me that he needed to pee, so I went down to the lobby to bring him up. He was in an unusually chipper mood, so I decided not to comment on how struck I was the moment I saw him in the lobby: damn, his hair has gotten gray. It's happening very fast. He looks great though, I genuinely mean that.
Side note: it occurs to me now that his good mood is likely enhanced by all the steps he's been obsessed with counting up. However he achieves it, exercise is great for far more than just the aim of losing or maintaining weight. Regular exercise is an extremely effective mood enhancer.
But I digress! We stopped at Starbucks on our walk to Pacific Place, as Shobhit brought rum and chocolate liqueur in a flask, and once he bought us both hot chocolates to go, he poured the booze into them, and we brought those as drinks to the movie.
We all saw
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, which I had been
very excited about as I had loved
Mad Max Fury Road so much. But, largely due to that excitement, I was a bit let down: solid B movie at best. Some great action sequences, but nothing better (or even quite as good) as in
Fury Road. Shobhit even assumed I might give it a B-minus. The major problems with it were it was overlong at 146 minutes, and Anya Taylor-Joy was miscast in the title role.
— पांच हजार छह सौ तेईस —
On Saturday, I had long hoped to take a day to go back and hang out with Claudia at her and Dylan's place in Port Orchard, for longer than just the two hours I was able to hang out on my way to see Jennifer during my Birth Week. I also really wanted Shobhit to ride the Kitsap Transit foot ferries over with me, and he likely would have, except an acquaintance of his from Tech for Housing invited him to gather signatures for a ballot initiative that would tax employers who pay anyone more than $500,000 a year to help pay for affordable social housing. In spite of Shobhit himself having mixed feelings about the ballot measure himself—I knew instantly that I will vote yes on it—he felt it was not in his best interests to say no to this invitation, so that's what he spent Saturday afternoon doing instead, at Seattle Center during the Folklife Festival.
I had texted Claudia Friday to make sure she was still good with me coming to hang out on Saturday. This was her text reply:
Duh. Come over. We are grilling now
Loads of veggie burgers and field roast dogs
Clearly this was not made explicit in those texts, so when I did arrive at her place on Saturday, I did not realize her "we are grilling now" meant she was actually having a barbecue with several other people also invited. I basically came to join a party. And this was totally fine of course, I just kind of wish I had known to expect that beforehand; I thought I was getting more of a one-on-one visit. On the upside, I got a bunch of free food, including a delicious Impossible Burger.
Several other friends of Claudia's that I have met before at other gatherings were there, including her good friend who also used to work at PCC, Jamie; two bike riding friends (among others) named Lisa and Rick; and I got into several friendly chats with other people whose names I don't remember. I did meet Dylan's brother for the first time, getting the reminder that they are identical twins: the brother's name is Daren. I think. Shit. I may be remembering that wrong. Anyway, the only way they could possibly have been told apart, at least by a casual acquaintance of Dylan's like myself, was that Dylan has longer hair. Their faces were uncannily exactly alike.
It's easy to cite the convenience of the Kitsap Fast Ferry from Pier 50 on the Seattle Waterfront to Bremerton, which takes thirty minutes and is half the time the vehicle ferry takes. But, then you have to add on the Kitsap Foot Ferry from Bremerton to Port Orchard, which I typically have to wait around 15 minutes to get on, and that boat crossing across the Sinclair Inlet takes 12 minutes. Basically, the two foot ferries it takes to get from Seattle to Port Orchard takes a full hour. When you add onto
that the time it takes to get from home to Pier 50, which includes needing to get there early-ish and is also dependent on the bus schedule if I don't walk (I left home on Saturday at about 10:50 for the 11:30 ferry to Bremerton); plus the roughly 20-minute walk from the Port Orchard Ferry Dock, we're talking close to a solid two hours from door to door—I got to Claudia and Dylan's house at about 12:45.
It was about a two-hour trip back as well, and I left Claudia's at 4:30 to get back in time for the 5:00 foot ferry from Port Orchard back to Bremerton. The next option after that was not until the 6:30 ferry, and as Shobhit was back home by the earlier ferry, I decided I didn't want to wait another ninety minutes.
This still had me at Claudia's for a little over three and a half hours, which was much longer than the merely two hours I visited in April. Now, I did have less time directly with her on Saturday this past weekend, but I still had a good time. Claudia seemed slightly disappointed when I said at 4:00 that I would be leaving in about half an hour, but when I said, "I've got a two-hour transit ride back," she replied, "That's fair."
— पांच हजार छह सौ तेईस —
Shobhit had asked if I wanted to go out for breakfast on Saturday morning, but I already knew I'd be eating too much at Claudia's. I suggested we go on Sunday morning instead, so that's what we did.
Shobhit, between all his walking campaigning last year and all his walking to get steps in this year, has noticed all sorts of small gems of places around he neighborhood. He suggested we go to a place called
Volunteer Park Cafe, on 17th and Galer. So, we walked there.
This place has an incredibly limited menu, and separate few items for breakfast vs. lunch. Breakkast menu items were limited to granola and yogurt, or an egg sandwich on a poppy seed bun. I wanted the later. They also have a pretty well stocked pantry case, so I also asked for one of the cinnamon rolls. Shobhit also got a double espresso and I had a hot chocolate.
The egg sandwich, the cinnamon roll, the hot chocolate—all truly excellent, alone worth returning for. My only complaint would be that the hot chocolate was not very hot, but it had a very distinctive chocolate flavor that largely made up for that.
They have very few tables there, and it was raining lightly which made it difficult to use the otherwise fairly extensive outdoor seating. We stood inside waiting for both a table to open up and for our sandwich to be prepared, during which we ate the delicious cinnamon roll while standing. A table finally opened up and we sat at it just as the sandwich was brought to us. I'd like to come back sometime when it's both warm and not raining so we can sit outside.
— पांच हजार छह सौ तेईस —
On my way to the ferry to visit Claudia on Saturday, I got off the bus a stop early so I could go into the Central Library downtown to check out three movies, all of them Merchant Ivory films that I made a note of after watching the
Merchant Ivory documentary film at SIFF. Because I got back home from Claudia's on Saturday as early as I did, we actually watched two of them that night:
Maurice (1987) and
Howards End.
When Shobhit and I got back from breakfast on Sunday, we watched the third DVD:
The Remains of the Day. Of the three, I actually liked this one the best.
And then, right around the time we finished that movie, I
finally got a voicemail from Timberline Emergency Veterinary, that Shanti's ashes were available for us to come and pick up—a solid week after we had brought her body in. Shobhit was set to start a work shift at 4:00, which left us all of about two hours, but we quickly got going and drove up to Lake City to pick up Shanti's ashes.
When we got there, it was a different guy at the front desk than who had been there late the previous Sunday. I said we were there to pick up our cat's remains, and when he came back, there was a sort of reverence in his air and demeanor when he handed me what looked a lot like a gift bag, with a deep blue color to it, a paw print inside the lined shape of a heart on both the bag and the tag hanging from the handle.
We looked at
the contents of the bag as soon as we got in the car. They offered a ceramic paw print as part of the package, which came inside its own flat blue box; the cedar box full of her ashes was inside a fabic bag of the same color. The bag also contained an envelope, inside of which was both the "Certificate of Cremation" and a little flyer titled
Coping with the Loss of a Companion Animal. I haven't even looked through the flyer yet, I'm not sure what it'll tell me that I don't already know.
I didn't expect to get as emotional as I did when we picked up Shanti's ashes. I did not sob the way I did quite a lot the previous Sunday when I came home and found Shanti's body, but I did feel a wave of sadness wash over me, and had to wipe away a few tears on the drive home. Shobhit saw this and held my hand as he drove, which only made me well up with tears again.
It's only been a week, so my memories of Shanti remain very vivid. It's easy to make the mistake of expecting her to come around a corner from somewhere in the condo, but she isn't there anymore (well, her ashes are—but if those start walking, we have a very different problem on our hands). Shobhit is clearly still grieving in his own way; he mentioned the other day that he had clicked through photos of her on Facebook, and just today he texted me about how he misses having her lie beside him on the couch while he pets her—this had been her favorite spot to hang out for quite a long time. She used to bat at his arm, shoulder or head if he wasn't paying attention to her or moving aside so she could jump up onto the sofa next to him.
I took six pictures of the bag and its contents, and added them to my "
Shanti Passes" photo album on Flickr, which now contains 19 shots. These include the photo Shobhit wanted taken of her body when he said goodbye to her at Timberline Emergency Veterinary, a shot that gives me the creeps but I kept because taking it clearly somehow gave Shobhit comfort.
And since I made that photo album, on Sunday I went through my archives and retroactively created albums for the passing of the two previous pets I lost: "
Peng Passes" (2008, 12 shots) and "
Batty Passes" (2004, 5 shots). I put all three of these albums into both my "
Burials and Memorials" collection, and my "
Pet Galleries" collection.
Shobhit worked 4 to 9 on Sunday, and I probably spent most of that time working on my current video project.
— पांच हजार छह सौ तेईस —
This brings us to yesterday, which I spent much of with Laney. First, we went to another movie:
Babes, a B-plus comedy that was a better movie than any we'd seen in a while. I had originally had this scheduled for Sunday but later shifted it to Monday while Shobhit would be working, so I could spend the afternoon on Sunday with Shobhit.
From there, Laney and I caught the #49 bus from downtown to Broadway around where Broadway Market is, so we could walk just the last few blocks up to the DeLuxe Bar and Grill—the location Laney proposed, because their Happy Hour starts at 3:00, even though we got there at 2:00.
Shobhit worked a bit later than scheduled, to around 2:00. Laney and I each had an order of nachos and one drink (I had a Moscow Mule that was super delicious), and basically killed that first hour until Happy Hour started. In the meantime, Shobhit drove home from work, then walked to meet us right at Happy Hour, at which time we all ordered a Happy Hour drink plus a Happy Hour $6 appetizer: Laney and I both got onion rings; Shobhit got tater tots.
This way, just like on Friday, Shobhit
and Laney got Social Review points. He really wants to make sure he beats her on the next Social Review, which I'm sure he would have anyway. At the moment, Shobhit is at 17 points and Laney is at 16. She and I are seeing another movie tonight which will make them tied again, but don't fret! Remember, when Shobhit and I go to Toronto that will give him
six points during which we won't even see Laney. They'll probably be closer than usual this quarter but Shobhit remains the safe bet for the top spot.
We all walked together down Broadway after that, and then we parted ways at Broadway & John so Shobhit and I could cut through Cal Anderson Park on our way back to our place. I spent time writing my review, and Shobhit zonked out and napped for like three hours. I watched the series finale of
The Sypathizer (a well made limited series I also have somewhat mixed feelings about) and also spent more time on my video project.
So here we are. I guess I can get to getting some actual work done now.
[posted 12:354 pm]
