— पांच हजार छह सौ बारह —
We had a planned power outage on our block, and thus our entire condo complex, last night. They had to do it during work to replace a transformer on 14th Avenue. This is actually the second time this has happened in the past six months, but at least for the December 14 one, they waited to start until 7 p.m. Last night's started at 5 p.m. The power was out before I even got home from work.
I don't know if the December one was for transformer work too or not. I just know that they scheduled it for like 12 hours then too, and they finished well ahead of that schedule. The same thing happened last night; when I woke up this morning, my alarm clock was blinking at sometime around 4:45, which would indicate the power had actually come on nearly five hours before—not long after midnight, actually.
It did mean, still, that we had no power the entire evening we were home, before going to bed. Shobhit charged my laptop for me, and charged his as well, so at least we had power there. His phone was really low on battery but was able to charge it a bit by plugging it into his laptop. I had charged my phone for about an hour before leaving work, and then also charged my phone into my laptop, which worked surprisingly well at charging the phone without draining the laptop's own battery all that quickly. I was impressed.
We had no access to our own wifi, of course, but Xfinity has public wifi hotspots, which you can log into with your own account login. We had access to that, evidently generated from somewhere outside of our block, so that rather worked out well for me last night: I had no movie to go see, and no possible TV to distract, really nothing else to do. So, I actually finished the quite detailed email travelogue about Gabriel and Lea's wedding earlier than I had been thinking I would. I worked on that most of the time it was light out, and got it emailed out to my mailing list by about a quarter to 9:00.
I did take a couple of breaks while I worked on that. First, Shobhit spent some time planting the starts he bought in Mount Vernon on our way to Lopez Island last week, in his p-patch plot. He also bought some wire fencing to wrap around it and try keeping out god forsaken bunnies that eat all his plants. When he was ready to do that, I went downstairs to help him with it.
Later, I spent just a few minutes helping him run lines from a side for an audition. It was like three quarters of one page and was very few lines, so it honestly didn't take long. Shobhit was getting irrationally angry about how long he was having to wait for me, literally at one point saying "You're so selfish" (way to get me to want to keep doing this, very motivational). To be fair, it did not take a huge amount of time so I really could have taken a break for it earlier. Shobhit could also have taken a more effectively positive approach.
— पांच हजार छह सौ बारह —
— पांच हजार छह सौ बारह —
It had been my suggestion to go for a walk once it got dark, though. What else was there to do? Read a book? By candlelight? No thanks.
Shobhit decided he wanted to go get dessert somewhere. I looked on Yelp for dessert places that were both highly rated and "open now," and landed on a spot on Pike between Boylston & Belmont called R+M Dessert Bar—nearly 300 reviews, average rating of four and a half out of five stars.
Shobhit wants to say I've never noticed it because, according to him, I am always looking on my phone. (He never wants to acknowledge how often he's on his phone himself. Not quite as often as I am, I'll admit, but more than plenty.) The truth is, it's a tiny place tucked in the middle of two far bigger, more noticeable places. You don't even get to the counter until you open a door to the interior of a building, into a sort of small lobby, and go around a corner to face the street again.
We ordered a
chocolate strawberry mousee dome to go, and then Shobhit decided he wanted a slice of pizza, even though he had already made a large amount of ramen with fried tofu at home—he said he had a craving. We walked up Pike to a pizza place he wanted to try, didn't like their by-the-slice flavor options, and then we backtracked and over to Pine Street to get one of the favorite pesto pizza slices from Hot Mama's Pizza. They have like three little tables outside, so we sat at that, shared the pizza and then shared the dessert, which was indeed delicious.
The guy at R+M had said this was their second most popular dessert. The other one we almost got, the triple chocolate ganache brownie, was their most popular. We'll have to go back to get that one sometime.
This gave Shobhit a coveted point on the next Social Review. Thanks to his nearly monthlong trip to India, he's currently behind Laney, with 10 and 8 points thus far in the current quarter, respectively. We've got about a month and a half to go though, so I think he should still handily beat her out for the #1 spot as usual. Shobhit tried to say "I don't care" when I mentioned the Social Review point, and I was like, "Liar!" I know him better than that. (He wasn't actually being pissy in this particular instance, for the record.)
I'm glad we ate there instead of coming home just to eat in the dark. By the time we got home, it was nearly 10:00, so I just set about getting ready for bed. Shobhit stayed up for a little while, but even he came to bed shortly after, clearly having gotten bored.
I was struck by how many people were out and about on Capitol Hill at 9:30 on a Wednesday night. I would expect this more on a Thursday evening, the kind of unofficial start to the weekend, but Wednesday? I must really be getting old. On the other hand, I found it sort of hopeful. The vibe is back!
— पांच हजार छह सौ बारह —
[posted 12:31 pm]
