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Shobhit made an elaborate Indian dinner last night, for two reasons: we have Beth over as a house guest for a week; and both he and I had no plans last night so the three of us were all home for the evening.
Beth didn't even change out of her pajamas all day. As far as I know, she never went anywhere. Shobhit had suggested going for a walk at one point, only for Beth to say, "I'd have to put my bra on!" I suppose that would explain why, when I did a brief video clip of the two of them rolling dough for parathas together on the kitchen counter, she saw me and suddenly put her arm over her boobs. I mean, she had a shirt on.
Shobhit largely approached this like he does when we have a planned dinner party with guests. He made only slightly less food, limiting it to three main dishes: a bell pepper dish; a kidney bean dish; and a potato and greens dish. He was going to add paneer to the bell peppers but changed his mind when Beth said she doesn't like paneer. She also didn't eat any of the kidney bean dish—which was actually by a wide margin the best of the three—as she said she doesn't like beans. No wonder she's a proud carnivore; without eating beans I'm not sure where she'd get much protein.
Anyway, I discovered Beth is quite the picky eater. I was notoriously picky growing up but only have a few things I never want to eat now (okra, broccoli, cauliflower . . . after being with Shobhit, certainly "bitter gourd"). I eat far more things now than I used to, though, and tend to like any bean based dish Shobhit makes. I wonder if garbanzo beans would be included in Beth's list? I should ask her. Shobhit did not make that last night.
The best part was the parathas, which he stuffed with a mixture of potatoes and something else, something green that I forget. Beth tried to help make parathas but couldn't get the rolling and then stuffing quite right. When I was tasked with spreading ghee on the parathas and flipping them on the two frying pans we had going, Beth was eager to take over that task. Shobhit got irritated with me for not supervising her well enough; Beth said she knew what she was doing; then she would use a bit too much of the ghee, and at one point she said, "Matthew let me burn this one." Haha.
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— पांच हजार छह सौ छियालीस —
There's not much else to tell besides that we had a big dinner at the dining table, and we all stuffed ourselves silly. We opened a bottle of wine. Apparently while I was at work, Shobhit opened the Pappy Van Winkle and shared a shot with Beth, who called her dad who is apparently a bourbon expert. He had specific instructions for Shobhit which involved adding a tiny bit of ice and letting it soak for a moment, or something—I forget the specifics, only that it apparently "opened up" the flavor in a way Shobhit had not yet experienced with it.
Once we were all done with dinner, Shobhit and I watched the back half—three episodes—of season 3 of
Slow Horses on Apple TV, while Beth spent most of the time on her phone. We're now all caught up, and season four comes out in September—right when my three free months end. I may wait a month and then pay for just one month just so we can then watch that season.
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In more recent news, my morning today at work was nuts. I got to work and discovered over a dozen emails from POS people at stores asking about roughly 4,000 items having batched, which nobody expected to happen. Even now there's no definitive knowledge of why this happened, but we have a general idea. There were several things I could do to make things easier, which I had less than half an hour to get done before my weekly 1:1 with Gabby which she had rescheduled to 8:00 this morning—and then Dave cut into the first ten minutes of it with a separate brief meeting.
Gabby and I spent about half our meeting talking about this when we were meant to be touching base on my "goals" for the year (an exercise I have honestly not that much respect for, it seems kind of dumb and pointessly corporate in nature to me—this is not a reflection of Gabby but of overall company policy). We then had a weekly Teams meeting with people in IT about a new pricing module we are in the process of rolling out, and we spent basically all of
that half hour discussing this morning's batching issue. Which I then spent most of the rest of the morning responding to more emails about.
Gabby, ever the over-achiever, even went so far as to open a Teams meeting for "office hours" for POS to drop in and ask for any further clarifying questions. I was skeptical that it was necessary but, shows what I know I guess: multiple POS staff accepted the invite to join, and a few did get on the call to ask questions. And there went my lunch break.
I will be unusually happy for this day to be over.
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[posted 1:41 pm]