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Once again! I actually posted a couple of times over the weekend, so I have already covered both Friday and Saturday in previous posts:
Riding Lynnwood Link Light Rail Extesion with Laney (Friday; posted Saturday)
Alki Beach Pride with Shobhit and Laney (Saturday; posted Sunday)
Shobhit was pleased to learn he got a Social Review point for Sunday, because we went out for a walk that day. Actually, we did twice—both time for desserts! Although he didn't partake when we went out earlier in the afternoon, when I suggested we walk to Top Pot Doughnuts, the store they have on Capitol Hill, on Summit between E Mercer & E Roy.
There's a connection there to Alki Beach Pride, actually. Shobhit and I both filled out a sexual health survey at the Public Health - Seattle & King County booth. They gave a $5 Top Pot gift card to every person who filled out the survey, and Shobhit and I both filled one out. Shobhit gave his gift card to me, so I had $10 in Top Pot gift card money. Why not go spend some of it the next day!
I would not have counted that walk as a social engagement without going to Top Pot, which basically qualifies as "out for dessert." Otherwise, we were just walking out to do errands: on the way back, we stopped at QFC so Shobhit could buy his requisite lottery tickets; and then we spent a while browsing the Capitol Hill Farmers Market. From there we walked up to Safeway to take advantage of a few digital coupons, and from there we walked to Trader Joe's, where we were disappointed to discover that, just like Costco did a few months ago, they have totally stopped selling fat free milk! I need to find a place to write to them and complain, because they're not going to bring them back unless customers complain.
Anyway, Shobhit and I otherwise watched a bunch of TV Sunday afternoon. Once it was just about evening, Shobhit suggested another walk—to Salt & Straw for ice cream. This was funny considering his deliberate choice
not to have a doughnut. To be fair, though, Salt & Straw is arguably the best ice cream (or even the best dessert) around, so that makes a difference. Also, Salt & Straw's seasonal flavors rotate monthly and change on the 1st, so we wanted to go check out the new flavors.
We shared one waffle cone with two scoops, one flavor for each scoop: "Finnriver's Black Currant Apple Cider," which was good but we both would have preferred it without the gummy candies in it; and "Apple Cider Donuts," which we both quite liked. And ironically, Shobhit wound up eating some chunks of doughnuts after all!
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— पांच हजार छह सौ छियासठ —
So, Tim Burton's
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice opens next weekend. Yesterday was Labor Day, which I thus had off of work—and between Laney's and Alexia's schedules, we were able to plan for a Braeburn Condos theater showing of the original, 1988
Beetlejuice at 12:30.
Jessica, Laney's daughter, made a last-minute decision to join us. She arrived maybe ten or fifteen minutes into the movie. Shobhit could have joined us, as he didn't work until 5:00, but he chose to take a long walk to get his steps in instead.
Laney, Alexia, Tracy and I are
all seeing
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice on Friday. I invited her to join us yesterday but she had other plans. It's sort of just as well: I had been surprised to see on Letterboxd that I had just watched this in October last year, and when I searched my calendar I was reminded that Tracy had seen it with me then—at Centra Cinema. So, I have already rewatched
Beetlejuice with all of them; Tracy just got an 11-month jump on everyone else.
This made the fifth time I have watched
Beetlejuice, just since 2007—as far back as I could keep records of this
on my Letterboxd account.
This was a rare case of a Braeburn Theater movie watch
not being a double feature—we just watched the one movie yesterday. Laney and Alexia and I agreed on a Tim Burton double feature for the near future, though:
Edward Scissorhands and
Mars Attacks! I still need to schedule that.
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After Shobhit and I binged through the rest of season one of
Severance on Saturday, we pivoted to another show on Apple TV+:
Pachinko, which Laney told me about, even though she hasn't watched it herself yet, but she told me it has incredibly good reviews. We're now four episodes in, I think.
Somewhat to my surprise, Shobhit locked into this four-generation Korean drama immediately. The one minor irritation is that the show was shot in three languages—Korean, Japanese, and English—but for some reason the Apple TV app defaults to English overdubbing for the Korean, even though it sticks to original Japanese with English subtitles when characters speak Japanese.
I hate overdubbing but Shobhit prefers it, so I left it instead of changing the setting so Shobhit would continue watching it with me. The unfortunate result of this, though, is that when the character should be speaking Korean, we get excellent face acting and rather bad, bland English voice acting. Shobhit likes it so he can listen to dialogue without having to look at the screen at all times. I hate it because it creates a weird disconnect, and actually robs us of half the actual performance by the actors themselves.
Anyway. Shobhit went to work at 5:00, and then I took myself to a movie at the AMC 10 in the U District, which meant taking Light Rail from Capitol Hill Station to U District Station. To my genuine shock, when I boarded the train, there were Lynn and Zephyr!
They had suitcases with them, and were taking the train up to Lynnwood Station, where a friend was to pick them up and drive them home to Everett. Just as they had last year, they spent the weekend in Seattle at a hotel and to attend the PAX conference. They had even mentioned there being another queer fashion show I could join them to watch, back when Shobhit and I met up with them to go to Jetty Island in Everett on the 17th. But, we never followed up, so that never happened; with Shobhit having Sunday off of work it's kind of just as well anyway.
So, it wasn't a huge shock in retrospect that Lynn and Zephyr were on the train back to Lynnwood yesterday evening—they had done the same thing last year, just getting dropped off and picked up at Northgate Station instead, as that was then the northernmost station. Still, what are the odds that not only would I be getting on Light Rail at the same time they'd be going through Capitol Hill Station,
and that I would get on the one out of four train cars that they would be on? I actually heard my name twice before I realized I was being called out to: "Matthew. Matthew!"
I had two empty seats on either side of me—one to my left and one in front of me—so they came to sit and chat with me, the few minutes it took for me to travel from Capitol Hill to University of Washington Station, and then on to U District Station, where I was to get off. It was fun to see them in such an unexpected way, though.
The movie I saw was
Good One, which I am somewhat ambivalent about, although it's very well made. I left the movie thinking I would give it a solid B, but as I wrote the review after I got home, I bumped it up to B+. It's both subtle and rather provocative. It would have been nice to be able to discuss it with Laney, but I didn't even decide to see that one until just a few days before, and Laney can't go see
all the movies.
— पांच हजार छह सौ छियासठ —
[posted 12:30 pm]
