— पांच हजार तीन सौ चौबीस —
I would have to say last night's hopefully-annual "Merchandising Holiday Night Out" was a definitive success.
We have 26 in the department, so at first that was the number proposed to Pasta Casalinga for their pasta making event, even though they usually cap it at 22. Then, I got two declines immediately, because both Amy (who is in Hawaii) and Benny evidently had other plans on this date. A couple of "tentatives" at first later became official declines as well, as they pretty reliably tend to do—Shelley, who is new here this year and has yet to really manage to come to one of these social events (not necessarily at any fault of her own), can't eat anything due to a dental appointment on Tuesday; Amanda hoped to be able to come early for a bit before something else she already had committed to, but then the tentative start time of 5:00 shifted to definite start of 5:30 and that precluded that possibility. Four down, 22 left ostensibly coming—the very cap Pasta Casalinga had to begin with.
By yesterday, over the course of Tuesday and Wednesday, three people who had previously been confirmed yeses switched to nos: Beth, who is dealing with a parent in the ER (that's is quite obviously more important); Robin, who is apparently just starting to recover from being ill (covid or not, yes, correct choice, stay the fuck away!); Mackenzie, without explanation. On the flip side, though, Elliott discovered he had dates wrong so although he initially had declined he emailed yesterday to ask if it was too late to come after all. Of course not!
That left expected attendance last night at 19, and then, neither Leon nor Kevin C showed up, I have no idea why; we even had an all-Team meeting yesterday afternoon, a hybrid between the 10 or so of us at the office and everyone else on Zoom, and although both of them were in attendance on Zoom, there didn't seen to be any indication that they
weren't coming. Kevin even talked about how he would get there and back. Maybe something came up.
So, out of a team of 26, 17 showed. It was still plenty, though; Pasta Casalinga is a
rather small space in the Atrium section on the south end of Pike Place Market. It was a bummer that fully one third of the team wound up unable to come, but, it was still really fun and plenty of people.
I am one of four people on the recently-created Merchandising Event Committee, for brainstorming and planning social events for the team, and I wound up with the responsibility of sending out the invite and tracking RSVPs for this. I was very on top of it, which created the kind of false impression that I had organized the whole thing. No fewer than three people thanked me shortly after my arrival for "making this happen," and more than once I had to say, "It was Steven's idea!" In fact, he had been the one to email Justine with the suggestion, because he knows Michela, the Italian lady who cofounded and runs the place, and apparently has been raving about it for a long time. Justine then forwarded it to those of us on the committee, after which, sure, I deeply advocated for it because I thought it was a great idea. The rest basically agreed, and so it went. I had only minor direct contact with Michela, though (Steven was the point person there, even though he's not even on the committee), and I actually don’t even have a clue how much it cost or who took care of getting it paid for. I only know that, whatever it cost, it wound up approved for the budget.
In any case, Steven really deserves the credit for this being the holiday event we did this year. I just coordinated the tracking and communicating who would and would not be coming, as well as the Outlook invite.
I kept thirty of the photos I took last night, which was a decent enough size for a photo album, but then Adrienne texted me
twenty photos she took as well, fully fourteen of which I took, giving me a total of
44 shots from yesterday. I was almost resentful of how good several of Adrienne's shots were, better than a fair majority of mine, in my opinion. I got some good ones too, though. The album includes two video clips, both of which are seen at the top and bottom of this post. This fantastic photo of me, though, was taken by Adrienne:
— पांच हजार तीन सौ चौबीस —
This now makes
a new collection of three photo albums, all of holiday season events for the Merchandising Department—even though the first consists of the one photo I took for our 2019 event, before the show started at Benaroya Hall for the Seattle Men's Chorus holiday concert we all went to that year. I made that its own photo album for the purposes of this collection, tracking our department holiday outings through the years. Granted, 2020 wasn't so much an "outing" as it was a virtual "Happy Hour," which was still super fun complete with little gift bags for everyone.
We never did go out last year, but that was just as well, as last year was the massive Omicron spike (but enough people working at the office that a virtual event wasn't really realistic anymore). Thus, so far, we have 2019, 2020, and 2022. I'm happy to be part of making sure we do something again in 2023.
Anyway. I had actually hoped to listen to Christmas music on my walk down there from the office, but Noah asked if I was walking down and I said yes, so he said, "I'll join you." I'm not complaining though, it was also perfectly nice walking with Noah—who actually walks slightly faster than I do, and when he noticed I was actually keeping up he asked, "Do people give you shit for walking too fast?" As a matter of fact, they do! Danielle did just a couple of weeks ago when we were walking downtown from the condo for the Lighting of the Tree Ceremony, asking me to slow down.
So there were maybe five people already there when we arrived, and we even ran into Darrell on Western Avenue when we went up the stairs to cut through the back side of the Market via the 2017 MarketFront expansion. The three of us then walked the rest of the way there, where we found Cathryn and two or three others. It wasn't long before everyone else arrived who was able to come, and the event lasted from 5:30 to just after 8:00.
Michela, the lady who runs the place and ran the class, had us break up into four different groups, thereby starting with four different bowls of semolina flour and water. I was one of few who never did do any of the dough mixing or kneading. I don't want any of that shit under my fingernails. I did wind up being given a small bit of prepared dough to roll out into a thin rope, though, and Michela ultimately told both Elliott and me that our ropes were too thick. Then, the instruction on rolling the inch-cut rope pieces into pasta noodles was difficult for me, because you're supposed to use your fingertips and my long nails get in the way. I improvised and just cut them open lengthwise using my same nails as a tool; Michela later told me
my noodles actually looked really good.
A separate, smaller group, enlisting the help of David and Steven,
worked on the sauces in the kitchen. At some point all the pasta noodles were collected and then boiled; Michela instructed us that you should put coarse salt in the boiling water but
not olive oil ("It's a waste of perfectly good olive oil!"), or presumably any oil at all. Quite soon after that,
the pastas were ready to serve, and it occurred to me that this was almost certainly the freshest pasta I had ever eaten.
I liked the one with a red sauce better, though. The green sauce, which included a typo of broccoli, was super savory and, while decent, nowhere near as good. Part of that may have been that it was made with pre-made pasta shells in the vegetarian version made for Brandy (a pescatarian) and me. She and I ate at the bar next to each other and probably visited with each other there more than I chatted with anyone else all evening. I don't think I had ever had an extended conversation with her before. (In my defense, although she told me she's been with PCC for 15 years, she's only a recent addition to the Merchandising department.)
I had hoped to get a good, group shot of all of us, but then David, who has something like an hour drive home, started saying goodbye to everyone before half of us were even done eating. Gathering for a group shot would not have been feasible. Oh, well. I got a lot of great photos otherwise anyway. When we all finally parted ways around 8:00, I got out onto 1st Avenue, the door shut behind me, and started thinking: I feel like something's missing. Oh, shit! My bag! I tried to get back inside and gates had been drawn down. I looked up Pasta Casalinga online and found their phone number, quite relieved when someone actually answered the phone. He asked me to describe my bag, I did, and he brought it out for me. Whew!
I barely managed to catch a #11 bus home on 4th and Pike, and by around 9:00 I was starting on my photos. I then spent the next
two and a half hours trying to get iPhoto to work properly—it was not loading new photos from iCloud, nor was it even properly importing photos after I loaded them from my phone to OneDrive. This computer is driving me crazy. Shobhit is always convinced it's because I have too many programs open (rarely more than three or four, most of the time all needed; if this can be done without issue at work on my PC there's no reason the same should not be the same at home on my Mac) or because I have too many browser tabs open. But, even after restarting the computer and
only opening iPhoto, it still took, like, half an hour—not an exaggeration—for anything to open, finish loading, and be in any way operable. It's nuts, and I really need to get online with an Apple Help representative soon to look into what the fuck is happening to my computer.
I honestly think part of it is just the computer's age, and thus iPhoto's age. I'm encountering this a lot lately, where it will load photos from iCloud properly only after it's been open for, like, two hours. Not very useful when I'm starting at 9:00 and hoping to get some otherwise very simple tasks done by 10. Instead, just because of all this bullshit, I didn't get to sleep until 11:30.
And even that was after giving up in the middle of iPhoto finally having loaded the photos from iCloud, but getting stuck mid-export to Findr on a video clip, just taking forever to get through any of its processes at all. Only after I got up this morning were all the photos exported properly. And I have to do it this way in order to export the files as jpegs; they are formatted differently if, for instance, I try to AirDrop the files directly without filtering them through iPhoto first. What a pain in the ass. But whatever: Adrienne texted me her photos, at my request, this morning, and now all the photos are loaded and tagged appropriately on Flickr. I just need to get some, if not all, of them captioned now.
— पांच हजार तीन सौ चौबीस —
[posted 12:32 pm]
