— पांच हजार सात सौ नौ —
What a "delight," coming back to work after three days off, with over 250 unread emails, and an inability even to keep up with just the fucking emails that have come in
this morning.
My last Daily Lunch Update (DLU) was on Friday last week, November 8—six days ago. Shobhit and I didn't even leave for Phoenix until Sunday, which means I haven't yet been able to mention what I did last Friday night: Laney and I took Light Rail up to Northgate, and we went to see
Blitz at the Regal Thornton Theater, because it was the only option we had in Seattle proper.
We were astonished to find we were among a whopping
three people in the theater we went into for this movie—only one other person was there. And this is a film, despite being an Apple TV production that they want people to watch on a streamer, clearly designed to be best viewed on the big screen. And this was a 6:50 showtime! On a Friday night!
It made me wonder whether that Regal theater is not long for this world. I could not believe how dead it was. It did not look like a lot of people were going to see any of the other movies playing either.
Anyway. The movie was decent.
On Saturday, I took myself to see
Small Things Like These, which was quite good.
That movie was at the AMC 10 in the U District, the first of two showtimes for the day: 4:30 (the later one was after 10:00). And there were at
least 37 people at that movie, including myself—in that screening room, that was 55% capacity. And that was for this movie, an indie drama about forced labor of unwed pregnant young women in 80s Ireland. Never in a million years would I have expected this movie to be so popular, especially in the current cinema industry landscape. Why were so many people going to see this one, and no one going to
Blitz? Talk about bizarre.
According to Box Office Mojo,
Small Things Like These has barely made more than half a million dollars domestically; it's made $3.4 million worldwide.
Blitz doesn't even have a domestic box office figure yet—it was given a very limited release for Oscar qualification—and has earned barely more than half a million worldwide. Neither movie, of course, made the domestic top 10 last weekend, although even at that modest number
Small Things Like These ranked #14.
In any event, the theater was so crowded at
Small Things Like These on Saturday that, until the movie actually began, I really wondered if I had mistakenly gone into the wrong theater. Nope.
A couple had booked seats directly to my right, well after I had booked mine. So many other seats, they could have at least put a buffer seat between us. What a couple of pyschos.
— पांच हजार सात सौ नौ —
— पांच हजार सात सौ नौ —
Much of Saturday was otherwise spent doing laundry and finishing what packing could be done before Sunday morning. We caught the bus just before 7:00 Sunday morning down to Westlake Center, where we had to transfer to a shuttle bus rather than catch Light Rail there, a bit of an annoyance as Light Rail stations were closed between Westlake and Stadium Stations for maintenance work over the weekend. The shuttle bus took us down to SoDo Station, where we were finally able to get on the train that took us to the airport.
And: I
already posted the blog version of my email travelogue detailing the entire trip to Phoenix, which was indeed a lot of fun. Now I have at-home vacations to look forward to both over Thanksgiving Week (the week after next) and the week prior to Christmas precisely five weeks from now; and then my Birth Week at the end of April. Beyond that, it's wide open, and we now have no travel plans solidified at all. I do aim to visit Barbara again in Louisville next year, and it's possible that could happen before my Birth Week, so there's that.
Anyway. Shobhit and I had considered taking the bus into downtown Phoenix yesterday morning before we had to head to the airport around 1:00, but: we had already done this for dinner the night before; and we had to check out of the hotel by 11:00, where they quite annoyingly did not offer the service of storing luggage for you. This might be the first hotel I've ever been to that would not do that.
This meant we had to be out of there, with all our bags, by 11:00. So basically we just said "fuck it" and headed to the airport on the shuttle (at least the hotel had that; this was SureStay by Best Western Phoenix Airport, so it would make sense) right around that time. This gave us plenty of time to spend a leisurely morning at the hotel, going up to the office building by the road to get our free continental breakfast (nothing special, but workable: bagels, doughnuts, fruit, yogurt, toast, cereal—Shobhit was disappointed there were no eggs), which we did before I even took my shower, which is rare for me.
This also meant we were at the airport at around 11:15, a solid five hours before our flight was even scheduled to leave. Shobhit knew it was a long shot but still checked to see if there was any way we could get onto an earlier flight; there was only one such flight and it was full.
You'd think this would be an agonizing bore, spending all that time at the airport, but in the end it worked out beautifully for me. There is free wifi at the airport, and this gave me ample time to write up my email travelogue. These emails take me hours to get done, and I wasn't even done by the time we were boarding our plane.
Thankfully, Delta seems to have changed its in-flight wifi policy. In the past you could only get free wifi if you were a T-Mobile customer, which I am not. Now, if you log in with your frequent flier number, you can use the wifi. I did just that, and I must have spent at least a solid two hours more, on the flight, finishing up the travelogue. I had it emailed out while we were still in the air. Gmail indicated at the time that it was sent at 5:51 pm; now that I am back in the Pacific Time Zone, it's saying it was sent at 4:51.
It's a separate process to convert these emails to something I can post to this blog, as I have to add a ton of html commands, both for things like paragraph breaks and for embedded photos and hyperlinks and such. I managed to finish that, and get it posed to my blog, with minutes to spare before we touched down at SeatTac yesterday evening.
I brought my library book with me on this trip, but any time someone else would be reading (like Shobhit: he spent most of the flight yesterday with
his library book), I would be either processing photos—which as I did daily as the trip went on—or working on the travelogue. I finally got back to my book on the Light Rail back fro SeaTac last night; I have finally finished
Dune Messiah as of the end of my lunch break today.
It was really great to have the travelogue done before I even got home—I love managing efficiencies! It gave us time to eat dinner and finally watch the excellent season finale to
The Penguin last night (while Action Movie Night was happening, but we didn't want to be rushing right into that the minute we got home). I deliberately made sure I had no plans tonight just in case I'd need to work on this, and now I don't; it's still nice to have a free evening. I may work on the calendars for Christmas, which I am actually getting relatively close to finally getting done.
— पांच हजार सात सौ नौ —
[posted 12:22 pm]
