— पाँच हजार चार सौ सैंतालीस —
Regular readers may have noticed that, while I was on my trip to the Twin Cities for eight days, I did not update here in any way whatsoever—had I been thinking about it, I would have at least kept up to date on the Threads digests (no longer Twitter, because fuck Elon Musk and "X"), but, I never even thought about that. Thus in an effort not to overwhelm myself, I have been updating two back posts for the Threads digests each morning so far, which means those are now up to date through Saturday (August 5), prior to this post you are reading right now.
Soon, there will be backdated posts adapted from my email travelogues, in two parts respectively for Saint Paul / the Co+nvergence conference, and Minneapolis. I hope to get much, if not all, of that done tonight. I had thought I would work on it
last night, which was why I did not bother posting a Daily Lunch Update yesterday even though that was actually my first day back to work after the trip, because I figured I'd be posting
something later—and then I remembered that last night was Action Movie Night at the Braeburn Condos theater.
So, I might as well get a brief note on the movie night out of the way now: we had only six people in attendance this week: Tony, Jake, Chris G, Ben, Shobhit and myself. It was the first Movie Night Shobhit would attend without hemming and hawing about whether he should instead be focusing on the Seattle City Council primary election—which, by the way, unfortunately, he was one of the six out of eight candidates who won't be going on to the General Election. In fact, he came in
eighth, with 406 and 1.55% of the votes. I don't know if this is any consolation to him, but Ry got barely more than that, with 487 and 1.86% of the votes. Bobby, by a mile my least favorite of the candidates, got a solid 10% of the votes, but the flip side of that number, of course, is that 90% of the voters (and only 36.21% of registered voters actually voted in this primary) wanted someone else. The two top vote-getters have actually been easily predictable for months: Joy Hollingsworth, with 36.9% pf the vote; and Alex Hudson with 36.5%. Shobhit is convinced he knows which of the other candidates' voters will go to which of the top two in November, which by his estimation gives Hudson the slight edge, but frankly he doesn't have any truly hard data (yet?) to support that prediction.
Anyway! I said I was going to write a brief note about Action Movie Night and then went on a tangent about the primary election, which happened on Tuesday last week, August 1, the day I traveled to the Twin Cities. After it became clear that evening that he would not be moving on to the General Election, he spent time while I was out of town both cleaning up all the election-related paperwork and clutter all over the dining table and the coffee table and the kitchen counter (which I genuinely appreciated), and confirming his hours back to work at Total Wine & More this week. It also meant that he could easily respond to the weekly check-in on the Action Movie Night email list that both of us would be attending, and we'd be bringing food as usual.
Also as usual, we made pasta, although Shobhit did most of the cooking of it this time, while I did some unpacking. I'll get to that momentarily.
This week's pick was Jake's, and his history of movie choices is pretty liberally sprinkled with horror titles, but also some genuinely great movies (not all of them horror), so whether I would like this pick seemed genuinely up in the air. I knew from the first shot that it was Jordan Peele's well-made but deeply uneven movie from last year,
NOPE, which I was actually kind of happy to give another chance. In the end, I stand by the
solid B I gave it last summer, even though, as we discovered once the movie ended, the more you think and talk about it, the less it really works.
Curiously, Jake himself was openly and immediately disappointed in it, saying his wife had convinced him it was enough in the horror genre to make it something he'd like. He called it a "slow burn," which is true, and a complaint of Shobhit's, as he nodded off several times, prompting me to elbow him to get him to stop snorning.
— पाँच हजार चार सौ सैंतालीस —
— पाँच हजार चार सौ सैंतालीस —
So, about the unpacking: I did not get the suitcase I had checked in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul Airport on Tuesday morning, until yesterday (Wednesday). Delta Airlines sent my suitcase to Las Vegas.
I learned a valuable lesson here that I don't think I will ever forget again.
Always check your bag tag. I was waiting at baggage claim at SeaTac Airport yesterday, and the bags stopped coming out, with mine never arriving. The Delta Baggage Services desk was right by there, so I knew I'd need to go over, and as I walked I pulled out the bag tag I had kept folded in my passport the whole day traveling. It had a name that was not mine on it, and LAS VEGAS written on it. Shit!
Now I have to back up a bit. While I was in Saint Paul, Shobhit suggested I get some liquor from a local Total Wine & More to pack and bring home, because Washington State's liquor tax is at 20.5% but Minnesota's is only 9.38%. There was no Total Wine close enough to take transit to without it being a one-hour trip one way, which was not feasible at any time during the conference I was attending, so I did as Shobhit suggested and ordered for delivery. That did include a delivery fee, and I don't remember how much it was but in retrospect it was probably a wash in the end: I might as well have still bought it all at home.
But, whatever. I bought it in Minnesota. It was even delivered while I was
having dinner and drinks with PCC folks at the InterContinental hotel restaurant on Tuesday night, the day I arrived, and right after the NCG orientation I had attended. I left the table to go get the box with five liquor bottles in it from the hotel lobby, and then brought it back to the restaurant table, where one of the people there was like, "Is that for us?" Nope!
One of the bottles was a 750 ml bottle of vodka for use in the days in Minneapolis after Shobhit flew out to meet me on Saturday. So, although I bought five bottles of liquor, there were four (Maker's Mark whiskey; Bailey's Irish Cream; Largo Bay white rum; and Largo Bay coconut rum) still int the suitcase when I flew home on Tuesday this week.
Now, I also got a
full tote bag of samples from the Vendor Showcase at the conference on Friday, which included eight sealed beverages: two glass bottles of sparkling water, two aluminum bottles of mineral water, and four cans of flavored sparkling waters or juices. This also significantly added to the weight of the suitcase, which we lugged onto the light rail when transferring from the hotel in Saint Paul to the hotel in Minneapolis on Saturday afternoon—a 40-minute train ride and a 50-minute trip when counting the walks to and from the stations.
We burned through a lot of the samples between Saturday and Monday, with the suitcase so noticeably lighter that we both felt rather confident that it was now below 50 lbs and we would not have to worry about going over the weight maximum for checked luggage. In retrospect, it was just how much lighter it felt by Monday that deceived us. On Saturday, with all the samples included, it really must have been somewhere close to 70 lbs.
Shobhit had booked his tickets so late in all this planning, he had to book on a separate airline, and even had to take two legs home on Tuesday, with a layover in Denver. His departure gate wasn't even in the same terminal, and we had been so convinced my suitcase eight would be fine, he didn't come out with me for baggage check at terminal 1; I just got off the tram with the suitcase and he went on to terminal 1, where his flight leaving at 11:37 a.m. was on time and stayed that way.
Mine, not so much. I didn't know this yet, though. And, my suitcase's weight had no direct bearing on it getting misdirected to Las Vegas, although it could be part of the agent getting distracted in her work. Until I found out about her mistake, I had thought she was great, actually: when I discovered the suitcase actually still weighed
57 lbs—damn!—she did not make me get out of line to get the weight down. Instead, she suggested I keep the suitcase on the scale, so I could take out only what I absolutely needed to, in order to get it right down to exactly 52 lbs, which she said she could check without incurring the $100 overweight fee. I took out four things: the pair of binoculars, which are of course heavy; the quart bag of cosmetics, which I was quite happy to have on hand yesterday morning even without my suitcase; the Klean Kanteen metal thermos that had been part of
my other swag bag when first registering for the Co+nvergence conference; and a 12oz tin of Equal Exchange hot chocolate I had also gotten from their table at the Vendor Showcase. This barely got the suitcase down to 52 lbs.
Now, because I was not asked to step out of the line, I did not want to keep holding it up, and so once the bag was checked and I was handed the tag to match, I just folded it inside my passport and got out of the line as quickly as I could, then headed to the security line without giving it another thought. Two things here: one, I should have fucking looked at the tag, a mistake I will never make again. But two, as the lady I spoke with at Baggage Services at SeaTac noted, the agent herself should have confirmed with me that I was going to Las Vegas, which she did not do. I could then have informed her that the destination was a mistake.
Shobhit and I have contemplated this and realized there could have been all manner of circumstances at play here, but, worst-case scenario, the baggage ticket printer was one off with every bag she checked, in which case several bags could have been sent to the wrong city that day. God knows where the bag belonging to the guy who went to Las Vegas went, unless his was fine and for some reason the printer just re-printed his a second time for me.
Anyway. I had gotten up shortly after 5 a.m. Central Time on Tuesday, so Shobhit and I could take light rail to the airport together, even though my flight was scheduled to leave at 12:30, nearly an hour later than his. But, at 9 a.m. I received a text from Delta that my flight was delayed to 1:16. And then a text at 10 a.m. that it was delayed to 2:16. It never technically got delayed again, but we were not actually in the air until 3:22, having been on the tarmac for quite a while, during which I snoozed a bit.
I had expected to spend about four hours at the MSP Airport before taking off, and in the end I spent a good six hours before boarding, and about seven hours before actually getting in the air.
Shobhit's connecting flight out of Denver was also on time (what irony, when connecting flights are more worrisome when it comes to delays, and it was my direct flight that got delayed, thanks to a mechanical issue on the plane coming in from Seattle), and set to land 5:49 Pacific Time. Had my flight been on time, I'd have landed at 2:20, far too early to wait for him, and we'd have taken light rail home separately. As it was, my delayed flight landed around 5:00. And then I spent a good amount of time at Delta Baggage Services when I realized my suitcase was not there, which gave me only about half an hour or 45 minutes maybe to wait for him after his flight touched down.
I had worked on my travelogue email about Minneapolis pretty much the entire flight, thanks to my Delta SkyMiles account giving me free wifi access. I finished it up while waiting for Shobhit at baggage claim. This way I had been able to send out the email on Saint Paul & Co+nvergence on Monday night, as I had worked on that a lot during downtime when not walking the Minneapolis Skyway that day; and then send out the email on Minneapolis on Tuesday night, right after we got home.
Having suitcases swapped makes things complicated of course, because the wrong name is on it. I had to describe the color and whether it was hard or soft to the agent at Baggage Services, and describe some of the contents. When I told her there were four liquor bottles inside it, and the outside upper pocket was full of candy (from the vendor showcase), she giggled and said, "I like you!"
There was a memorable but brief moment when she was typing information into her computer. This was a middle-aged Latina woman with an accent, and mostly-bald White guy who was clearly her superior passed behind her at one point, casually swiping his hand along her upper back. She paused very briefly and, behind his back, shot him an incredibly dirty look. It all happened very quickly, but I clocked it.
When Shobhit arrived, we decided to give them his phone number as backup for delivery of the suitcase, as they said it could be delivered as early as midnight or 1 a.m., which was too late for us, so instead it would get delivered in the morning. When we went back in, the Latina lady was gone, and we tried speaking to a Black guy with an African accent who clearly struggled to understand our circumstances. Another lady who had been around to overhear our issue earlier waved us over, explained that this other guy was new, and told him to just come over and watch. We got Shobhit's number added.
The one real silver lining to all of this was that we didn't have to lug that heavy suitcase home on light rail. We just had to carry our backpacks, and the suitcase was delivered! With some kind of critical things in it, granted—and I don't mean the alcohol: my glasses were in there, so yesterday morning everything I did before showering I had to do basically unable to see; it also had both of the only tubes of mascara I have in it. I really hated the idea of coming to work with only eyeliner and not mascara, so on my bike ride to work I actually stopped at the Bartell Drugs on 5th Avenue downtown to get a new tube of mascara, which I put on in the men's room after arriving at the office.
The morning delivery turned out to be an empty promise, but Shobhit and I both found tracking numbers we could monitor when our delivery guy, whose name was Ivan, was out, and it even showed where he was. He was in Shoreline . . . and then SoDo? And then back to the aiport! What the hell? The web page said delivery "by 3:24," though, which was six hours after the noted time of pickup. Evidently he had to go back to the airport, though, either for my suitcase or someone else's. By the afternoon, it was finally delivered, and Shobhit was home to receive it.
So, once I got home from work, Shobhit was already well into cooking the pasta. One of my snacks had torn open and got crumbs over a lot of the clothes, but that was the worst of it, thankfully. I just shook the crumbs off all the dirty clothes to be put in the laundry; put away my toiletries and samples and other things; and swept the crumbs out over our balcony onto the sidewalk below. I'm probably not supposed to do that so don't tell anyone.
I'm just glad I have my suitcase back. I hope it had a good time in Las Vegas. At least the luquor bottles came back full, so clearly it didn't party too hard.
— पाँच हजार चार सौ सैंतालीस —
[posted 12:27 pm]
