magic sauce (of peanut)

— पाँच हजार सात सौ अड़तीस — Another quiet evening at home alone last night. I didn't get on FaceTime with Shobhit at any point, he texted that he wasn't able to but didn't say why. I made myself a stir fried rice, mostly as a way to use up the one bell pepper still hanging out in the refrigerator that would have likely gone bad otherwise. I also added sauteed mushrooms and chopped up a veggie chicken patty. I only just now realized I should have added a chopped onion; I have a whole bag of them I haven't even opened. What a dipshit. Oh well. Oh, the other big reason for this choice: the leftover peanut sauce from when I got takeout at Mamnoon with Alexia on the 4th. I wasn't going to use it on anything besides rice, so there you have it. But also! Laney and I had to do some rearranging of our social schedule yesterday after we discovered September 5 is not opening this weekend after all—they even had scheduled showtimes, and Laney had booked our seats on the AMC Stubbs app, but then they pulled them and canceled our booking. Now it appears to be opening next weekend instead. We therefore have one less movie to go see this week, but since we were already planning to get together, she suggested we meet at the Starbucks in the Sheraton Seattle Hotel lobby and get hot chocolate (or, in her case, maybe a mocha), into which we can pour some peppermint liqueur. It'll be an extra, DIY "Happy Hour." I brought a couple shots of Rumple Minze in my backpack. Laney had gone to the liquor store looking for the same, but they only had the larger size left and it was way too expensive, so she got another brand in a smaller bottle instead. Anyway, it only hit me while I was making that dinner last night: I can save half of this, bring it to work, heat it up just before leaving, and have that for dinner with my spiked hot chocolate tonight! Perfect! The stir fried rice with peanut sauce was delicious, by the way, even without the onion I should have added. — पाँच हजार सात सौ अड़तीस — — पाँच हजार सात सौ अड़तीस — So anyway, I sat down with my rice and tea and watched the season finale of Skeleton Crew on Disney+. Honestly, now that the season is done, my overall reaction, but especially to the finale, was "meh." It wasn't bad, but it was also certainly nothing special. I tried to watch the first episode of the Prime Video series Daisy Jones and the Six, mostly because it was refereced in the book I am reading about Fleetwood Mac, and apparently Stevie Nicks loved it. I have long known the show is inspired by Fleetwood Mac's notorious 1970s romantic drama, but hadn't gotten around to checking it out because of mixed reviews. And, I turned it off after about 15 minutes. It might work better for me later, but the artifice of it all really stood out to me, especially as this watered down and fictionalized tale truly paled in comparison to reading the real story in the book. I should have spent some time reading the book at home last night. Instead I went a weird amount of time adding Happy Hour web page hyperlinks to the relevant cells in the shared "Matthew and Laney Social Calendar" excel document I maintain. We do Happy Hour officially twice a month, and we now have a location planned for every single one of them through the end of December this year. It's kind of nuts, but part of it is because Laney keeps taking walks and passing places that look cool and have Happy Hour, and emailing me the suggestion. She just did that this week, and that one I had to slot on Saturday, December 13. (We already plan to go back to Christmas Dive Bar on Monday, December 22.) By the time I was done with that, it was already just about bed time. — पाँच हजार सात सौ अड़तीस — [posted 12:35 pm]

from vegas to winnipeg

— पाँच हजार सात सौ सैंतीस — Last night Laney and I met at Pacific Place for the 5:15 showing of the relatively (and therefore a bit surprisingly) acclaimed Pamela Anderson movie, The Last Showgirl. We both enjoyed it, but also had a lot of criticisms of it. In fact, once I got home, made myself an utterly delicious grilled cheese & mushroom & tomato sandwich for dinner, and wrote the review, I kind of surprised myself by giving it a C-plus. I had been leaning toward B or B-minus during the movie, but it was easier to see all the things wrong with it upon thinking about it after the fact. That effectively took up my whole evening, though. Go to a movie; walk home; make dinner; write a review. There's not a lot more to report on the past 24 hours, really. — पाँच हजार सात सौ सैंतीस — — पाँच हजार सात सौ सैंतीस — I did get on FaceTime with Shobhit after I posted my review, but only briefly. He said he was "a little under the weather" so I sure hope he's over that by the time he's back home on Sunday. He had to bail because he and his mom were headed out there somewhere. It was around 9:30pm my time which would have made it roughly 11am theirs. I guess I could provide a minor work update. We had our weekly team meeting today, for the first time with Brandi and Cathryn included: now being referred to as "P3" because we're now "Pricing, Promotions & Project Management." I was concerned we might start needing more than half an hour now that we have five people instead of three, but everything we needed to discuss fit into the half-hour block quite neatly. There was also some discussion about upcoming PTO, as it's always listed last on Gabby's meeting agenda. I learned yesterday that the "Co+nvergence" conference run by National Cooperative Grocers (NCG), which I went to for the first time in 2023 but did not happen this year, is confirmed for this year—albeit as a 2-day conference rather than a 3-day conference as happened in the past. I am very eager to go again. Thankfully Gabby is again eager to do whatever she can to help make that happen, and Noah even said yesterday "We want to take you with us," but the tricky part this year is the timing of the new Downtown store opening, which may happen in August—and the conference is on August 14 & 15. I was somewhat surprised by that as in the past it was the first weekend of August, but the concern would be the same either way. And actually if we can manage the store opening early in the month that might make going easier. There's also the office move to consider, which will happen around the same time, so we'll see. The thing is, I want to tack extra days on just like I did last year, but I really want to, at least once, go up to the tiny town of Baudette so I can see my Aunt Cyndi, my mom's biological sister, where she lives. In the past I was looking up ideas for how to fly up there from the Twin Cities and rent a car the rest of the way, maybe also taking a day trip for the three-hour drive from there to Winnipeg. It just occurred to me yesterday that it makes way more sense to swap that around: fly from the Twin Cities to Winnipeg and back, and take a day trip from there one day to visit Cyndi in Baudette. Winnipeg is the closest thing to a major city in Manitoba, a province I have not yet been to—it has a metropolitan population of 834,678, only slightly larger than that of Spokane & Coeur d'Alene; but its city proper population is 749,607, which is very close to that of Seattle (but whose metro population is 4 million). In any case, there will be way more to see in Winnipeg and travel between there and the Twin Cities will be much easier, so that's my working idea right now. We'll see how Shobhit feels about it, as he never wants to spend money. Hopefully he'll have found a new job by the time I'm seriously considering this. — पाँच हजार सात सौ सैंतीस — [posted 12:33 pm]