— पाँच हज़ार नौ सौ पचासी —
I'm getting very little done at work today. This is largely because I sort of spaced processing all the photos I took last night, and did it from my phone and then on Flickr this morning. I normally wouldn't go that route in this way, but I wanted to have photos from last night to embed into today's Daily Lunch Update (DLU).
It's very, very quiet at the office today anyway. For the first couple of hours it was just me, Marie, and Cat (the receptionist) here. I think I have seen three others so far, and not all of them even stayed for very long. Even as I wrote this very paragraph, one of the sections of overhead light darkened due to lack of movement deteced in that section of the office.
Fridays are always the quietest day of the week, but it's even more so this week because of all the people who were gone at Expo West in Anaheim. Even yesterday, when Thursdays are usually a little rowdy as the entire Fresh team is sitting in the desks around me, was rather quieter than usual. Gabby had also told the team to feel free to skip their in-office day this week, which they all did; I still came in of course because I work in-office every day that I work.
I did get briefly interrupted in the middle of the above paragraphs because Amanda came in. She's wearing a mask today, and she said she's fine but because so many others have been sick lately she's "not taking any chances." As of now she makes a whopping six people in the office (not counting Cat, who sits at the front desk on the other side of a secured entry door) so I'm not sure how much risk there is for her here, really. But, whatever makes her feel better.
Anyway, I'm starting to amass a lot of photos from these neighborhood Art Walks Shobhit and I keep going on—and especially the Pioneer Square First Thursday Art Walks, which I now have three separate photo albums for, and thus I have put them into
their own dedicated albums collection. That in turns sits alongside
other miscellaneous Art Walks, under the
Seattle Art Walks umbrella collection. Danielle is coming for Belltown Art Walk next week, though; by the time I have multiples of that one, I'll make a collection just for Belltown. And so on and so forth.
— पाँच हज़ार नौ सौ पचासी —
— पाँच हज़ार नौ सौ पचासी —
All of this is to say: yesterday Shobhit and I did the Pioneer Square First Thursday Art Walk. We actually hadn't done that one since November, though I think he has on his own, on his many long walks otherwise. I only discovered last night from one of the many signs around the neighborhood that they claim the Pioneer Square one is the "
nation's longest running art walk," as their web page itself says it's been happening "
since the early 1960s."
This would partly explain, I suppose, why the Pioneer Square art walk appears to be by far the most popular. I found another web page recently that said it attracts "thousands," plus there's the convenience of how close together all the venues are—it's arguably the easiest one to do by just walking around the neighborhood. Shobhit apparently spoke to someone briefly in one of the venues who said it's "really bounced back," which suggests to me that its popularity dipped significantly in the wake of the pandemic, but you'd certainly not know that by attending the monthly event now.
I've been seeing posters for Art Walks in different neighborhoods for a few years, but never realized that they were almost all of them reliable monthly events, and I always imagined them more as a street fair. I did not realize until Shobhit and I started doing them that they are in many different actual galleries, and in a lot of cases stores of all sorts that simply host artists on their walls.
There is also always a reliable smattering of them offering snack plates you don't have to pay for, and in some instances small cups for wine. We went into a venue last night that had way more substantive offerings than usual, because they had an event where an artist named Romson Bustillo gave a half-hour talk regarding his work both broadly and the public art installation he's been commissioned to do for the Pinehurst Infill Station alonh the Lynnwood Extension, which is set to open later this year. He was odd, as many artists are, and he gave his entire speech from
behind a mask he held up while clicking through a slide deck as part of his presentation. He also sat in a chair for the whole thing, and quickly abandoned the microphone he was given, theorizing that his voice alone was loud enough (it kind of wasn't).
Anyway, they actually had pizza at this event. It was probably warmer when we first walked in, but we were told the talk was in half an hour, so we went to check out some other venues and then came back. We each had a slice of vegetable pizza and shared a rather large slice from a cheese pizza, and both were room temperature, bordering on cold. But it was free pizza! And they had wine as well, which Shobhit fetched for both of us when we sat in the row of seats they had set up for the event.
When it ended, Shobhit declared it not really worth the time. I disagree; I found some of it interesting (especially seeing the
size comparison of the Philippines, where Bustillo is from, to the United States—its length is roughly equivalent to that of the U.S west coat), and I was happy to get filled up with pizza, even if it wasn't piping hot. I still had plenty of crackers and cheese at probably three other venues.
As it seems we do every time we go to Pioneer Square, we stopped at Mirabelle by Orphee, the French pastry shop with the really cute owner, before heading back home. We shared a chocolate hazelnut croissant that was amazing. We also had a kind of embarrassingly long stretch where neither of us could decipher him saying simply "chocolate hazelnut" through his thick French accent:
choke-o-lot-aze-ol-not. I was halfway there when I though he was saying we had a choice between chocolate
or hazelnut. Once I realized the simplicity of what he was actually saying, I was privately pretty embarrassed.
We took the RapidRide G line bus home, and I immediately set to watching the 1989 Ron Howard film
Parenthood, which I had not seen in at least two and a half decades (maybe even three?) and always had a soft spot for when I was younger. It's not quite as good as I remember but I still enjoyed it. It did mean, though, that I completely forgot about this week's episode of
The Pitt, which I'll have to catch up on either tonight or tomorrow.
— पाँच हज़ार नौ सौ पचासी —
[posted 12:31pm]
