from one thing to another

— छह हज़ार बहत्तर — Well, I seem to have shifted straight from jet lag fucking me up to this cold fucking me up. The one time I slept through the night without waking up, since getting back on Tuesday last week, was Saturday night, I think it was. I slept something like 10 hours that night. Shobhit even asked me, "Is jet lag over?" I really didn't know, because I suspected I was coming down with something. Shobhit was too; he was pretty significantly congested on Sunday night. I still went to work in the office yesterday, but largely because I knew there would hardly be anybody there. Even with both Noah and Frank out of office this week, a lot more people were likely to be there today, so I became increasingly convinced over the course of yesterday that I should probably take my stuff home and work from home today, if I didn't feel any better. I thought of it as insurance: if I felt okay, then I would just bring my computer, keyboard, mouse, and head set back again. If not, then I would work from home. I actually felt much better this morning, but I am still working from home—because by the end of the evening last night, I was wildly congested, way more than I had been through most of the day. I still woke up several times last night, just as I did the night before, and yet I woke up feeling much better this morning than when I went to bed. Certainly less congested, though the congestion wasn't entirely gone. There was no foolproof way to know how the rest of the day would go though, so I stayed home. No one wants me at work around them sniffling and coughing. I woke up several times coughing last night, but it seemed to have more to do with the runny nose fucking up my throat than having a cough on its own. I am coughing a bit today without as much congestion but not a huge amount. I am hoping to follow the same trajectory Shobhit seems to have. He was super congested Sunday, but far less so yesterday. He wasn't even visibly or audibly congested, though he still took a Sudafed before bed last night, and I took one too. He always tries to convince me to rub Vick's vapo-rub on my nose, neck and chest when I have a cold, but this one really burned my nose, even with just a little spread on it, almost t the point of being intolerable. When he asked if I wanted more Vick's this morning I said, "Absolutely not!" Shobhit isn't really coughing at all. I was going to take myself to a movie tonight but I think I'll skip it. Whether I'll return to the office or work from home tomorrow will depend on how I feel when I wake up. But I am very driven to be much better by Thursday, when we have our summer social event with the Merchandising Enablement Team (MET, formerly P3), commemorating my 24th anniversary at PCC (which was actually August 5), at my choice of a rooftop bar downtown called The Nest. I really, really don't want to miss that, and I'll just take a huge pile of cough drops if I have to. I'll tell you one thing, it'll sure be nice once I have have just a regular, solid, uninterrupted 7-hour night of sleep again. — छह हज़ार बहत्तर — — छह हज़ार बहत्तर — I rode my bike to and from work yesterday, but won't be doing that today, given I'm working from home. And when I got home yesterday, Shobhit was listening to all his Monday news programs, so I just left him to that, until he asked me to help him make the parathas he made to have with what were otherwise leftovers. In the meantime, I spent the evening finishing with all the tags on all the photos for the trip to the Netherlands and Belgium. I may go back and try to find tags for certain floats in the Canal Parade in Amsterdam at some point, but otherwise, that's a wrap—finally—on dealing with the 1,993 photos (a record) for this trip. I won't be dealing with travel on this scale until the end of next year at the soonest, when hopefully we'll be ringing in the New Year in Sydney, after hopefully spending Christmas 2027 in Adelaide, after perhaps a few days in Perth (the last of the five major Australian cities we still haven't been to), after perhaps stops in Hong Kong and Singapore. Five cities with five hotels is a lot, though, so we'll have to wait and see on that. But, you know . . . maybe. We've got other, domestic trips to worry about before then. Albuquerque in October; maybe Vancouver, B.C. in December? Provincetown for our anniversary next June. A trip to Alaska with Alexia maybe sometime next year. Of all these, only Albuquerque is set in stone—flights and hotel booked—and I am really looking forward to that one, as I'll finally get to attend their International Balloon Fiesta. For now I guess I'll worry about preparing for the coming weekend. Jennifer and Matthew and all three of the kids are coming to stay the night on Saturday, as part of a Seattle weekend for Ian's birthday. They're doing the Seattle Underground Tour first, which Shobhit and I will skip. But we're going to join them for Afternoon Tea at The Queen Mary (which I have never been to) on Sunday. Jennifer wanted to cover both Shobhit and me for that since we're saving them hotel costs. Shobhit wasn't comfortable with that, but I managed to sort of broker a deal with everyone: I won a $100 gift card to Tuttal Bella at work in a drawing a couple of months ago, so we'll use that to cover a good portion of taking them all out to dinner on Saturday. So that's that. — छह हज़ार बहत्तर — [posted 12:32pm]

movies tv lunch

— छह हज़ार इकहत्तर — I already posted about Alki Beach Pride, which happened on Saturday—you can read about that here. That closed the door on all Pride events, local or regional or international, for the year. I spent the rest of the weekend going to movies or watching TV. On Friday I took myself to see Spider-Man: Brand New Day right after work. Yesterday I rode my bike down to Lower Queen Anne to SIFF Cinema Uptown to see Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. They are wildly different movies but I still gave them both a solid B. I also signed up for a week's trial subscription to AMC+, which allowed Shobhit and me to binge-watch the third season of Interview with the Vampire, actually categorized as a "limited series" called The Vampire Lestat. Even though it was kind of overstuffed with plot detail and information which made it often difficult for me to follow, I really enjoyed it. I think the performances on that show are excellent. We watched episodes 1-3 on Saturday after coming back from Alki Beach Pride and doing a bunch of grocery shopping; we watched episodes 4 & 5 before I left for the movie yesterday; and we watched episodes 6 & 7 after I was back home and written the review. And then we watched this week's episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, and we watched last nights premiere episode of the new DC show on HBO, Lanterns, which was actually more compelling than I expected. I worked on tagging photos from the trip to Europe during a lot of this. I have also done a lot of this while at the office, including while on a Teams call with all the POS people this morning. Don't tell anyone. I do need to get my ass in gear with a lot of the backlogged work I still have to do after returning last Thursday; today is only the third work day since I've been back. I've gotten the most pressing stuff done, at least, and in kind of a miraculous turn of events, things were relatively quiet during my time away. I'll credit that to being well prepared before I left, and leaving my coverage people (Amanda and particularly Cathryn) well prepared. It seems both Shobhit and I have developed colds. As I texted to Laney, I remain grateful: I much prefer this over having caught colds right before or during the trip. Anyway, Karen also had to take some extra time to finish prepping for a presentation she has at 2:00, so she hopped off the call at 12:50. So our call this week only lasted about 40 minutes. I think she felt like I must have a lot more to tell about our trip, though I couldn't think of a lot off the top of my head. I told her I'd take down some notes for our next Zoom lunch on Friday next week. — छह हज़ार इकहत्तर — — छह हज़ार इकहत्तर — I just finished with a bit of a truncated Zoom lunch with Karen. She already had a scheduling conflict on Friday and asked to reschedule for today, but then she was staying at their Tulalip home over the weekend and her hearing aid died, which created an emergency need for a repair. She had to return to Seattle today, earlier than origially planned, and had an 11 a.m. appointment for getting the hearing aid fixed. She told me she had appointments for the majority of the hours of the day today. It was kind of nuts, but because of the hearing aid issue, she had to scrap most of her other meetings this morning. I didn't mention this but I'm kind of struck by her decision to keep the lunch meeting with me on the calendar. She had texted me she might be a little late getting on the call, and it was probably 12:10 by the time that happened. I was in the call and waiting, and came back to my desk to get some tissues and cough drops; when I returned she was then there waiting for me on the call. Other than the tale of her hearing aid, we spent a good amount of time talking about Shobhit's and my trip to Amsterdam and Brussels. She told me that in the photos (from the travelogues) we looked "relaxed and happy." I was like, "Well, that's good to hear!" We did bicker a couple of times—once in the middle of the street in Amsterdam—but by and large we got along fantastically, which is saying something considering we spent most of every hour of every day together. We did do some things separately, though, particularly when it came to gay bar events and the bathhouse, plus my solo trip to Zandvoort, and that also helped. All the major stuff we did otherwise, though, we did together. It's only in retrospect that I am realizing it's a miracle I never got sick of him. Granted, it's worth noting that we were just doing fun shit the entire time. I sort of thought about Seattle in this context, upon returning. Shobhit and I were in Amsterdam a combined 13 nights, and we never ran out of things to do. I may be a permanent tourist here in Seattle, but would that even be possible here? I suppose it could if I were the tour guide—and, a key point of comparison here, Seattle were hosting World Pride. That might still be a stretch, though. There's a lot to do here, but is there enough to keep someone visiting for the first time entertained for two solid weeks? Maybe with a few day trips to areas outside the city, just like Shobhit and I did to Rotterdam, the Hague, and I did to Zandvoort. It's still a compelling thing to consider, though. Seattle remains my favorite city in the world, but I'm not sure it has nearly as much to offer newcomers as Amsterdam does. To be fair, Amsterdam has the advantage of 600 more years of history to draw from. — छह हज़ार इकहत्तर — [posted 1:06pm]