— पाँच हज़ार नौ सौ पच्चीस —
How's this for a nice turnaround: when I got to work yesterday morning after taking Monday off, I had around 80 unread emails—of course a lot of them were not relevant to me, but just by 11 a.m., I had responded to 24 of them. It was a very busy morning. But, today? What a wonderful thing: I got to work and had
four unread emails, not one of them relevant to me! What a dream.
Of course I could easily get a steady stream of them later, but that's a hell of a lot easier to manage when I am not also catching up on literally dozens of them from an entire day.
And today is going to be unusual, to say the least. We'll have our first "Foraged Feast" in this new office space very shortly, and that will take up a couple of hours around lunch time. Then, at 3:45, 3/5 of the "P3 Team" will leave for our annual holiday Happy Hour, this year at Christmas Dive Bar on Capitol Hill.
I'm very much looking forward to it all, but will be especially interested to see how the Foraged Feast goes, it's going to be so different from how it's ever been before. The kitchen is not big enough here, so it will be used only for food staging. There is a wide walkway through the middle of the desks area of the office, and tables are being set up along that space for us all to sit at. I have heard multiple times recently about the conference space on the 12th floor of Rainier Tower being used for things like the Store Directors Meeting last week, and the Merchandising all-day meeting scheduled in January. I toured that space in May with the Office Relocation Team, and it features an actual kitchen, and although the seating space is in two separate conference rooms, it could conceivably accommodate an event like this. I suppose we'll see; one of the rooms can comfortably seat around 20, the other 18 or maybe even more; I'd say it can hold around 40. Depending on how many actually show up and participate today, I really wonder whether the
Rainier Tower Conference Center is a viable option for the Foraged Feast in the future, thereby leaving anyone else using the office in peace.
People keep referring to the Conference Center as "upstairs," which kept making me think they had found a new space in Rainier Square Tower, which is actually the building directly above our office (the tower seen in the photo below). But, then I got clarification from Gabby: they go through the PCC Corner Market store next to the office, out the back door and up the escalator to the Rainier Square lobby, and to the elevator banks in front and to the left—they all thought they were going straight upstairs doing that. But no, they are actually making their way to the south end of the block and going up
Rainier Tower, which is the older (built 1977), shorter (514 ft) skycraper on the south side of the block, next to the newer (built 2020), taller (850 ft) skyscraper directly above our office on the north side of the block.
— पाँच हज़ार नौ सौ पच्चीस —
— पाँच हज़ार नौ सौ पच्चीस —
Anyway, yesterday evening was a bit fuller than expected. Shobhit picked me up at work at 4:30 and drove us down to Costco, where I bought a new pair of AirPods—in fact, a higher-end pair than I have ever owned: the
AirPods 4 with Active Noise Cancellation, which retails at Apple for $179 but I got at Costco
for $99.99, itself $30 less than if I had replaced the model for which I lost one of the pods in the dryer by purchasing
that direct from Apple ($129.99).
They also offer different forms of AppleCare, but it seemed that to purchase it at Costco we had no option but to go with the annual cost of about $15, but I preferred the monthly option that auto-renews until I cancel, which means it never expires, like the AppleCare I had on the last pair did. So, we took the box all the way up to the Apple Store at University Village and purchased the AppleCare there. I was a little annoyed that we spent so much time just driving all over town, but in the end I was pretty satisfied with how quickly the staff person at the Apple Store got it done; trying to take care of it online would have taken far longer.
So, now I have $180 AirPods that I spent $100 on instead, and will have a $1.62 (with tax) monthly charge to retain AppleCare on them for the indefinite future. I hadn't budgeted for any of this, but I can rearrange budget items to make it work. This all makes me very happy. The "active noise cancellation" feature is taking some getting used to—I can actually still hear outside noise, it doesn't cut it off; it just takes it down a decible, or something. It's like it becomes more distant, even though it's still very audible, or certain elementa of it is, anyway. The first thing I noticed was how different the sound of a flushing toilet is when I have them in my ears; at first I thought there was something wrong with the toilet.
I guess
here's a better explanation for what they do:
With Active Noise Cancellation, an outward-facing microphone or microphones detect external sounds, which your AirPods 4 (ANC), AirPods Pro 1, AirPods Pro 2, AirPods Pro 3, or AirPods Max then counter with anti-noise, canceling the external sounds before you hear them. An inward-facing microphone listens inside your ear for unwanted internal sounds, which your AirPods also counter with anti-noise.
Transparency mode lets outside sound in, so you can hear what's going on around you.
I just checked, and I do have Transparency Mode turned on right now, which I suppose is why I can still hear stuff—something I'll want when, say, walking down the street. There is a mode called "Conversation Awareness" that I turned off while on my way to work this morning, because it kept turning the sound almost all the way down when I so much as cleared my throat. I think I can just pause it when I need to speak to someone, just like I always have.
There are other controls I can turn on, such as Siri commands or using certain gestures of my head for certain controls. I may or may not explore that later.
Anyway, we did buy a couple of other things while we were at Costco, and then when we were at University Village, Shobhit decided to order takeout from an Indian restaurant I located nearby. We got Shahi Paneer and took that home. We started watching
Jay Kelly on Netflix while we ate, and then I paused the movie long enough to start making the blueberry cashew banana bread I brought for today's Foraged Feast. We continued watching the movie while the bread baked.
It was well after 9:30 when the movie was done, which I thought was fine but flawed; I knew I had wanted to watch and review it and when Shobhit went to Netflix to look for something to watch, I jumped on that. And then I did something I almost never do and wrote my review that I wasn't able to share until 10:30. But, I knew I'd be too busy today to write it, same thing tomorrow, and I already plan to watch
two movies I want to review on Friday—in the theater
and on Netflix; in that case I'll probably wait until Saturday morning to write the review of the second one.
Anyway as you can see I've got a lot of shit going on! Thankfully this cold I caught from Shobhit has been kind of shockingly short-lived.
— पाँच हज़ार नौ सौ पच्चीस —
[posted 1:33pm]
