the lost pod

— पांच हजार नौ सौ चौबीस — Why does it always seem to happen that I take just one day off, and I come back to work the next day with so many emails it takes me all fucking day to get through them? Okay, more like half the day. But still. I'm tempted to say it's weird how much more manageable it seems when I take a week off for Thanksgiving or Christmas, but there's a key difference there. No one else is working, or working much, at those times either. So while there may still be stuff that comes up with stores, there's far less incoming from vendors or brokers. This is why I have more reason than just weaseling out of "Holiday Helper" store shifts to take PTO at these times. They just fit far more comfortably in my work load. I'll have a hell of a lot more to deal with after my Birth Week vacation ends in early May. And I don't even want to think about what I'll come back to after Shobhit and I are in The Netherlands (and a few days in Belgium) for two and a half weeks next summer. Even after I'll need to train backups on certain tasks (which I can easily just let go for a week, not so much two and a half), that's almost certainly going to be a shit show that'll take me more than a month to recover from. Fun! I'm actually not working a full week from now until the end of the year, I just realized. Four-day week this week, after taking yesterday off; four-day week next week, with my pre-Christmas PTP starting on Friday; I work only on Friday the week after that; and New Year's Day is an office holiday Thursday the week after that. So the number of work days the next four weeks are: four, four, one, four. I'm still comfortable with that. — पांच हजार नौ सौ चौबीस — — पांच हजार नौ सौ चौबीस — I meant to take it easy yesterday, but Shobhit and I took a walk downtown in the afternoon. We went to the Army Surplus store to see if they sold cheap umbrellas. They had umbrellas, but they were still like fifteen bucks; I might as well just replace the one I lost on the train on Saturday. I asked if they sold any other umbrellas, and we were informed they sell "tactical umbrellas" for $70. These are basically sold as "unbreakable" and even have a tip that can be used to break glass. Just what I need! We passed on the $70 tactical umbrellas. The cashier even noted that the other, regular umbrellas are useless in the weather we had yesterday, which was very breezy. We still have a slightly smaller, backup umbrella that we brought, but it never rained much while we walked and it would have been pointless anyway in that wind. We both just wore rain jackets and I had my hood up most of the time. It was also not super cold, so it certainly could have been way worse. They did sell "texting gloves" for all of $1.50, though. I bought a pair of those each for Shobhit and myself. So, not a total waste of a destination. We walked through Pike Place Market from there. Shobhit wasn't feeling up for walking all the way back home though so we caught a bus. And that was it for our adventures yesterday. Or so we thought! I also did laundry, and guess what? I had been wearing blue jeans I knew needed to be laundered when Shobhit asked if we should do laundry yesterday. I quickly changed out of them to put on a clean pair. I swapped out my wallet and my belt, but you know what I forgot? My fucking AirPods! I washed, and dried, my AirPods. I found the case, which had been in my front jeans pocket, stuck to the side of the dryer drum. Only one of the pods was still in the case. What followed was quite a lot of involved effort, trying to locate and retrieve the lost AirPod. The other one, anazingly, still works fine. I was even able to use the "FindMy" app to make the lost one make a beeping sound, which we could hear clearly coming from somewhere inside the dryer. I found multiple YouTube tutorials for how to remove certain components of the dryer to reach into its insides—at one point I had eight different screws removed, and two solid pieces of the dryer's case removed. We even partially removed what I learned are called "dryer drum baffles," thinkinh the AirPod had somehow gotten inside one, even though the idea defied the laws of physics. Here's the upside: we removed about two decades' worth of lint from areas inside the dryer that were beyond the lint trap. So that's good, I suppose. Here's the downside: with much effort, we got the stackable washer/dryer pulled paritally out of the small closet it's stored in; I even went down to the package room to retrieve the two-wheeled hand truck, which ultimately proved useless. I squeezed into the closet space behind it, even removed the scrunchy tube and reached up into it (I did unplug the whole thing)—all to no avail. When it became clear the only way we were going to get it is if I went further and removed the entire back panel, we finally gave up and put it all back together and back into the closet. The AirPod will just have to live in there indifinitely. My two years of AppleCare coverage for these AirPods expired on November 26. Why couldn't this have happened two weeks ago? Costco appears to sell AirPods for a hundred bucks, compared to $129 direct from Apple. Replacing just a single AirPod will cost me $69. We agreed I might as well just go buy a new pair and get a new period of AppleCare with it. Shobhit's picking me up after work today and we'll go straight to Costco. That whole thing must have taken up two hours of our evening, though. Then we ate dinner while watching The Family McMullen on HBO Max. Just like the 1995 film it's a sequel to, it was . . . okay. We can check that off our list I guess. — पांच हजार नौ सौ चौबीस — [posted 12:31pm]

A Klingon Christmas Carol

After posting yesterday about most of what I did over the weekend—accompanying Shobhit to his doctor appointment late Saturday morning; The Great Figgy Pudding Caroling Competition Saturday afternoon with Shobhit; riding the Federal Way Link Extension with Laney on Grand Opening Day Saturday late afternoon and early evening; watching Avatar: The Way of Water with Laney at the Braeburn Condos theater on Sundayy afternoon—I totally spaced mentioning what I did on Friday night: A Klingon Christmas Carol at TPS Center Theatre with Shobhit! This morning and early afternoon, I caught up on my draft of "Part One" of my "Christmastime in the Northwest" travelogue email. So, I will paste here what I already wrote about this in that email draft, to save myself some time and energy: Oh, look—another show I got free tickets to! A Klingon Christmas Carol, at TPS Center Theatre. Okay, those of you who are Trekkies, just bear with me for a moment, I'm going to speak to just the other people for a bit. In Star Trek lore, the Klingons are one of the major adversaries to the Enterprise (that's a spaceship—keep up!) crew, and, I suppose, all of humanity. At least, this was the case early in franchise history; later they became "complex allies" (thanks to Google AI Overview for that phrase—there went a ton of wasted water!), hence the existence of one on the crew of the Enterprise in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Not that those details really matter in this show—only that they are a race preoccupied with honor and warrior culture, onto which Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol is grafted. I never watched much of the many different Star Trek TV series, but, as a massive movie buff, it is likely unsurprising that I have indeed seen every one of the motion pictures multiple times. And actually there is a line from Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country that I find directly relevant: "You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon!" It seems Klingons have a bit of history laying claim as the original source of classic literature from Earth, and indeed A Klingon Christmas Carol, or Klingon Long Night's Song as it is presented in the script, is claimed to be the "predecessor" to the Dickens classic, presented "in the original Klingon." I knew going in that A Klingon Christmas Carol is performed in Klingon with English subtitles projected above the stage. But, I did not realize it is not entirely in Klingon: all the Klingon characters only speak Klingon, but we do also get a Vulcan narrator, ostensibly giving a lecture at the Vulcan Institute of Cultural Anthropology, who narrates in English. Anyway, the show was fun, but you probably do need at least a cursory knowledge of Star Trek lore to get it. The show we went to had an audience maybe 30% full, but it was pretty enthusiastic and enough for the players to feel appreciated, I think (or I hope, at least). Speaking all that Klingon has to be quite the challenge. Shobhit informed me that night that he actually auditioned for this show. Shobhit and I walked downtown and then to Seattle Center on Friday evening to get to that show; we arrived several minutes early so he could do a few short minutes of work in the TPS office on the 4th floor. That "office" fascinates me, as it has a desk and modern computer monitors right by the office door, but the space is otherwise a long, narrow, windowless storage space filled with clearly years of theater supplies of every imaginable sort (or: clutter, depending on your definition). I found a bin of rubber duckies, countless boxes of disinfecting supplies, a Bumbershoot poster from many years ago, some music stands, and some past-year Gregory Awards, to name just a few things off the top of my head. We then went down to the ground floor Center Theater to check in for the show. We did have assigned seats, which were in row F I think, in the center section, with a great view of the stage. But, in the middle of the first act, Shobhit had a bit of a coughing fit due to his lingering cold (which I also have, just not nearly as bad), and we had people sitting directly on either side of us. When intermission started, Shobhit apologized to the woman on the other side of him for his coughing, and she was almost shockingly chill about it; I rather worried about how uncomfortable he might be making people, myself. So, still, we moved to the side section where almost no one was sitting or the second act. Ironically, he never coughed once in the second act. I managed to get an 11-shot photo album out of that event, which was a lot given how few photogenic things there were around, and of course I could not take photos during the performance. We did ride the Monorail downtown after the show, and we snagged the very front seat, allowing me to take video of the full, one-mile route—over which I added a Christmas carol sung in Klingon that I found after some extensive searching on YouTube. That and a still photo I took of our reflection in the Monorail front window alone added two shots to the album. And that now covers Friday, and the rest of the weekend, and today so far—when I am taking the day off, trying to take it easy, but I will walk downtown with Shobhit in a few minutes. I forgot to mention in yesterday's post that I promptly left my umbrella on the train at the very first new station Laney and I got off at on Saturday. Goddammit! I really liked that umbrella, which was clear. Well, today we're going to see if umbrellas at the Army Surplus Store will be worth buying. I'm feeling pretty productive otherwise, now that I'm even caught up on the holiday travelogue. Tomorrow night I shall make blueberry cashew banana bread for our "Foraged Feast" event at the new office on Wednesday, which will likely be the final event I cover in "Part One" of my travelogue. I like to have that and Thanksgiving in the same photo digest email. And hopefully by Wednesday my own coughing will be minimal—I woke up this morning coughing more than I did yesterday, but it has since subsided significantly. [posted 2:08pm]