Seattle mayoral candidate
Katie Wilson is in the above picture. Can you spot her?
— पांच हजार आठ सौ इक्यानवे —
There was no Daily Lunch Update (DLU) yesterday, because of the in-person POS meeting that occurred at the Burien store between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. It was my first in-person day at work since Tuesday last week; I probably could have gotten away with returning Wednesday but I wanted to have two negative covid tests 48 hours apart before I did that, less because of any worry about actually still being infected than so I could feel no obligation to wear a mask. I hate working from home, but I hate wearing a mask all day at work more. And yesterday was both a solid five days since I had texted positive, all with no symptoms,
and the second time in two days that I tested negative.
So, I brought my laptop, keyboard, headset and mouse back to the office yesterday morning, where I worked for all of ninety minutes before I carpooled with Cathryn down to the Burien store. The walk to work was a bit interesting, as being nine days since I had done so, it was noticeably darker in the morning. The day got gradually lighter during the roughly 25 minutes it takes me to walk, and I'm a bit ambivalent about the state of the streets on the Pike/Pine Corridor at that time. After I cut over to Pike in the 7-block stretch between Broadway and Boren, there was a tweaking guy walking barefoot from the sidewalk into the middle of the street, sporadically shouting at nothing into the air. He also had no shirt on, was kind of surprisingly buff, and had a sort of sheet he sometimes wrapped around his torso and sometimes waved around. In short, he was the kind of guy you want to avoid at a quarter after seven in the morning. Or any time, really. But, this is very much in keeping with the character of that part of Capitol Hill these days. Which is too bad, on a ton of levels.
Anyway, yesterday was odd overall, in that it felt kind of like a day off even though it wasn't. I chose not to bring my laptop to the meeting, even though I easily could have—but, then I've have wound up bringing it all the way home again at the end of the day needlessly. Cathryn did bring her laptop, but she only works in-office on Thursdays anyway so she would have been doing that regardless. We made much better time than anticipated after leaving the office at 9 a.m., and Gabby was the only one already there at the Burien store classroom when we arrived at about 9:30. She also had her laptop, of course, so when I commented that I could have brought mine, Cathryn deadpanned, "Well, then you'd just be working." I did check email on my phone, and in one brief instance I did ask Cathryn to borrow her laptop so I could log into HQ (our item maintenance system) as myself and set something to batch for today. But, that was the only system work I did yesterday after 9 a.m.
Technically you could say I worked from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., just by virtue of attending the all-POS meeting. I was able to answer some key questions, such as how we define "local" for the purposes of flagging it on our shelf tags. I'm very familiar with
that. There were both pastries provided at the beginning of the meeting, and lunch provided between 11:30 a.m. and noon: Gabby's idea was to provide a baked potato bar. I should have taken a photo of that but I didn't. I should just start taking photos everywhere all the time. When in doubt, take a photo! Anyway, Gabby has a realy thing for potatoes, and has shared the story more than once of an anniversary party given to her at a previous job with a baked potato bar. In this case, as part of a way to cut back on budget costs, the Burien store Deli baked all the potatoes for us.
There was a lot. Gabby asked for 25 and they baked 32. I took home four of them, along with two extra cans of vegetarian chili. Gabby had hoped to make the chili but wound up not having the time; she shared with us how she felt guilty about not being able to do it, which was totally unnecessary. The chili was still good.
I ate way too much food yesterday. I deliberately skipped breakfast at home, knowing all this food was coming later. I was too hungry when I got to work so I still ate a cereal bar found in the office kitchen. I had a pastry when I got to Burien. At lunch time I had a baked potato and a bowl of chili with shredded cheese and broken tortilla chips I mashed into it. It was delicious but I also got very full very quickly.
And then? The Pricing team I'm on followed this with a "Happy Hour" at the Burien restaurant Amy works at a couple nights a week:
Fireside Burien. This served as our fall "team social" outing—our last one had been to celebrate my work anniversary, in August
at Mbar's rooftop bar. At that one, Brandy was able to make it but Amy was not; this time, Brandy was out on PTO and likely would not have come to the POS meeting anyway. I'm hoping our holiday outing in December will finally manage to include all five of us, which hasn't happened since we all too Marie out for drinks at Six-Seven at the Edgewater Hotel
in May.
Anyway, we were at Fireside from about 2:30 to 4:00. I was way too full to order more food, but they still ordered a couple of appetizers for the table to share, both of which were delicious:
Artichoke Spinach Dip Au Gratin, and a bruschetta starter apparently recently added to the menu but not yet reflected on their website. The cocktail I ordered, largely on the strength of its name alone, was called a "Boozy Pig," and it had bourbon mixed with pineapple juice. It wasn't my favorite. Whatever.
We basically talked about work the whole time, of course. But that's how it goes. It's still fun to get out and socialize with the team outside of work. Normally we'd have gone out later, but Amy actually lives in Burien (she also works in-office once a week, Tuesdays now if I remember right) and the rest of us were already there. So, Gabby scheduled it for mid-afternoon after the POS meeting ended.
Cathryn very kindly gave me a ride not just back into town, but back home. It was about 4:30 when I actually got home, which is normally when I leave work. It's all good; I had a surprisingly comfortable and manageable work load this week, and I turned on my out-of-office replies when we left in the morning.
— पांच हजार आठ सौ इक्यानवे —
And then, I had a very full evening in a way I hadn't completely anticipated: Shobhit and I went to the opening night gala event for the
Tasveer South Asian Film Festival. We did not stay for the feature film that was sceened in the end, but we did stay long enough to watch the three short films they screened, all of which were much better than I expected.
After people commented on our lack of Indian outfits they remembered from last year at the launch party last month, Shobhit suggested we dress up again for last night's event. We wore the exact same outfits we wore to the launch party last year, and you can see our "red carpet" photo above. We got a lot of attention because these outfits made us look better than 95% of the other people there. Shobhit wanted a photo on the "red carpet" just like we had done in front of that very same backdrop last year; there were three professional photographers who took shots of us in that spot alone. They had a hired photographer for the entire evening's event, a young Black man I got a slight vibe of queerness from, and he even took some photos of us sitting in the audience during the Q&A later in the evening. I was so locked into the Q&A that I didn't even notice him taking photos of us until about halfway through his snapping. He was taking audience shots, clearly, but with us as the focal point in frame, or so it appeared anyway.
Before the program started and Shobhit was mingling (as was I a bit, to a far lesser degree), a woman even said to us, clearly also having remembered us from last year: "You guys wear the best outfits!" These people clearly don't remember that we were wearing exactly the same thing, which was good I suppose. Shobhit was wearing the outfit he wore at our wedding in 2013—and he looks fantastic in it—but I was not; I'm thinking next year we should both wear something different, and perhaps I will re-wear the wedding kurta I also had worn in 2013. I should make a note of this for next year actually.
They had
chai provided, which I had two cups of, but you had to add your own milk and your own sugar to it; it was fine but nothing like the chai I make at home. "Your chai is better," Shobhit said, which I loved hearing; he associates our chai at home now with what
I make—because, 99% of the time, I'm the one who makes it (and I'm good with this, as I like how I make it better than how Shobhit does, as he always wants less sugar; the way I make it now is to cook it with less sugar but I add another spoonful to my own mug—I've got a whole system down). They also provided
free samosas which were perhaps the best part of the whole evening; I asked no fewer than three people where they came from and bizarrely, nobody seemed to know. How the hell are we supposed to figure out where to go in Columbia City to find them again? Shobhit's are still better, of course—that goes without saying—but these may have been the best restaurant samosas I had ever had.
The whole evening's program fell a bit behind, which was kind of to be expected, but was the biggest reason we did not stay for the feature film they showed in the end: it would not have let out until after 10:00 and neither of us wanted to stay that late. Besides, the feature was a film called
Little Jaffna, about the Tamil community in Paris—I would be interested in theory, but the 6.5 out of 10 average user rating on IMDb did not make us think it would be worth staying late for. (The Letterboxd average is 3.5 out of 5, which is a bit better; but, had I watched it, I would have felt obligated to write a review, which I was not going to have a lot of time for either.)
We did stay for the three shorts they played beforehand, though. Normally I would post a short review for each on Letterboxd and link to them here, but none of them are currently listed there, which is disappointing. So I'll just share mini-reviews of each of them here:
By Design (14 minutes): Right out of the gate, this was a short about a lesbian couple—one Asian, one South Asian—who gradually discover they don't see eye to eye about having children. The acting was pretty strong, but I felt the script was the weakest of the bunch. Shobhit theorized that they ordered them the way the did for this reason, so they would get better as they went along. On average I'd give this one a
B-.
The Sale (16 minutes): This one is inspired by the director's own mother's real experience as an encyclopedia saleswoman in the nineties; this short is set in 1993. The acting in this one was less strong, I thought, but the excellent production design and the script both largely made up for it. So, I give this one a solid
B.
Yakshi (18 minutes): I really enjoyed this one, about a "maneater" woman spirit who gets the best of a cocky young Indian man who is trying to impress his bosses is Boston by contributing to mining and gentrification in the Indian state of Kerala, where the film takes place. It mostly takes place in the house where he's staying, but it's overall very well done, fun, provocative, and at times even a bit scary. The lead is played by Babil Khan, son of the wonderful, late Indian actor Irrfan Khan (
Life of Pi,
The Lunchbox), who tragically died of cancer at the age of 53 in 2020.
— पांच हजार आठ सौ इक्यानवे —
Oh. One last thing: not having updated yesterday, I haven't told you about Wednesday night. I took myself to a movie: the documentary about Marc Maron,
Are We Good? It was fine.
The remarkable thing about it was that I went all the way to Lynnwood to see it—my first time taking transit to see a movie at the AMC Alderwood Mall. This documentary had only one-night showings across the country on October 5 and October 8; AMC was not showing it downtown. The Regal Cinemas was, but I don't have a monthly subscription there—so I would have had to spend an extra twenty bucks. Instead, I spent an extra two hours: the transit ride there was about an hour; same on the way back. It was a fair trade.
Anyway, I took Light Rail from Capitol Hill Station to the end of the line northbound: Lynnwood City Center Station. But, from there I could catch a 6-minute Rapid Ride bus ride to Alderwood Mall. Perfect. There aren't even any other stops on the route between these two points. The valuable thing I learned here is that if something I want to see is not playing at Pacific Place, going to Lynnwood may be an option. Even with the transit ride taking an hour, thanks to Light Rail Lynnwood feels closer than it ever has before. I think that's pretty damned cool.
That Alderwood AMC is huge and super nice, by the way. Sixteen screens as opposed to the 11 at Pacific Place; far better seats which, while they don't recline, they do rock a bit; a huge lobby area, complete with a counter for both hot food orders and even mobile orders. Meanwhile, AMC Pacific Place is in a constant state of gradual decay. Oh well: for now at least, it remains my go-to movie theater as long as it can be.
— पांच हजार आठ सौ इक्यानवे —
[posted 12:37pm]
