Unos Poquitos
Shobhit went to Steamworks yesterday, which is relatively unusual; that's typically my thing. I was perfectly happy to encourage him to go, when he texted me he was thinking about it -- but I said he should also send out some resumes. And he did, so hey -- he was productive for a little while, at least!
He went in the early afternoon and stayed until around 5:00, knowing he could wait and then walk the rest of the way with me on my way home from work. He decided we should stop for a snack at a place for Happy Hour, so he could get a Social Review point for the day.
This actually made me think he might have already read quite long journal entry about the weekend, since in it I had mentioned that he got a Social Review point for all three days between Friday and Sunday, and maybe he was just trying to perpetuate it even further. Turns out he was just eager for more points in general, as usual; he was reading the entry on his phone just before we left Poquitos on Capitol Hill, and also during the entire walk home from there. It did take him a little while to read it -- even after I wrote it yesterday, I pasted it into Word to see how long it was: 4,930 words; seven pages. If any of you actually read the entire thing, well, congratulations!
Anyway. At Poquitos, we split two Happy Hour menu items: Black Bean Tostada ($3.50, decent) and Grilled Corn ($6, excellent). I didn't realize anyone besides Bait Shop had corn with cojita cheese -- the difference is that Bait Shop serves it as Corn on the Cob; Poquitos serves it in a bowl with seasonings and the cheese all over it. It's actually a lot easier to eat the latter way.
I actually did quite well with my portion control yesterday, at least compared to most days anyway. I declared my half of those two small dishes my dinner, and I did not eat any more for the rest of the evening. When we got home, Shobhit ate another two bowls of leftover pasta. Now, he had barely eaten anything earlier in the day, whereas I had a regular lunch, a regular breakfast, and a few bites of chocolate -- oh, and a rather tiny slice of key lime cheesecake at work. Still, down a full pound and a half from yesterday, to 147; Shobhit was down too -- by 0.7 lbs, to 187.9. So we were both down, actually, but still -- I win!
Then we proceeded to watch three episodes of the first season of Fargo, which we suddenly can't get enough of -- even though they keep using Calgary as a stand-in for Duluth, which is truly bizarre and distracting. I guess in this show's alternate universe, Duluth is a major city of over a million people. In reality it has all of 86,000. I looked all over online for critical complaints about this, and could find none; I only found a few people complaining about it on Twitter, only three of them from 2014 when the first season first aired. Mine is the third of the three from this year; curiously, none from any year between.
Every time they showed Calgary's skyline, I kept mistaking it for Minneapolis -- it's the only city in Minnesota with a skyline that looked even remotely like that. I should have realized it was missing Minneapolis's distinctive second-tallest building, though, Capella Tower. In terms of visual impact, Minneapolis has a skyline relatively similar to Seattle's, at least historically -- Seattle has gotten far more downtown construction in recent years. Calgary's skyline is actually even denser than Minneapolis's.
Hmm. According to this world skyline rankings list, among these three cities, Calgary actually ranks highest, at #59. Seattle is next, at #62 -- although I suspect it would rank higher in 2018; this was updated to 2015. (And I did not use Emporis's skyline ranking page because its top 100 does not include any of these cities.) Minneapolis comes in last, at #86. By this standard, Fargo not only does not use Minneapolis, but uses a city with an even bigger skyline to stand in for Duluth, of all places. Again: it's very weird.
I think Shobhit and I were both very tempted to watch yet a fourth episode of Fargo, episode #6 had been so compelling, but I decided, okay, three hours of this one show is enough for one evening. So after that, we did a crossword.
Not the New York Times crossword, though. I decided to cancel my New York Times subscriptions, both to the digital news content and to the crossword puzzle (these are two separate costs), because I finally tired of their transparent editorial biases -- it was a somewhat difficult decision still, because a lot of their articles are still really great, and I would even say the writing itself is arguably the best of any newspaper in the country. But their pandering to Trump supporters was no longer something I could stomach.
And, after a few Twitter exchanges, I found out for the first time that if you have an Amazon Prime account, which I have had for a few years now, it automatically comes with a six-month free trial subscription to the Washington Post -- which is not perfect either, but their editorial decisions seem to have far more integrity these days. And? This includes access to crossword puzzles at no extra cost.
The weird thing is, when I canceled my New York Times subscriptions, I was told they would continue through the end of their billing periods -- the news content through January 27 and the crossword through the end of February (that one had been for a year, starting at the end of last February). Apparently this change still cut down on the number of devices that could be used, though: I can still access the regular New York Times crossword on my desktop computer, but Shobhit can no longer access it on his laptop, even when he's logged into my account. This is a little annoying, but whatever.
We always did the crosswords on his laptop, so now we've just switched over to the ones provided at the Washington Post website. We tried one on Sunday evening and I found it exceedingly difficult, but last night's was easier. We actually managed to get it done in well under an hour.
And then I was off to get ready for bed.
I had thought I would take myself to a movie last night, but the movie I had scheduled, it turned out, was no longer playing. I saw Phantom Thread on Thursday last week and it turns out that was the only one opening this week that appeared to be worth seeing. I'm going to a trivia night about cats in movies at Central Cinema tomorrow, though, and dragging Shobhit along, just so my whole week isn't devoid of going out anywhere. Plus it sounds fun. Maybe we'll have a cocktail right before leaving to save money.
[posted 12:20 pm]