back to business
I'm finally caught up! Well, as far as my DLU (Daily Lunch Update) posts are concerned, anyway; I still have lots of captioning to do -- although, whenever I do use photos from last week's trips in these posts, I make sure those photos themselves have captions if they have not been captioned yet. So, you could click any one of the photos in this post and it would take you to their respective Flickr pages with a caption written underneath.
But, I have no more updating on the trip to do here on the Fruitcake Enterprises blog now, which took me quite some time to catch up on -- Danielle's and my time in Toronto, which occurred Tuesday-Thursday last week (May 28-30), did not get written up until Monday this week (June 3, four days later); our time in Niagara Falls on Thursday and Friday last week (May 30-31) did not get written up until Tuesday this week (June 4, four days later); our time in Syracuse (May 31-June 2) did not get written up until yesterday (June 5, three days later). I had no time for writing up in the evenings, because a) I spent all evening Monday writing up the requisite photo digest email; b) Tuesday evening was occupied by attending the SIFF screening of Troop Zero (pretty good); last night was occupied by attending the SIFF screening of The Long Haul: The Story of the Buckaroos (surprisingly good).
Whew! Busy week! And with no great signs up letting up, although my packed calendar is still pretty self-inflicted: I intend to go to Steamworks this evening, just so I can use my receipt coupon from my last visit before it expires. I actually do have tomorrow evening open, because Happy Hour with Laney had to be postponed two weeks when I discovered the new bar she wants to go to won't actually be open until next week. So, I'll get in some quality time with Shobhit.
But, with all the SIFF movies now out of the way, I have several regular-release movies to catch up on -- Laney and I are seeing Rocketman, which actually was released a week ago, on Saturday; the best time for me to see Late Night will be Sunday; I shall see Brightburn Monday evening and Godzilla: King of the Monsters Tuesday evening -- unless any of them have terrible reviews, which I still have to check. I want to keep Wednesday evening open for packing, before Shobhit and I head to Portland Thursday morning for our two-night anniversary trip, before stopping in Chehalis for Britni and David's wedding on Saturday June 15 -- not only the second wedding I'll have been attending this month alone, but barely more than two weeks apart. I hope no one else whose wedding I have to attend gets married again any time soon. Granted, before this year I haven't had any weddings to attend since Brandi and Nick's in 2013 but whatever.
Speaking of which, I ordered Britni and David's wedding gift today. Shobhit noted this morning that we should really come with a gift, and he's right -- in pretty stark contrast to Elise and Sean's wedding, I'm not spending any huge amount of money just to attend Britni's; I should really give them a gift. Also, Britni and David are family and Elise and Sean are not, which arguably makes a pretty big difference. Also also, for Brandi and Nick I got them an engraved flask filled with (of course) Hennessy brandy. The card I made for them had a note that it was to make up for not having any alcohol at Shobhit's and my wedding, which had occurred earlier the same year. I suppose I could make the same apology to Britni, given that she and I drank together at Brandi's wedding. (Brandi and Britni are sisters, and both of them came to my wedding, so this seems only fair on both counts.)
Maybe I should make this my default "traditional wedding gift from Matthew" -- like the cake serving set is from Dad and Sherri (which they also always have engraved). I suppose that's a little less tacky than what I like to get otherwise -- a jar opener utensil, which I insist is the most useful kitchen utensil in the universe and was what I got Nikki and TJ at their wedding, and maybe Becca and Tyler at their reception party although in their case I can't remember for sure. A suppose a flask is likely to get a lot greater appreciation.
Once Britini is married, by the way, fully half my ten nieces and nephews will now be married (Ricky and Rachael did not have an event with a guest list, so I didn’t attend theirs). Of the older set, only David -- Gina's son, not to be confused with Britni's fiancé David, or hell, my Uncle David on my mom's side, too many fucking Davids -- remains unmarried; the rest would still be too young: Alex, Angel's youngest; and Christopher's three boys, Tristen, Christian and Braeden. I guess Tristen and Alex are both technically adults now -- hell, Alex is 21 -- but they still don't really have any business getting married. It just now occurred to me that, given how severely Christian is on the spectrum, I'll be pretty surprised if he ever gets married at all.
Anyway! What else can I tell you? Well, there's the one movie I still haven't told you about that I went to see Monday last week, the day before I left for Toronto: Booksmart, which was very good and deserved greater success than it got. Hopefully word of mouth can give it some staying power, as it was stupidly released on Memorial Day weekend against way too many huge-movie competitors. I saw it that morning, as I had holiday pay that day at work. Otherwise I actually would have come in to work. But if I get holiday pay regardless, why the fuck would I waste it? So, what would have been four days off for this trip at any other time became another full week off of work only three weeks after returning from my Birth Week.
It still worked out, though; I'm just about caught up at work now, finally.
Now I'm posting just a little later than normal because I got to my lunch break half an hour late, after a surprisingly lengthy conversation with Eric, first about work but then it morphed into telling him all about my travels last week. As you can imagine, every time I tell people about it, there winds up being a lot to tell.
I don't think there's really anything left to tell you here, though. I'm bummed that my AirPods ran out of juice, but on the plus side, not only is that so much of a "first world problem" it really doesn't even count as a problem at all, but they recharge remarkably quickly. I've been away eating my lunch for all of fifteen minutes and already they're up to 83% recharged. Why am I even mentioning it then? I'm just using it as space filler here. I might as well just post this and get back to work.
[posted 12:48 pm]