quiet weekend here, hot weekend there
Sad news from Australia—the fires have already directly impacted our travel plans. Not to a huge degree, admittedly, but it still happened. Uncle David and Mary Ann already had us booked to stay one night, on Thursday March 5, on Kangaroo Island. It was a place called Kangaroo Island Wilderness Retreat, at Flinders Chase National Park on the west side of the island. That booking is now canceled, as the structure has been engulfed by bushfire flames.
Mary Ann let me know via Facebook comment yesterday. She wrote, in part: And just as a last thing, the wonderful Flinders Chase National Park has succumbed to the flames - we were booked into accommodation there in March, so we are now going to get alternative accommodation as soon as we get back home. The Mayor of KI has said that it is important that travelers continue to support KI and we will be doing that. Maybe not see all we would have, but we will be seeing some spectacular things and helping out those effected by this disaster.
So. Given that we've never been there before, having to change what had been booked hardly makes a huge difference to Shobhit and me. Still, I hope we'll be able to visit some of the same spots Uncle David and Mary Ann took Grandma and Grandpa to when they visited decades ago; I was looking forward to making that sort of connection.
Mom called me this morning, to ask if David and Mary Ann were okay. So that means places as remote as Wallace, Idaho are finally getting news of these bushfires of unprecedented scale. They got several callouts on last night's Golden Globe Awards telecast. I assured Mom that they were indeed okay; there are fires all over the continent but the major cities themselves are not on fire. Uncle David and Mary Ann live in Adelaide. Also, they leave today for a trip around several stops in New Zealand, by way of Sydney. I also mentioned to Mom that, although they are physically okay, this national disaster is clearly taking an emotional toll on the entire country. That definitely includes Uncle David and Mary Ann. I'm glad I was able to be a bit of a liaison and assure my mother her brother is okay, though.
First weekend of 2020 was relatively uneventful. I did socialize, but I really never went anywhere. Instead, several friends came to me, on Saturday for a double feature. Yesterday I never even left the condo. I could have gotten away with never showering or getting dressed all day, come to think of it. Maybe I should have done that. But, I didn't know if I might go out and buy some sponges. We need sponges. But also, we're going to get some large packets of them on sale at Costco soon, so for the moment we're relying on scratch pads to wash our handwashed dishes. That has proved to be not quite good enough, but whatever, we can handle it for just a few days.
On Friday I walked home from work, and I chopped a few vegetables before Shobhit got home. He got off work at 6:30 and also stopped to get some more vegetables. I think I also watched a comedy special or something. My Netflix account says I didn't stream anything on Friday, though, so . . . what the fuck did I do for an hour and a half before Shobhit got home? I don't remember! Maybe I just caught up on Twitter. That sounds feasible.
Anyway, once Shobhit did get home, we made a super vegetable-heavy Asian noodle dish. I even posted a picture of it. It wound up a little bland, but yesterday I fixed that by adding two chopped veggie sausages, more salt and more pepper, and even a finely chopped jalapeño. That made all the difference in the world and now it's delicious.
Then we finally finished season 3 of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel on Amazon Prime Video. I thought a lot about how that show sidesteps the overt prejudices of the fifties and sixties, only ever making subtle references to them, but I still find it irresistibly delightful. The acting is great and it has excellent blocking and chorography, especially for a TV show. But then, streaming is in rather a different category than "TV" even though it's regarded as that.
On Saturday I had an unusually well-attended double feature in the Braeburn Condos theater—sort of. In terms of attendance, four people came: Laney and Jessica, as had already been planned to begin with; also Evan, and her friend Sam, a woman she works with. So, there were four. But, because Evan and Sam both had super-early shifts at the Mercer Island grocery store they work at on Sunday morning, they could only stay for the first movie. And they even left before they could see the very end of the first movie because the fucking projector kept cutting out, as it does about every other time I go in there to watch a movie. It's driving me fucking crazy.
The movies were Batman Returns, the 1992 movie that remains my favorite of all time and which Evan voted we watch first since it was the one she came for; and The Dark Knight from 2008. Both films were Tim Burton's and Christopher Nolan's second of the Batman movies they directed, and I had never done a double feature with the best of each director's Batman films. Also, last month Jessica and Laney both informed me they had never seen The Dark Knight and I was shocked, and I said that had to be remedied.
I ate way too much that day. Or consumed too much, I should say. I never made a proper dinner, but I did have two cocktails (one during each movie), and Jessica brought a dessert platter of brownies, lemon bars and coconut bars. I had two each of the brownies and lemon bars. Again, one during each movie.
It was a disappointment to have to do so, but we all packed up and moved up to the condo once it was time to start the second movie. Jessica voted for that when I gave them the option, because although it wasn't the "theater experience," my TV was guaranteed to play it without issue. Well, sort of: I discovered when we got upstairs that the fucking DVD would not allow me to pause it or stop it or anything; I kept getting this little red X in the upper corner when I tried. So, if anyone had to use the bathroom, it just continued to play. I couldn't set the closed captioning on either, which I prefer to do. Oh well. At least we were able to watch it, and the picture never cut out, like it did over and over again downstairs with the other movie.
Shobhit worked until 9:45 that evening so it was a while after Laney and Jessica left that he got home. Although I had been wide awake well through midnight on Friday, I was pretty zonked out Saturday, perhaps partly because of the drinks. Still, I made an effort to stay up until Shobhit got home from work, and he watched the rest of the first episode of the Netflix documentary series The Movies That Made Us, about the making of the movie Dirty Dancing, with me.
It was a similar scenario yesterday, when he worked 11:15 a.m. to 8:15 p.m. I watched the Golden Globe Awards while he was gone. When he got back, I had dinner of leftover Asian noodles (which I had enhanced) and Costco spring rolls (which were surprisingly delicious) waiting for him. Still he ate other things two more times after that. I did a little better yesterday than I had the day before, at least, and was down nearly a pound this morning. We watched two more episodes of that documentary series, the ones about Home Alone and Ghostbusters. Maybe tonight or tomorrow night we'll get to the fourth and final one, the one I am most interested in, about Die Hard.
[posted 12:25 pm]