Surprisingly Social
I've got one Social Review point per day for all three days of the weekend! Unfortunately none of them for Shobhit. Frowny face. ☹
Friday evening was, in a way, the nicest detour from routine: my first-ever social hangout with Tracy, the new woman working on Private Label. Well, "new-ish," as she started back in March, while Shobhit and I were away in Australia. Aside from a few Zoom meetings, I had not seen her in person since the two and a half days I worked at the office between getting back from Australia and being asked to work from home, because I was coughing too much from the cold I caught on my trip. With just a few exceptions, the rest of the office continued to work at the office for another week and a half after that, until the state basically mandated that anyone who could work from home should. I just got a head start on Friday March 13, before everyone else followed suit on Monday March 23.
Anyway. Tracy's desk at the office is right behind mine. So, I did meet her in person, and even chatted with her a little bit, as I recall. But it wasn't until after I was working from home that we began getting to know each other personally, at first over very long messages via work emails. In fact, it began during that week when I was working from home but she was still at the office. An email had been sent out to the office, introducing her as a new hire. I commented on her being from Puyallup and that I was from Olympia, and things sort of snowballed from there.
As someone who keys a lot of data for Private Label items in Grocery, she often also has work related questions for me. Between that and the emails we've exchanged, it's fairly common now for her to start a Skype IM session just asking how my day is going. We chat a lot. In at least one case, she scheduled a one-on-one Zoom meeting to see what more I could tell her about new item setup (in the context of Private Label, unfortunately there was still a fair amount I did not know and could not help her with), and we wound up chatting for like an hour, and she vented a lot of frustrations with her growing pains in this new position. The sense that I get is that she's responsible and a hard worker though, so I have a feeling she'll work it out.
Anyway, it was earlier last week that she finally suggested getting together for "a snack in the park" or something—socially distant, of course. I was all about it; I loved the idea. And although she was perfectly willing to meet at Cal Anderson Park just like I had with Laney, I was kind of wanting a change of scenery, something removed from the history with "CHOP" which still remains with a certain number of tents in other parts of Cal Anderson. And when I heard she lives on Eastlake, I suggested Streissguth Gardens, having remembered discovering that park during my "Botanical Gardens" themed Birth Week in 2018. We later discovered she lived incredibly close to there, just 0.2 miles from right on the other side of the freeway.
Now, there's also the fact that, being a botanical garden, Streissguth Gardens is mostly a block full of thick vegetation, not open lawn suitable for laying out blankets. But! There is a small strip of lawn on the north end of the gardens which we were able to make work, even though it was right next to what Tracy later said she and her sister (who lives with her) call "The Stairs of Doom." People exercising passed us occasionally, but we were still able to lay out our blankets roughly ten feet away from each other, and we were able to visit easily.
In fact, we did so for about two and a half hours, only getting up to leave when it was starting to get chilly and I wanted to be able to ride my bike back home before it was completely dark. I had carried the bike down a steep set of stairs to that grassy patch, and did not want to walk it back up, which meant taking it down to the street to the west and riding around by going north first before I could turn right up a street back to 10th Avenue, which turns into Broadway. It was already pretty dark by then so thankfully I still have a working light on my bike helmet.
I actually rode back there again briefly late Saturday morning, because I left my metal reusable straw in the grass, and thankfully it was still there. I had made myself a stiff Moscow Mule in a thermos (see in comments) and brought that straw because it was barely long enough. Then, stupidly, I had set the opened thermos leaning against my helmet very shortly after arriving, and it fell over and spilled nearly all of its contents all over the blanket tote—which I sprayed down Saturday morning and hung over my condo's balcony railing for most of the day to air it out. I joked to Tracy, "If I were an alcoholic I'd be down slurping that up." Instead I just made myself another one once I got back home. But, when I packed everything up, I had inserted the straw through one of the holes in my helmet on the ground, instead of putting it in my bag immediately like I should have, and then spaced it when I picked up the helmet so the straw was on the ground. I figured in all likelihood it was still there by the next morning though, and I was right. (On Saturday I just briefly locked the bike to the railing at the top of the staircase, instead of carrying it down the stairs again.)
On Saturday, the Social Review point went to Laney: our virtual watch of Uncut Gems on Netflix, both of us watching the movie on our regular computers (me on my iMac, her on her laptop), and otherwise connected via Skype on our mobile devices (she on her cell phone, me on my iPad).
For some reason I can never get Netflix Party to work with her, but we found a workaround that kind of renders it moot anyway. The thing is, even with Netflix Party, which allows for communal chat but not audio, the actual audio playback is never fully in sync when you can hear it from the other end over the mobile devices. So that issue persists whether using Netflix Party—where, for example, if I press "pause" it automatically also pauses on her end—or just attempting to sync the start of play. We both took care of the latter by listening to the audio playback of the movie on headphones, me specifically on my AirPods, synced via BlueTooth to my computer. I just keep the volume down low enough (and keep close captioning on, as always) that if Laney and I want to actually speak to each other over Skype, we still can.
It works out fine, and is also a workable system even if we watch a movie on a platform other than Neflix, like Amazon Prime or Hulu. In fact, we have already scheduled our next virtual movie hang, and on Saturday September 12 we will watch Sister Act together (from our separate homes) on Disney+.
Anyway. Uncut Gems is a very good movie, and I had been recommending it to Laney for a while. She was suitably impressed with it.
Yesterday, Shobhit called out for work, because he is getting so frustrated with the job he's feeling unusually close to making a major decision about it. Under normal circumstances, for that very reason I would have asked Alexia to walk to the office with me on Saturday instead, but we had already made plans on Thursday to walk on Sunday, because she had to be with her mom on Saturday to celebrate her 90th birthday. Alexia texted me a couple of photos of them together and I was stunned by how much Alexia looks like her—and also how amazing her mother looks for 90. (The many health problems she apparently does have related to being that age, according to Alexia, notwithstanding.)
So, I still walked with Alexia yesterday. We had initially settled on 10 a.m., but when I was ready earlier and texted her to see if she wanted to leave early, we left at 9:30. I told Shobhit we would be back around noon, and that's exactly what happened.
After having talked about it briefly with Tracy on Friday, as she had posted a photo on Instagram of a gigantic sunflower she had seen there (which I didn't even think to look for, come to think of it), Alexia and I finally took a brief detour into the Belltown P-Patch we have walked past countless times along Elliott Avenue but had never walked into before. It was surprisingly dense, and very pretty, and I got a few pictures.
We made it the rest of the way to the office, arriving right around 10:30, early enough on a Sunday that no one else was in there at all. I could take off my face mask, hooray! I took my usual twenty minutes or so, to exchange receiver paperwork and scrounge the Merchandising pantry for snacks I could pilfer, and then we were on our way back again.
Alexia had been having knee trouble, so we actually had not walked anywhere together since Sunday, August 9—three weeks almost certainly being the longest break we've had walking anywhere together since we started. But, we last saw each other two weeks ago, on Saturday August 15, when we rode the Seattle Great Wheel together. It had still been an unusually long time since we last hung out in any capacity. She had warned me she might need to go slow, but she actually walked just as briskly as ever; I was impressed. She said she would just need to ice it for twenty minutes or so once she got back home and it would be fine.
She's actually going forward with a long-planned trip to visit friends on Long Island in New York, now that Washington State has been taken off of their quarantine list. I have agreed to look after her cat over the two weekends she'll be gone. I guess her son Bram will feed her during the week when he is working and therefore closer by, but this way he won't have to go out of his way on the weekends. This also means it'll probably be another three weeks before we walk together again. And honestly maybe it would be wise to wait two weeks even after she returns, but, I guess we'll see.
Once we got back, very shortly afterward Shobhit and I left to do some shopping. We went to check out the brand new PCC store in Bellevue, with its spectacular art piece of an Orca whale made out of flying crows, and did a bit of grocery shopping there. Then we went over to Mayuri foods for our every-few-months Indian grocery store shopping.
We picked up some takeout from a nearby place we liked. They have very good food, but I'm a little perturbed by their merely spotty mask wearing: two people working the front counter had their masks pulled below their noses; the guy who clearly runs the place kept pulling his mask under his chin to talk to people; at least half the people in the kitchen weren't wearing masks at all! What the shit? I probably shouldn't be anywhere near any other people for at least the next two weeks for that reason alone, and thankfully, I have no plan to be. My next in-the-park Happy Hour with Laney will be Friday, September 11.
Shobhit and I ate at home while checking out an Amazon Prime show called The Boys, about a team of superheroes who are all actually pieces of shit. I had been thinking about giving it a go for some time, and it had been on "my list" for my account for ages, but only when there was a commercial for it while Shobhit was watching The Bourne Ultimatum on SyFy did I mention that. Shobhit said we could check it out—and once we did, he was so into it we burned through four episodes in a row.
So that's what I did last night.
[posted 12:27 pm]