arboretum diversion
I have only one social event to report on over the weekend—but it was with Shobhit! I had a CD to pick up at the library on Saturday afternoon, and at first I suggested he walk with me down there to pick it up—he had a novel to pick up as well—and I noted he would get a Social Review point. But, when the weather app on my phone said that there was a 90% chance of rain by 1 p.m., he suggested we just drive instead, so that's what we did.
Side note on the ongoing weather forecasts on Saturday: it was very weird. 1 p.m. came and went, still sunny; at 1:00 it said there was an 80% chance of rain by 2:00. Two o'clock rolls around: still sunny, now saying 90% chance of rain by 3:00. Those sure were high percentages for it to keep on not raining—but, I guess to be fair, the flip side of that was there was still either a one in five chance or a one in ten chance of it remaining dry. And that it did, for a few hours anyway, and it very much worked in our favor.
We drove to the Central Library first, and because of the sunshine I stupidly wore my light jacket instead of my regular pea coat. Standing in line for curbside pickup at the library, with pretty breezy winds, I was fucking freezing. It was a huge relief once we picked up our things and got back into the car.
Shobhit wanted to go to Pike Place Market, but once we realized there was no need to buy anything and traffic is getting ever closer back to normal, there was no place to park. So, we just slowly drove through, and then Shobhit said, "Where should we go?" First I suggested the cherry blossoms at the UW campus, so we drove there. It took us a little bit to find the lined tree area where those blossoms are, but we could see from the car they were actually not yet in bloom (note to self for reminder in about a month!). Then I suggested we go to Washington Park Arboretum, so I plugged that into the GPS on Shobhit's phone. (We know how to get to all these places already, but Shobhit still likes to have the GPS on, so he can track how long it estimates until we arrive at our destination—and try to beat it.)
I honestly thought we would just drive through it on our way home, and as a sort of pleasure drive that was not part of just running errands, that alone would have netted him a Social Review point. But, as I said, it was still sunny, so we parked and actually got out to walk a bit on a nearby trail by lake water. The sun was still out and it was not nearly as breezy here, so I wasn't quite as cold. Also, walking a bit helped.
We walked for a bit and I had no idea where we were exactly, so I checked the marker in the Google Maps app: we were on Foster Island—which I an honestly not certain I had ever been on before. Maybe; if I have, it's been ages. I know I've been to areas of the Arboretum before where you can walk around and under the elevated roads of the west end of the Highway 520 Bridge. In fact I am seeing now that there are trails you can take from that island to the west, across another island and to East Montlake Park; we might even have done so on Saturday but it was then getting chilly even there and we wanted to get back in the car. Perhaps we should return later in the spring or summer.
In any case, it was a nice, pleasant diversion on a Saturday afternoon.
As for the rest of the weekend, I watched and reviewed two movies, both of them SAG Award screeners I was able to watch with Shobhit: News of the World on Friday (solid B) and The Father on Saturday (B+). I had a third movie tentatively planned to pay for VOD yesterday but I scrapped that for now, both because I wanted a break from review writing and because I wanted to watch the WandaVision season finale instead. I wound up talking about it with Gabriel on the phone for a while later in the evening, which evolved into a fascinating conversation about how "Online Learning," which he currently teaches, differs from "Remote Learning." (What Gabriel is doing currently, and will do so through the end of the school year regardless of how covid restrictions change, is Online Learning. It's sort of like his job transferred to a different school system, and it's one they plan to keep as an option net year no matter what happens with the pandemic, as it turns out to be a very effective system for students with differing learning styles.)
Shobhit had already had scheduled days off on both Thursday and Saturday, and he decided to call out on Friday, due to increasing exasperation with his job (and particularly his boss's bizarrely lax attitude about persistent theft at the store) as well as it thus giving him a three-day weekend and time to relax from those work stresses. He was back at work yesterday though, during which time I watched the aforementioned show, spent a fair amount of time uploading edited clips of digitized old home videos to my Flickr account, and made a very tasty macaroni and cheese casserole dinner.
[posted 12:29 pm]