— पांच हजार पांच सौ सत्रह —
I walked directly downtown after work yesterday, and met up with Alexia at the Fairmont Olympic Hotel for her to see the
Seattle Festival of Trees, which I had just seen with Shobhit and Laney the day before, on Sunday, but now it was time to go with Alexia. I actually had this on the calendar with Alexia since before the originally scheduled visit with Danielle and Laney on Saturday the 18th, which I canceled due to my cold.
I figured having a fresh set of eyes would show me some details I hadn't noticed the day before, and I was right. I added another ten photos to
the photo album, which now contains 53 shots. That makes
a new record for this particular event, which I have now gone to three times in as many years—although, still, I have only managed to go during the grand opening ceremony the first year. One day, I will again!
I spent most of the walk down there on the phone with Gabriel, who called partly to revel in my new AirPods, which finally actually work on the phone. My old pair were shot with that functionality ages ago, and I would constantly answer with AirPods in and not be able to hear him. After a slightly rough start where I couldn't hear a thing the first time I answered the phone, I called him back and then it worked great. We chatted for 42 minutes. We won't get into what he had to say about
Squid Game: The Challenge, which I am not watching.
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— पांच हजार पांच सौ सत्रह —
It didn't take Alexia and me too long to run through all the Christmas Trees at the Fairmont, and then we walked home together. As we walked, taking up the vast majority of the 20 minutes or so that it took us, Alexia detailed the astoundingly stressful week she had prior to Thanksgiving, with a relative testing positive for covid in Boise, an incident that sounded horribly like an attempted break-in to her cousin's duplex she was staying in but which the cops ultimately said were probably raccoons (!), local health professionals in Texas attempting to put her dad into hospice care even though Alexia insists it's not yet time for that, and her boss at work suddenly getting fired without any stated cause, not even to the boss himself. The stressful stuff at work, of course, has stretched through Thanksgiving week and into this one: she and her colleages got word, something like a week after news of his suspension, that her boss, with whom she has happily worked for more than 20 years, that he was officially terminated yesterday morning.
It was all . . . a lot.
I spent the rest of the evening watching TV. First I suggested checking out this Netflix series called
Tore (pronounced "tor-ay"), which I had been intrigued by but had not realized it was Swedish and not in English. Shobhit has pivoted to never wanting to read subtitles because then he "has to pay 100% attention" (uh, is that so bad?), and I much prefer subtitles because dubbed dialogue that does not match mouth movement is distracting. But, I still switched it to dubbed English for him, and I have to say, whoever did the dubbing on this show did a very good job, and my brain kind of stopped even noticing the un-synced lips. The show is six half-hour episodes and we watched half of them.
Then I went to the bedroom to watch the latest Mike Birbiglia special on Netflix,
The Old Man and the Pool, which I quite enjoyed. By the time that was done it was time for bed.
— पांच हजार पांच सौ सत्रह —
[posted 12:32 pm]
