— पांच हजार नौ सौ तैंतीस —
I don't know why I do this to myself, but I do it every year—evidently more so this year than ever before, however: I am near completion of my "2025 in Ten Minutes" video. I was up working on it until 12:30 last night. Mind you, I worked on it almost non-stop from the time I got home from work at 5:00. I took a break from it once to prepare my dinner, and once to make myself hot chocolate. I melted a small candy cane into it. It was a rainbow colored candy cane so I'm not certain if it would have been quite as pepperminty as it would have been with a conventional candy cane, but it was pretty tasty.
Shobhit FaceTimed me for a few minutes from India. I got kind of unfairly testy with him, as I was trying so hard to get as much as I could done on the video. I need to learn how to repeat myself due to his hearing difficulty without yelling. "Do you have to yell?" he asked, smartly without being testy himself (pretty impressive for him, to be honest). No, no I do not. He let me go shortly after that so I could focus.
I discovered some new features in iMovie this year, which proved super helpful in cramming the massive amount of clips and photos I selected for the 2025 video. I can do picture-within-a-picture; I can overlap two images (either photo or video in either case) with one lessened to any level of opacity I want; I can do split screen (either vertical or horizontal). This year's video is going to feature a lot of all of these things.
Has iMovie always had these features and I am only now discovering them? I just googled it: apparently it's had the split screen feature since 2010. Fifteen years! Jesus Christ. I should dig more into what features I've been missing all this time. I do know it still has annoying limitations when it comes to titles.
Anyway, being able to double up in this way, effectively finding ways to show two clips concurrently, is kind of a mixed bag. It contributes to short attention span and over-stimulation in a way I'm not crazy about. But, it also saves a ton of time, especially when it's a challenge to edit down for time—because Flickr has a 10-minute limit, I always keep my annual videos at that length. I don't want to ask more of people's time than that anyway.
In fact, when I had my first rough project with all the photos and video clips added before editing anything down, the video was at a solid 30 minutes. I needed to get it down to a third of that, and I was really afraid it would be difficult. But with all these tools and tricks I never used before, by the time I was done with the first round of edits, the length was all the way back down to 8 minutes and 30 seconds! I was like: well shit, I can
expand some of this now! I never had that experience before.
Anyway, the project still needs at least one last music track added, and then some final tweaks on certain photo-inset sizes, that kind of thing. I'm seeing a movie right after work today with Alexia, which is really going to cut into my available time tonight, but with all I managed to get done yesterday, with what amounted to at least six solid hours of work, what I have left shouldn't take nearly as much time. I think I should still be able to share the video tomorrow morning, on schedule.
I do need to learn to take the same approach with this video as I do my Book Log, though, and contribute to the project throughout the year as opposed to doing it all at once over just a few days at the end of the year, against a tight deadline. This will allow me to make something much better and more satisfying anyway.
— पांच हजार नौ सौ तैंतीस —
— पांच हजार नौ सौ तैंतीस —
In other news, I am kind of deliberately buring the lede here. Gabby scheduled a kind of impromptu 1:1 meeting this morning, even though we had already canceled what had originally been scheduled for Friday because she's going to be in Costa Rica for a couple of weeks.
She gave me a heads up a month or so ago that she was working on getting me a promotion—critically, in name only (but also with an accompanying raise), reflecting the work I am already doing. She wanted to make sure I didn't feel like she wasn't listening to her, because I have said from the start that I don't
want a promotion. But, if you offer one that does not require new major responsibilities, and comes with a raise to boot? I'm not going to complain about
that. She told me she wouldn't know for sure if it was official until the end of the year.
There has been a fair amount of talk recently about tightening of budget, so I did ask her in a meeting a couple of months ago if I should maybe not get my hopes up about this. I hadn't brought it up since she first told me, but this seemed worth asking. She told me she was afraid I might wonder about that after all the budget-talk, and she said: "I still can't say anything, but you should not lower your hopes."
When she scheduled our meeting this morning, she suggested we take the meeting at Fonté Bar out on the second level, upstairs here in the Rainier Square lobby. She said she was craving a peppermint hot chocolate. Some mildly amusing serendipity there. I knew then that I must be getting the news now. I won't lie, it did cross my mind, very briefly, that it could be a "condolence hot chocolate," but I know that was not at all likely.
They apparently cannot officially announce promotions until after the new year, and since Gabby is on her trip from the 2nd until the 12th, she told me I can't go around telling everyone about this now—though she did say it would not be big deal if there were a few individuals I shared it with. But, for this reason, I won't yet get into the specifics of how
much the raise is, except to say this: it will be the largest raise I have gotten in 16 years.
I really thought it was going to be the largest raise I've ever had, but I just checked the spreadsheet I have that details my wage increases by year. And actually, this is only the third-largest raise I've gotten. I'm not going to be disappointed by that, though. Those two raises that were higher (I once got a 16.55% raise, in 2008) date from well before Cate the CEO changed everything about how PCC works, and gave all the proceedings a much more corpratized kind of bureaucracy to it. I knew that I would never, ever get a raise like that in this new reality without a promotion—and this
is the first promotion I have ever gotten, at any job. I've had three job title changes already over my 23 years here, but none of those coincided with raises and none were actually promotions.
All of this is to say: ever since PCC sort of hardened and clarified its policies on personnel matters, within
that context, this is by a
gigantic margin the largest raise I've gotten—I have only gotten cost-of-living, or slightly higher than cost-of-living, increases every years since 2013. I got a quite-significant raise in 2012, and this will be a bit larger than that, percentage-wise (0.7% larger, to be specific). Since then, the largest wage increase I have gotten was in 2023, and next year's raise will be 8.29% higher than that.
Anyway. I suppose I can share my new title. Right now it's "Center Store Support Specialist," what I've been officially since 2016, and by a pretty wide margin my least favorite of the four titles I've had here. As of next year, it will be "Pricing Analyst." This is very similar to the title Amy has had for a couple of years now, which is "Pricing & Promotions Analyst." I don't have a clue how much she makes but I can probably assume I already made more just by virtue of my longevity here, which has always been a major factor in how much I make relative to the actual work I do. Although I suppose I should probably not sell myself short in terms of the value of my institutional knowledge, which I am tasked with sharing quite regularly anymore.
I did surprise myself to have discovered this will be my third-highest raise and not the highest one ever, but after years of smaller increases, it will result in by far the most extra actual dollars in my paycheck. The new wage kicks in as of the 2nd, which means my second paycheck in January will cover one week with the old wage and one week with the new; I won't be able to fully finalize my 2026 budget until getting my 1/30 paycheck and then also my 2/13 paycheck, as the checks are also different between two each month due to only one of them getting a monthly deduction for my Orca Card. But I'm not complaining!
I'm thrilled. I thanked Gabby multiple times, and she said a lot about how valuable I am here. This is my favorite thing about this job, how valued I have felt for decades. That kind of thing means a lot.
— पांच हजार नौ सौ तैंतीस —
[posted 12:35pm]
