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I was going to take myself to see the new
The Naked Gun last night, but I didn't like the available showtimes, so I booked a seat at 5pm today. Then I asked Shobhit if he'd be interested in seeing this movie with me, especially since I had $10 in AMC Rewards to activate and put toward his ticket. He said yes, but he has an event at C.C.'s he wants to go to tonight. I decided, okay: I'll go to Steamworks then. We bumped the movie to tomorrow, which we'll see at 10:45 a.m., before we go to the "Day in Punjab" culture festival happening at Seattle Center.
There's a lot planned for this weekend, actually—and all of it with just Shobhit, with the exception of tonight, when we're going to separate things on our own. On Sunday we'll go down to watch the Seafair Blue Angels air show.
All of this is to say: I didn't go out anywhere last night. I rode my bike home from work, Shobhit made a stir fried vegetable dish that was especially tasty once I put some of my peanut sauce on it, and then we watched three episodes of season two of
Foundation on Apple TV.
I then spent some time working on a video project, which I locked into to such a degree that I didn't stop until around 11:00.
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— पांच हजार आठ सौ छप्पन —
I needed to pump my back tire on my bike after I got home yesterday. I was pumping it up against the wall of the garage near Shobhit's car when a young woman came up behind me and scared the living shit out of me. She didn't mean to. Then she asked if the two guys were still by the garage door.
They were when I came in: two young men, one of them shirtless, crouched behind the particle wood walls on either side that are part of the scaffolding currently on the east wall of the East Building, almost certainly doing drugs. I had stopped my bike just inside the garage door to watch it close, which I always do anyway whether anyone is there or not. I should have said, "You guys need to leave, or we'll have to call the police." But, I was too afraid of confrontation. I told Shobhit about it when I got upstairs and he went down to check, and said they were walking away just as he got down there. He was ready to call the cops himself, but as the guys were now leaving, he sent the building managers a request to send a reminder that residents need to call 911 if people who don't live here don't leave.
Anyway, I told the young woman the guys were there when I came in, "But I kept an eye out for them." She said she would do the same as she left.
On the subject of my bike, both yesterday and today I rode down Pine on the way to work and turned left on 2nd instead of right on 4th as usual; then rode down to Seneca and turned to the waterfront, where I then rode the new protected bike path that now runs along the entire length of the waterfront. I really love it. Yesterday I even took a brief video of the section with planters on either side, and added it to
my socials.
As for my tire, I spent the last few days unsure if the feeling that it was a bit deflated was in my head. Well, after pumping it up again last night, the ride this morning was a hell of a lot smoother. So it wasn't in my head. Hooray!
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I just finished with a Zoom lunch with Karen, our first in a month because the last one had to be canceled—there were too many scheduling conflicts, and she and her family have gone on
three trips just since June 20: first to San Diego; then to Massachusetts to visit Karen's mother; and then to Hawaii, which they returned from just yesterday.
I totally spaced that they were in Hawaii when the 8.8 earthquake in Russia happened, causing a tsunami warning. I did not realize until this conversation that when a tsunami warning is issued, they don't know whether there will really be one at all, or how intense or big it might be. I only know that Karen, Dave and Anita had quite the adventure in Honolulu because of it: they were at a store when the sirens started, and apparently no one around them panicked. But, when Karen asked the cashier, the cashier calmly told her, "Oh, you'll be fine, you just won't be able to go back to your hotel" because the beach would be in the evacuation zone.
Their hotel was apparently 45 minutes outside of town, and although she heard soon later that hotels were only evacuating the bottom two floors and moving them all to upper floors, they had quite the adventure braving traffic getting back, and it took hours to get through to the hotel on the phone, and they took the advice of a friend who used to live in Hawaii that they just go hang out at a mall for a while. And that's what they did, for six hours!
Most of the stores were closed; in fact at the mall, she said, only the movie theater and the Starbucks was still open when they got there. Karen said as soon as they left the store in Honolulu all the stores on the street were shutting down and people were leaving. At the mall, though, they dealt with a lot of anxiety having no idea whether a big tsunami would actually hit or if the power might go out or what, none of which actually happened. They just played cards in the mall's central hallway, and even met a newlywed South Asian couple in Hawaii on their honeymoon, who also joined them for cards.
It was very fascinating to hear about, and this was the topic of most of the conversation for the lunch hour. But now I have to pee super bad so I need to post this so I can go do that, and then get back to work.
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[posted 1:11pm]
