Today is the first day of my "August staycation," which means I won't have my regular work lunch breaks to update with Daily Lunch Updates (DLUs). Lest I forget to update at all, I need to make an extra effort on this for the next several days . . . so! Let's see how quickly I can do a rundown/overview of the past weekend.I have other stuff to do today!
—On Friday I added twelve new photos to the working "
PCC Central Office Move" album, as it was our last day at the 3131 Elliott Avenue office. Only about half of those were taken by the time I posted
that day's DLU, and they also included also included two video clips: one of
my final bike commute long the waterfront; one
walking around the office right after I arrived, showing plastic box totes and rolling carts here and there. After I wrote that post, I took two final shots from that beloved patio—one
reading my book out there on my lunch break for the last time; one
a zoom shot on the top of Rainier Square Tower, at the base of which is both the new "small format" PCC Corner Market downtown store and the new office space, also my last time seeing the view of it from that vantage point. I took a few more photos of the office, and even two shots of my bike. I am only realizing now that one shot of the bike is in the 3131 Elliott Avenue parking garage; the second is in the Braeburn Condos parking garage.
—I rode my bike home on Friday with the very last things from my desk in my backpack: my work laptop; the plastic paperwork stand I keep my printed calendars to; my PCC tumbler I use for tea every day plus the coaster I have always used for it; my headset and its cradle used for charging it; my mouse, and two small bottles of hand lotion. This will all be the first load I bring back to the new office on Tuesday next week, where they will have a new keyboard waiting for me in my cubby—leaving my old one on my desk last Friday was the indicator to have it recycled, and I already filled out a survey asking for a new one. Several of the letters were scraped off of it so I was good with getting a new one of those, but my headset and mouse were still perfectly good so I saw no need to replace them. Anyway, thanks to the laptop more than anything, this all made my laptop quite full and very heavy, and after carrying my suitcase
plus my heavy backpack (that time with my Macbook in it) all over Minneapolis my last day there fucked up my left shoulder for a good two days after—I'm nearly 50; I shan't be doing
that again—I figured it best that I not ride home with the backpack this heavy on my back. I tied it to the rear bike rack, something I had not done with anything in ages, mostly because I switched from my shoulder bag to the backpack Alexia gave me some time ago, to give my back more even distribution. But the bag now was particularly heavy so I used it, tying the bag with the bungee cord I always have there. It was a little precarious, and easy to offset my bike's center of gravity, but I made it surprisingly close to home without incident or without the bag sliding over the place. Only when I stopped on Pine right in front of my building, halfway up the block toward 15th Avenue East, to take
a picture of the scaffolding finally going up our south side of the building for the ongoing building repair project, did the backpack suddenly slide over and hang off to the side. I righted it before riding the rest of the way up the hill—most of the way this time I rode in much lower gear than normal—but by the time I got into the garage the bag was hanging off the side again. It was a bit of a challenge grabbing the bungee cord in a way that I could unlatch it again to take the backpack off, but after a few minutes I managed it.
The rest of the evening Friday was relatively uneventful. We had dinner, we watched this week's episode of
Foundation on Apple TV.
—On Saturday Laney and I went to see a movie:
Honey Don't, the new Ethan Coen film, and although we both agreed it was not great and had a lot of flaws, we both still really enjoyed it more than we expected to. Both of our expectations had been in the basement due to the mixed-bad reviews, but Laney was interested in the lesbian noir of it all and so was I; plus we had no money to lose on it since we both have AMC A-list monthly subscriptions.
—After the movie, Laney walked as far as Pike Street with me but then peeled off to catch a bus back up the hill. I went to the Central Library to pick up a DVD I had ready to check out. On the way, I passed Rainier Square, and something occurred to me: would the electronic fob I was issued at work last week for the new office be working already? I walked in through the north entrance to the Rainier Square Tower lobby, and through the elevator bank to the short steps up to what used to be the north entrance to the store and is now the back entrance to the office. I saw the fob reader already installed there, and tested it. It worked! I peeked into the door to see if anyone was in there, and kind of unsurprisingly since it was Saturday, there wasn't. I went inside and kind of snuck around quietly, and I took four more pictures, taking the total for my working "
PCC Central Office Move" album to 20 shots. I'll surely be taking a bunch more on September 2 when we all have our first day in there. I'm now thinking, though, that I may pull this same trick if I'm downtown next weekend, which will be after all the desks are finally set up in there, that being the whole reason everyone is working from home this week (or, in the case of people like myself or Frank—who took his inspiration from me—taking PTO). I could clearly barge in during the week if I wanted to, but I don't want to be disruptive.
—Shobhit went to an overnight event out of town Saturday night, so I took that opportunity to return to Steamworks. They have much higher rates on weekends, $47 before 6:00 and $62 after, so I went out of my way to get there right before 6. This meant that I was not quite done writing my movie review before I needed to go, however, so I did something unprecedented: I brought my laptop with me, and I finished writing the review while in the Standard Room I rented. I knew it would be some time before I got any action, though (indeed, I was there five hours for this very reason; I usually give up and go home after four if nothing of note is happening), so this was a way to kill a bit of time at the beginning of my time there. Writing the review in this way, though, with interruptions and then doing it in a very unusual environment, would still be why the review is shorter than usual, barely more than 600 words. I also just didn't have a ton to say about this movie in particular.
—Yesterday, Sunday, Shobhit returned from Gig Harbor, and shortly after that he made cucumber sandwiches to bring to the party we were invited to: Agastya, who was part of the all-Hindi play that was the first Seattle play Shobhit had ever been in, in 2005 (twenty years ago!) and also taught the Hindi class Karen and I met at and took from 2005 to 2007, was hosting a party for people associated with that same South Asian arts organization,
Pratidhwani. We couldn't have been there longer than about an hour, but that was plenty of time to see Agastya and his wife Mariana's ("rhymes with banana," she said—I won't forget that name now) quite large house in Kenmore, with its view of a green belt in the back beyond their very own pickleball court. I was actually having a relatively good time, but Shobhit was suddenly eager to go, and asked me to drive. He told me he was "feeling hazy" and was too afraid of falling down or something in the middle of the party. Nothing like that ever happened, but at least this left us plenty of time to relax and hang out the rest of the evening.
—We had watched one of this week's two PBS reruns of
As Time Goes By before we left, then we watched the other after we got back. Then we watched the DVD I had checked out of the library:
Michael Clayton, an excellent movie which Shobhit had never seen before, and which he made easier for me to retain its dense writing by being there to offer clarifications for me. Then, he did something he had never done before, and which kind of shocked me: as soon as the movie ended, he started it right over again, with the director and editor commentary on! He later admitted he thought it would be more like an interview and didn't realize it would run the entire length of the movie—he clearly didn't know how DVD commentaries work—but that didn't stop him from running through the whole thing again. Effectively we watched the entire movie twice in a row. Then, we walked to the Capitol Hill branch library to return it, and then walked back.
There you have it! How's that for a "quick run-through" of my weekend?
[posted 8:42am]
