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This was a relatively uneventful weekend, which I was pretty good with: we're headed into fall and then the holiday season, which means weekends like this are going to become rare until probably into the New Year.
The most exciting day was Friday, when I left work early enough to meet Laney at a 4:00 showing of the new Paul Thomas Anderson movie,
One Battle After Another. This was the second solid A I have given any movie all year, and it's easily in the #1 spot. Given the plethora of things there is to love about it, even though we still have the rest of the awards season to go through, I'll be shocked if any other movie comes along to knock it out of that spot. If something does, that only bodes well for what a good year for movies this may turn out to be in the end.
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Saturday was especially rare, in that I had no social engagements, and no movies to go see. The day was wide open, and Shobhit's was too. I suggested we go out and do what shopping we needed to do that day. Two other things got tacked on, and we left at like 11:50 a.m. and got home around 4:00. We were out basically running errands for about four hours.
I knew we needed to buy some Blue Diamond Almond Milk from PCC while it's still on sale until tomorrow, and we needed to go pick up a few things from Costco. Normally we would do these things at Seattle stores in both cases, but Shobhit wanted to go to a store in Bellevue to get an assessment on the sale value of a small bit of gold he owns, which he purchased at the Dubai airport in 2022.
So, this shifted our focus to the Eastside. We went to the place to get the gold valued, and it wasn't as high as Shobhit wanted (especially compared to listed public value) so he chose not to sell it. Then we went over to the Mayuri Indian grocery store, its new location, since we were in the area. And then we went to the Kirkland Costco, and since we were in Kirkland, I suggested we just go to the Kirkland PCC to get the almond milk.
A bit of trivia about the Kirkland PCC store: until the current location opened in 2022, the orginal location was the store we had that had been operating the longest—since 1978. This was our oldest store the entire time I worked here, until 2022 (my 20th year at PCC). When the original Seward Park store, open since 1985, closed to make way for the new Columbia City store a mile away in 2015, Kirkland became our oldest store by far—the next store that opened after Seward Park was View Ridge, in 1987. Now that the old Kirkland store is replaced by a new one, also roughly a mile from the original location, View Ridge is our oldest operating store. So, in 2022, we went from our oldest store having been open since 1978 to our oldest store having been open since 1987.
I think it was when we reopened the West Seattle store in 2019 that we started including a major art installation with every new store opening. That includes six stores since 2019, and seven if you include the reopening of Dowtown as "Corner Market": West Seattle (2019); Ballard (2019); Central District (2020); Bellevue (2020); Downtown (2022); Kirkland (2022); and Corner Market (2025).
Some time ago, I decided to put
photos of all these art installations into a photo album. I almost never go to suburban PCC stores, though, although I did already have a photo of the fantastic orca made out of black birds (probably my favorite of all the art installations) at the Bellevue store—but, to be fair, of all the Eastside stores, Bellevue is kind of the most accessible. And I've even only been there a couple of times since that store opened in 2020.
I don't think I had yet been to the new Kirkland store at all, though, and this was the one store for which I still didn't have any photos of the art installation—this one is a series of paintings on tile on five columns along the windows at the side of the store, facing the parking lot of the complex it's in. I took photos of three of them, mostly because there are only one or two photos of every other store's installation, and I found only three of the five columns all that interesting.
I'm thrilled to finally have
this album complete, though. Assuming our next store, Madison Valley, actually opens on schedule sometime next year, hopefully that one will also have a major art installation I can add to it. I'll be very disappointed if there isn't. I think it's awesome that we've done this with all our new stores over the past six years. We even retained the original art piece from the Downtown store—it used to hang in what's now the office kitchen (at the time it was the Downtown store dining area); it's now on the opposite wall of the foyer you walk into from the street, to face either the Corner Market store directly ahead or the office entrance to the left.
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— पांच हजार आठ सौ चौरासी —
I guess I'll give Shobhit a Social Review point for yesterday, even though it's a bit of a cheat: he walked with me to meet up with Laney at her apartment building on Broadway; then walked with us to Pacific Place, where Laney and I saw another movie. To be fair, Shobhit and I did walk slightly out of our way on our way to Broadway, just to give him a few more extra steps: we went from Pine along 15th to Union, then walked down Union to Broadway and walked up to Laney's building from that direction.
Usually I come down Pine and turn toward her building from the opposite direction, so Laney was slightly startled to see us coming from the other direction. "You usually come from the other way!" she said. And after a minute she added, "I guess you've got to keep me on my toes."
Laney and I had just seen each other last on Friday, and still we launched right into gabbing, to a degree that Shobhit barely had a chance to interject into conversation, which is rare indeed. I think maybe part of it is he always wants to rush ahead, and then he'd have to stop and wait for us to catch up. But the first thing I said was an idea that just came to me over the weekend, largely because I knew Laney and her friend Debi sang a song for Kris, an old friend from the chorus days (Kris and Debi actually used to be married), for Kris's 70th birthday party on Saturday night. Laney even emailed me the video recording of the performance yesterday, which was predictably great.
So this was my idea: "I've decided what I want from you for my 50th birthday," I said. I told her I wanted an original song. It could be wholly original or it could be a parody; it could be earnest or it could be funny; she could perform it at whatever version of a party I have next year, or not—really, whatever she wants to do, however she wants to do it. I just want her to write me, and sing me, a song. I did mention that if she did do a parody, she could easily find a karaoke instrumental version of whatever song it was to sing along to on YouTube, which she thought was a good idea. Honestly I'd really love it if she could sing it
with someone so they could even harmonize, but I don't know who she would sing it with that would also be invited to a party (although I suppose she could harmonize on a recording of some kind). That part's just an "it would be nice" thing, certainly not required. Besides, I know Laney is a very good lyricist but I don't have any idea whether she has any real skill at arrangements. I just want a song! That's all!
Laney did seem to kind of love this idea. She was immediately brimming with ideas. But, as I told her, I don't want to know what it will be, and I don't want to hear it until my birthday. "Oh not, of course not," she said, that sort of thing.
What I love about this idea, though, is that it's both very creative, and very Laney. And those are the kinds of gifts I cherish the most.
Anyway! Shobhit peeled off in front of Pacific Place, and Laney and I went in to the AMC to see
Eleanor the Great, Scarlett Johansson's directorial debut, starring a 94-year-old June Squibb about a woman who gets stuck in a huge lie by telling the Holocaust survival story of her dead best friend as her own. I was a bit cautious about this one, as the MetaCritic score is a pretty bad 51; in the end I felt a score that low was unfair. The movie is hardly perfect, but it actually had a lot going for it, particularly June Squibb's performance.
Laney and I walked home after, and then Shobhit and I did the requisite Sunday night TV watching after I finished my review:
Task and
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.
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Just one last note, bringing us to today: it's a wet day today! I actually walked to work and back both Thursday and Friday last week, just because in both cases I had plans with Laney immediately after work. Today I wasn't able to get out of the condo until about 7:10 a.m., mostly because of the time I took to make a sandwich to bring for lunch. I'd have gotten to work easily by 7:30 had I ridden my bike, but I chose not to. It was barely misting at that moment, but the roads were super wet and I didn't want to splatter all over myself.
I went and caught a RapidRide G line bus down Madison. This is more frequent but I don't think it's really any faster than if I take a #10 or #12 down Pine; it's just that I had just missed a bus at that stop. And the G bus stops a block further away from my work than a bus stopping on Pine does. Well, whatever: I still walked into the office through the back door at 7:33. That worked. It was fine.
It was raining a bit harder later this morning, I noticed out the windows overlooking 4th Avenue from our office kitchen—literally the only windows our office has. I wore a rain jacket today so I didn't bother bringing an umbrella. I think I'll actually kind of enjoy walking home in it late this afternoon. I'm ready to ease into this being the more typical weather pattern again.
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[posted 12:31pm]
