— छह हज़ार एक सौ दो —
Cathryn and I took the bus from downtown to the new Madison Valley store—the one that
took a decade to finally open
thanks to whiny NIMBYs—yesterday morning, to take an opportunity to see it before its Grand Opening finally happens on Wednesday next week. We walked over to catch the RapidRide G line up Madison, which we also took back; the store is looking very cool and I really like the signage. Being with Cathryn, who works with Deli items, Michael M gave us a tour of the new Commissary there, which has several new, very cool pieces of equipment, including one that apparently will shrink wrap 25 pizzas per minute.
Counting the one photo Gabby sent to the team that she took at a daily morning "huddle" a few days before, I left with 16 photos of the store. I never thought to edit and upload them to Flickr last night, though, so I'll have to do that either tonight or this weekend. I'm hoping to get back on Wednesday next week just to see how it's going on its opening day.
— छह हज़ार एक सौ दो —
I only worked two days this week, Thursday and Friday, and both days have included some pretty major diversions: the field trip with Cathryn to the Madison Valley store yesterday; and today, we had the quarterly in-person POS [Point of Sale] meeting, this time at the Columbia City store. This made it easy to take Light Rail from Downtown, and I ran into Anna, our temp who will take over for Amy while she's on maternity leave starting in December, at Symphony Station. So we rode the train together, and chatted the whole way—probably more than she and I have ever talked since she started this temp job,
or when she worked at the office as an intern last year.
Barely more than half the POS people came to the meeting today. Some are on PTO; several are out sick. Cathryn took the ferry in from Kingston yesterday rather than today, so she's skipping the POS meeting today; Amy is doing the same because she's also not feeling well. And there's really nothing on the agenda today directly pertaining to me, so I could have gotten away with staying at the office, really. But, with Cathryn not here, I figured it best just to be at least one person available in case any questions come up during open Q&A that I might be best fit to answer. I brought my work laptop, which I don't usually do at these POS meetings, but I'm still working through my backlog of emails and that allowed me to do some work sitting at the back of the store classroom these happen in (Gabby tries to switch the store location with each of these meetings, though she had to book the tight space of our largest conference room at the office for the summer meeting due to PCC Cooks having all the classrooms booked—only for that program shortly afterward to
get axed after 43 years in existence).
— छह हज़ार एक सौ दो —
— छह हज़ार एक सौ दो —
What I
did do last night was go with Shobhit to the West Seattle Art Walk for the first, and probably the last, time. This happens on the second Thursday of the month, same as the Capitol Hill Art Walk, but I have long wanted to check out the West Seattle one. Until the end of the day at work, I thought we were
not going to West Seattle, as I had proposed the idea to Shobhit on Wednesday night and he suggested I go ahead and book a movie and we could do West Seattle Art Walk another month.
I booked
The Social Reckoning for 4 p.m. at Pacific Place, so I could have the movie watched before they discussed it on the Friday episode of
The Big Picture podcast; I then also bought a ticket to see the documentary
The History of Concrete, which I am dying to see, at SIFF Cinema Downtown [Cinerama]. (Why they're playing a documentary at the Cinerama theater, I haven't a clue.) But, I wound up canceling the Thursday ticket and rebooking it for Saturday instead, literally less than 5 minutes before the 4 p.m. showtime, because Shobhit texted me at 5:53 to ask if I was still going to see the movie. I preferred to still go to West Seattle Art Walk given the opportunity, so I canceled, but because I had already bought a ticket to a different movie tonight, now I won't get to see
The Social Reckoning until tomorrow afternoon. I'll just have to save the podcast episode until I've seen it, just like I had to with their
Digger episode last week.
And? Honestly, West Seattle Art Walk was kind of a bust. Just like with Central District Art Walk, I'm just going to take this one off my calendar. This one still had a ton of participating venues, like more than 40 of them almost exclusively along a few miles of California Avenue but with large concentrations of them along a few central blocks, but the places with snacks and wine never had particularly good snacks, and more importantly, nearly every place did not have actual art anywhere near as good as the art found at Art Walks in Pioneer Square, Capitol Hill, Belltown, or even Downtown. Those four, I will keep as a monthly event on my calendar, and go back to them as schedules allow.
I only took like three pictures of art in West Seattle, whereas I typically take enough in other neighborhoods to justify a dedicated photo album. Not here though. Shobhit did run into a guy from The Olympians group he's part of, but I don't think we walked among places along California Avenue, almost none of which were actual art galleries, for more than about an hour. Only the first place we went into, called
CraftLab Seattle and which was only participating for the second time, was all that interesting. The featured artist there did collages and had framed pieces of Mt. Rainier made out of torn pieces of newspaper that were super cool. It felt like a pretty great start, but none of the other venues were as engaging, particularly when it came to the art.
So, we walked a few blocks south along California Avenue, then back north again to the car, and then we drove back home. Shobhit made some delicious parathas for us to eat with leftover egg curry, and we watched the second episode of
War on HBO Max.
— छह हज़ार एक सौ दो —
[posted 12:25pm]
