— छह हजार एक सौ तेरह —
Work continues to be . . . a lot. The Partners Portal remains down,
the issue from last week still being not quite resolved. I'll be part of a meeting that has been set up for right after my lunch break to help determine what we want to do next. Things seemed more hopeful on Friday than on Thursday, but there has yet to be any further updates since Friday that makes it sound like needed further progress has been made, so, who knows.
Gabby is still in France and not scheduled to be back in the office until Thursday. This also meant that Cathryn and I ran the biweekly Teams POS meeting this morning in her absence, which provided a ton more for us to think about that didn't even have anything to do with all the cybersecurity threat issues. This took up a big part of our morning, and I barely managed to get this draft ready before leaving for my lunch break.
Part of that was that Shobhit and I went to the annual West Seattle Harvest Festival yesterday, now the
fifth one we have gone to in as many years. To me, it's a new Halloween tradition that I won't miss if I can help it; I am especially interested in the children's costume parade, led by the West Seattle High School Marching Band, that always kicks off at 11 a.m. Shobhit really doesn't care about that; he cares about the Sunday West Seattle Farmer's Market that it occurs in conjunction with. He loves how much more variety and number of vendors this farmers market has than we tend to get at the Capitol Hill Farmers Market. He even
bought a giant pumpkin—not for carving, but for eating. It was good we had a large tote bag barely big enough to fit it in.
Unfortunately I totally spaced uploading the day's photos to Flickr when I got home much later in the day, and I really wanted to be able to embed photos from the event in today's Daily Lunch Update (DLU), which meant uploading the photos direct from my phone to Flickr while I was at work this morning, and then manually adding even the file names—which I usually do after exporting them from Apple Photos to my external hard drive at home—after the upload was done. The fact that for some reason the photos do not load in the order they were taken when doing it direct from the phone added to the challenge. But, I got it done, and so you see the photos in today's post.
The
full photo album has a solid 30 shots in it, comparable to most others from years past. I managed this even though we were actually at the market for about 40 minutes, but we got there early enough that as soon as the costume parade passed by twice, we were headed out again by 11:17 a.m. This gave us enough time to do some shopping both at the West Seattle PCC and the downtown Costco even though I also had other afternoon plans.
— छह हजार एक सौ तेरह —
— छह हजार एक सौ तेरह —
Those afternoon plans were what qualifies as this month's "Happy Hour," again at Laney's apartment in Federal Way. Shobhit dropped me off at the SoDo Station so I could catch Light Rail, on his way home with the groceries. Luckily for me, the train pulled up right when I got to the station. I actually got out of the car at a corner two blocks away so Shobhit wouldn't have to turn.
Much like we did last month, I got off the train at Federal Way Downtown Station, Laney met me on the sidewalk outside her apartment building, we walked in together, and just hung out and chatted for a few hours in her living room. She had a cup of wine she said she was excited to have since she hadn't had any since my last visit; I brought a makeshift margarita that was just raspberry lemonade spiked with tequila, but I also brought my own margarita salt to put on the rim—I've just about burned through that salt we've had now for many years. Laney had some blue corn tortilla chips and I had brought myself some cheese and crackers to snack on while we caught up.
Laney is still using a walker, and seems hopeful she may be able to take it on the Light Rail into Seattle by the holidays—that remains up in the air, but we're tentatively sticking with the plan to see the Gingerbread Houses at the Sheraton during a weekday of my PTO during the week of Christmas. She was much improved the last time I saw her, and seemed close to the same to me this time, albeit with the numbness in her feet apparently a bit better now. Plus she has perhaps more confidence now than she did a month ago that
maybe she can take Light Rail somewhere by late December. But, she probably won't know until that time is closer. I should eye a date to go down to hang out with her in November, come to think of it. If nothing else, she's even more of an eternal optimist than I am, and sings the praises of physical therapy as long as—and this is the key part—you are reliably consistent with it. This is something I deeply relate to as I still do my every-other-day stretches to ward off any return of the nerve pain in my right arm, which has also been successful.
I asked if she wanted to walk around the nearby park like we did the last time I was there, a bit of fresh air with the weather having improved over the drizzliness in the morning. I got back on the Light Rail direct from there, leaving Federal Way at 5:52 and getting home at right about 7:00. This would largely explain my spacing the photos, because Shobhit had made
a beautiful lasagna for dinner, which we ate while catching up on the week's TV:
Youth,
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, and the season premiere of season 9 of
Curb Your Enthusiasm, which I was fascinated to learn had aired in 2017, a full six years after they did a previous season. Amusingly, Larry David looks basically the same whether he's 64 or 70 (or 50 or 79).
— छह हजार एक सौ तेरह —
[posted 1:42pm, after forgetting to post for an hour]
