Satur Day of Contingencies

Jennifer was supposed to visit this weekend, and then had to cancel because on Thursday she tested positive for covid. We had tickets to the Northwest Chocolate Festival yesterday, and reservations for drinks at the Fog Room downtown last night. I really didn't want to waste either of those things, so naturally I set about finding contingent companions. I went to the Northwest Chocolate Festival with Danielle, who really should have been who I contacted first. Instead, I contacted Alexia first, who was headed back from a work trip to Portland on Thursday, headed out for a vacation trip to England soon, and so she declined as she wanted some alone time at home or a bit. Totally understandable. I then texted Tracy, even though I knew that in all likelihood she would have other plans, as she often does on Saturdays. So, my next approach was this: I looked at my latest Social Review just to remind myself of which people I hang out with the most often. Shobhit is always #1, of course, and if he hadn't been working yesterday, he'd probably have already had his own ticket anyway. Laney was out because she would not want to be at a crowded indoor event with a bunch of unmasked people. Karen would not have been an easy sell, and likely also already had plans; most of the other high-ranking names were part of our biweekly Action Movie Night and a) I don't know any of them well enough to invite them to something like this; and b) they would not be likely to have a great amount of interest anyway. But then it finally dawned on me: Danielle! Now, she has a work schedule that has her working over the weekend every other weekend, so I did already know that the chances of her availability were at best 50/50. I lucked out, though, and she was both available and very interested. She said she wanted to see if Rylee would want to come along, and if she did then Danielle would just buy her a ticket. But, Rylee is doing this project for school where she takes care of this mechanical baby doll for four days (no eggs or sacks of flour these days), and she's too embarrassed to take it with her to public events, so she declined. Danielle told me a fair bit about how Rylee is doing with the project, though, and it sounds like she's actually taking it very seriously—she wants to get a good grade—and I thought that was very cool. Good for her! Apparently every time the baby exasperates Rylee with its cries, Danielle says something like, "See, maybe you'll think twice before you let a penis anywhere near you." Anyway, with Danielle coming from Renton, I told her I was fine with busing over to meet her over there at the Medenbauer Center in Bellevue, rather than asking her to come and pick me up in Seattle. That would be a lot less driving for her. We decided to meet there at noon. Because Danielle is never on time for anything, I deliverately chose a #550 Sound Transit express bus scheduled to arrive at the Bellevue Transit Center at 12:10. To my astonishment, Danielle was actually in downtown Renton before I was. But, it took her so long to find parking that I still managed to walk the two blocks or so from the Transit Center and then wait at the Meydenbauer Center until about 12:30 before Danielle arrived, having had to walk several more blocks than I did, from her parking spot. It was fine. This yielded my second photo album of Northwest Chocolate Festivals, the last one having been with Shobhit in 2018. Unlike in 2018, though, when I uploaded 40 shots of the event, this year's photo album has all of 25 shots, only 17 of those from the actual event. Most of the large conference room where the event takes place is just vendor booths for different brands of high quality chocolate bars. There is slight variation here and there—and there was a Topo Chico booth handing out free bottles of sparkling water—but that was the vast majority of it. And typically, they have little bowls of tiny pieces of different flavors of their chocolate, either with a spoon or little tongs for you to pick up a tiny bite and drop into your hand. At some booths, the vendors dropped the piece into your hand themselves. Either way, those tiny samples are very deceptive—you still try so many samples, after a while the seemingly impossible occurs: you get chocolate-d out. It happened with Danielle sooner than it did with me, maybe two thirds of the way making our way through the booths. I have a feeling Jennifer would have lasted longer, both in sampling stamina and in overall interest. We've already agreed to plan to try again for her to visit for this festival again next year. Hopefully she doesn't get covid again. It was still a good time with Danielle, don't get me wrong. And she was patient while I still wanted to make my way through the rest of the booths. Even then, there were several we passed over, due to a variety of factors, like how interesting or tasty they looked, or how crowded a given booth was, or just the difficulty of finding an efficient route that hit every booth in there. We tried doing the outer perimeter first and then made our way through the island rows of booths in the middle. There were large photos of chocolate in different forms mounted along the walls along the perimeter of the room. Once one of them was cleared enough of people standing near it, Danielle indulged me or a selfie in front of one. I was quite happy with the resulting shot. We had gotten inside the conference room at about 12:30, and we left at roughly a quarter after 2:00—so, we spent an hour and forty-five minutes in there. We both had some time to spare, and even though Danielle knew I had drink plans later in the evening, she suggested we go somewhere for a drink there in downtown Bellevue. The amount of construction going on there was astonishing. It seemed like every other block had pedestrian detours due to construction. In fact, right outside Meyenbauer Center when I was waiting for Danielle, this lady got confused and passed me actually saying, "This is so ghetto!" Seriously? What an incredibly suburban-white-woman thing to say. Anyway. We both looked up places on Yelp for nearby ideas. We settled on a place that Yelp said had outdoor seating and was currently open—only to discover they were not open yet. We then settled for this place called Forum Social House, which we had no idea was also a miniature golf place until we got to it. It's on the third floor of Lincoln Square, which is across the street from Bellevue Square—who large, neighboring shopping centers in downtown Bellevue. We decided we should come back sometime and actually play some miniature golf. We were both incredibly amused by the neon sign there that read WASH YOUR BALLS. I recorded the Live Photo as a video because the couple of seconds it captured of Danielle pretending to put the sign in her mouth cracked me up. Flickr must have some kind of algorithm that identifies potentially offensive content because it automatically uploaded that clip as a private upload, and I had to change it back to public in order to be able to embed it into this post. We took that picture on our way out. We were the only people drinking at the bar on a Saturday mid-afternoon, for about an hour. Their restrooms had an eggplant emoji on the men's room door, which really cracked me up. It made slightly less sense to me to put the peach emoji on the women's room. "A peach is supposed to be a butt," I said. Danielle said, "Well, people like women to have a juicy booty, I guess." Either way, I suppose either way you could call the use of these emoji, amusing as they were, a bit regressive. Trans women who have penises would still be using the women's restroom. This was underscored by when I wanted to ask where the restroom was, and the bartender lady's back was turned when I said, "Excuse me?" and she replied, "Yes sir?" Within moments, she actually apologized: "I should not have assumed your pronouns." she said. That was sweet, even though I truly wasn't even thinking about it. I just said "That's okay" and moved on. I did think about this later, though: if I were, say, 25 years old, I probably would care a lot more about it. I'm too old now to waste the energy on giving too much of a shit. Or any shit at all, really.  I don't owe anyone clarity on my gender identity, and I emboy that in practice by literally not even thinking about it. I had a strawberry margarita and it was pretty tasty. I took an additional eight photos at Forum Social House, which was what put the "Northwest Chocolate Festival - Bellevue 2023" photo album up to five shots. That included duplicating one Live Photo into a video, and having Danielle test me the lovely selfie she took with me at the bar. Soon after that, I was back on the 550 bus to Seattle. I finished reading Arostotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, the best novel I have read in over a decade, on that bus. I really wished the book had been longer, I loved it so much. Actually, I may have finished it while walking home from the bus stop downtown. I spent some time on the bus exchanging texts with Jennifer on Facebook Messenger, who said she was feeling a little better. At Shobhit's suggestion, I offered to pay her the $40 for her Northwest Chocolate Festival ticket. She suggested that, instead, I just buy her a cocktail or two the next time she visits. Sounds like a deal. I was home long enough to feed the cats, Shobhit was just home from work, himself. I actually could have asked if he'd want to come out for drinks in Jennifer's stead at the Fog Room. But, then I'd have had to pay for both of us. I spent less by going out with Laney instead—I asked if she wanted to go because she had initially wanted to join Jennifer and me for drinks, but then backed out when we found out we couldn't reserve patio seats for more than 2, and she didn't want to be inside at dining room seating. Well, now it was down to a reservation for 2 again, and Laney jumped at the chance to join me. Shobhit had found something else to do anyway: there was a screening at Northwest Film Forum of a 1975 gay porn parody of The Excorcist called Sex Demon. Had I not already had other plans, I absolutely would have gone with him. He later told me about how much the audience, which was not sold out but was close to it, laughed at it. Apparently a couple next to him had not realized what they were in for and left after the first scene. The movie is apparently 60 minutes long, which is actually kind of an eternity for porn. Anyway, I'm digressing. Back to the Fog Room! Laney says downtown Renton is super sketchy at night and she didn't want to be walking home from the transit center alone—her building only being a few blocks away notwithstanding—so she drove her van up to Seattle and actually found a parking spot on the street on Capitol Hill. And, I met her on the platform of the Capitol Hill Light Rail station. The southbound train was just pulling in when I stepped off the elevator, but I saw Laney immediately and sprinted right up to her, nearly startling her. We rode the one stop down to Westlake Station and were up on the street level at 6:30, fully half an hour before the reservation. We were only two and a half blocks away. Well, our table was just made ready for us when we arrived anyway. But, it was right next to a glass railing, and Laney has an increasingly difficult time with heights right next to a ledge. I asked if she wanted to ask to be moved to another spot on the patio, and she said yes. We moved over to the communal table with the coals that light up in flames when it gets cold. That was exactly where we sat the last time we had drinks there, back in 2019. I misremembered that visit as having been in midsummer because it was not dark, and last night we were there, wonderfully, through sunset. But, I had forgotten that we actually went to the Fog Room in October back in 2019 as well—October 13, in fact. But, they had reservations earlier in the day back then, and we had gone there at 3:00 in the afternoon. Last night's reservation was at 7:00. We actually decided we'd go back again this winter, maybe in January. We can still sit out on the patio, warmed by the coal flames. I really like this idea. And I can find new angles of photos to take. It was nice to get sunset photos this time around, even though my Fog Room 2023 photo album only has 10 shots in it. I actually had dinner at home before leaving, with barely enough time for it. It was a cost saving measure. I still had a Bavarian pretzel with cheese dip along with the one cocktail I ordered. I had initially budgeted $75 for the Fog Room. In the end, that combined with Forum Social House set me back about $66. The pretzel was very good. It was also what Laney ordered, with an order of fries as well. She had two drinks, both beers. It's too bad I don't like beer, what with it being so much cheaper than the cocktails I always order. Oh well. We were up there maybe an hour and 15 minutes. We chatted a bit with a lady and her friend sitting next to us, who were staying there in the Charter Hotel and set to leave on an Alaskan Cruise today. Laney and I walked from there back to Westlake Station, got off at Capitol Hill Station, and I walked her to her van. She was parked all of two blocks from my building, so I declined her offer to give me a ride home. Shobhit and I then caught up on some television: the night's PBS airings of the lovely Judi Dench sitcom As Time Goes Bye from the nineties, which they air two episodes of every Saturday night. And also the fourth season finale of Sex Education on Netflix. [posted 8:24]

Northwest Chocolate Festival 2018

-- चार हजार चार सौ बाईस -- For once in my life, I'm not eager to eat some chocolate as soon as I get to work. I'm hoping to sustain this feeling as long as I can, honestly -- I weighed in at 155 lbs yesterday morning, a record high since I started tracking on an app on the last day of July. I was back down to 153.9 this morning, which was both a surprise and a relief after yesterday, the very reason I have zero desire for sweets at the moment: chocolate overload at the Northwest Chocolate Festival. But, I am getting ahead of myself because I should mention Saturday first. I like to go on chronological order when I can. Also it's the first image in today's DLU and that has nothing to do with chocolate. It does have to do with wine, though, at least a bit, and I think Shobhit is right that when I drink I am almost always up in my weight the next day. I poured out the last of the bottle of red wine Shobhit opened the day before, and brought that for my drink to have during the double feature I had with Laney in the Braeburn Condos on Saturday. As you can plainly see from the photo, which really cracked both of us doing, we watched The Poseidon Adventure and Titanic. Laney had very little recollection of having watched The Poseidon Adventure with me before, and actually no recollection of having gone to see the remake, Poseidon, with Mac, Barbara, and me in 2006 -- a year which, incidentally, is now twelve years ago. Not only is The Poseidon Adventure an old movie (now 46 years old, it was 34 years old in 2006), even its remake is kind of an old movie now! Although honestly, judging by my solid-B review at the time, I might actually enjoy seeing it again -- although I would probably still feel that the original was far better. Laney and I were both struck, watching it this time around, by one of the biggest heroes of the movie being a fat woman (played by Shellwy Winters) -- in 1972! It was also interesting to learn on iMDB's trivia page for the film that Winters gained 35 lbs (!) for that role and was never able to take it back off again. Incidentally, she was born in 1920, which would make her 52 in this movie, and 86 at the year of her death -- just month before Poseidon was released in 2006. As it happens, in my review of Poseidon, I make reference to having re-watched The Poseidon Adventure not long before, and I was rather struck by this bit about the thrilling sequence with the cruise ship capsizing: The last time I watched the movie with some friends, we backed up the DVD to watch the entire scene a second time. That "last time" I referred to there was all of six days before we went to see Poseidon when, on May 7, 2006, Laney hosted a "Disasterthon" at her place, apparently having originally planned on hosting it at Shobhit's and my place but then changing the location due to the timing of Shobhit and me moving to Wallingford from First Hill, a move we made to accommodate his mother's first visit from India so she'd have a room to herself. Anyway, on that day, the double feature was The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno. (I guess we re-watched a scene at least once per movie, because I also distinctly remember rewinding to show everyone in the latter movie when Jennifer Jones's Lisolette bounces off the side of the building when she falls.) Charlie and Cavin had also been present for that double feature, but they did not join us later for Poseidon. It's curious to me now that I did not mention re-watching the capsizing scene in my regular LiveJournal entry about it, yet I did in my review of Poseidon. Anyway! Laney and I have now re-watched both The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure recently this year, but each now as part of other double features. Instead of "Disasterthons" as a broad theme, we made them more specific: first was The Towering Inferno and Die Hard, paired because this year's Skyscraper was a cross between the two movies and inferior to both. And then, probably from discussions about watching The Towering Inferno back in 2006, we decided that would pair well as a "Sinking Ships Double Feature" with Titanic. And they did go together well. It's now been 21 years since Titanic came out, and it clearly had been many years since Laney last saw it. She mentioned more than once how much more "intense" it was than she remembered it, while the ship is sinking. I had reserved the Braeburn Condos theatre between 11 a.m. and 6 p.m., and that proved perfect. The Poseidon Adventure is just shy of two hours long and Titanic runs three hours and fifteen minutes. I always pad at least two hours onto the combined run time of the two movies for my theatre reservation because of inevitable delays and breaks; Titanic itself came split into two discs and I had to reboot that damned projector player with all three discs -- but, at least, I managed to get it to work in shorter order each time than I have in the past. I was only able to get the third disc to work once I gave up on having closed captioning on but whatever; in the relatively soundproof theatre there's not nearly as much concern about passing sirens and traffic like in the condo. I also had to pause it for a while when Laney got a call from her daughter Jessica, which of course was also fine and understandable. In any case, that was pretty much my entire Saturday. I had the large cup full of wine as mentioned before, which amounted to probably two standard amounts of glasses of wine; I also made myself a veggie burger to have for an early lunch as the first movie ran. Once the movies were over and we parted ways, Shobhit was on his way back from volunteering to set up the Northwest Chocolate Festival; I drove the car down to meet him downtown and we then did some weekend shopping at MacPherson's on Beacon Hill. Shobhit complained several times about prices being higher, almost refusing to understand that of course, with winter starting and produce having to be brought in from farther away, of course the prices would go up. And then we went to the Columbia City PCC, just to take advantage of the latest string of weekly coupons we got in the mail, this one for $5 off $10 spent in the Deli department. We ordered a fresh made Olympic Pizza, which we have both decided is the best pizza PCC makes. We each ate two slices at a small table there at the Deli, which affords Shobhit a point on the next Social Review. Hooray for him! -- चार हजार चार सौ बाईस -- -- चार हजार चार सौ बाईस -- So that brings us officially to yesterday's Northwest Chocolate Festival -- apparently its tenth anniversary, but this was the first I ever attended. I've heard of it before, and Shobhit had mused about going before, but we never did. He wanted me to find out if PCC was doing any kind of sponsorship and if there were any way I could get tickets that way. I want to say PCC had some kind of indirect association in the past, but I can find no confirmation of that; there certainly wasn't any this year. Besides, that kind of makes sense: we're a retailer, not a manufacturer. We sell tons of chocolate, and we sell a lot of the brands that had booths there, but we don't actually make any of our own. I seriously had way too much chocolate yesterday. It was a cool thing to attend though, even though I can't imagine feeling like it would have been worth paying $25 to get into. I'm not sure I ate $25 worth of samples, to be honest. Shobhit worked it, though -- literally: setup volunteer work on Friday evening netted him one day pass; working another four-hour volunteer shift on Saturday (thereby missing out on the double feature with Laney) netted him another. So, we both got in for free yesterday. I find this approach of his fascinating, because Shobhit is, quite frankly, not exactly altruistic by nature. And his motivations here were not altruistic at all: he did the volunteer shifts precisely with the aim of getting in on Sunday without having to pay for those tickets. He was even going to scrap the idea of going altogether when he hadn't heard back from organizers about volunteering. At the last minute, however, he did hear back from them. And this is the thing: what difference does it make, really, whether he's volunteering for selfish reasons? He's still volunteering. Far more than I ever have, actually. He's helping out, keeping busy, making connections, however tenuous they might be in the long run. Building community. The net effect is the same -- from the perspective of those he helped, it was still altruistic. His motivations are arguably not even relevant. We walked downtown first, stopping at the Metro Tunnel so he could add $10 to his Orca Card. We caught a #33 bus on 3rd at Pine, the same stop I sometimes catch that very bus to ride the second half of my way to work. Only this time we took it further up Elliott Ave to get off in the middle of the Magnolia Bridge, something I had never done before, and then walking the pedestrian paths and stairwells down to Pier 91 and then on to Smith Cove Cruise Terminal, where the festival took place. I guess there cruise ships must be done now that summer and early fall are over. They might as well use that building -- which I had never been to before; our Inside Passage Alaska cruise in 2007 launched from south of downtown -- for something. It did yield a fair amount of useful information for future reference. Such as . . . *A fantastic brand discovery in Seattle-based Dolcetta Sweets, which had samples of Peanut Butter Crisp Truffles which might very well be the best peanut butter confections I've had in my life. I have to be honest, most of the chocolate we tasted was fine, but not particularly exceptional -- this was exceptional. I even veered into hyperbole in the moment: "That was stunning," I told the lady. I really should take note of the few local retailers that sell their product. Perhaps I'll buy some for Christmas gifts or something. *Shobhit asked me also to take a photo of the Cacoco Drinking Chocolate booth, he was so enamored with that product -- probably largely because of how not sweet it is. There was also a guy working the booth he'd met the day before whose painted fingernails he wanted me to see. I do recall telling Shobhit we carry that brand at PCC, although he should probably note now that I just looked it up in our system as I was writing this, that they are very expensive: $13.49 for their roughly 11-oz packages. That said, that's actually 50 cents cheaper than they sell on Cacoco's own website, as it happens; and with my 25% discount they would actually retail at $10.12. Which is still a lot. *There was another booth by an organization called Melt which represents several small, local chocolate makers in Portland, Oregon -- among them a brand called Creo Chocolates, which, apparently much like Seattle's Theo Chocolates, offers tours (albeit much more expensive ones, I see now); they offered us a brochure about them and we've made note of it for our next visit to Portland, which we now have planned for next year for our anniversary. (Our anniversary is June 14, but we need to be in Washington -- specifically Chehalis -- for Britni and David's wedding on the 15th, so Shobhit made the pragmatic suggestion of spending the immediately previous couple of days in Portland. I haven't spent a weekend there with him since 2010 and I also really want to go on their gondola, so this struck me as a win-win.) Anyway, you can click here for the full photo set of the festival -- a comfortable 40 shots in all, about 10 of those of the very nice views from Pier 91. I edited, uploaded and even captioned them all at home after returning late yesterday afternoon, before working a bit on this year's calendars. I think I'm a tad further behind my usual schedule on those but I think I'll still be all right. I'm doing a couple of things about them rather differently this year, which might somewhat disappoint some, in that the photos are less personalized -- the flips side of that being they are much more calendar-like with natural beauty in them. This being the 12th year I've made these calendars, it's kind time for me to shake things up a little anyway. -- चार हजार चार सौ बाईस -- . . . And now, I'm just back from lunch with Karen at the Six-Seven Restaurant down at the Edgewater Hotel. Due to both her schedule and the holiday, we had to reschedule both of our November lunches to days other than the usual second and fourth Thursdays of the month. Our next one, since we obviously won't be meeting on the Thursday of Thanksgiving, will be the following Monday, exactly two weeks from now. November thus far this year has, much like most of October, been astonishingly dry. It's only been within the past week that it has turned noticeably cold, as in seasonal for this time of year. It's a tad warmer again today though, and I had a rather pleasant walk to and from the Edgewater today. We plit the gyro sandwich as always -- now that they stopped the specials menu, it's pretty much our default every time. So these lunches are literally half the cost of what they used to be. We had pleasant conversation as always. I told her about yesterday's Northwest Chocolate Factory and we discussed 2019 travel plans. It's looking like I'll be closing out 2018 without having flown in a plane anywhere at all -- something that has not occurred for me since 2007. (I had assumed it would be earlier, but it's 2007: we did go to Alaska, but that major trip was on a cruise ship.) The hope, if everything goes as planned, is that in 2019 I'll fly to three different destinations: accompanying Danielle to a wedding in upstate New York in June; another trip with Danielle to Las Vegas some other time of the year; and a trip to Shobhit to visit Sara W from work in her reclaimed home of Denver, as I promised her we would visit. All of these trips are unconfirmed at the moment, but they are the hope and plan for now. -- चार हजार चार सौ बाईस -- [posted 1:18 pm]