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I walked straight to Laney's apartment building from work yesterday, that being the first Monday after Daylight Saving Time ended. It was also rainy and overcast, making it even darker than it would have been otherwise. At first I ascribed it only to the cloudcover, but then I remembered: oh. The sun sets an hour earlier now.
To be clear, it's setting at the time it's supposed to. I've been hollering into the void about this for ages now, but if we want to stop changing the time twice a year, it's absolutely within our power: we need only to make
Standard Time permanent—something Hawaii and Arizona already do, and have for some time. The problem is that a majority of people (all of them idiots) want to make
Daylight Saving Time permanent, which requires Congressional approval, and so it never happens.
The U.S. already tried this once, about fifty years ago—in the seventies. Within a couple of years they reverted back to shifting the time in the fall and spring, because making Daylight Saving permanent meant an hour more of darkness in the morning during the winter, which made things more dangeous for kids going to school. People today don't have enough memory of this, and so they think we'd all be fine with an extra hour of darkness in the morning, and they don't want to sacrifice the daylight lasting clear until 10:00 p.m. in June.
Dummies, all of them! If the complaint is just having to change the clocks twice a year, there's a simple and easy solution: make
Standard time permanent. So the sun will set at 9:00 instead of 10:00 in June, boo hoo. This choice does not require Congressional approval. So unless people are willing to make this choice, they should all stop bitching about this.
I went off on a bit of a tangent there, didn't I?
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Oh. I still haven't mentioned that Laney and I went to see a movie on Sunday afternoon. The new Yorgos Lanthimos film,
Bugonia. We both found it a bit imperfect but we also both really liked it. This was basically the highlight of that day; I didn't mention it in yesterday's post because I was too focused on the
Día de Muertos Festival Shobhit and I went to on Saturday.
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— पांच हजार नौ सौ छह —
Anyway, I walked first through the Skinner Concourse tunnel from Rainier Square to Union Square, then through the Seattle Convention Center to Pike St, just to avoid the rain for the first half mile or so of my route (0.4 miles, technically). I then walked up Pike to Broadway, and was at Laney's building by probably 4:50. It was just a couple more minutes before Laney got downstairs, and we walked the couple of blocks from there to Lost Lake Cafe and Lounge on 10th Avenue, where we had our Monday Happy Hour.
This was originally scheduled as our October Monday Happy Hour, which we usually do on the fourth Monday of the month. But, because I had the Gregory Awards to attend with Laney last week, we postponed it to Monday this week.
The Happy Hour deals there are amazing. We both had the Happy Hour Grilled Cheese & Fries, plus a side of tartar sauce which was $1.25 extra, but the dish on Happy Hour is otherwise $4.99. And the "New Drink, Who This?" daily cocktail for Happy Hour was a margarita—also $5. They were surprisingly delicious and I had three of them. So, a dinner plate and
three cocktails, even with an extra side of tartar sauce, cost me just under $30. That's
with tax and a 20% tip! I'm amazed they can even pay their employees. It's very common at other placed for my to meet or exceed my usual $50 budget for Happy Hour with a single dish and two cocktails, and sometimes even only one cocktail. In this case, I came in $20 under budget—that's 40%. Good thing, because I was already like $57 over budget. Now I'm only $37 over budget. Okay, make that $49 over budget—it turns out the movie I'm seeing tonight is only playing at SIFF Cinema and not at AMC, so I won't be able to cover it with my monthly AMC membership. But hey, I'd otherwise be $69 over budget!
Anyway. When it comes to the cheap prices, I can say in at least one case, we really got what we paid for: the grilled cheese sandwich was possibly the worst I have ever had at a restaurant. Super dry. We both agreed we would come back for Happy Hour at Lost Lake, but we'd get a different dish next time. The nachos, maybe.
Everything else was actually good, though. The fries were great, the perfect amount of crispy; and the margaritas were fantastic. I was pretty pleasantly surprised by it. Our server had told us the grilled cheese from the regular menu was much bigger, but the sandwich we got was pretty regular size. Maybe you get a lot more fries? The fries we had were more than enough, and good that we didn't get a bunch more because we still would have eaten them all.
We sat in a quiet, dark booth in the lounge section. They still had Halloween decorations up,
adorable ghosts with weapons in their hand affixed to the light fixture above each table. Ours had a fake steak knife in its hand, which unfortunately is kind of hard to decipher in the requisite Happy-Hour selfie I took.
I think we were there a couple of hours, easly chatting the entire time as always. I made several trips to the bathroom, because that's what I do when I consume lquids and especially alcohol. The mirror was covered in stickers, one of which was a cartoon drawing of a pregnancy test, the result indecipherable. Still, someone wrote over it:
Stop Trying. Rude!
After that I walked home and updated my Lily Allen playlist. She recently released a great new album, her first in seven years, and I have listened to it enough times now to know which tracks are my favorite. Shobhit was at a rehearsal but he actually got home very shortly after I did.
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[posted 12:34pm]
