Well, all of my photos from over the weekend are captured now. So just briefly before I get to yesterday, I'll let you know that the photos from the Willapa Hills Trail bike ride with Dad, Gina and Beth on Saturday -- which I wrote all about last night -- are now captioned. I did that this morning.

I captioned all of yesterday's photos last night. That's because I wanted to get them uploaded as soon as possible to Facebook as well, and I did that first -- in fact, the photos uploaded there aren't even much edited; for the first time, I uploaded them direct from my phone while Shobhit drive us home from Mason Lake. I even captioned them during the drive home, which both helped kill time on that nearly two-hour drive (we opted to save both money and time by skipping the initial idea of taking the Bremerton ferry, knowing there would be a multiple-ferry line on a Sunday evening), and saved time by my not having to write them out once we got home. Once I got the photos edited to my liking and loaded that way to Flickr, I just copied and pasted the captions over from Facebook. The Flickr uploading took longer than usual, though -- their Flash uploader, which can usually be used to upload as many photos as I want in one swoop, was not working for some reason. I had to use the old uploader and upload only six images at a time. With about 85 photos, counting the entire weekend. Anyway, with yesterday's photos nearly all of them on Facebook, that's the easiest way for family (both there and not there) to see them. People are much more apt to tab through a Facebook photo album than to click through to Flickr. (If you're actually reading this here, you're not a typical person.)

Anyway, so how about I back up to the morning? I got out of bed at about 7 a.m. Which is pretty early, actually. I'd gone to bed around 11:00 and got a good, solid eight hours of sleep. I had my cereal and was in the bathroom to start getting ready at 7:30.

Dad and Sherri were both already up and showered and ready to go. They'd been up for probably an hour by the time I got up. They're really becoming old people, I guess. Under normal circumstances I try to get out of bed well before they do so I can get my shower done before they're even out of bed. I actually make an effort to be out of their way as soon as I can, because I take an hour.

This has always been the case, mind you. Maybe Dad is getting senile and not remembering that. I got into the bathroom at 7:30, and when I came back out at 8:30, he made a comment about how long I had taken and that we were supposed to be out at Mason Lake by 10:00, and we needed to stop at the restaurant on the way. "We've got time," I said. According to Google Maps, this is a 48-minute drive, even including a stop at the restaurant. The stop at the restaurant didn't even take ten minutes.

But, whatever. I think from now on I'll just mention it as soon as I head to the shower so they'll know what to expect: if I'm starting to get ready at 7:30, I'll just say, "Okay, I should be ready to go at 8:30." Dad made another comment about our need to get going before we left.

It wasn't even 10:00 yet when we got to Mason Lake, and when Sherri texted them, Eric indicated they were running late and weren't there yet. We were first to arrive, and after a minute, a park employee came and opened the gate for us.

Even Uncle Paul and Sarah arrived with Braxton and Sarita before Jennifer and Eric got there. Jennifer and Eric had asked Dad and Sherri to be there at 10:00. They probably got there within half an hour after that, though.

I don't see Braxton very often at all anymore, so every time I see him I'm amazed by how huge he is. Not fat -- just a large guy. He's 18 now! This was the kid who was severely mentally damaged by my cousin Andy -- Braxton's biological father -- by shaking him as a baby. It's a long, complicated, dark history. Uncle Paul and Sarah have been their legal parents, having adopted him, for pretty much as long as I can remember now. I think Andy sired another three kids at least; I've kind of lost track. Sarita was the second, and Uncle Paul and Sarah adopted her too. I'm pretty sure she's neurotypical. The weird thing though is that to Jennifer (and Ben and Heidi, for that matter), they are her nephew and niece. For a long time, as far as Uncle Paul and Sarah were concerned, they were Jennifer's brother and sister. So depending on the angle, they are both: nephew and niece; brother and sister. I heard a new development about this when overhearing Sarah talk about it yesterday, though: I guess they've taken to letting Braxton and Sarita decide on their own what they think of Ben, Jennifer and Heidi as. I guess Sarita basically thinks of them as siblings. From her perspective, having grown up entirely with this family configuration, that pretty much makes sense. She certainly never grew up calling Jennifer "Aunt Jennifer."

When thinking about this, I often think of the movie Chinatown, the woman getting slapped and saying with each slap, "She's my mother! My sister! My mother! My sister! She's my mother and my sister!" That was about incest, though, and as many seriously fucked up things have gone down in my extended family, I'm not aware of there having been any of that anywhere. Just really weird configurations based on marriages and/or adoptions. Such as my Aunt Penny, who once divorced Tammy's dad and then married the man's uncle. Grandma McQuilkin tried to explain this to me once when I was a teenager and I got very lost. I'll never forgot Grandma saying, "'I'm My Own Grandpa'?" Indeed. When Aunt Penny was married to that guy, she had step-siblings who were also her dad's cousins. How the hell do you wrap your brain around that, especially when you're a kid? Hell, I used to get lost trying to follow the "halves" of siblings in Jennifer's family: her only full sibling is Heidi. Because Ben and Andy had a different mother before them, they were Jennifer and Heidi's half-brothers, technically -- yet, all four of them are my cousins, because I only need have their father in common for that to be the case. And then there's Caren, Jennifer and Heidi's mother, who had Lewis with another man -- so he's technically their half-bother just as Ben and Andy are, but I'm not related to Lewis at all.

Even with two stepsisters -- easily regarded as sisters after they've been in my family since I was five -- my immediate family has long felt like basically the only one that was straightforward. Uncle Garth, who lives in Wyoming and is the only one of Dad's siblings who was not there yesterday, had a biological daughter, a sister (half-sister actually, I believe) to my cousin Shane, I didn't even know existed until I was well into my teens, and she friended my on Facebook not long ago. She filled me in on details about that history that I can't even remember now; I could check the Facebook Messenger history if I wanted. Suffice it to say she was raised by her mother with Uncle Garth having no real involvement in her life until she connected with him as an adult. She lives in Wyoming as well. Even Aunt Raenae had Troy and Michael with one man and then Toni Marie with another -- curiously, Troy is the oldest of us grandkids and Toni Marie is the youngest; Aunt Raenae was the oldest of five and had her third child much later in life when her first two kids were teenagers. So, even though Dad did also get divorced and re-married, he is the only one among his siblings who did not either have biological children with more than one person, or re-marry in a way that created new family members who were also blood-related in some way. You know what? I never quite realized that particular distinction until just now. I suppose to put it more simply, even as someone who divorced and remarried, Dad produced by far the most conventional family out of all his siblings.

Granted, he did get started at the youngest age of any of them, I believe. Christopher was born when Dad was 17 and I was born when he was 20. I don't think any of the others had kids as early as 17. Some were close though. Even Grandma and Grandpa McQuilkin themselves were married and had Aunt Raenae when they were both all of 18 years old.

I'd rather like to show a list of everyone who was present at the Family & Friends Picnic yesterday, but it would be much more difficult than usual this time. Let's just do family, as best I can recall:

1. Uncle Lynn [Grandpa's brother]
2. Woman whose name I forget [Uncle Lynn's daughter? -- my dad's paternal cousin]
3. Above woman's presumed daughter, name also unknown
4. Les [genetically Roxanne's son, raised by Uncle Lynn]
5. Farrell [Uncle Mile's -- Grandpa's brother's -- daughter; my dad's paternal cousin]
6. Rick [Uncle Miles's stepson]
7. Aunt Arliss [Grandpa's sister]
8. Aunt Raenae [Dad's oldest sister]
9. Toni Marie [Raenae's youngest]
10. James [Toni's husband]
11. Hayden [Toni and James's son]
12. Thayer [Toni and James's son]
13. Kylar [Toni and James's son]
14. Uncle Paul [Dad's brother]
15. Sarah [Paul's wife]
16. Braxton [genetically Paul's grandson via Andrew; adopted by Paul and Sarah]
17. Sarita [genetically Paul's granddaughter via Andrew; adopted by Paul and Sarah]
18. Jennifer [Paul's daughter]
19. Eric [Jennifer's husband]
20. Hope [Jennifer's daughter]
21. Chase [Jennifer's son]
22. Ian [Jennifer's son]
23. Aunt Penny [Dad's sister]
24. Tammy [Penny's daughter]
25. Erin [Tammy's husband]
26. Dad
27. Sherri
28. Matthew/me
29. Shobhit
30. Auntie Rose [Grandma 's sister]
31. Uncle Imre [Auntie Rose's husband]
32. Valerie [Auntie Rose and Uncle Imre's daughter]

Mind you, only 21 of the above are in the family photo shown below; most of the kids could not be gathered up for the photo, being occupied with things like swimming in the lake. And the photo was taken with Valerie's camera, soon after Shobhit arrived but just before Valerie needed to leave to take Auntie Rose and Uncle Imre back home, presumably to Port Townsend. (Auntie Rose, who does not use Facebook, emailed me several times this year to stay up on the details of when and where this gathering would take place -- the only reason she didn't make it last year is that no one told her; I'm not sure even Valerie got the Facebook invite last year.) And at that point, the perennially late Aunt Raenae and Toni Marie had still not arrived. If they had, another three adults at least could have been added to the photo below.

In any case, 32 family members alone listed above matches the total I managed to count last year, and people who made it last year but were unable to this year included Gina and Beth (and Gaia, their Italian exchange student Gina got sick of long before her school year with them was supposed to end); and even Auntie Dean, listed first last year but since deceased. This year Grandpa's surviving siblings to make it were Uncle Lynn (not pictured below but he's in the "August birthdays" photo) and Aunt Arliss (pictured below, the super-short lady with white hair in the front row).

Jennifer and Eric's friend Kay from last year did not make it this year, but other friends of theirs did come:

33. Jody [Jennifer's friend from work at the post office]
34. Audra [Jennifer's friend from work at the post office]
35. Nick [Eric's son -- I suppose I could have included him as "family" above except he's too distant to be regarded as related to me, and that connection is only by marriage to my cousin]
36. Nick's wife whose name I don't know
37. Scott [Eric's friend and former employee]
38. Did Scott have a wife? I assume so
39. Hope's friend whose name I forget even though she actually introduced her to me
40. Farrell's boyfriend whose name I don't know

And even that doesn’t include peripherals like children of friends I did not know. Jennifer and Eric deliberately opened it up this year to friends as well as family, which of course is fine; it's not like they need mine or anyone else's permission for that -- they now have their own access to Mason Lake Recreation Area with their connection to the Shelton Chamber of Commerce, and Eric is now on the newly formed Shelton City Council as well. (That's as of this year, having dissolved their previous three-member Commission -- the last city in the state of Washington to have that instead of a City Council.) Eric is a very conservative guy and I would probably oppose him on every single policy issue, but I've seen the behavior of his liberal opponent on Facebook and he is a douche bag to such a high degree that I'd probably still vote for Eric over him were I a resident of Shelton. (Thank God, I am not.)

I even ran into a woman who knew me, but I didn't really know her, who was not part of the picnic. her name is Sharon, and she worked with Barbara a decade ago at the Seattle FAO Schwarz. She came up to me as I was putting my bike in Shobhit's trunk, and started saying, “I feel like I know you...” I totally assumed she might be some distant relative I didn’t know well at the family reunion. Then she said, “Do you know Barbara Burnett?”

Thoroughly shocked and laughing I said, “Yes!” And she told me she used to work with her at FAO Schwarz. And what was she doing there yesterday? Apparently she went to Shelton High School. She has history with Shelton as well. She added, "And then I moved as far away as I could get!"

Of course I asked to get a selfie. “Be sure to tell her Sharon said hi!” she said. I posted it to Facebook to make sure Barbara would see it. I immediately went to tell Dad, Sherri and Shobhit about the woman I had just run into. Sherri in particular thought it was awesome. Barbara moved back to Virginia in 2010, so it's been a long time. Sherri still misses her a lot, as do I.

Shobhit, by the way, arrived at maybe 2:30. He was a little more pissy than necessary when he arrived, because the GPS directions he'd used based on the address I'd given him had taken him to a dead end street that quite confused him, and he only found us because the app had rightfully told him I was only a few hundred feet away, and so he walked a trail through the woods and to the lake shore until he found us. And he was rather bitchy when he first arrived, which may have been understandable but was still uncalled for, and he was apologetic once he and I finally got back to the correct parking lot with the car.

Dad and Sherri had even figured out after we got back that the address listed on the Facebook invite (which I had used to send Shobhit) did indeed take a driver to the spot where Shobhit had gotten stuck at a dead end -- which, by the way, the Maps App showed as a road that went all the way through right toward the entry road to the Recreation Area, even though in reality the road dead ends. I had never seen that kind of inaccuracy in the Maps app before. I guess that was way too far out in the sticks -- all of eleven miles away from Shelton, but, whatever.

Shobhit and I even went to the Recreation Area office to try and get some directions -- he got really annoyed when I didn't go with him at first, actually saying, "They might be afraid of a non-white person." I was like, "Seriously?" -- and he said, "Do you see any other non-white people around here?" Now, my initial inability to take that seriously frankly just speaks to my white privilege. Considering how more rural areas are even more conservative than they used to be (Rick, when told at one point that there needed to be an area declared "Switzerland" where no politics or religion would be discussed, actually had the moronitude to say "I thought we were all Republicans"), and especially the current state of what passes for civil discourse in this country, and the attitudes widely and openly shared by conservative people about non-white people, if you really think about it, Shobhit's nervousness as far as that goes was actually well founded. That said, I did see one woman in our group who I assumed was the wife of some friend of Jennifer and Eric's, appeared to me to be maybe Latina. I don't think Shobhit ever noticed her, but it did mean that he wasn't the only non-white person there. He was easily the darkest one, sure (and certainly the only non-white person in the family photo below), and probably one of only two in the entire group. Anyway, I'm digressing -- the office had a sign that said BE BACK SOON and there was no one to ask, so we just set about looking for his car and making our way back the proper way on our own.

It took a few minutes, but Shobhit and I finally found his car, parked at what clearly actually was a dead end. I had thought for a few minutes that he had taken a wrong turn, until he made it clear the GPS had guided him right there -- he had gotten out and walked because I had sent him a pinpoint of my exact location rather than the address, and that told him I was only a few hundred feet away. Once we got back into his car, we had to backtrack and drive a roughly two-mile loop back around to find the proper entrance. Hopefully we'll be able to figure this out better next time, perhaps with the two of us driving there together. Shobhit was still in L.A. in 2016 and last year was working a weekend shift; this was the first family reunion of any kind he'd ever come to at all, let alone to Mason Lake.

Jennifer had managed to rent the large kitchen this time, after not being able to secure it the past two years. I'm pretty sure this was the first family event held inside the large kitchen shelter since the family reunion in 2004. I'll never forget that one, because I took Nikki with me as she was having her summer weekend visit with me at the time, but Shobhit and I had been dating only two months and I had made a conscious decision not to bring him, thinking the family would be threatened by it -- "why do you have to rub our faces in it" kind of thing. And then, of all people, Uncle Paul had said, "Where's your friend?" More than one person wondered why I hadn’t brought him. And then for the next 14 years, it was just circumstances that kept him from coming to one of these things. Until now.

And, to my surprise, he actually sat down and just chilled, pretty relaxed, for a while. This was also why I thought it best that he just come on his own, and not be with me there as early as 10 a.m. He'd get bored and want to leave a lot more quickly than I would. And indeed, it was only a couple of hours, by 4:30, when he started saying things like "I'm ready to go when you are." And we were leaving within about an hour after that, but by 5:30 even I was okay with leaving; I'd been there then a good seven and a half hours.

It was warm yesterday, and I could have done my own swimming in the lake. I did have my swim trunks with me. But, I failed to tell Shobhit to bring a pair, and I really should have. He definitely would have gone in. He even took his shirt off when lounging on the folding blanket he took out of the trunk, and laid out right by "Switzerland" -- the picnic table and the two lawn chairs Dad and Sherri brought and set up next to it. At one point he half-facetiously talked about just getting in the lake in his underwear. He needs to realize this is not Lake Washington, or Gay Pride. This is Mason Lake in Mason County. Not one person there would have considered that appropriate. Thankfully he kept his pants on.

As for the food, I was pretty delighted to find multiple vegetarian options this time around -- when I was the only vegetarian, the onus was really on me to make sure there was something I could eat there. That's why last year I went out of my way to buy and bring some macaroni salad. Now, though, Hope (Jennifer's oldest) is also a vegetarian -- or, I guess now, technically a pescatarian: she's reintroduced fish into her diet, apparently. In any case, when Dad and Sherri did their shopping for the event his time, they got a pack of Field Roast vegan sausages. The potato salad Sherri made, which was very tasty, had no meat in it. Valerie, who did not make it last year and who also has experience catering to a vegan daughter, brought a vegan salad. Eric brought his cheese and spinach artichoke dip with chips. Shobhit and I actually had a whole lot to choose from there -- and I had brought sample protein bars from work as insurance. (I returned them this morning, since they weren't technically part of the samples bin and they never got opened; I put them back on their pantry shelf at work.) Shobhit got himself quite the voluminous plate of food. And I spent a lot of time grazing, and also had a slice of the Costco cake Jennifer and Eric brought for the many August birthday people who would be present -- including Dad, whose birthday was yesterday itself. Sherri was actually going to bake a cake, was literally getting ready to start, when I told her Jennifer had already texted me they were bringing one from Costco. Sherri was relieved not to have to do that after all.

All in all, it was a pretty pleasant day, Shobhit's brief bout of pissiness notwithstanding. We left around 5:30 and were home probably sometime around 7:30; I spent the rest of the evening either dealing with photos or writing the blog post about Saturday's bike ride. There's probably more detail I could share about yesterday but I should maybe get some actual work done at work today, you know? Besides you can always click through the photos to get more details in the captions.

[posted 12:44 pm]