Hooo boy, did I have a busy and eventful weekend! I'm sure glad I already posted about my Friday evening visit to the Smith Tower with Danielle on Saturday, because I have too much else to write about now. Although, I do still need to start with that, as well as yesterday afternoon and evening -- the beginning and the end of my weekend -- for essentially the same reason, just briefly: Once I got home from Olympia yesterday, at about 3:00, I spent pretty much the entire rest of the day captioning photos. I actually captioned the photos of Dad and Sherri's 35th anniversary dinner first (I'll get to that momentarily), but spent by far the most time captioning all the Smith Tower photos.

This was so time-consuming because I was much more detailed than usual, just by virtue of the fabled status of the Smith Tower, which has now stood in Seattle for 105 years. (Had I been thinking about 2014 being its 100th anniversary, I might have gone up then, but I wasn't; also the beautiful renovations enjoyed today were not done until 2016 anyway.) I particularly did somewhat of a deep-dive with online research for the caption to this photo, taken of the pyramid that tops the tower just above the observatory -- from which the photo was taken. I even posted all of that to all social media (Instagram, even though the default formatting there precludes consistent paragraph spacing, and character limits for captions meant I had to post the last part of it as a comment; Facebook; and Twitter, although there, instead of posting all of it as a thread, the text was so long that I just included the first sentence and then a link to the Facebook post -- I still stretched out the text in its entirety for this morning's tweet digest right here at fruitcakeenterprises.com). Because none of these social media platforms have custom-text hyperlink capability, for all the hyperlinks I used in the Flickr caption, I went to the Google URL shortener to include "goo.gl" links there. So, as you can imagine, the text for that one single photo involved some pretty time-consuming work. (Full disclosure: having been inside the building the majority of the time on Friday, for the social media posts I used a much better exterior shot of the Smith Tower, which I took in 2014 while riding the Seattle Great Wheel with Auntie Rose for my Birth Week. And you know what? It literally only hit me while writing this that that photo actually was taken on the 100th anniversary year of the Smith Tower. Side note: that shot also has a pretty great vantage point of the then-busy-with-traffic Alaskan Way Viaduct, which will be totally demolished and gone by the end of this year.

And that was just that one single caption -- to be certain, the one I spent by far the most time on, but plenty of the rest of the captions in the "Sunset at Smith Tower" photo album have links in them, to pages on the Smith Tower's current official website, or to the Observatory Bar's menu, or to other web pages related to the Smith Tower; there are also plenty of notes on photos themselves (information about an item in the photo that comes up in text when you hover the cursor over it), in nearly all cases about skyscrapers pictured.

Danielle texted me yesterday mid-morning to ask me to send her a link to the photo album, and I immediately texted her the link, although at that time the photos were 99% not captioned, and there were only tags to rely on -- which she would never find browsing in the mobile version. Once I was done with the captioning last night, I sent her an actual email with the link, with the note reading, in part: I am emailing the link to you now instead of texting because, if by chance you still have any interest, it would best be browsed through on an actual computer, as a lot of the captions include links, and a lot of the photos have notes on the images themselves, and those can’t be deciphered on mobile devices.

I honestly wasn't sure she'd be that interested in perusing the minute details, but I did feel pretty good about her response: I LOVE IT!! What a great memory we made. Thanks for documenting it, my personal historian. (Danielle likes to tell people about my being her historian -- if I had any connection to it at all, any event in her life can be dated using my backlogs of photos, photo captions and blog posts.)

I had reached back to Seattle yesterday at about 2:45, but stopped at QFC to get my digital download coupon for a free Hershey's chocolate bar with Rese's Pieces in it; I also bought a jar of pasta sauce with another coupon. Exciting stuff! Anyway that was why I got home right around 3:00, and, aside from a dinner of a sandwich made with veggie tunafish from a Loma Linda packet from January's Vegetarians of Washington dinner, the results of which I would say were mixed, I spent the entire rest of the day either editing, uploading, tagging and captioning the 35th anniversary dinner photos, or captioning the Smith Tower photos. It was just past 10 p.m. when I was done -- in fact I sent that email to Danielle at 10:07 -- and then it was time to get ready for bed, even though the same time the previous night it was actually 9:07. But, we're back in Daylight Savings Time now, and I had to set four clocks an hour forward manually last night: the clock on my night stand; the microwave; the oven; and the analog clock on the living room wall. It was predictably pretty close to 5:30 when I woke up this morning -- although Guru was an asshole and woke me up about three times through the night before that -- and I was kind of concerned about getting to work too late as a result. I got on two different buses though and it was 7:35 by the time I got to my desk, which is more than fine by everyone.

So I guess I should get to Dad and Sherri's 35th anniversary dinner, huh? First I want to mention the cake in the photo at the top of this entry. That cake came from Albertson's, brought by Gina and Beth. The whole point of this dinner was to be as informal as possible so getting a cake from a local grocery store seemed appropriate. Honestly, though, I felt like that cake exceeded expectations. It was white with raspberry filling and it was very tasty.

But, also: note the cake knife. It's engraved: Kim & Sherri 3-9-84 and was the knife Dad and Sherri used to cut the cake at their actual wedding. Shobhit and I have a very similar knife that was their wedding gift to us in 2013; it's their traditional gift to all family members who get married. (This shot of Brandi and Nick cutting their cake later the same year in 2013 is probably with their gift from Dad and Sherri; ditto this shot of Nikki and TJ cutting one of their wedding cupcakes in 2014; Gina and Beth's mostly-impromptu wedding in 2016 had no reception and therefore featured no cake; on Saturday night Gina promised Sherri that they would have a cake soon so they could cut it with their cake serving set.)

Anyway, there was actually some question about cake once I arrived in Olympia about 45 minutes before dinner was scheduled to start at 4:30 on Saturday, and Sherri asked if there was going to be a cake. "You know," I said, "there hasn't been any discussion about cake at all." Sherri quipped, "Well if there's no cake, we're not going!" Then she said she had taken out the wedding cake Dad and Sherri had used at their wedding in 1984, so I said I would text Gina and Beth to ask -- but Sherri said she didn't want to do anything to make them feel obligated.

Thus, it was kind of a relief when I arrived and there was cake there. And, when it was time for dessert, we had Dad and Sherri get up and cut the cake together.

[Temporary side note on the above video, which hopefully will become irrelevant after a week or two: it's a video of Dad and Sherri cutting their cake, all of about six seconds long, and it's only not playing by Flickr at the moment because of a temporarily extended process of changing their servers. The help forums assure us that when it's all done, even videos we upload at the present time will then start playing. In the meantime, if you're super eager to see six seconds of Dad and Sherri sticking the knife into the top of their anniversary cake, I have also uploaded it to Dropbox here.]

So, anyway. I guess this counts as a family gathering, so . . . 35th Anniversary Dinner Roll Call!

1. Dad
2. Sherri
3. Angel
4. Ricky
5. Rachael
6. Raiden
7. Britni
8. Gina
9. Beth
10. Me
11. Jennifer
12. Eric
13. Ian
14. Aunt Raenae

That's a respectable number for an event as deliberately informal as this was, I suppose. As a general rule we only invited Dad and Sherri's kids and grandkids, but included Jennifer and Eric (I'll get to them in a moment) because Dad and Sherri spend so much time with them; I kind of figured Aunt Raenae might get an in-person invite (she's not on Facebook, and refuses to) and that was fine. Sherri did express some slight disappointment that of her 10 grandkids only two of them showed up -- although, to be fair, fully half of them live in either Spokane or Wallace, Idaho; one lives in Arizona; and it was never all that likely any of them were going to come. It would be more accurate to say that two grandkids out of the four who might realistically make it actually did so -- David, I believe, had a work commitment; Alex actually had RSVPed on the Facebook event invite that he would come and then never did, so I don't know what the story was there.

It was a very good time overall, I'd say. There wasn't even too much awkwardness, at least within the two-hour reserved room period between 4:30 and 6:30, having both Jennifer and Eric there. Eric actually drove Jennifer and Eric to the dinner -- Hope and Chase were with Sherman for the weekend, so I never saw them at all. There was a sort of sad moment when I went up with Eric and Jennifer to order our dinners, and Eric offered to cover my dinner. I was like, "No, I can get my own" -- and then he said, "Let me get it, this might be the last chance I ever get to buy you dinner." So I was like, okay. (To be honest I have no complaints about how much this helped my budget.) And then I made a stupid mistake, as Jennifer had just heard me say I was going to get a 10" pizza, and I accidentally ordered a 15" one. She told me later she knew I was making a mistake, and when I asked her why she didn't say anything -- I totally would have corrected it -- she said she figured other people would eat some of the pizza too. And to be sure, they did, but this sort of counts as taking advantage of Eric's generosity, which I was not at all out to do. The mistake only hit me when the pizza came and it was surprisingly huge. I mentioned like three times that I did not mean to order the large pizza. That said, other people who were still waiting for their orders to come did partake in this pizza, and everyone who had it quite liked it. (I ordered a "veggie pizza" on which you choose four toppings, and I went with minced garlic, mushrooms, bell pepper, and tomatoes.)

So. You can click here for the full photo album of the dinner on Flickr. The album actually has 28 shots in it, 27 of them publicly visible (I included a shot of Dad's "ancestry.com" breakdown and, even though he probably wouldn't care if I made it public, I decided to limit that to "friends and family" who are also Flickr members); 18 of them were taken actually at Dirty Dave's Pizza Parlor. Before we left for the dinner, Sherri asked for an official portrait of them taken on the actual date of their anniversary, and I took a few shots of them sitting at their fireplace in their living room, one of them quite fantastic.

Sherri had said any of us who wanted to was welcome to come by the house after dinner, and so Jennifer and Eric, Aunt Raenae and I all did -- none of the others did. I probably should have stayed back longer than I did, but Jennifer was clearly chomping at the bit to get me alone, and I had already agreed to drive her and Ian back home after dinner -- although we drove to Dad and Sherri's house for a bit first. Ian rode with Eric, and so Jennifer and I were alone in the car for the five minutes or so it took to drive there from Dirty Dave's. This was when she started sharing certain details about her and Eric's separation that I have no business sharing here (I have matured since the idiotic things I blabbed on my blog 10-15 years ago!), but suffice it to say some of the details were striking -- stemming from both sides of the equation, as is really always the case -- and their separation, right now at least, makes sense.

Eric was waiting in his van with Ian when I pulled up to Dad and Sherri's house, but we were so far ahead of everyone else getting there that there was a little bit of awkwardness while we waited. First Ian came out and came into the house with Jennifer and me (I have a key), and Eric did not come in for a few minutes. Then he did come in, and for several minutes I was just in Dad and Sherri's living room with Jennifer, Eric and Ian. Then Dad and Sherri finally arrived, with Aunt Raenae in tow, and we all visited pretty civilly for a while.

Amongst this group, Eric was first to leave, and he took Ian outside to say goodbye before he left. Ian's biological father, whose name was also David (enough with the fucking Davids!), skipped town shortly after he was born, went to another state, and has never been a part of Ian's life since -- Eric is really the only father Ian has ever known, so it makes sense for them to continue having quality time together. As soon as Eric left, though, Aunt Raenae turned to Jennifer to tell her that she had no sooner gotten picked up at the airport the day before by James (Aunt Raenae had just visited her son Michael, and also granddaughter -- and Michael's niece -- Elizabeth, in Texas) than James blurted out to her that Jennifer and Eric had separated. This led into discussion about the stuff Eric has shared on Facebook prematurely, and how many relatives and friends had contacted her to say some variation of "Why am I learning about this on Facebook?" Well, that was never Jennifer's choice -- although she certainly beat Eric to the punch when she messaged me about it on February 28 (basically a week and a half ago). "I just wanted to tell you before Eric posted something on Fb," she wrote. Eric had already been posting slightly suspiciously cagey stuff on Facebook, so this made sense -- but, I was still glad to get definitive news about it direct from her rather than from a public post.

(Incidentally, this is the very kind of thing Aunt Raenae was talking about when she said she refused to get on Facebook -- I guess Veronica, Michael's wife, had tried to sign her up for it during her visit, and she refused. Aunt Raenae didn't even couch it in terms of over-sharing on her own part, which I don't think she would do necessarily even if she were on Facebook: "Other people would share stuff I have no business knowing," she said. I don't often think of Aunt Raenae as wise, but here is one case where she definitely is.)

Around 7:00, I said I should get going so I could go have a cocktail at Jennifer's house -- I also knew she wanted to fill me in on a lot of stuff. And she really did: she later told me that the stuff she told me, only her mother and I now know about. That made me feel privileged, to be honest. She clearly thinks of me as a trusted confidante.

She invited two people who work with her at the Post Office to also have drinks with us, and only one came -- this very young, 26-year-old guy named . . . "you'll never guess," said Jennifer . . . it's Matthew! (I told Shobhit over Skype Messenger she had said "You'll never guess," and "Matthew" was his first guess.) Anyway, he seemed nice enough, even if occasionally some of our conversation was slightly awkward. He asked me about what I do for a living. And we actually all three of us had a few pretty good laughs, as we hung out in the living room while Jennifer folded laundry. Also, before that guy arrived, I took pictures of Jennifer's cats, which now number seven. (Since I last took a photo of her then-six cats, in 2014, three of those have died or run away; in the past year she's gotten four new ones, all of them purebred.)

I started zoning out around 9:00, unfortunately, and struggled to stay awake from the next couple of hours. I made a pretty valiant effort, and even had a second "Exhibitionist" cocktail she made me, at her insistence. That didn't exactly help me stay awake, but, whatever. Those drinks were very tasty, but thankfully not too strong -- it took me until around 1 p.m. to feel fully normal again on Saturday after all the drinking I did with Danielle on Friday night; these Saturday night cocktails had no real effect on me at all, except maybe for making me more tired. I hadn't gotten a huge amount of sleep Friday night as it was. So, when I finally did go to sleep Saturday night, in Hope's bedroom, I really zonked out for the night.

And then, yesterday morning, when Jennifer came out to the kitchen after I had finished getting ready (and she hadn't showered herself yet), she said, "If you're hungry there's a banana." I replied that maybe we should go out for breakfast. We settled on a place called Blondie's, which we had gone to together a couple of times before, and which I have now decided should be called "Blandie's." Next time, I want to try a new place. Hopefully I remember that.

I can come up with places with much better seasoned food this very coming weekend anyway, when Jennifer comes to Seattle to stay the night on Saturday -- either dinner Saturday, or breakfast Sunday, or both. Like far too many people from the South Sound, Jennifer is a bit of a baby when it comes to driving in Seattle (even Dad seriously balked when I asked if he would come to Seattle this year for my Birth Week Bike Ride, so I guess I'll still come to Olympia for that), so she asked Eric if he would drive her to the Bremerton ferry. That's at least a 45-minute drive one-way from Shelton, so if I were in his position I'd be like "no way," but, pushover that he is, Eric agreed. (We'll see if they stick to that plan, now that I think about it, given something I saw on Facebook this morning that suggested he'd done something new to piss Jennifer off.)

I suggested we drive to the restaurant separately, so that I could head out of town straight from there. When we left the house in Olympia Saturday night, Sherri had said they would be home if I wanted to stop by on my way back yesterday, and I said, "Okay," not knowing whether I would or not. I decided I would, just to break up the drive home from Shelton. Dad was walking around his yard when I pulled up, with the car out and running to warm it up -- I guess they had dinner plans in Shelton with Aunt Raenae, but they were going to head over there early to hang out just because they were bored. They were totally down with visiting with me for a while, though, so they turned off the car and we all went inside to visit.

And, we did that for roughly an hour before I decided to get a move on. I always enjoy just sitting and talking with them for a while. So then, Dad and Sherri and I all left at the same time, and I sent Gabriel a "Polo" on the Marco Polo app he likes to use, to see if by chance he would be in Tacoma while I was passing through. Nope! He was with Lea, in Woodinville for some reason. Later he even sent me a Polo about visiting the Redmond PCC store. It's just as well, I suppose: I never would have gotten all my photo editing and captioning done otherwise. I finished out the day feeling quite productive, given how busy I had been all weekend otherwise.

I also got on Skype with Shobhit for about an hour and a half last night while I was working on captioning, although we had to put each other on mute after his constant yakking with his mom in Hindi was breaking my concentration as I was trying to work. He showed me this really old bundt cake tin he's going to bring home that was taken out of this oven they had that never got used and apparently they just sold for aluminum parts. He's talking about using it to make a bundt cake for my birthday. We'll see how that turns out. It could be great, you never know!

[posted 12:35 pm]