— चार हजार आठ सौ अठहत्तर —

I have quite a lot today to update you on my rather sociable weekend—something social on each of the three days, one of them even in-person—but first I simply have to share this delightful surprise I came to when logging onto my work email this morning.

It was an email from Brent, with this in the subject line: SER Appreciates you, Matthew! SER stands for "Social and Envrionmental Responsibility," one of our somewhat more recently created departments at the office, and Brent is the "Senior Sustainability Specialist." He's also been on the third-highest number of weekly Zoom Office Lunch Meetups, after Rebecca and myself; that "meetup" is hosted officially through PCC, and specifically the SER department. Each week Rebecca takes on "host" duty, although I believe when we very first started them it was Brent.

Anyway, looking at that subject line, I honestly figured: this must be some kind of form holiday greeting that somehow programs in the name of each recipient for when they receive it. I mean, what the hell have I done for the SER team specifically?

Well . . . I really like to make "I have no humility" a part of my brand, because I do genuinely love myself, it's fun, and the people who are irritated by it (namely, Gabriel) just give me a greater kick out of it. But the truth is, in a case like this, I guess I hold more value than I realized. Here's the body of the email from Brent:

Happy Friday, Matthew!

Each week, the SER team sends a letter of gratitude to someone that we’re so thankful for and appreciative of the contributions that they make to our team and beyond.

This week, we chose you! Thank you, Matthew, for everything that you do to support our team and practically the entire company. We appreciate your fun personality, spirit, and deep passion for PCC’s history and culture that you bring to work every day, not to mention our Tuesday lunch happy hours, which you’ve been a long-standing attendee!

Usually, we’d hand deliver a card to your desk, but in the world of 2020, we present our virtual card to you! SER Card to Matthew

Have a wonderful and well-deserved weekend, The SER Team ❤

Side note: I didn't just include that hyperlink for your convenience here; it was included that way in the email. But you're also more than welcome to click it! The notes left for me there, from literally everyone on that eight-person team (I must confess, I'm honestly not even sure who James is), were a truly delightful surprise to come to at the start of my work day this morning. I even slightly struggled for the right words in my email response, in which I did "reply all" since the SER alias had been included in Brent's email:

Whaaaat

Well to say this was something it would never even occur to me to expect is an understatement . . . I just now read all of your delightfully kind notes. This is all so very sweet, thank you! 😊

This would normally be the place where I would say something along the lines of, "I'd say this was humbling, except I have no humility!" But, this was just so unexpectedly kind, even I could see that saying something like that would not be fully appropriate. The best thing to do is accept the compliment with grace—although I do still believe very strongly that there's never good reason to deflect compliments, or only accept them with some measure of self-deprecation, so I quite deliberately avoided doing those things. And it's possible to avoid such things without saying something along the lines of, "I know, I really am great, huh?"

I tried to research a little in regards to how long a Kudoboard lasts, and I'm finding it difficult to find. Do these just stay live indefinitely? The sense I am getting is that they do indeed, barring the creator deleting it or the company itself closing down, and thus its hosting site with it. My guess is in all likelihood that link will stay live for years to come, if not decades, but just in case! I still took a screenshot and uploaded it to Flickr. For posterity!

I've even decided not to post about this on social media. I feel like the intensions are too pure, and given my history on Twitter and Facebook, it would come across much more like boasting than just my sharing a sweet thing I appreciated. I honestly think it's a different thing for me to write about it here. A blog has far greater space for detail and nuance, and my audience is so much tinier here that it would work far less as a boast than it would on Facebook.

I'll probably still include my screenshot in the end-of-the-year "2020 at PCC" email I send out on December 30, however. (I save New Year's Eve for my broader personal "2020 in Ten Minutes" video, which I also spent a lot of time working on over the weekend.)

— चार हजार आठ सौ अठहत्तर —

Okay, so let's get back to what I did all weekend, starting with Friday evening, in which I met with Laney on Skype for what is pictured at the top of this entry: December Virtual Happy Hour—the first of an unusual two we have scheduled for this month. Laney starts her year on the road for retirement in January, and she wanted to have a second Happy Hour this month before she heads out, and I was all for it.

Side note: we were going to see each other (virtually) three times this month, with a concurrent/virtual viewing of Fargo, the original film, on Friday December 4—but, she caught a cold that lasted her about a week and she had to cancel, thankfully improved enough to keep the Happy Hour date this past Friday. She actually did contact her doctor about whether she should get tested for COVID, but testing sites are so overwhelmed right now, her doctor took stock of a fever that barely qualified as such, and a lack of any other telltale COVID symptoms, and suggested she hold off on getting tested. Laney, who is far more fastidious than probably anyone I know besides Gabriel (who is legit OCD-level about it—not a judgment, for the record) about precautions, assumes she must have caught it by something along the lines of touching a shopping cart at QFC that some literally-snotty kid must have just handled. I wonder how often they sanitize their carts, anyway? I only go into QFC occasionally and never to shop for enough that necessitates a cart; Costco and PCC are both very good about cart sanitizing, as is Trader Joe's. That said, "there but for the grace of God go I"—I really go out of my way to not touch my face when out in public for any reason, but I could easily make a single mistake at the wrong time and pick up a bug, or even COVID, the same way. A good reminder of the need to be super vigilant, especially now.

Never mind the fact that Shobhit actually works retail every day, and I have never gotten the sense that they are especially more vigilant than average about sanitizing high-touch areas. All I can do is the best I can do personally, I guess. I keep thinking about the article I read about people who assumed they were fine flouting precautions and protocols because they remained fine . . . until they weren't. "You're fine, until you're not." Maybe I'll just stick with the notion that I lead an insanely charmed life. Which I will . . . until I don't. I don't take for granted that it means I can stop being cautious though, because I still adhere to certainly the most important things: no visiting inside anyone else's home, no visitors inside my home, no going anywhere without a mask, thoroughly washing hands any time I do need to go somewhere, especially after I return back home. These things, I am religious about and have been for months.

But I digress! Laney was fine again by this past Friday. And so was I, incidentally . . . I never even thought to talk to Laney about this, although I would have been fine doing so. I am more convinced than ever now that what I went through for about a week ending roughly last Tuesday was an especially awful herpes outbreak. It didn't have as much of the usual sharp pains in the same specific places on my body, but those did still happen two or three times. All other symptoms I had (chills, headache, body aches, and especially the concurrent discomfort peeing) were classically consistent with herpes symptoms, and much like Laney, I did not have enough symptoms consistent with COVID-19, most notably the lack of any fever or cough, and no loss of taste.

So, we had a lovely time hanging out on Skype, and for once I got the web version of Skype to work on my Mac using the Chrome browser, now that they no longer have an app in the Mac App Store, which is annoying. But at least this way I could view her on my much larger computer screen as opposed to just on my iPad. She was still just looking at me on her small smart phone, which she insisted was fine. She still appreciated the cup-of-eggnog earrings I wore (the lost one having been replaced at no cost by the Etsy seller!—I was stunned) and my consistently themed Eggnog Drinking Team T-shirt. I went out of my way to get the requisite photo as a "selfie" with the Christmas Tree behind me, and Laney on my iPad (I had her on there just briefly so I could take the photo) right next to me. My cocktail was, of course, eggnog and rum! Specifically the Kirkland "Eggnog Wine Cocktail" from Costco that I finally broke and bought when we were there last Thursday, with another couple shots of rum added. I got a nice buzz out of it.

Hey, I just realized! Shobhit got home from work in the middle of our Happy Hour, and he wound up participating in the discussion long enough with us that he'll also qualify for a Social Review point for that day! He'll be happy to learn that. Laney and I had gotten to talk about Partition and the centuries-old tensions between Muslims and Hindus, and I knew he'd be far better equipped to answer some historical questions that Laney had than I would be. And then soon enough Laney was ready to make herself some dinner and we disconnected, and Shobhit and I set about making dinner ourselves.

— चार हजार आठ सौ अठहत्तर —

Shobhit's shift on Friday ended at 5:30, right about the time Laney and I got on our call, so he was home only about half an hour later, leaving most of Friday evening for him and me to be at home together. Saturday worked the other way around, with his shift that day being 12:30 to 9:30; I still left before him that morning, as when I texted Alexia to ask if she wanted to return downtown on Saturday to try a daytime attempt of the "Delights" portion of "Holiday Lights and Delights—specifically, the "Augmented Reality Adventure"—she suggested leaving at 11 a.m. So, that's what we did.

And, finally! As suspected after our failed attempts after dark the previous weekend, it was attempting it in broad daylight that was the key, and we had a much easier time getting the app to work. I will say it was still a little glitchy and I often had to close and re-open the app to get it to work properly, but that was still clearly separate from the issues we had getting it to work the previous Sunday evening. First, we walked to the Central Library so I could return a DVD, and then we walked over to Westlake Park.

And we visited the four spots we had been unable to get to work before, and between the two of us managed to get an additional 17 shots while we were out, 14 of those being specifically of the "augmented reality" 3-D images we captured through phone screenshots, as you can see by both the middle (a favorite of mine, a great shot of Alexia) and last shot in today's DLU. We both had a lot of fun finding each spot and then pointing our apps at the cartoon image on a nearby message board (a key element missing after dark the previous Friday) so we could get the 3-D images to work, and then getting shots of each other standing by or amongst them.

A bizarre bit of serendipity happened on our way back, as we went back to the library again as Alexia decided she wanted to take advantage of one of their "grab bags" they have available for anyone who wants to pick up some surprise bagged books or DVDs. When we were walking there the first time, I had returned the DVD of Alfred Hitchcock's original Rebecca, which Shobhit and I had watched on Thursday evening after returning from shopping. We talked a bit about it, and Alexia noted that she had never read the novel on which the movie was based, though she had read other novels by the same author. Later that day, she texted me a photo of one of the novels that happened to be, by sheer chance, in the grab bag she had picked up at the library on our way back: Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca! Holy shit, and what the fuck?

— चार हजार आठ सौ अठहत्तर —

. . . And that finally brings us to yesterday, and more specifically last night, when I finally got back on FaceTime with Gabriel and Lea to do our 2014 Movie Draft. This turned out to be a challenging year for Gabriel, as he was in the thick of his soul-crushing marriage to Kornelija, and thus did not watch nearly as many movies that year as he might have otherwise. It was still a fun exercise as always, and we took roughly an hour to get it done, before Gabriel declared he needed to make dinner. He had earlier suggested we start the call at 5:00, at which time I started preparing my own dinner, figuring I could just talk to them for a while at first on the iPad using my AirPods as I continued cooking, but they took until roughly 6 p.m. to call, which worked out perfectly for me as by then my macaroni casserole was just finished. Thus, I was able to FaceTime them on my iMac—after taking a few minutes to get the damned computer to work well enough for the app to launch, presumably largely because I was trying to close iMovie at the same time and that clearly takes a lot of RAM—and see them on the preferred larger screen as well.

Gabriel decided this time around to switch up who he sent the anonymous draft lists to, and he sent them, instead of his brother, to Mandy, who kind of went apeshit with excitement over being able to participate. This resulted in a rather long string of texts maybe an hour later, after I had finally managed to watch Friday night's episode of The Mandalorian, which I had spaced after so much socializing and other activity over the weekend. I'm kind of hoping we can even bring her onto the call the next time we work through a draft, even though right now the word is she doesn't want to create a list herself but wants to be on the call to listen to the rest of us discuss. I've never done three-way FaceTime calling with Gabriel but I know it can be done for anyone with Mac products, as we all do; I've done it before with Danielle and her daughters. Or we can do it via Zoom, but for some reason for this I like the idea of it still being FaceTime.

Lea spent a lot of the call wrapping Christmas presents. Maybe some of them were also Hanukkah presents, I don't know; I do know she's Jewish. I should get my ass in gear and also wrap the rest of my calendars, which I still have to do. Instead, over the weekend I still made time to watch and review to movies: on Saturday, Alex Wheatle (the weakest of Steve McQueen's "Small Axe" series thus far but still good: solid B), and on Sunday, The Prom (maybe the most fun I ever had watching an objectively bad movie: C+).

And still all of this is aside from the several hours I spent on my eventual "2020 in Ten Minutes" video, which I really must keep down to ten minutes, or at most 10:29 (so I can still round down and call it "in Ten Minutes") assuming Flickr will still allow me to upload it there under their ten-minute limit, as YouTube will no longer work for me in any way if I include copyrighted pop songs. In any case, I have added tons of photos and video clips, constantly resulting in way over ten minutes run time, then relentlessly edited them down and in many cases deleted photos I dearly wished I could include but sometimes you have to kill your darlings, and right now, with photos associated with Christmas still to add, I'm at about 10:20. That's actually pretty workable, all things considered; I'm sure at this point I'll be able to edit it down to the desired length in the end.

My initial approach had been this: to divide it into three parts. Four minutes for Australia, even though it accounts for all of two weeks out of the year, but also well over half the photos and videos from the year that I'd want to include; then three minutes each for sections that currently have the working titles of "Part Two: Quarantine" and "Part Three" holidays. Turns out, I needed more time for the second part and not as much time for the third; it's working out at something closer to just over four minutes for Australia; about four and a half minutes for "Quarantine" (which includes my Birth Week; trips to the ocean and to Idaho; and my mother's passing); and then roughly two and a half minutes, maybe closer to three minutes depending on how much over 10 minutes it is in the end, for "Holidays." The default time given to a single photo in slide show format in these iMove videos is four seconds, and here I've allotted 2.7 seconds per photo at most, with many others, such as the rapid succession of virtual cocktails (or "Virtual Quarantinis" as I called them) with friends and family for my Birth Week, getting only one second. A few rapid-fire photos are even at half a second. It's just easier for me to do it that way than cut them out completely—in the case of my Birth Week, for example, it's either include all twenty-plus participants or none at all, and the latter is not an option! And, for the most part they were separate photos, so in order include them they have to be seen very quickly.

I think I am much further ahead on this video now than I tend to be by this point in December; now I just have the few Christmas-related photos to add from the next couple of weeks, tweaks to make to how the photos are presented (whether the zoom or pull our or show up static, etc), and the pop music tracks to add, hopefully at least three of them. As such, I am feeling quite productive heading out of this past weekend, and soon I should be able to focus on my other year-end projects, including the "Audio Top 20" of albums and podcasts; the Book Log which is already ready as I write that up as I go along throughout the year; the Top 10 Movies of the year; and my "2020 at PCC" photo digest email. I have the next three weeks or so to work on all of those, which is plenty of time.

Being both productive and ahead of schedule always feels good. Maybe I should try that in my actual job!

— चार हजार आठ सौ अठहत्तर —

[posted 12:30 pm]