holiday movealong
Life has been pretty uneventful since I last updated roughly 23.5 hours ago . . . Shobhit had a shift at Total Wine & More until 6:30 and so he didn't get home until around 7:00. I made myself a Field Roast veggie burger for dinner, and Shobhit doesn't much like their patties so he asked me to make him "burgers" using fried slices of eggplant instead.
This was actually a new and kind of interesting experience for me, come to think of it. Shobhit likes to have two patties but one bun, so basically served open-faced; I fried two thick slices of eggplant and they revealed themselves to have basically no density at all, so I fried another two for each side of the bun. What I ended up doing was, on top of each bun-half, sandwiching the fried onions, mushrooms, chopped green chili peppers and fresh sliced tomato between two slices of eggplant. I put plenty of seasoning on it as well, and Shobhit wound up liking it more than I thought he might once he actually got home and ate it. He also insisted on making French fries out of the four potatoes we had left, which I absolutely did not need, but at least my weight is exactly the same as it was yesterday and I guess that's the best I can hope for. I'll just be more mindful of portion control today, as the last few days my weight is finally going in the right (down) direction again, however slowly.
We ate the fries while watching Monday's episode of His Dark Materials on HBO. Before Shobhit got home, I watched 1.5 one-hour comedy specials, from the few I had not already seen mentioned on a year-end list I heard about from Marc Maron's podcast (because his special had been ranked #1). The first was Leslie Jones, which I realized I had already watched when it was originally released nearly a year ago, but I couldn't stop watching as it was still making me laugh.
I also did a bit more work on my "2020 in Ten Minutes" video, adding a couple of the music tracks and editing accordingly. I then discovered I had missed about 10 photos from October, just when I thought I had perfectly edited it down to a workable length. Fuck! That shot the full run time up to 10:45 or so, and I managed to axe a few photos and edit down a few of the video clips just slightly, and now it's at 10:00 even. I'm pretty sure whatever is left of the year to come I can keep under thirty more seconds so I think I'll be okay.
. . . Hmm. Maybe not. I was thinking my "2019 video" was slightly over 10 minutes and on Flickr it's ten minutes exactly. Granted, it ends appropriately right at that moment, but I can't think of any other video I can check to test this on Flickr with its ten minute limit . . . I may have to just keep it legit at 10 minutes by the end of this year, or test it first if I try to finalize it at, say, 10:29. I'm beginning to think now I won't get away with the latter after all. Fuck.
In other news, this morning I got the invite finally finalizing a date for our Zoom Merchandising Holiday Happy Hour: Tuesday next week. Somewhat annoyingly, it's scheduled for 5 p.m., but I'll live. I'm just thrilled it's happening at all, which means it will guarantee at least six Christmastime photo albums for 2020, and even six if I can do a Christmas Lights tour of neighborhoods as I still hope to do. That's less than the 8 I managed in 2017 and 2018 and certainly the ten from last year (which I already knew would be an anomaly under any circumstances), but more than I managed any other year between 2013 and 2016. Considering the limits on our regular lives this year due to the pandemic, I'm really quite pleased with that. And really, I'm pleased that we'll get a Merchandising holiday gathering at all, even if it does have to be on Zoom. I'll be sure to get lots of fun screenshots, just as I did for the "Holiday Happy Hour" we already had for the entire office.
[posted 12:27 pm]