Well, this was unexpected: my irrational obsession with making Flickr photo albums at least 20 shots was more than doubled with yesterday's "Birth Week Quarantini" with Jennifer. 44 shots! That's in line with many average Birth Week day photo albums in any other given year when things are actually normal. And this year, as with everyone, I only spent time with Jennifer via FaceTime.

There's a lot of reasons for my getting a surprising lot of photos yesterday, though. First off, before I actually called her at 4:00 in the afternoon, I still took some other shots with the intent of padding the numbers: I had 13 photos before I even placed the call. Still, that means there remained 31 photos to be taken during or related to the FaceTime call. Even that's a lot more than the mininum of 20 I typically aim for.

This is not likely to get repeated with many, or maybe any, of the other people I FaceTime with this week, though. Jennifer kind of went all-out for me in a way I certainly did not expect. Inspired by the sign Laney made for me on Friday, Jennifer asked Hope, her oldest, if she would draw a sign for me. Hope is incredibly talented, and so I was treated to this truly fantastic work of art:

And there is just so much going on with this sign! It says,

Happy Birthday MATTHEW
It's that bitch Carole Baskin's
Fault you can't eat
CAKE with US

Carole Baskin being, of course, a reference to the suspected-husband-murderer from the massively sensationalized Netflix docuseries Tiger King, which became all the rage in online discourse in the first days and weeks of the stay-at-home orders across the country. Hope also added a flying saucer for some reason, with a little alien sliding down the rainbow to the left of her little portrait of me, from my "DO GO ON" meme where I dressed up as Gene Wilder's Willy Wonka for Halloween 2016. It looks like Hope added a little star to my hat just for good measure.

Other reasons I got plenty of photos yesterday included my taking several screenshots of her cats (I only got maybe five of them, out of seven), and also getting at least one screenshot each of everyone else in Jennifer's house: her three kids Hope, Chase and Ian; and even one of her boyfriend Matthew. And also, food! They literally got a birthday cake for me, and even sang me Happy Birthday (side note: I do not actually expect to be sung to every day) before I blew out their candles!

Jennifer cooked their dinner a bit earlier than usual just so it would already be done and they could sit and eat while we visited via Skype; they had shrimp and grilled asparagus and something else I forget. And, in addition to the cake, Jennifer made stuffed strawberries as a secod dessert. I really wished I could be there to eat some.

They also just ate "my" cake while I watched. Jennifer did try to feed me a bite.

Anyway. Between all their food, the many people present and often participating in the conversation, and all the pets, yesterday yielded a lot more photos than I envisioned. I'll be surprised if any one of the other photo albums for this week surpasses it, with the possible exception of Thursday, my actual birthday. Yesterday Shobhit suggested we drive up to the Tulip Festival, even though it's not actually happening this year. They still have the flower fields, though, and we can just drive around and look at them maybe. I wonder how many other people will have the same idea—probably a lot, actually—and how hard it will be ever to just pull over and take some pictures. I kind of hope it's a bit rainy, or at least cloudy, that day now, as that will discourage others more than it will us.

We had originally planned to go to the Tulip Festival Saturday April 18, the same day Dad and Sherri were going to go as part of Sherri's birthday weekend. But, that obviously got canceled. At this rate, I'll consider it a blessing if we're even able to go to Olympia for Christmas.

In any case, Shobhit was originally scheduled to work Thursday but when I expressed disappointment he asked to swtich shifts with someone, so now Thursday is the one day this week he isn't working. And, with the exception of Wednesday when he has a six-and-a-half-hour shift that ends at 4:15, all the other days he does work he's working until 7:30, which works well for my "Birth Week Quarantinis" with friends. Laney was Friday; Jennifer yesterday; honestly somewhat to my amazement, I already made plans for hanging out (virtually) with Gabriel today—he actually called me yesterday to ask when I wanted to do it. I'll be ready with today's cocktail at 4:00!

Tomorrow will be Danielle, and I'm hoping with Dad and Sherri on Tuesday since that was the day we had otherwise planned on going to Cape Disappointment for a bike ride. I still need to get confirmation from Lynn for Wednesday, which itself had also been the original day planned to go with her to a state park. Thursday's my birthday, always reserved for Shobhit; I'm hoping to get on FaceTime with Beth, Barbara's daughter, on Friday. She had said some time ago she wanted to be part of my "Virtual Birthday" I turned this year's week into. Saturday next weekend will be with Sara from Denver; Sunday will be with Shauna. So, I should still manage to spread the love across all 10 days of my so-called "Birth Week" as usual.

I managed to stay on FaceTime with Jennifer a good three hours yesterday. I think she pretty much just waited for me to be the one to sign off, and once we had well and truly run out of things to talk about, I did just that. She said she still needs to get Hope to help her load Zoom so she can join for our family meetups (which have not been scheduled in a while). I discovered how not tech-savvy Jennifer really is yesterday, which I was kind of taken aback by: I did not realize how out of touch she really is, technologically speaking, and she's a year and a half younger than I am! She also has an iPhone and a large iPad, but could not figure out either how to FaceTime me via the iPad (which should be very simple) or sometimes even how to take her phone off "lock rotation" so her image would not be sideways on my end. She even sometimes had trouble figuring out how to get back to FaceTime on her phone after being in another app, or she would forget that she had the front-facing camera on instead of it pointing to herself. I laughed at one point and said, "You sound like you're seventy years old!" Not ten minutes later I was having my own technical difficulties with FaceTime for a minute, so of course Jennifer took the opportunity to say back to me, "You sound like you're seventy!" Touché.

We hung up at about 7:00, and soon thereafter I baked Costco spring rolls for Shobhit and me to have for dinner, which we ate while watching the movie Molly's Game on Netflix. I knew when I saw it in theaters in late 2017 that he'd be into that movie, and he was glued to it last night. Still, when I asked if he liked it, the best response I got was basically, "Huh."

Now I'm going to post this, maybe spend some time captioning photos on Flickr from the past two days, and make some cashew butter chocolate chip cookies.

[posted 10:19 am]