So I got nearly two hours on FaceTime with Danielle last night . . . which, as it turned out, was all we needed. This is one of the many downsides of "sheltering in place": when you go back to catch up with the people in your life, there's not a hell of a lot to catch up on. The most interesting things to talk about become things like what you're eating, what you're watching on TV, or if you're lucky enough to still be working right now, how the job is going. And even that last example can really vary depending on whether you're working from home or not; if you are, there's less likelihood of anything all that interesting to talk about there either.

I mean, okay, to be fair, Danielle seems to have a lot more going on in her life than most. Her ex-husband drinks too much—so much so that, apparently, he was recently so drunk, with both the kids there, that he mistook a lizard cage for a toilet and peed into it. That's not to mention his mother, who has lived with Patrick since last June, and apparently has become a bit of a terror and "verbally abusive" to the girls, to such a degree that he finally kicked her out and she's shacking up now with one of his cousins. And bear in mind, Danielle had been having both girls stay with him instead of at her house, because she has been working in the Emergency Department at Valley Medical Center, which means she is consistently working with, around, or near patients who have COVID-19.

After talking to Danielle last night, it occurred to me, sadly: in that scenario, it's actually hard to gauge which house really is safer for the girls to stay in. Things had gotten so bad at Patrick's that the girls both came back to Danielle's place again for a few days. And not just them, but even Jordan, Patrick's oldest who isn't actually Danielle's daughter! (She was Danielle's stepdaughter for many years, but never lived with her; Jordan always lived with her mother. She's in her twenties now.) But, I guess, as of later yesterday, they all returned to Patrick's again, I believe precisely because they finally got rid of Patrick's mother. Time will tell if that lessens Patrick's drinking, which Danielle said sort of ramped up in the face of dealing with his mother, but who knows.

At one point Danielle did briefly get both Morgan and Rylee on the FaceTime call, long enough for them to wish me a happy birthday. Rylee even took their tablet around so that Jordan and even Patrick could say Happy Birthday, although Patrick, fully knowing better, actually said, "Happy Birthday Matt!" I just said, "Who?" Danielle chimed in, "He's being antagonistic." And I think he really was, although he was sort of slightly playing it as a joke. Still annoying.

Danielle continues to be the person in my life I worry by far the most about in the face of the pandemic. She's a nurse and she's literally around the virus a fair amount. Not constantly like a lot of the nurses who work there, but more than anyone else I know. Today she works again in her regular department; usually she does intake for patients getting surgeries, and in the past a lot of those were elective surgeries—which are not allowed right now. They are still doing medically necessary surgeries, though, and I guess any patient there still has to get a COVID test before they can be admitted. Did I mention earlier this month she sent me a photo of herself wearing personal protective equipment (PPE)? It's a hell of a lot more than she used to have to wear, I'm sure.

Side note: Ivan, my other friend who is a registered nurse, remains in New Zealand. He sure picked perhaps the best time in history to travel there. He always hated nursing, although his only jobs were always only at assisted living facilities—the very kinds of places where the current virus runs the most rampant—although he was typically in far more higher-end places, where richer people lived. That's not to say money protects you, but it sure as shit gets you better health care, and I'm sure the nursing homes being particularly hard hit by COVID-19 are typically much lower-end places than the ones he worked at. Still, I'm sure he's thanking his lucky stars that not only has he refused to do any nursing work since he left for New Zealand last August, but he just happens to be in one of the least-hard hit countries in the world. He had been living there long enough on his two-year visa once the pandemic hit that he had no risk of being forced to return to the U.S., which is now the hardest-hit country in the world. And New Zealand shut things down so quickly so early on, including closing their borders (which, if they're smart—and clearly they are—they will keep closed for some time to come), it was just yesterday they announced they have stopped community transmission of the virus, and will already be easing restrictions. This just means they are going from "level 4" down to "level 3" lockdown and so they aren't "switching a switch" either, but they are clearly well ahead of virtually the entire rest of the world. Australia, where Uncle David and Mary Ann live, is evidently not far behind them, although there are concerns about how quickly they want to try returning to normal. And by the way: that tracking app that's apparently controversial? I would voluntarily download something like that in a heartbeat. Anyway, back to Ivan: he still can't travel around the country or even go to restaurants, everything aside from essential businesses is closed just like here, but it's also stunningly beautiful where he is, and he has very little to worry about in regards to catching the virus. Still, even he's being smart: he told me not long ago he hasn't touched anyone for any reason in a long while. Not that he was ever that physically demonstrative to begin with.

So, even though his mom told him on the phone he should come home because there would be plenty of work for him as a nurse (to which his response basically came down to "fuuuuuck no!"), Ivan is a far different—and better—boat than Danielle. Danielle has a job, and can't afford just to decide not to. She doesn't have upper-middle-class parents who can just send her money on occasion. Also, this is literally what she went to school to do. I don't think it ever occurred to her that this kind of thing could be in store for her, but here we are.

She still has three-day weekends, though, it seems, while working 10-hour shifts the other four days. Sometimes she is on call during her days off, but yesterday she did not work, which was a big part of my choice of Monday for her. That, and I have been aiming to keep to what I had already scheduled for which people on which days I had already planned. It's just, instead of going to state parks (which, guess what, are being reopened next week; I still feel good about just shifting the state parks tour to next year, though, so hopefully there won't still even be "social distancing" guidelines in place), I'm hanging out with people on FaceTime or Skype, or in the case of Dad and Sherri this evening, Facebook Video Chat.

So, when my call with Danielle began—at 7:00 instead of my suggested 5:00, because she wanted to finish making dinner; I watched half an episode of The Plot Against America after making pasta myself—she asked me, "What would we be doing if we didn't have to do this?" I reminded her we had planned on going to Deception Pass State Park. Which, now we'll (hopefully) do next year. So, one of the first things we did was get the requisite photo of us holding up our drinks, as you can see in the photo at the top of this post. I'm trying to come up with different backgrounds for this photo with different people each day, to ease up on the monotony, and I chose my satellite photo poster of Greater Seattle because of all my friends, Danielle is most closely associated with Seattle. She moved here from Spokane and lived with me for four months in my studio apartment in the late winter and spring of 2000, after all. Granted, she never lived in Seattle proper again after that (she went from Renton to Kirkland to Bothell back to Renton again), but, close enough!

And since our call did not start until 7:00, and Shobhit got off work at 7:30 and was home shortly before 8:00, he actually participated in about half the call. Hooray for him, he finally gets a Social Review point for one of my Birth Week activities this year! She took that shot of Shobhit and me clinking our glasses together.

I did learn, for the first time, that when you're on FaceTime and you tap the white button, it takes a photo of what is on the screen on the other end. I felt so stupid for a few minutes, having never realized you could do that, and always doing the pressing of "home" and the side button on the device to take a screenshot. But! It turns out my technique is still better for what I want after all, as only my way still captures the little window in the corner showing yourself as well. As in, had the above shot of Shobhit and me been what I really wanted, it would have shown Danielle in a little window in the corner. Instead, she only pressed the white button on the screen, which means it took a photo, on her end, of only what my iPad was showing her, and thus excluded her from the shot. And she was holding up her own drink at the time for this very purpose. Dammit!

I did later get a fun shot of her face on my iPad through my martini glass, as you can see below. I decided to take a break from the hard liquor last night and have Willamette Valley Rosé. But, because it's a week of "quarantinis," I still drank it from a martini glass, as I will every day this week. I'm just aiming to put a different drink into it each day.

And the stuff about Danielle's job and her family chaos notwithstanding, it was still a fun conversation with her. During the first hour, when I said I wanted to get a photo of her with the skyline behind me from the roof, she said, "I want pictures with the art!" So, I switched her from the iPad to the phone so it would stay connected outside, and walked her across the street. And she took shots of me in front of four different murals, although once again we thought she was in the photo too but because of the way she took the photos, they each only show me standing next to or in front of murals. They still made some nice pictures, all of which can be seen in the full photo album on Flickr, which I managed to fill with 21 shots.

It would have been only 17, actually, but at 9:00 I took Shobhit's car and drove down to the office to swap out receiving paperwork, which any other week I would have done by riding my bike there and back. Come to think of it, since Danielle postponed until 7:00, I still could have. Dammit again! Oh well; it worked out well because this way I was able to get some nighttime shots of the view, which you can see in the four photos at the end of the album—hence, 21 shots instead of 17. These are easily the best nighttime shots I have ever gotten of this view, too, thanks to my insistence on upgrading my iPhone before our trip to Australia. It takes far better nighttime photos now because it has a new feature just for that purpose, keeping the shutter open for a certain number of seconds depending on the amount of light it detects. I'm very fond of these shots in particular.

We'll see what today brings! Video chat with Dad and Sherri tonight . . . Lynn and Zephyr tomorrow . . . Beth, for the first time ever during my Birth Week, on Friday. She'll be the farthest away, as she's in Virginia. Sara, who is slated for Saturday, will be second-farthest away, coming from Denver. Shauna on Sunday. Did you notice I skipped Thursday? No vide chat scheduled that day, as it's my actual birthday and I always reserve that one for Shobhit! In fact, we're going to take a day trip! This was his suggestion, too: to the tulip fields in Skagit Valley. They closed the Tulip Festival, but they're still growing the tulips, right? And I've gotten photos from roads in the past. Maybe we can even pack a picnic lunch and find some isolated place to eat it. That part remains to be seen, but it will be nice just to get on the road and be more than ten miles away from home, literally for the first time since early March.

In other news, Shobhit has high blood pressure. He's finally taking the step of taking medication for it. He had a telemedicine meeting with our doctor yesterday morning at 8:00. I even overheard a lady who started the session on his computer saying, "Are you alone in the room right now?" That was in the living room so I went ahead and just came back to the bedroom, where I was supposed to be working anyway. In any case, when I purchased a bunch of stuff just to use up the balance on my FSA card that would otherwise disappear, one of the things I got was a blood pressure reader. Shobhit uses it pretty obsessively, taking his blood pressure multiple times a day. It's always way too high, which is really what finally convinced him to go on medication. He still keeps eating too much, but he can tackle one thing at a time, I guess. Danielle has been very supportive of him getting on medication for it, and I think it's been even psychologically helpful for him to get that validation from her. Danielle is one of the few people whose opinion I think Shobhit genuinely respects.

[posted 12:30 pm]