Yesterday marked the third video chat app I've used since the start of "Birth Week Quarantinis" on Friday—after Skype with Laney on Friday, then FaceTime each with Jennifer, Gabriel and Danielle on Saturday, Sunday and Monday, yesterday I used Facebook Video Chat for the first time. It was with Dad and Sherri, since it was originally their day I had scheduled with my Birth Week activities.

I usually find "filters" to be stupid and annoying, as they were first rampantly overused on Snapchat, then later co-opted by Instagram Stories; apparently they have them on Facebook Video Chat too. I didn't even realize it was what I was doing when I first tapped my photo and tapped a little icon underneath just to find out what it was. Suddenly I was roasting a virtual marshmallow, which cracked up both Dad and me.

They didn't have their own drinks at first, but in short order they both indulged me so they'd have drinks of their own for the requisite "Birth Week Virtual Quarantini" photo, as you can see in the photo above. In that one, Sherri put on a filter so it put a beret on her head and another hat on Dad's. Since I was taking it as a selfie, I couldn’t really put a filter on myself even if I wanted to. I still think it made for a pretty great picture under the circumstances. Also: I briefly struggled to come up with a new background for this shot, something more specific to Dad and Sherri, until it revealed itself to be right in front of my face: Grandma Rhoda's latch hook rug, which Shobhit and I brought home after Christmas 2012, two and a half years after Grandma Rhoda died. Sherri gave out nine of them to family for Christmas that year, and I have no idea what everyone else has done with theirs, but ours has been hanging in our bedroom above our bed ever since.

Side note: I have that matted photo of a man's bare ass [scroll down to see it in the comments] that Mimi gave me at work five years ago hanging on the wall to the left of the rug. I had to be careful not to show a man's bare ass in this shot with my parents.

Anyway, Sherri called me just a couple of minutes before 5:00, and although she sat and chatted for a while for much of it, a lot of it was just with Dad. Sherri got some wine and Dad got a beer. Relatively predictably, things to talk about sort of puttered out right around the two-hour mark. We talked a fair amount about COVID-19, of course, and how little they go out for any reason—so little, in fact, that Dad let me know I would not be getting a card this year, because he doesn't go out. They had gone to Costco earlier in the day, with both masks and gloves on, but they don't sell greeting cards. I told him I totally understood and it was fine. He said I may still get one six months late, and we can just pretend he's turned into Aunt Raenae.

Incidentally, Dad is fairly conservative and always has been, tends to vote Republican. (I actually don't know if he voted for President Fuckwit, and I don't want to know; when it comes to this, we seem to have a "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy.) He did mention, though, that some people think the government is "making all this up," and he noted that made no sense because why would the government go out of their way to deprive themselves of all this tax revenue they're not getting? So, it's comforting to know that Dad's thinking far more rationally than a lot of the conspiracy theorists out there. Dad was never much for conspiracy theories anyway. I think he simply votes whichever way he thinks will allow him to keep the most of his own money.

I also told them about who else I've gotten online with for "quarantinis" so far this week. The drink I made last night was just hot chocolate with rum added, poured into the martini glass. I had to be extra careful with it when taking the photo because I had balanced my iPad atop two boxes on top of the cat scratcher, which itself, rather heavy, was placed on the bedspread on the bed, so I could get the good enough angle with the latch hook rug behind us. By the time the call was done, I had all of 17 photos and screenshots worth keeping for the day, four of those shots I took of Shanti being adorable in my lap while I was working earlier in the day.

But, then I went down to the Braeburn East Building 2nd-floor inner courtyard to take a few staged photos with Dad and Sherri's photo on my iPad, which took the day's photo album on Flickr to 20.

And after that, I went to check the mail. And guess what was there! To my delight and surprise, a birthday gift package from Mimi (speak of the devil), who retired from PCC a couple of years ago and now lives in the Skagit Valley.

I surprised even myself by how moved I was by the card and gift inside, it was so well personalized and thoughtful. The gift wrap alone was lovely (see photo below); and opening that revealed a book of haiku. It took me a minute but I realized that had to be connected to the fact that I used to send out all-office emails with funny haikus about the refrigerator purge when my team was on kitchen duty at work, something that had several pretty big fans.

It was not until I opened the book's front flap that I realized Mimi had also included a card, which was delightful in its own right, and also a short letter on pretty flowery stationery in which she reprinted a couple of haiku poems she said reminded her of me.

It was all so sweet, and genuinely moving to me, I took pictures of every part of the gift: the package, the wrapping, the book, the card, the letter. This package alone added eight shot's to the day's Birth Week photo album on Flickr, bringing the total to 28 shots, as of now the second-largest photo album of the week.

I had already been thinking about writing Mimi an email just to see how she's doing in all of this, and I finally had the prompt to get me to do it. I wanted to send her an email before I posted about the gift to Facebook, which I did this morning. The email I wrote wound up being fairly long (characteristic for me), and I sent it off last night. And although I did not read it until this morning, she had sent off a reply to me by 11:05 last night, complete with a couple suggestions for nice vantage points of views Shobhit and I could perhaps look for when we'll happen to be in the Skagit Valley tomorrow for my birthday, looking at the tulip fields even though we can't officially visit them this year. I loved getting these suggestions, too, as they sound like very cool spots we could have even visited in years past but never even knew about. It's a place she said is called "Little Mountain" and it has two different lookouts, apparently.

So that brings us to this morning, when I have actually not gotten as much work done as usual, for two reasons. First, we had our first all-Merchandising-Department Zoom meeting, which Darrell now says he wants to try having at least every couple of weeks. It maxed out at 23 people on the call at once, which means, so far as I can tell from the staff roster, there was actually not one person in the department missing from the meeting. All but two of us were in our homes; I could see that both Scott and David, both of them Merchandisers (Scott, who I work with, in Grocery; David in Meat) were at the office. I suppose it makes sense that Merchandisers be in the office more often than most, as that's still going to be where any sample product and other types of essential work mail gets sent. I suspect Scott spends more time working at the office than perhaps he technically should, but, whatever.

That meeting took up a whole hour, and Darrell actually went through us all one by one to get brief updates on how we were doing. It was pretty encouraging, actually, that everyone in the department seems to be pretty healthy. I keep reading horror stories in the news (middle-aged people having strokes and turning out to be positive for COVID-19), or from Danielle or Gabriel ("COVID-toe" prompting amputations!), and they freak me out. I told Shobhit this morning how now I keep feeling aches I my toes and legs and it freaks me out and he literally clapped his hands together and laughed at me. Real nice!

And then I wound up, of all things, on FaceTime with Claudia for a little while, as she suddenly messaged me about both Kibby and Robin having been let go, so I had to fill her in on what (relatively little) I knew. I know a lot more about Kibby than Robin, and Claudia even had a little bit of her own semi-gossip about Robin to share. Once I had finished some urgent emails and Shobhit had left for work, I tried to start filling Claudia in via Facebook Messenger, but then she decided to do video chat because it would be easier and faster.

And this really just turned into us catching up with each other, which I got the sense was really nice for both of us. I think she was starting to feel left out of my Birth Week as I had not scheduled a "virtual quarantine" with her—sometimes she's part of my Birth Week and sometimes she isn't. Well, now we're scheduled for Saturday, which will now be the one day this week I actually double up! I've got a 10-day "Birth Week" and now what in the end will have been 11 video chats scheduled. I didn't have one scheduled for tomorrow, but now it looks like we'll do a Zoom meetup for my birthday later in the evening. Tonight, I have Lynn and Zephyr to look forward to.

And now, I really need to get some actual work done today!

[posted 12:26 pm]