I think today's update, as usual catching you up on yesterday, will work backward. So I'll start with the little Family Zoom Meetup we had, which Gina suggested we schedule for my birthday on Thursday, after Tristen posted to the family Facebook page to ask if we would be having one this week. Once again Jennifer has evidently not figured out how to use Zoom (far less surprising after experiencing her on FaceTime last Saturday), but we did finally get a new addition to the group for the first time: Becca got Zoom on her phone! She's actually the video feed on my iPad in the photo above, the one with the outer border indicating she's speaking (or making the most noise—I'll get to that in a minute) at that particular moment, at bottom-center.

Others who joined the call included Dad and Sherri (middle row, far right); Christopher (middle row, center); Tristen (middle row, left); Shobhit (with me, top row left); Gina and Beth (top row center), and TJ, Nikki and Cheyanna (top row right). I think Nikki and TJ have been on all but one of these family Zoom meetings so far; they didn't make it for Sherri's birthday on April 17. And last night, although it had a record number of Christopher's children (three out of five), the Zoom call did not get any of my other nieces or nephews, none of either Gina's or Angel's kids. That's okay, though. I honestly expected early on that yesterday would be the one day I did not have a video chat this week, as I was just going to spend the day with Shobhit as I usually do on my actual birthday.

I was good with Gina's suggestion for the Zoom meetup, though, and thought, okay! Another cocktail for the week! By the end of the day this Sunday I'll have made 11 different ones for this. (I'm speaking to two people tomorrow.) So for this one, after getting a half gallon of mango nectar for this very purpose while grocery shopping earlier in the afternoon, I made a "mango vodkatini" and did my requisite selfie with the gang. Shobhit's even visible in this one onscreen on my iPad, albeit barely (again, top row left). So for this Zoom meetup we had seven video feeds and a total of 12 participants—13 if you want to count Becca's husband Tyler, but he never spoke directly onscreen and Becca only once briefly pointed her camera at him. He was fixing a fishing rod in anticipation of fishing being one of the few restrictions to be eased up in Washington State next week.

These Zoom meetups are always interesting in their odd and unusual mix of dynamics between different sides of my family. We are of course still all connected through Dad and Sherri, being their descendants, but we also have many years now of established difference between those who live on the west side of the state and those who live in Spokane and Idaho. Case in point: any time Nikki and TJ's 4-year-old, Cheyanna, gets on these calls, she giddily interacts the most with her uncle (Tristen) or in this case aunt (Becca), because she far more readily recognizes them. She just doesn't get many chances to see Dad and Sherri, much to Dad and especially Sherri's disappointment, so although I think she has a vague recollection of them, she doesn't have as quick an understanding of who they are. Same goes for me and for Shobhit, though probably to a slightly lesser degree since we visit them at Mom's in Idaho at least once and usually twice a year. But she for sure doesn't know who Gina and Beth are, and seeing us all as much smaller little "Hollywood Squares"-like boxes jumbled on a computer screen probably doesn't help a four-year-old much either.

Cheyanna did get a nice round of applause when she showed us all she could write her name, though.

We actually did manage to chat for the full hour Beth had it scheduled for, which apparently meant it was going to shut down at that point, so they kind of abruptly said their goodbyes around 6:55. We've done these so many times now, and there is so little to update each other on, that within the first five minutes we had a moment of silence, which I broke with, "Okay that's it I guess!" But, we got some chatting going, especially once Becca got on. She had a tendency to kind of dominate the conversation, telling us about how terrible the job was that both she and Tyler have been laid off from, but I don't think that was entirely her fault; being on her phone, it was fairly evident she didn't always realize when someone else was talking or trying to talk. If she keeps joining though then maybe she'll start to get the hang of it. It was nice to see her, anyway.

We actually could have scheduled for 5:00 in the end, but I had no idea when Shobhit and I would get back, and so I had suggested scheduling it for 7, which Gina did. So basically that became the highlight of my evening, after which I came back to the bedroom to work on processing photos—of which I took 69 yesterday alone, by far the most of any day for this year's Birth Week. That was because of Shobhit's and my outing, which I split into a Flickr photo album of its own, with 51 shots and still making it the largest of any for this year's Birth Week; I made a separate photo album for just our dinner, the day's "quarantini" and the Zoom call, which amounted to 18 shots—that one thus being the smallest (so far, anyway) of this year's Birth Week photo albums.

Well, unless you want to count "Auntie Rose Birth Week Hall of Fame," which has only 16 shots . . . but all of those are from past years. I posted that to social media this morning, to commemorate today being the day I was supposed to spend with Auntie Rose at Fort Worden State Park. But, she died in February, altering that plan for good . . . of course, then COVID-19 happened (lucky for Auntie Rose she missed it; I feel particularly bad for Uncle Imre now though) so we never would have been able to do it anyway. Now I hope to do the commemorative visit with Valerie next year instead.

But, I digress!

The above photo is of Saffron Grill, the Northgate Indian restaurant that catered our wedding in 2013, and which we try to get back to for meals out at least once a year or so. We were supposed to eat there with Lynn and Zephyr sometime after returning from Australia . . . so much for that plan! Sometime later, hopefully. But, I still told Shobhit I wanted to get takeout from there for my birthday dinner.

That photo is, of course, of their abandoned dining room, at 2:38 on a Thursday afternoon. They'd probably usually be kind of slow at that time, but never abandoned. No dining in now, in all of Washington State, since March . . . and likely for months to come. Shobhit and I have not done a lot to support restaurants the way many others have; we never ate out a lot to begin with. But, if we're going to get takeout, this is a perfect choice for us.

Mohammed, the guy who owns the place and usually hugs us as soon as he sees us there, was sitting at a table with just a few other staff when we came in. Shobhit and I both had our face masks on; no one on staff in there did. They probably should have, no? Mohammed is pretty old. That worries me. In any case, it took Mohammed a minute to recognize him, and he even took a minute to recall us when Shobhit identified himself personally when he called to place the order. He did so just to make sure Mohammed would make sure his bindi dish was super, super spicy. He did that for us the last time we ate there, but this time when we got home Shobhit declared it still wasn't quite as spicy as he wanted, but, oh well.

He did not get up from the table to greet us this time, which was as expected. He did give us a very enthusiastic hello though, and asked how we were. Shobhit mentioned it was my birthday and Mohammed immediately insisted on giving us a free dessert to take with us—as he usually does whenever we dine in there, either a dessert or an appetizer. Shobhit began to feel bad about that after we left; he honestly wasn't sure if he had said that just to mention that we were eating their food to celebrate my birthday because we love them so much (which is true), or if it was force of habit knowing we might get a free dish out of it.

I really want to go back again soon and leave them a big tip. Shobhit asked me if he should leave a tip, and then signed the check without leaving one before I could say, as I nearly did, "They probably could use all they can get." Shobhit is conditioned to not tip if we have not been waited on, though. I think even he will agree to tip generously next time.

In any case, we took all that home and had a very delicious dinner to cap our day before the family Zoom meeting. Before that, we had done our grocery shopping at both Costco in Marysville and PCC in Greenlake Village, on our way home from Skagit Valley—where, even there, we stopped at two farmers markets, so we supported the local economy at least a little bit.

All the tulips and other flowers had already been harvested from the usual huge fields, even though the "Tulip Festival" is usually the entire month of April, clearly in an attempt to discourage people from doing exactly what we were doing. In fact, there was a surprising lot of cars on the freeway, and Shobhit kept complaining about it. I had to be fair, though: "Well, we're one of them," I said.

In our defense, we were never around any other people except inside grocery stores, and even there we were careful to have masks on. Because we now know that cloth masks do more to protect others from you, rather than the other way around, any time I see people without masks on, I give them the widest berth. We're still supposed to maintain the six feet of distance even with masks on, but oral "slip streams" are a much bigger issue without the masks and they largely render the "six foot rule" irrelevant.

Anyway, our first destination, after leaving the house at about 9:45 in the morning, was what made the whole drive worthwhile, thanks to Mimi's suggestion in email the other day: Little Mountain Overlook at Little Mountain Park, at which I took 34 photos, hence the day trip's photo set being the largest of the week, and the only one to feature the kind of natural, photogenic scenery usually spread out over the entire week. It was such a nice break, a breath of literal fresh air, especially with so much less pollution happening at the moment.

In the park itself, we saw all of five people total, all of them at a distance. There are two lookout spots with spectacular, panoramic views of the town of Mount Vernon and the Skagit Valley (including parts of Puget Sounds and the San Juan Islands in the distance), and we visited the south one first. There was then a short trail walk to the north one, which is much newer, opened in 2005, and a very cool sort of blank with the lookout at the end of it. There had been no one there at the north one at all, and we just saw two people inside the covered structure at the south location when we were headed back to our car. Then, we saw three hikers on our drive back down the mountain, a couple and one single guy with two dogs. The couple waved at us as we passed by and Shobhit waved back. I could tell we made the right decision by getting out there earlier, in the morning, as people were coming out of the woodwork even by shortly after 11 a.m. when we left there, and we surely would have encountered even more people had we been there later in the afternoon—the very kind of thing we wanted to avoid.

The whole place was very, very pretty, particularly the park itself. I do love my urban lifestyle but wow was it nice to get out into the woods, even if for just half an hour or so.

It was after that when we attempted to visit the tulip fields, only to find them all entirely harvested. We still drove to the entrances of both Roosengaarde and Tulip Town, both of them with signage up noting that they were closed. STAY HOME, SAVE LIVES. And here we were, not staying home. We stayed in our car, at least! They have said that just going out for a drive is fine, which many of the people on the freeway might very well have been doing. Granted, we could see places like Lowell's and Cabella's from the freeway and their parking lots were packed with cars.

I guess you can consider us having been just a little naughty for leaving town for a bit yesterday. But it was basically a one-time thing, at least during the stay-at-home order. As I said before, there are no plans to do anything like that again before the order is lifted, and from now on any outing like that will be local walks and the like.

All in all, I really must say, a pretty pleasant birthday. It wasn't even that different than I had originally envisioned, actually—I had hoped to go with Shobhit to a state park with Shobhit. Instead, we went to a different park. A global pandemic is a bit of a bummer on which to start my 45th year (which means, just to clarify, yesterday I turned 44!), but given the circumstances, I had a very nice day, and for that I am grateful.

[posted 12:40 pm]