Back to work on Monday again . . . but, still updating on the last day of my Birth Week, as this year each day I have been updating in the morning about the day prior. This has meant, though, that quite unusually (but actually typical during my Birth Week), I had daily regular blog posts both days of the weekend two days in a row. Otherwise I would just get too far behind on all my Birth Week activities I had to catch up on.

At least today I have only yesterday to catch up on, instead of Friday through Sunday like I do most Mondays, which is good because I have a lot of work to get done today. Also, not a huge amount to share about yesterday; I merely had a roughly 70-minute Skype call with Shauna. As it happens, the first time I had seen her since my last Birth Week—a year-long break from seeing her that has happened multiple times now. Much as Beth had on Friday, she noted that we can get on Skype again sometime soon, so perhaps we will.

You know what? Just for honestly pointless shits and giggles, I'm going to list who I had video chat calls with all week, and what platform was used.

Friday, April 24, with Laney: Skype
Saturday, April 25, with Jennifer: FaceTime
Sunday, April 26, with Gabriel and Lea: FaceTime
Monday, April 27, with Danielle: FaceTime
Tuesday, April 28, with Dad and Sherri: Facebook Video Chat
Wednesday, April 29, with Lynn and Zephyr: Facebook Video Chat
Thursday, April 30, with several family members: Zoom
Friday, May 1, with Beth: FaceTime
Saturday, May 2, with Claudia and Dylan: Facebook Video Chat
Saturday, May 2: with Sara: Facebook Video Chat
Sunday, May 3: with Shauna, Skype

So, in order of frequency of usage:

FaceTime: 4 calls
Facebook Video Chat: 4 calls
Skype: 2 calls
Zoom: 1 call

A decade ago, the only one of these things, and which was a savior for Shobhit's and my relationship when he lived in New York and then Los Angeles, was Skype. Curiously, now the video quality on that platform is easily the worst and it is not at all my default preference anymore. I feel like FaceTime has the best image quality although Facebook Video Chat is surprisingly close. And Zoon is generally pretty good as well, it's just that it's also the only platform that caps unpaid calls at forty minutes. I keep thinking about looking into how much it would cost to pay for a membership, so I don't have to keep just asking Gina and Beth to host our family Zoom meetups.

Anyway! It was fun catching up with Shauna. She's another one who is a talker, and always has been. No lulls in conversation with her. Her grandson is two now and she goes over to her son's once a week to visit—through the closed sliding glass door. Still no physical contact, but she says there is a nearby window they keep open with a screen on it so they can hear each other well. She headed straight over there after hanging up with me, and that was right after a family Zoom call she had before calling me. Shauna was quite the virtual social butterfly yesterday.

My drink was a White Russian (as always, with Irish Cream rather than yucky coffee flavored Kahlua). Shauna took a tequila shot. She says she does that regularly with her girlfriends on weekly Zoom calls since they can't go out drinking together. I took so many pictures just trying to get a good one of her taking the shot, it became the perfect set of photos for me to make the first animated gif of the week.

Then, once I finished with those shots posed in front of a pig painting on my computer (because Shauna loves pigs), I moved over to the dining table to sit out the rest of the call. We did keep on taking several screenshots from both our sides of the conversation, but I only kept a few of them as otherwise they were all too similar; as such, yesterday's full photo album on Flickr contains only 13 shots total, making it officially the smallest photo album of the week. But! Because there is an extra item put in there as the animation of the three shots of Shauna taking the shot, the album still gets shown as having 14 shots in it, thereby on a technicality making it still tied with the Sara/Saturday photo set as the smallest album of the week. Those were the last two of the week, out of 13 separated photo albums, and clearly indicated a bit of a "winding down" as my Birth Week drew to a close.

Given the limitations of doing my Birth Week in the middle of "stay-home" orders due to a global pandemic, I'm pretty happy about that; I clocked in at 13 photo albums last year as well. They each had an average of many more photos, but whatever, I'll take what I can get. I did consider doing posed photos with Shauna's face on my iPad out in the inner courtyard of the Braeburn West building, which I had not used yet, but decided the inclusion of the pig was enough for the photos with Shauna.

I did add the collage I made of my posed photos with drinks from everyone all week in the Shauna photo album, though. I created it and posted it on the same day, after all.

In other news, I have a supporting part in the chorus of a really cool video Hayley made (Laney's friend, of Thayer and Hayley fame—Thayer being Laney's long-ago ex but always still close friend), and shared just yesterday. She reached out early the week before last, asking people to send her video of themselves singing the chorus to OneRepublic's song "Connection, and I was one of the people she tagged to ask to do this because she knew I used to sing in the Seattle Lesbian and Gay Chorus, along with Laney. (That, as it happens, was where Laney and I met—twenty years ago, in August 2000! We've known each other since she was younger than I am now.)

I asked when she would need it by, and she asked to get it by the following Saturday (April 25). I did my part on April 23, using the lyric video version so I didn't have to spend five times as much time on it memorizing the lines—because, at first, I thought I would try singing the whole song. I lost my patience though and never did do any better than just singing the second part of most lines, with headphones in (as instructed). The chorus is high for my range without going into falsetto, by I managed it. Still, even keeping one AirPod out of my ears so I could hear myself enough to stay in tune, listening back without being able to hear the music was something I found deeply embarrassing, and once I sent a couple clips to Hayley, I deleted them and hope never to watch those videos again.

This is a key difference between the me now and the me of fifteen or twenty years ago: in the past, I would have been too embarrassed to send the clips. Now, I was still embarrassed but I sent them anyway. I knew I would just get blended with a bunch of other people singing the chorus. And guess what? A bunch of other people participated who sang way worse, as you can plainly see below. But! As expected, Hayley still blended us all very well, singing alternate, parody lyrics that at Hayley's request Laney wrote for her. Laney has long written parody lyrics for songs sung by small ensemble choral groups she was in.

In any case, Hayley took a week to finish it up, and finally shared it yesterday. It's very sweet and pointedly rewritten for this era of pandemic self-isolation, and I think it turned out quite well. You can see me among the many little boxes of separate people singing the chorus in their homes (I made my bamboo plant my backdrop). Near the end, you can see the very end of the clip I sent to Hayley just for her amusement, in which I screwed up and just let out an exasperated tongue-babble. It cracked me up to see the visual of that included.

[posted 12:30 pm]