into the digital future
I was thinking about how this was actually a relatively quiet weekend, but then I realized, hey! I actually have two people to give Social Review points to for this weekend.
First would be Laney, as we had our monthly Virtual Happy Hour on Friday. We both basically agreed to "reset" our expectation of maybe meeting social-distanced in a park or something for next month, depending on how the pandemic is going. This, actually, was the third month in a row that we were planning to go to a bar with a view around town: The Fog Room in May (which we had already been to once before, last October); Mbar in June; The Nest Rooftop Bar in July. Obviously none of these actually happened, and very well may never happen with Laney, if she sticks with her plan to retire next year and start traveling in her van full time. The one kind of upside to this is how it has become a trial run of what we had already long planned to make "virtual Happy Hours" every month after she left town, as a means of keeping in touch regularly.
For now, it's just been Happy Hour over Skype, now five months in a row. I haven't uploaded the photos I posted on Friday to Flickr yet, but I will soon enough.
I think Laney has taken to really keeping her eye on the clock with these Skype Happy Hours. We got online with each other Friday at 5:30, and then were on for two and a half hours, to the minute. By 8:00, she wanted to get off and go eat her dinner, which has become a standard part of these video chats. I had two double shot margaritas and I ate salad for dinner during the call itself. Shobhit was working and did not get off until 8:30.
Laney and I had plenty to talk about, though, considering how very much had happened since we last got on a Skype call—not quite a month, but three weeks: we had done a Netflix Watch Party viewing of Da Five Bloods on Saturday the 20th, which was two days after Mom was first sent to the hospital; one day before Shobhit and I left for Long Beach; and a week and a half before Mom actually died. That was quite the string of events, one of them literally life changing. We didn't even mention that Pride Weekend, which had had to be virtual this year and which Laney didn't participate in at all, was also in the middle of all that! There was brief mention of our visit with Danielle for the Fourth of July, also within that three-week time span. I mean, Jesus.
Side note: Renee Raketty said on Facebook that Seattle's virtual Pride events were "a major achievement." The evidence? 3,300 average viewers per day. I have no idea how to gauge that as a metric exclusively within the parameters of online community participation, but compared to the roughly half million that would have participated in Pride were it done the traditional way, with in-person festivals and a parade? I don't know if I would go so far as to call it "a major achievement." I certainly applaud what they managed to put together; it was objectively fantastic, given the time in which they had to put it all together and what they did manage to put together. I just wish there were some way to get more people actually involved in it. Because the honest truth is, for a huge majority of the people who usually go to Pride, this year it was like there had simply been no Pride at all. (Not for me, though, and for that I am grateful.)
Shobhit worked 11 to 8 on Saturday, so I decided to walk to the office and back to swap out receiver paperwork, leaving at 11 a.m. Alexia joined me. I tried looking for my lost retainers while walking downtown via Pine, but that was really a lost cause. I just have to accept that I'm seeing a new orthodontist on Thursday, it will be another two weeks before I have replacement retainers in hand, and it'll suck up $400 of the balance on my FSA card, leaving a paltry balance of $66. My replacement contact lenses alone this year will cost me more than that, especially now that those are about twice as expensive as they used to be now that I wear multifocal lenses. What a pain in the ass! And all because I stupidly dropped my retainers out of my hoodie pocket while riding my bike to my dentist appointment. Oh, another side note: I'll be relieved when I have not gotten sick for at least two weeks after that.
At my suggestion, we walked back from my office via Denny Way, so we could stop in at the Asian grocery store Alexia had told me was a fascinating look: District H—which, hey look at that, I only just figured out when looking up that link just now that it's part of the same company as the H Mart that's also been on Pine between 1st and 2nd for a while now. Alexia and I walk past that one all the time too! Anyway, I wanted to go into District H because Alexia said they had all these international, unusual flavors of Kit Kat bars. Unfortunately, the single serving bars she had seen previously appeared to be all gone and now all they had was larger bags that cost seven bucks, and I was like, fuck that. So then we just walked the rest of the way home.
Aside from otherwise just watching some episodes of several different TV shows while Shobhit was at work, my new digital converter for transferring my VHS and smaller home video tapes to digital arrived from Amazon yesterday. The old one I had bought for when I made the video compilation of Grandma McQuilkin after her death in 2011 no longer works with the 64-bit macOS system Catalina, much like a ton of other older programs I have on the computer. With this new device, which cost me nearly $90, the setup was done in minutes and it works perfectly; I have already transferred probably at least a couple of hours' worth of home video clips featuring Mom, for the purpose of making a similar compilation video over the next couple of weeks.
I have quite a lot of home video tapes, both VHS and the smaller size that go into the camcorder Dad and Sherri had gotten me for my college graduation in 1998, which span a lot of events in my life between 1992 and, say, around 2004 when Shobhit and I first got together—by 2006 I had an iPhone that could do video on its own, at increasingly better video quality. But that decade-plus with lots of home video features a lot I still never converted to digital, and therefore have not watched in well over a decade themselves.
Kind of ironically, I've had my VCR and the camcorder and all their attendant cable connections waiting all this time, now nine years since making the Grandma McQuilkin video. I always intended eventually to transfer all the rest of my home videos, but as I said, there's a lot. Memory space on my 1TB external hard drive was always an issue, and only in the past week or so have I even gotten a new hard drive that quadruples the memory. That still starts with it already a quarter full, however, and I am already beginning to suspect I will have to upgrade my external hard drive yet again much sooner than I did this last time, as I hope to just get every one of those tapes transferred over time, hopefully within this year. But, just as I did with Grandma McQuilkin in 2011, first I have to concentrate only on the video clips featuring Mom, so I can get to making a memorial video collection of her sooner than later.
I'm already really enjoying working on it, even though sometimes watching video of Mom from 25 years ago makes me sad in a way I never thought to anticipate. Yesterday I watched the video Dawn had taken of the day Mom and Bill got married in 1997, for the first time in at least 15 years, maybe even 20. It's an interesting experience to watch something like that from this much of a remove, remembering the relationship difficulties and deep resentments between Mom and myself at the time, but which are now ancient history and meaningless.
[posted 12:19 pm]