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So, Shobhit's shift yesterday was 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., and since I stop working every day at 4:30, that gave me plenty of time to finish up everything else I wanted to do before posting to Facebook and to Twitter about the 83-minute compilation tribute video I made about Mom. I had already made the Spotify playlist that serves as the video's soundtrack, but after work yesterday I took maybe an hour and a half or so to write up the Word document I called "Notes on the Subtext of Songs in Mom's Memorial Video," which I also shared from OneDrive.

I tagged 16 people in the Facebook post: Christopher (my brother); Bill; Christopher's five kids, Nikki, Becca, Tristen, Christian and Braeden; Mom's brother, Uncle David and his wife Mary Ann; Mom's biological sister Cyndi; and six of Mom's caregivers and friends, Shelley, Holly, Darcy, Karen, Kristen and Mary.

I wish the video upload on OneDrive had an indicator of how many times it's been viewed, but oh well, you can't have everything. It's gotten a good response on Facebook, and even Laney posted that even though she never knew Mom, she watched parts of it, and even cried a little at the end. I already acknowledged how dull it probably gets to people who don't know her, but especially as time moves on past Mom's death (it's already been 20 days now), the people who were significant parts of her life are likely to appreciate the video in its entirety.

I even got a very appreciative email from Uncle David this morning (which was sent at about 4:30 pm, July 21, local time in Adelaide). I want to share what he wrote to me here:

Hi Matthew,

Just a note to thank you most sincerely for making and sharing that wonderful video -- and thank you for including Mary Ann and me even though we've been so far removed for so long. Joni Mitchell's "Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got till it's gone" keeps going through my brain and out my eyes ... I did write some words of remembrance a few days ago:

Dear Matthew and Shobhit,

Matthew, your tributes to Jeanni for encouraging your individuality illuminate another part of her tenacity, constant care and support for her family and close friends that were such a great part of her. Now she rests in the peaceful and loving space that she always wished for everyone else.

Thank you Shobhit for supporting Matthew at this grievous time. We're grateful for the days we were able to share with you earlier this year.

Love always to both of you ... hopefully we will be able to meet up again in the not too distant future!

Stay safe and strong,
David & Mary Ann.

I won't share my response to him in its entirety, but I will say I started it by writing, Well, of course I would include you! You're her brother, after all; excluding you would have been deranged. ☺ I then added that hopefully their plan for a visit to Vancouver, B.C. next year can still happen and we'll be able to get together again then, and if nothing else I really hope to return to Australia no later than what would normally be Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras in 2023, as that is when they will be hosting World Pride, which I would really love to go to.

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Then I watched an episode of I May Destroy You on HBO Max while eating a veggie hot dog for dinner, and that was how I discovered the show is actually still in its original run—I didn't realize that. I merely caught up on the backlog of six episodes, half the total of twelve for the season, that have aired so far. I think this week's episode should be available there now though.

And, now that I have finished the Mom tribute video, I have two other projects to embark on. First, cleaning up the fucked up playlists on my Apple Music app, and retrieving music tracks that still seem to be missing, which must have somehow not gotten transferred over when I tried copying the entire folder from my old external hard drive; I need to reconnect that and retrieve them. I have also turned Time Machine back on, which should save me from dealing with this level of detail of bullshit again in the future.

And, after that: actually do the digital transfer on all the rest of my home video cassettes, so I can get them all into my Flickr account once and for all. I'm still housebound most of the time, so it's not like I don't have the time. If there were ever a good time for that level of time commitment for a project, it's now. The program I bought even has an audio convertor, so I could do the same for all my old "talk tapes," which I have also wanted to do for ages. And then, finally, the digitization of my entire photo, video and audio collection will actually be complete.

Shobhit got home around 8:30 and we watched about three episodes of Designing Women before I went to bed, kind of early actually. I even got a solid seven hours of sleep last night, yay!

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[posted 12:25 pm]