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I had a pretty low key weekend. No socializing to speak of, aside from the Friday Office Lunch Meetup on Zoom, which I already wrote about in Friday's DLU. I spent most of the rest of my time catching up on Flickr photo captioning, which I am now fully up to date on with all photos I have posted from 2020 thus far (which accounts for 2,786 photos at this point). Next projects to get back on track on: digitizing home videos, which I haven't been able to work on in a week or two; and, more pressingly, cleaning up the mess of my music library in iTunes.

I was on a call for 71 minutes with a representative from Apple Support late yesterday morning, who walked me through recreating an entirely new library, including importing playlists from 2018. I can live with that. The trouble is, I have nearly my entire library in a playlist of one sort or another, which meant it took over two hours to load. The lady I spoke to, who gave me her first name but not a case number, scheduled a callback at 1:00 Pacific Time, warning that if she was on another call, she could take longer. I totally get that, but, I just never got a callback all day. I guess I'll need to call Support again after work today.

Anyway, through all of my weekend, I only left the condo one time: Shobhit and I drove to my office for me to swap out receiving paperwork late Saturday morning, then we drove to Pike Place Market where I stayed in the car long enough for him to buy some Beecher's cheese and a couple French rolls at the French bakery, and then we went to the Central Library, where I had a DVD to pick up.

The Seattle Public Library is shifting to curbside pickup, at the moment only for holds that were placed before libraries closed due to COVID-19 concerns—for now, they are not allowing you to place any new holds on their website. I guess this is the one time in history where it's very much to my advantage that I had 26 holds already on my account. I still went in and placed pauses on all the holds except for the DVD (which you can't pause once it's ready for pickup anyway), as I sure don't want them all to become available at once. I'm still trying to burn through the two books I've had at home since February.

But, we did pretty much immediately watch the DVD as soon as we got home: the Christopher Nolan film Interstellar, which I had marked for watching on, I think Hulu, for some time before it was suddenly unavailable. I still wanted to re-watch it, so I placed a hold on the DVD at the library ages ago.

Shobhit was only moderately interested at first, saying, "Isn't it boring?" I said, "I certainly don't think so." And in the end, he was pretty rapt, even for the full two hour, 48-minute run time. About halfway through he even said, "This is very well written." Also: I was shocked to discover the kid who had played Matthew McConaghey's teenage son had been Tomotee Chalamet, well before he became a household name. Can you believe that movie came out six years ago? Time flies so much, I often think about how quickly it will actually seem to have passed before all this pandemic shit is behind us. (Just in time for new global catastrophes! Fun!)

Shobhit actually called in sick Saturday, just because he felt like it—after all, if he doesn't use all his sick days by the end of the year, they don't roll over. It was nice to have a semi-spontaneous day to just spend together, even if we didn't really do anything special. Of course we watched a couple other movies and TV shows over the weekend, including this week's episode of Lovecraft Country last night, which I had to mirror to Apple TV via the iPad using the HBO Max app, because it had not yet had its Pacific Time Zone regular air time on the straight up cable channel.

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In other news, I have already made social plans for next weekend: with Tracy, the new woman from work I have gotten to know mostly over email since she started in February. She asked over IM today if I wanted to "meetup for a socially distanced snack or something." I did it with Happy Hour with Laney at Cal Anderson Park, so I figure, why not? I suggested basically the same thing: meeting at a park with blankets ten feet apart, which actually worked very well with Laney and me—I had been afraid the distance would make it hard to hear each other with regular speaking, but that was not the case at all.

She said she lives on Eastlake, and I suggested we meet at Streissguth Gardens, which I suddenly remembered from my "Botanical Gardens" themed Birth Week in 2018, when I first discovered it; the place is very close to Eastlake and Tracy was unaware of it. Now, it is mostly garden, but there is a patch of grass near the north end of it where I think we could still make this work. I'm actually pretty excited about it. Socializing! In person! With a new person! But of course, with proper precautions.

And, I already have plans to watch a Netflix movie with Laney via both Skype and Netflix Party on Saturday next weekend, so my next weekend is already getting to be pretty full.

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And, bringing us to today: I just finished up a Zoom "Lunch and Learn" on Bellevue history, a very similar presentation to the one offered several weeks ago on Seattle's Central District, in both cases to offer some history and neighborhood information for new PCC locations. Lamai really packed a lot into this half-hour on Bellevue, making it a very informative and interesting presentation. And then Brenna sprung on us all that Lamai is also soon leaving us all, to go to school at Western Washington University! Well dammit, who is going to have the most clever Halloween costume at the office now?? (Let's just not get into whatever the fuck Halloween is going to look like this year.)

So anyway. Back to work, headlong into another week!

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[posted 12:41 pm]