action packed
Mercifully, today's DLU is bound to be quite short compared to the typical Monday post, as I already wrote in detail about Saturday's memorial service in Port Townsend for Auntie Rose (plus the two state parks on Marrowstone Island that Shobhit and I visited on our way there) in a post yesterday. I'm really not kidding about the length of that post, either; I emailed Valerie this morning with a link to it, and figured out that it's just over 47,000 words, or the equivalent of about ten pages.
And there's even more I could have written about! For example, the only other descendants of Grandma McQuilkin—Auntie Rose's older sister—who were there besides myself were Aunt Penny, my dad's sister and Auntie Rose's niece; plus Aunt Penny's daughter, my cousin Tammy, and Tammy's husband Erin. They've been at plenty of family reunions over the years and I'm Facebook friends with Erin, so I might have spent some time talking to them this past weekend, but Shobhit and I only realized yesterday that they must have left as soon as the actual service was over. We didn't see them inside the church hall for the "memorial tributes." I figure either they are vaccinated and over-precautious, or one or more of them is unvaccinated and regarded it as too high a risk to go inside with people. Both of these scenarios are reasonable from their perspective (well, except for nearly any reason not to get vaccinated), but if they are indeed unvaccinated then their decision not to go inside was objectively best for everyone.
And actually, Aunt Penny did communicate with me, in a way, as soon as Shobhit and I arrived, and I was looking in vain for Dad and Aunt Raenae in the crowd before I realized they had not made it. Aunt Penny had gestured toward the back, evidently to get us to see the small table where we needed to write up our name tags and put them on.
So, what about the rest of my weekend, then? There's very little to tell, actually. I just spent the evening on Friday at home, and Shobhit and I burned through some episodes of Squid Game on Netflix. And yesterday, I had the Braeburn Condos theater reserved for Tracy to come over and watch a double feature of the James Bond movies Skyfall and Spectre, but although I did still watch the movies, I wound up never using the theater reservation as Tracy never came. I woke up briefly shortly after 6:00 yesterday morning to find this text from her, sent at 5:10 a.m.:
Hey, sorry about the last minute notice but I'll need to cancel our movie day. I'm having a depressive episode and I haven't slept yet. I'll text you when I wake up.
I texted her back shortly after 10 a.m., to tell her I could wait an hour or two to start if she woke up early enough for that and she changed her mind, or if she wanted to come and see just the second movie, but I still ended it with "only of course if you feel up to it. Taking care of yourself is first and highest priority always"
She never did text me again yesterday. She's not at work today either and I haven't heard from her since, but I don't feel any resentment about it. If she needs to make choices in service of her mental health and well being then I understand and respect that. I do kind of wonder whether she'll still join me for No Time to Die after work on Thursday, a plan we made on Friday and she told me then to go ahead and purchase the ticket and she'll pay me back, which I did. I guess I can only hope she'll be up for it once Thursday gets here, but only time will tell.
So, Shobhit did not want to go downstairs to watch the movies in the theater, which I honestly would have preferred. He wanted me to watch them upstairs in the condo, so I just went ahead and did that, even though it totally wasted a theater reservation. This double feature was a different experience from the previous weekend's with Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace, as I found those two movies to be of roughly equal quality and pretty enjoyable.
This time, though, it was like I forgot how great Skyfall was, and I also forgot how stupid Spectre was. As in, Skyfall is my favorite Bond film out of all 25 that had been made up to that point; and Spectre, with its ultimately preposterous retconning of all the previous villains of Daniel Craig's Bond films somehow having been part of the same organization, is easily the worst of the Daniel Craig Bond films. I mean, it's still entertaining, but as Shobhit noted, "It's comparatively convoluted" (true) and "this is kind of stupid" (also true).
On the upside, the MetaScore for No Time to Die is 70, up ten points from the 60 score for Spectre. How Quantum of Solace got an even lower score at 58, I'll never know, but I feel that movie was way better than Spectre. At least it was a lot easier to follow. The thing about Skyfall, though, is that it has a great plot, great acting, and in particular great editing and cinematography, making it even more fun just to look at than any of the other Daniel Craig films as James Bond. I did hear on a recent podcast that No Time to Die takes itself a little too seriously—and Skyfall also had a sprinkling of pretty great, subtle humor—but I guess we can live with that.
In any case, when not watching the movies yesterday, I spent several hours in the morning and early afternoon writing that long blog post about Saturday, and then after the movies were done I went back to the bedroom to work on captioning all the days photos—I didn't even finish that until this morning.
Besides all of that, I suppose I can tell you that next weekend is already shaping up to be action packed, a possible majority of it having to do with Ivan, with whom I haven’t had a chance to go out much in a while.
When Shobhit and I took him and Shobhit's cousin Harshal to Discovery Park and then the Ballard Locks at the beginning of August, he was pretty interested in the Locks, and when I told him Argosy Cruises does a tour through them, he expressed interest in doing that. He said we should do it in the fall, as he wanted to avoid any peak season summer crunch, and so I waited until maybe a week and a half ago to bring it up again, suggesting Sunday August 10 as a possible date.
At the time he still seemed interested, and although he said he gets every other weekend off of work, he also didn't have his October schedule yet. Evidently he finally did yesterday, though, as he messaged me, Let's plan on doing an Argosy cruise this weekend please
He was home and awake last night when I saw the message on Facebook Messenger (for some reason his messaging app of choice), having sent the message shortly after 6:00 but I didn't see it until about an hour later. But he was eating his dinner and I went out to the living room to discuss it, especially after I made the delightful rediscovery, which I had forgotten, that AAA members can get a 20% discount—so I booked both tickets and he will pay me back. We're now set to take the 3:30 tour that leaves South Lake Union and does a one-way, two-hour tour through the Locks and ends on Pier 55 on the Seattle waterfront. This is in the opposite direction from the direction Shobhit and I took the tour for my "boating and waterfronts" Birth Week in 2019, so that'll mix it up a little for me. I did ask Shobhit last night, as a courtesy, if he wanted to join us; he said he had been on it before and declined. Ivan has never taken this tour, though, and I am happy to take it again.
So, that will be Sunday next weekend. Saturday is the delayed in-person Seattle Pride event at Volunteer Park, which I also told Ivan about and he expressed an interest in making checking out as well. A while back I sent him the trailer to this Icelandic horror-drama movie called Lamb which I figured would interest him; it did even more than I realized, as he said we should also go see that this weekend, which I'll then have to wedge in the middle of all that stuff. Assuming Ivan will be working Friday night and thus taking the nights Saturday and Sunday off, the most realistic time for us to do that then will be at one of the 7 p.m. showings on Saturday evening, after the Pride event. Somewhat to my surprise, he was good with that plan as well. I don't feel like Ivan usually wants to cram too much planning into that short amount of time, and honestly I'll be surprised if he actually does do both Pride and the movie on Saturday, but maybe he will. We'll see. I am hoping Shobhit, at least, comes with me to the Pride event on Saturday. He won't have anything better to do!
[posted 12:25 pm]