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Not much of note to report on today, although that's going to change pretty quickly going forward.
I didn't go anywhere or see any movies last night, which effectively made a nice break. Shobhit worked until 8:30, so I made dinner, using up most of the vegetables we had left and making a stir fried rice along with a veggie chicken sample from work. I used peanut sauce/dressing for my portions (dinner last night and lunch today) and left the rest for Shobhit, who opted to add soy sauce. He seemed to actually kind of like it.
Oh, I almost forgot—I did wind up talking to Danielle for around 45 minutes while I was cooking. She called to ask if I wanted to go with her to this
show happening at the Seattle Rep Theater in February and March with her. She had found a way to get significantly discounted tickets to it, and she wanted to have a night out with a friend to look forward to. I said sure, and we decided on a date and time while we were on the phone (Saturday February 26, 7:30 pm) and she made the purchase, all while we were on the phone.
I then got an update from her on Patrick, which I had not really gotten since
I was at her house on November 21 at the time she got the news Patrick had gotten in a bad car accident. Last I heard, he was still in the hospital and may need surgery. I still don't know if he ever had surgery, but I don't think so. I only know that he is still "slightly cognitively impaired" and that he's being advised not to work for another
two months at least. Well, if nothing else, Danielle could breathe a bit of relief in the knowledge that she wasn't going to lose a coparent for her children, which she was really kind of freaking out about last month.
Anyway, as you can tell, I took a while to cook that dinner. It was a lot of chopping vegetables and sauteing them. I used one vegetable I'm not even entirely sure what it was. Daikon? I also added sliced zucchini, in addition to the standard onion and bell pepper and green onion and mushrooms. Shobhit and I are going to Costco tonight and will be adding fresh inventory of a lot of that stuff, the old being what Shobhit wanted used up last night. I even added a good amount of both basil and cilantro. I'm like a fancy chef or some shit.
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Ivan was awake earlier than usual last night, out and reading on the love seat in the living room when I got home from work. I'm not sure Shobhit realizes this, but Ivan really likes the Christmas Tree and Christmas lights too, and if Shobhit is gone but Ivan is home when it gets dark, Ivan always takes the initiative to turn the lights on (Shobhit no doubt assumes it's always me). So, he was in the living room reading, surrounded by the Christmas lights.
He had also gone to get takeout, and even eaten, while I was on the phone with Danielle and cooking. By the time I was finished making my dinner, Ivan was shuffling back over to the love seat with his book and his requisite throw blanket he likes to curl up in. Shanti was sitting on the arm of the love seat and looking right up at him, which I found hilarious and certainly delighted Ivan as he kind of worships Shanti (and is often pointedly indifferent to Guru, just to annoy me). When Ivan took a couple of steps closer to the love seat, Shanti began meowing straight at him, quite loudly, communicating with him directly and persistently in a way I had never seen before. It was both hilarious and adorable. She even got up onto the back of the love seat and all but demanded he give her some attention.
So, moments later, Ivan took off his glasses and posed with her. "
Picture!" I actually took three shots, and I sent all three to him, but I only kept the one I truly lucked out with and got with Shanti in mid-meow, her mouth open. I think it's a fantastic picture.
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I then went to eat in the bedroom while I worked on the "2021 in Ten Minutes" video. I went out of my way to make this one video clip heavy, and fewer still photos, just to give it more potential engagement. The many video clips I added, I just added unedited at first, which took the run time well past thirty minutes. I took a pass at whittling it down last night, and so far I've got it down to 13 minutes. Bearing in mind there will be plenty more photos and video clips for the next couple of weeks, I will need to knock off at
minimum four more minutes off of that. I'll probably have to make multiple more passes at editing to get there. I did notice that, as per usual, the vast majority of the content is from the second half of the year. The only real exception to this was last year, because of our two-week trip to Australia in February and March, and I deliberately allocated a full four minutes of that year's ten to that trip alone. In any case, Flickr still has its ten minute limit which is good because then I have no choice to limit it at least that much and not try to get away with eleven or twelve minutes as I have done in the past.
I also located three tracks from this year's new albums to add for the soundtrack: Garbage, Adele, and ABBA (the ABBA one, conveniently, is about Christmas, so it goes at the end). There's also a brief subtle inclusion of "Edelweiss" from the
Sound of Music soundtrack because that was sung at Auntie Rose's memorial, and I might also add a snippet from "Let It Go" from
Frozen for when my grandniece Cheyanna is singing that in a video clip from our visit in Idaho in June.
The music thing is also tricky, now that I have subscribed to Apple Music—I can't add track files from a streaming service to my videos; I can only use downloaded music files. In the future, assuming I stick with the Apple Music subscription (and with each passing day that becomes more likely), any specific track I want to use, I will have to go out of my way to purchase individually.
I have to admit, I'm finding the Apple Music subscription terribly convenient. Many old albums I used to have but didn't even have recently in my music library, I can now find and listen to with no effort whatsoever. As I write this I am listening to, of all things, Ozzy Ozborne's 1983 album
Bark at the Moon—which I never owned, but still heard plenty as a teenager because my brother had it.
I'm still eventually going to have to spend an inordinate amount of time reconstructing playlists, but at this point I have basically made my peace with that. At least I still have most of them on my iPod Classic to use as templates to duplicate them exactly as they used to be.
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[posted 12:22 pm]
