some notes
Guru went an entire day yesterday without puking. It was like a fucking miracle.
I just cleaned puke up from under the dining table this morning. While I should have been working. And as often happens, I hit my head on the underside of the table while I was doing it.
I am so, so sick of this. There is concern for Guru's health, of course, although how pressing it is kind of remains to be seen: he's been puking regularly literally for years. We really should get him back in to see a vet sooner than later, but Shobhit doesn't want to until we're far enough out of the pandemic that we can go inside with the cats to offer at least some comfort while they're being emotionally traumatized.
The thing is, in between his puking, Guru is meowing incessantly at random intervals. It's crazy making. This work-from-home racket has mostly been fine for me all this time—it will have been a year as of March 13—but I feel like I'm finally hitting a wall with it. It's frustrating no matter what if I still come home from work to puke I have to clean up, but at least I can still put it out of my mind for the ten or so hours I'm away from home for the day. The pressures of work itself are enough to deal with. And as I start to feel some "work-from-home fatigue," it certainly doesn't help that I know it'll be months yet before we can work in the office again.
And god knows how it'll look even there going forward. Claudia already told me over text the other day that "I never want to go back to full time at the office." Apparently being at the office is far more distracting to her for getting actual work done than being at home, but also, as she put it, "I don't really care for a lot of the folks in the office anymore. I don't miss hearing them or seeing them." Yeesh. It's too bad too, because she is by far one of the best people still there (as am I, if I do say so myself), and her absence will be keenly felt.
Not much to actually update you on; I chose not to watch a movie last night and instead spent the bulk of the evening editing and uploading digitized home video clips. The old photo albums added to this time included Easter 1999 (5 video clips added); Lynn and Jim's Wedding (17 video clips added, and incidentally not only are they long since divorced by Jim is dead); and Tulip Festival 1999 (4 videos added).
Some notes about these:
One of the clips for Easter 1999 is only a 39-second bit that cracked me up, of Gina blowing her own nose and then wiping David's, when he was all of nine years old. My favorite is that at the end I said, "He's gonna love that in twenty years!" So, now that it's 22 years later, of course I had to post that to the family Facebook group.
When it comes to the album for Lynn and Jim's wedding, to which I brought Barbara as my "plus one" even though she had never met Lynn before, the album originally contained all of 19 photos, and now has nearly as many—seventeen—video clips added. Twelve of those are just of Barbara, her then-roommate Alicia, and me hanging out at their apartment while I got ready for the wedding, and covers a full hour of my just leaving the camera set up on a shelf with it recording surveillance-style. I think I thought maybe it would be interesting to watch many many years later, but, I was mistaken. That said, I've kept the videos all this time, so I saw no reason to delete them. Instead I cut it all up into manageable five-minute increments, and added a note in the album header not to bother watching them because they are boring as shit. Ha! (One minor exception: when I wiped eyeliner on my jeans and Barbara insisted it would never come out, which I didn't believe. The black mark was there for the entire rest of the time I had those jeans.) Anyway then I have five separate video clips of the wedding itself.
Not much to add about the Tulip Festival set, except to say that two of the clips were recorded on Sherri's birthday, the day she turned 47. Barely more than three years older than I am now! Apparently I bought her a set of earrings and a necklace as a gift, which I completely forgot about. I wonder if she still has them? I have no memory of her wearing them any other time. Honestly I'm not nearly as concerned with that as I am just realizing I would have spent inheritance money to buy them, and although I would never say I regret having done it, I probably should have spent far less money on such things at the time. I might actually have been able to do things like invest and grow the money, instead of completely running out of it by 2001. This is how you learn lessons in life, I guess.
[posted 12:30 pm]