A Walk Between the Screens
I've got just one bit of socializing to report on from my weekend: I took a walk with Alexia early Saturday afternoon, to the Central Library and back. I didn't even have anything to pick up or drop off myself, but Alexia had a couple things to drop off, and she'd had such a busy week prior with her job that she really wanted to get a walk in. We even talked about how we might want to make a renewed effort to take these walks more often again, as schedules and especially weather and limited winter daylight hours have cut down on how often we used to walk before.
There's a couple of other parts to that as well, not least of which was her knee surgery that kept her from being able to walk so far as my office with me for a while. It sounds like maybe she's healed enough to start back in on that again, plus the later time it gets dark each day, slowly but surely, as we approach the spring equinox in March. Or, I suppose, if she's still limited in that sense, she can just walk with me as far as downtown and I can walk on to the office myself.
There's also the fact that I never go to the office on weekend days anymore. I used to go on average every Tuesday and either Friday or Saturday, having processed receiving paperwork on Tuesdays and Fridays, but that was making the two receiver stacks too lopsided, with far too many invoices stacked up and waiting for me by Tuesday after a weekend. Now I process the paperwork on Mondays and Thursdays, and then go into the office at the end of the work day those days. The size of the stacks even out at least a little better that way. And then, I've just been waiting until Shobhit is home from his job and I take the car. This has resulted in my getting less exercise over this winter than I have maybe in two decades, but, whatever. I'll get back on my bike again soon enough. Also, I still have faith that I'll be back working in the office sometime this year, in which case I'll be exercising more just by default, always coming home either on my bike or by foot, depending on the weather.
I was supposed to have a virtual Happy Hour with Tracy from work yesterday afternoon, but she texted me asking to postpone to next weekend because her sister was having car trouble and she needed to go pick her up. I went ahead and had my planned margarita anyway. So, now I have at least four separate social plans next weekend.
As for the rest of my weekend, I did watch and write and post reviews for two movies, each on Friday and Saturday: Friday was Malcolm and Marie (which I kind of hated, but thanks to good acting and nice cinematography: solid C), and Saturday was The Trip to Greece (solid B, as completely expected). I don't remember what made me think of the latter movie and look it up to see if it was available streaming, but I did a very unusual thing in posting a review of a movie some nine months after it was actually released—I hadn't realized it was out, and as a completist I wanted to write about this one since I had also reviewed the previous three in the series.
I spent much of the rest of the weekend starting on the editing of my digitized old home videos. Check this out: all of the content of my two-hour videotape covering camping with Grandma and Grandpa McQuilkin, Jennifer and Heidi, Tammy, and Toni Marie is now loaded to my Flickr account. This is after a process of loading the two-hour file to iMovie, then cutting it into maximum-ten-minute segments so I could upload them. This was the first home video recording I ever did (aside from a brief bit when I was 12, in 1988, with my "Big Brother" using his camcorder), and I was sixteen years old.
I have a lot more to get through, but I feel good just having the process started. In contrast to when I was digitizing it all, I won't be able to do this work during my work day, as it requires too much constant attention. So that's another reason it will take longer. But, I'm in it now, and once I have a huge project started, I see it through to the end, always, no matter how much time it takes. It'll be so, so satisfying to me when I have it all on Flickr, and in particular the holes in my holiday collections of phot albums can be filled with the holidays when I only took video and never took still pictures.
I have already, on occasion, exported much shorter video clips to post to certain people's Facebook pages, of when they were much younger. That'll probably keep happening here and there over the coming weeks.
Aside from that, I convinced Shobhit to start watching The Larry Sanders Show on HBO with me, and he was immediately into it. I never watched that whole series, only saw a few episodes in its original run between 1992 and 1998. But, I've been meaning to watch it ever since I discovered on MetaCritic that it appears to be one of the most acclaimed TV comedies of all time. In fact, three seasons appear on the top 10 of that list alone, two of them in the top three, topped only by one season of Murphy Brown (which would probably also make a nice re-watch, although just the one season of that show is anywhere near the top of that comedy ranking). So, we've watched three episodes so far, the third one featuring Carol Burnett, which was genuinely hilarious. Shobhit and I were both clapping and laughing our asses off.
[posted 12:33 pm]