clips galore
Shobhit had his second Project Management class of the week so I spent much of the evening last night editing and uploading more home video clips—I'm actually nearing the end of this project already! I think I just finished what would be the equivalent of my penultimate two-hour tape of videos. This particular one, though, covered most of 2004, and five separate events. Let's review them!
*McQuilkin Kite Fly 2004 (8 video clips added): This was on the Washington State coast with extended family, in March. I rented a car to drive all the way down there on my own—2004 was the year in which Shobhit and I got together, but that wouldn't happen until three months later, and he didn't start accompanying me to family gatherings until the holidays. As had long been typical, I spent most of my time with either Dad and Sherri or with Jennifer.
*Easter Weekend 2004 (6 video clips added): Barbara and I took Amtrak together to stay at Dad and Sherri's in Olympia for the weekend, headed down on Saturday and back to Seattle on Monday. It's been a long time since I stayed there that long for the Easter holiday in particular, maybe even since this particular year.
*Family Reunion 2004 (3 video clips added): The most memorable aspect of this for me was that it happened to fall the same weekend I had Nikki for her third summer weekend visit with me, which gave her a quite-rare opportunity to be present at one of these huge extended family gathering events. She had just turned 12, literally two days prior. She's 28 now, and pregnant with her second child!
* (2 video clips added): I had nearly forgotten about the "theme" of this one . . . this was the third birthday party for Barbara, in as many years in a row, that had a fun sort of gimmick: 2002 had been our "Will Writing Party," with Barbara, Danielle and Craig; 2003 had been a surprisingly huge party with tons of guests and even multiple surprise ones, including Barbara's daughter Beth—called her "epitaph party" (I will forever love her gravestone cake from that year). In 2004, it was "Barbara's 30th Birthday Party Dedux," an idea I had after she had told me she didn't remember her 30th birthday (which had been in 1982) because she had gotten wasted on booze and cocaine. So, for this party I brought a case of Coke (soda)—an got a great photo of her snorting a can. The attendance numbers at this one went right back down to what they had been in 2002, just basically with Craig swapped out for Clarica (who had also been at the 2003 party). Although technically this party had more, as I had a boyfriend to bring (Shobhit, at his first Barbara party) and Danielle brought Morgan as a two-month-old. So this party actually had six in attendance, if you count the baby.
*Thanksgiving Weekend 2004 (3 video clips added): This would be the second family holiday Shobhit ever took part in with me; the first had been for Halloween, an odd one as somehow I did not take any video footage at all for Halloween that year—and not only that, but even though there is a great photo of him and me dressed as our first time out as "a cowboy and an Indian" (which we repeated once about a decade later in West Hollywood) at Andrea and Walt's Halloween party the night before, he is nowhere to be found in any of my photos from Halloween Day and evening in Olympia. Strange. But! Check this out—Dad and Sherri dressed as hospital staff with face masks on. They were sixteen years ahead of their time! Anyway, I'm seriously digressing here . . . Thanksgiving Weekend then marked Shobhit's first time accompanying me to visit Mom and Bill in Idaho. We also spent some time at Christopher and Katina's house the day after Thanksgiving, and with the exception of a brief video clip of Gail at her house when we had stayed with her in Spokane, all my home video footage from that trip is roughly 17 minutes' worth with my nieces and nephews at my brother's house.
After all that, now I just have Christmas 2004 and a few videos, I think from 2004—oh, and still the roughly one-hour video of the birth of Morgan from July 2004. And then I'll be done. Well, sort of: I still need to get a copy of the video I took of Rylee's birth in 2008, of which I never got a copy of my own. I'll have to get that from Danielle at some point this year, after which all of my home videos will finally be added to my Flickr account. Only a few of them kept private, though, because some of the videos of birth may necessitate some level of modesty. Although in both cases I did record from behind Danielle's shoulder; I wouldn't have been able to handle a straight-on shot and probably would have fainted. That's not hyperbole, either. I literally nearly fainted the day Morgan was born just from seeing the epidural needle.
I think I may be getting better about needles, though, after this past year has bombarded us with images of them. I am finding when I see people getting shots in TV and movies, it doesn't bother me like it used to. I still can't speak to whether it's easier to see in real life, because I have made assumptions about that in the past and then found it still affected me. I am not super inclined to test looking right at a needle entering me in person.
Anyway, after Shobhit's class was done and I had the days video clips uploaded, I went out to the living room and we watched a couple more episodes of season three of The Larry Sanders Show. And that about wrapped up my evening.
It's taken me less than a week, but I think I have adjusted to Daylight Saving Time. I've been truly zonking out at around 10 p.m. the past couple of nights, and that same time last week was only 9:00. I still wish we could just stay on Standard Time all year round. It irritates me that any push to stick to just one of the two is a push to make DST permanent, which I think is dumb. It may give us the illusion of an extra hour of evening daylight in the summer, but extending that to winter means in December it would be dark in the mornings clear until around 9 a.m. How idiotic is that?
[posted 12:30 pm]