Easter 2021

Easter 2021 Roll Call! 1. Dad
2. Sherri
3. Gina
4. Beth
5. Matthew
6. Shobhit
7. Brandi
8. Nick
9. Jaycee
10. Gianni
11. Enzo
12. Ricky
13. Rachael
14. Raiden
15. Ruby Mae
16. Britni
17. David [Britni's husband]
18. Alex
19. Caitlin
20. Amira
21. Alaina . . . Hmm. Well, I guess I have to half-concede something, as I really did not realize the list was this long until I just wrote it out. I was on a FaceTime call with Gabriel and Lea later last night for our 1990 Movie Draft, and Gabriel made a crack about how I "hung out with dozens of people today." Immediately defensive, I said, "it wasn't dozens of people." Yeah, well . . . okay, technically I was still right. But also, barely: three more people present, and it would have been two dozen at Easter at Dad and Sherri's yesterday. And, indeed, it was the closest thing to a "normal" family holiday gathering than anything my family has done, quite literally, since Christmas 2019. And, many could quite reasonably argue that it was jumping the gun, too many people together too early—this in spite of the fact that among these 21 people, four are fully vaccination and two (Shobhit and myself) are partially vaccinated. That left another 15, eight of them adults and seven of them young children, not vaccinated at all, collectively from four separate households, all of them interacting indoors without masks on. For Shobhit's and my part, I will say this: we took a compromise approach, probably not as cautious as we should have been but certainly far more cautious than anyone else there. When the full group was present, both Shobhit and I wore our masks any time we were inside the house. Not a single other person did that. When we first arrived, the only ones there were Dad, Sherri, Gina and Beth—all of them fully vaccinated—so we deemed it safe enough for us to visit inside the house without our masks on until others began to arrive. And when they did, Shobhit put his mask on and I went outside on the back porch. For the next few hours, I stayed outside as much as I could help it, and aside from when Easter Egg hunts were going on, I was easily outside more than anyone else, including Shobhit. He wanted to be warm inside; the weather was actually decent, with sun breaks, but still chilly. He just kept his mask on. And then, this part was probably inevitable as opposed to what you could say was a bit of naiveté with my "compromise approach" mentality (which is why, in terms of safety, avoiding gatherings like these altogether is the better option): after a while, the only ones left at the house were Dad and Sherri, Shobhit and me, Britni and her husband David. Two fully vaccinated people; two partially vaccinated people; and two unvaccinated people—all adults. By that point, the masks kind of fell away and we just stopped wearing them, even inside, for the next hour or so. Call it a calculated risk, I guess. I'm not saying every choice we made was the best choice. Far from it. But, I won't pretend they weren't choices we made—not here, anyway, where my readership, reach and influence is minimal at best. It's minimal on Facebook too but it's still much, much different—which is why I did not post any photos to social media that indicated how many people were around. David did mention something at one point which indicates a pretty naïve approach on his part, and which I think basically represents the approach of the rest of the family, and frankly way too many more: "When I'm not with family, I follow all the protocols." Which is to say, he means more than just his own household: they hang out with siblings and grandparents, etc, under the assumption that the whole family is essentially a "bubble." It's that sort of thinking that causes the spread of the virus. Three more points about my activities this past weekend: first, being partially vaccinated, I am still largely protected—nowhere near as much as I will be once I get the second shot, but far more than without any shot at all. That mitigates my worries about this a huge amount. Second, it will be two and a half weeks before I am around anyone besides Shobhit again, which is plenty of time to move past your standard "quarantine" span of days. Third, I get my second shot on Tuesday next week, and thus will be full two weeks past full vaccination near the start of my Birth Week. I'd be a lot more worried about all of these things under other circumstances, although to be fair, the rising number of cases among unvaccinated people is admittedly a pretty grave concern of its own. Anyway. This year's mix was interesting in that Angel, my oldest sister, did not make it—but, all four of her children and all seven of her grandchildren did. By contrast, Gina and Beth (Gina being my other sister, also older) did make it, but her son David, his girlfriend Jackie and their little baby did not. It's very much due to there being so many small children now that the total number went up to 21, nearly double the 12 we had for our "virtual Easter Zoom" last year, and slightly more, even, than the 19 present for Easter 2019 (which itself had a very different mix of people). This particular holiday seems to really vary in people who come and number of people present: 2018 had only 13. Dad did a return to form with the Easter Egg hunts this year: a hunt for the small children in the back yard, and a hunt for the adults in the front. Jaycee, my eldest grandniece, is now 11, but as that separates her from the small children, Dad told her she could join in the adult egg hunt this year. I took some video clips of it, which distracted from concentration, of course, but I am never good at finding eggs, and found zero this year. I think Shobhit found maybe one? Dad hid plastic eggs with prizes in them, and I think the ones for adults generally had money in them—at least one with a lot more than other eggs, although I have no idea how much; I never found out. When it came to food, Dad and Sherri made a ham, and I brought down the Field Roast Celebration Roast I had gotten on sale over Christmastime and saved just for this holiday specifically. In fact, I had totally forgotten about it! It was Shobhit who asked if we had one. And it was nice to have it, as otherwise there was virtually nothing in the way of protein for us to eat there—even the breakfast egg casserole Beth had made had meat in it. Gina and Beth also brought a cheese and crackers platter, which I had some of, and Shobhit would not touch any part of it only because there was a small section of sliced salami on one side. I never get that ridiculous about my vegetarianism. As long as the cheese or crackers isn't actually touching the meat, I'll happily eat it. It's a wonder he can function at all at events like this sometimes, honestly. He did have plenty of deviled eggs, his stated reasoning being that and the Field Roast were the only non-sweets he could eat. Of course he could have had cheese and crackers, so he can just take responsibility for that. Anyway, about 32 of the deviled eggs, I brought: I made a bunch on Saturday night, and they were quite good, if I do say so myself. There were none left over by the end of the day, only some of the other batch Sherri also made. And most of those got done right before Shobhit and I left, as Sherri was cleaning up and handed me one to eat. When I made them last year, at Shobhit's request I had made the filling out of garbanzo beans. Last year he cited not caring for mayonnaise. Ironic, that: he was perfectly happy for me to make them with mayonnaise this year, all because there was a great deal on Best Foods Mayonnaise at Costco. Even his culinary preferences get trumped by a good sale. As for photos, the Easter 2021 photo album on Flickr contains 59 shots, 52 photos and 7 video clips, another example of how "photogenic" Easter winds up being also really varies over the years. As it happens, this photo album would have been only 43 shots, but another 13 were added with the very last thing Dad, Shobhit and I did before Shobhit and I headed back home: we went to check out the newly opened portion of the Deschutes Valley Trail running from Tumwater Historical Park to Brewery Park at Tumwater Falls (formerly known, for decades, as simply Tumwater Falls Park, but they changed the name in 2019). Dad had long wanted to show it to me. It was not a long stretch of new, paved path, so we were able to walk it pretty quickly. I would have loved to spend more time within the Brewery Park itself, as I had not been there in a long time, but as I said, it's not going anywhere and I'll get a chance again. I wanted to get going by 4:30 so Shobhit and I could get back home in time for the SAG Awards. And, that we did: the SAG Awards this year aired for all of one hour, with pretty skilled editing actually and although there were shots of Zoom calls, those were used sparingly. It made for a briskly paced awards show that thus surpassed most other, longer ones done "virtually" in recent months (most notably the Golden Globe Awards telecast, which sucked). There were some notable surprises which will no doubt shift a lot of Oscar prognosticating and narratives, so I look forward to hearing people talk about that on my film-related podcasts. It also meant I had more time than anticipated for the aforementioned 1990 Movie Draft with Gabriel and Lea. I even could have done it at 7:00 p.m. instead of 8:00 as scheduled earlier in the day via text, but I learned later that they had a surprise visit from Janine, Gabriel's mom, and so that took up roughly the hour until 8:00 when we already planned to do the draft. So anyway, real quick let's run down the history of winners, including who won this time: Movie Draft #1, on 10/4/2020: 1999 (winner: Lea)
Movie Draft #2, on 10/18/2020: 1984 (winner: Lea)
Movie Draft #3, on 11/8/2020: 2007 (winner: Matthew)
Movie Draft #4, on 11/22/2020: 2000 (winner: Lea)
Movie Draft #5, on 12/13/2020: 2014 (winner: Lea)
Movie Draft #6, on 1/10/2021: 1970s (winner: Lea)
Movie Draft #7, on 1/30/2021: 2020 (winner: Gabriel)
Movie Draft #8, on 2/14/2021: 1993 (winner: Gabriel)
Movie Draft #9, on 3/14/2021: 2003 (winner: Matthew)
Movie Draft #10, on 4/4/2021: 1990 (winner: Lea) Lea's back on top again! She had quite a streak there for a while, but either Gabriel or I won the last three rounds in a row. But, apparently, you can't keep her down. Ten Movie Drafts so far, and Lea's won six, Gabriel's won two and I've won two. I would spend more time on this, except I have work to do and need to get back to it. It was nice to hang out with them for an hour as always, even if it was virtually. I do look forward to our in-person State Park visit on April 23, though. By which time, we'll know that I am far more than well safely past the interactions of Easter Sunday, and I'll be a week and a half past my second shot. The visit will still be exclusively outdoors, though, as all will need to be until Tess can get vaccinated. She's not even old enough to be among the great many who qualify for vaccination after April 15 if they are 16 and older. I have no idea when that age threshold is expected to go down, but I imagine it has to do with when they have enough study trials on younger children. One last thing! I also had April Virtual Happy Hour with Laney on Friday—which means, between Laney on Friday, the Tulip Festival with Shobhit on Saturday, and Easter yesterday, I was quite the social butterfly this weekend, with an insanely social weekend from start to finish. The Happy Hour with Laney had to be via phone only, but the upside of that was it meant I did not have to rely on wifi, and so I spent most of the call sitting on the otherwise empty rooftop deck of my building, where I got a nice selfie for my requisite post about it (as did Laney from her spot camping on the Gulf Coast of Texas). [posted 12:32 pm]