Gina's 50th Birthday Party Roll Call!

1. Gina
2. Beth
3. David
4. Georgia [David's baby]
5. Sam [friend of Gina and Beth's]
6. Rob [friend of Gina and Beth's, Sam's brother]
7. Tim [Rob's husband]
8. Joe [Sam's roommate]
9. Samuel [guy Joe is dating]
10. Angel
11. Brandi
12. Nick
13. Jaycee [Brandi and Nick's daughter]
14. Gianni [Brandi and Nick's son]
15. Enzo [Brandi and Nick's baby]
16. Ricky
17. Raiden [Ricky's son]
18. Ruby [Ricky's baby]
19. Matthew
20. Shobhit
21. Wendy [Sherri's sister]
22. Sherri
23. Dad

I suppose it should be noted that I use the word "baby" kind of loosely in the above list; is a one-year-old still considered a baby? Infant? Toddler, maybe? The family had four babies all born in 2020—all of them "pandemic babies," I guess you could say—and three of them are already a year old: they were born in March, April, May and December. Alex did not make it to the party yesterday, so one of those three babies was not there; three of them were, though.

This isn't even to mention Nikki's baby, Elijah, born about a week ago, but they live in Spokane and none of them were at yesterday's party.

Gina and Angel are just one month shy of two years apart—there was some discussion yesterday about how Sherri was 17 when she had Angel, and 19 when she had Gina—which means Angel's 50th birthday party was two years ago, back in 2019. I went to find my blog post about it and was kind of surprised to find how much smaller it was: that one had family only, none of Angel's friends, whereas Gina's party had five of her friends over for it, thereby increasing attendance by about 20% more than it otherwise would have been. Gina's party still had 19 family members, though, as compared to the 14 at Angel's, although of course three of those are the babies who had not yet been born in 2019. Still, David (Gina's son) did not make it to Angel's party, and neither did Shobhit, in both cases probably because of work conflicts. Had none of those two or the three babies been there yesterday, the family count would again have been 14.

Brandi was not at Angel's party two years ago, but she and Nick were still living in Phoenix at the time; Alex and his Caitlin with her daughter did make it in 2019 but that family, which includes the aforementioned fourth 2020 baby, did not make it yesterday.

It's tempting to say the higher attendance at this party was at least partly due to eagerness after a year and a half of COVID restrictions, but it's pretty clear this would have been the way it shook out regardless. And we had a pretty large family gathering last Easter already anyway (with 21 in attendance), and that was at only the very beginning of vaccination processes—Shobhit and I were both between shots at that time, and we wore masks any time we were inside the house.

Speaking of which, we were also not in the middle of an unprecedented surge due to the Delta variant in April either, which made yesterday's party somewhat tricky. Sherri did make a pretty deliberate choice to hold the festivities entirely outside, with only a few people at a time going inside the house for bathroom breaks or to get utensils or whatever. There was no true "hanging out" inside the house during the party. The vast majority of us were vaccinated, but some (Brandi for sure, maybe one or two others; no one took inventory) aren't. Gina did make an arguably ill-advised crack about this being "a super spreader event," and Beth said something along the lines of, "Don't even joke about that!" I still noted then, though, that it was still unlikely so long as we all stayed outside.

In any case, I got a fair number of compliments on the birthday tribute video I had made for Gina, now embedded at the top of this very post—it got a pretty good response on Facebook as well, where I had posted it at at 7:22 a.m. Gina herself, and apparently also Barbara, had trouble playing the video from the Flickr page on their browsers, which I still don't understand; everyone else seemed to play it just fine. I finally uploaded it to Instagram just so they could play it, only to get the predictable notice shortly thereafter that it was blocked in most of the world due to the copyrighted material I had used (the Lady Gaga song "Hair," from her 2011 album Born This Way). Evidently it was only blocked in something like 20 or 30 other countries, though, and neither the U.S. nor Australia—the only countries I ever really care about in contexts like this—were included. So by and large I think we're still fine. I'm just glad Flickr doesn't do that shit to me.

Shobhit and I had aimed to leave around 11:30 but didn't really get on the road until about a quarter after 12:00. We had some traffic to contend with that slowed us down around Tacoma, and then our first stop in Olympia was Shobhit's Project Management classmate we brought some samosas to, after Shobhit felt so bad about not letting him take the leftovers home from the party they had a couple of weeks ago. The guy clearly did not think this was necessary but also still very much appreciate it, and invited us inside his home for a couple of minutes. He was from Myanmar but has been in the States many years; clearly very straight but I found him rather attractive, something that does not often happen to me with straight guys.

The most interesting part of that though, was that he just happened to live in the very same neighborhood as the one Dad and Sherri lived in, before they moved into their current house in 1993! His house was on 12th Way; Dad and Sherri lived on 12th Ave E. We went right over there so I could get a photo of the house. It's kind of a blue-gray now; it used to be yellow.

The very next photo I took was also of a house, this one being Gina and Beth's new house, to which they are doing massive renovations and will be moving into just next weekend. I got a text from Beth as we were leaving Shobhit's classmate's house, to meet them out there as that was where Dad and Sherri was with them at the moment. This suited me fine, as I was eager to see the house myself anyway.

They also had Jaycee, my eldest grandniece (she'll be 12 next month), with them. She had apparently been curious as to how I edit my videos, and when she asked me about it she started with, "Hey mister!" Uh, okay. Anyway, we got to that house at about 2:10. Once we left, there, Dad and Sherri had been given a ride out there apparently, so they rode with Beth to the Mexican restaurant where they picked up takeout for the party; Jaycee went along with Gina to her and Beth's current house where Gina needed to change; and Shobhit and I went straight to Dad and Sherri's house, effectively being the first to arrive for the party, even before Dad and Sherri did! The party officially started at 4 and Shobhit and I got there at right around 3:00.

Angel was the next to arrive; a friend gave her a ride there. She and Shobhit and I did visit for a few minutes sitting in the living room, even though we know Angel is not vaccinated. That was dumb and we should not have done that. At least it was relatively brief? Ten or twenty minutes, I'd say. Still, if Shobhit or I were carriers, she could easily have caught it. On the upside, I guess, being vaccinated still means the risk there was low. Not quite as low as it used to be, but still low. And as I said, when the party was actually happening, everyone stayed outside. Shobhit did go inside to lounge on one of the living room chairs at one point, but at that time no one else was inside.

Wendy, Sherri's sister, was the only one who spent a lot of time at the party, even outside, wearing a face mask. She spoke openly about still having anxiety about it, and to be honest, when it comes to risk mitigation, she was probably the smartest of all of us. (I still make my decisions based on risk/reward and probability assessment, and being outside still meant the risk for the rest of us was minimal.) Wendy asked at one point if people were hugging—which she was doing herself if others were okay with it—and Sherri basically said, "Whatever anybody's comfortable with."

Shobhit and I brought out one of our blanket totes from the trunk of our car, the largest one, which we only sat on occasionally; by and large there were enough chairs for all of the adults, between several lawn chairs and even four folding chairs Beth drove over in the bed of her pickup truck. The blanket tote largely became a nice place for people to set down their toddlers, as you'll see in a few of the photos in the full photo album.

Speaking of which! That photo album, which includes the tribute video, contains 37 shots or videos. Just one more than the album I had made for Angel's birthday party in 2019. For a minute I thought they were exactly the same number, but I hadn't added the tribute video to Gina's album yet, which bumped the number up to 37. Angel's 50th Birthday Party photo album also starts with the tribute video I had made for her, but that one was shorter and far less sophisticated, focusing simply one 50 still photos of her throughout her life. After digitizing all of my old home videos earlier this year, making a tribute video for Gina with tons of video clips was a lot easier to do.

The video for Gina included the clip of us all singing Happy Birthday to Angel at her party in 2019. The video I took of us all singing Happy Birthday to Gina will wind its way into some other video retrospective soon enough, I'm sure.

The possible health risks notwithstanding (again: fairly minimal), I'm glad I went. I can't allow a 50th birthday party for my closest sibling to happen and not be there. It was a good time, and it seemed pretty clear Gina had a good time too. She in particular thanked me multiple times for the video, and she and Beth both expressed gratitude at how well I document all of our shared family history and events.

Oh, and the Mexican food was pretty good. I actually called the place to find out whether their rice and beans were vegetarian—beans yes; rice made with chicken seasoning. So, Shobhit just made vegetarian rice to bring ourselves, which worked out well; we couldn't eat the chicken enchiladas or the beef tacos but there were soft taco tortillas with which we could make tacos of our own. Also, we brought about 30 samosas, 19 of which got eaten at the party, and then 6 were given to Gina and Beth to take home and the other 5 to Dad and Sherri. Dad was particularly impressed with them, in a way that almost took me aback: "He's really outdone himself this time," he said. "Those are yummy yummy!"

We didn't leave until around 7:00, so we were in Olympia for roughly six hours, with family about five hours. We left later than Shobhit would have liked, but whatever, he always wants to leave earlier than I do. He did complain about feeling tired while driving in the dark, which is not a good thing, and I'm happy to drive home at night in the future if I need to. We got home, I uploaded and captioned all the photos on Flickr, and then went to bed. I was too tired to write up this post last night and so I did it this morning. Now I need to get ready for my day, which includes going to Tulalip to see Karen and Dave's new property on which they plan to build a second house. They're bringing Anita with them and we'll have a picnic lunch. I took a break during writing this very post to help Shobhit deep fry another batch of 12 samosas to bring to that. So now, I need to get to it.

[posted 9:30 am]