Thursday, December 30, 2021

Here I am, my last day at work in the year 2021. I had been working at the office without a mask on since the start of July—it had been precisely what I had waited for before lugging all of my computer equipment back to the office instead of working from home, which I could do all day without a mask on. But, with the massive spike of infections due to the Omicron variant coming along just as predicted, we received an email the afternoon of Wednesday the 29th: for the time being, work from home if you can; if you have to work at the office, "I would advise you" to wear a mask.

I mean. I kind of color coordinated it fairly well.

This picture was on Thursday, though. My initial reaction was that I would continue working at the office unless or until someone told me I had no choice but to go back home. I mean, it's not the end of the world having to wear a mask. It's not lost on me how ridiculous I sound complaining about it, when literally every store staff member has had to wear one for the duration of their shifts every day for at least half a year—plenty of them have been doing it every day for going on two years now. Such people feeling no sympathy for me here is totally understandable. I tried complaining about it to my nurse roommate, who is covered in PPE and a face shield for all of his shifts. Why? BECAUSE I'M CLASSY.

But! I did evolve on this pretty quickly, for two reasons. First, Tracy told me she figured out how to connect her laptop to her TV to use as a larger, external monitor—and, on Thursday last week, I quite easily got an HDMI cable I did not have at home from our IT department. This way I can have a usable at-home setup without having to dismantle my dual monitors at work, also get the at-home stands for them that I returned to IT half a year ago, only to have that setup at home for a few weeks before it's likely to be about as safe to work at the office again. I don't want to be having to lug all that crap back and forth all the time. (Some people in the office just purchased separate external monitors to set up at home to make the hybrid plan more workable in general, but I'm stuck on the principal of the matter: I should not have to spend my own money on at at-home work station.)

And second, I did spend time with a bunch of family over the weekend, and it makes sense for me to work from home for at least the next week for that reason alone, to make sure I don't develop any symptoms. So, I'll just deal with working from home again for a while. I guess.

By the way do you like my snowflake earrings?

Friday, December 31, 2021

Sixth and final Christmas movie in 2021! I actually managed to watch either of them over the course of the holiday season in 2020, but at that time I was not going to movie theaters to see movies—in December 2022, I was. And still I managed to watch six of them this year: The Apartment, which I had never seen before (and barely qualifies as a "Christmas movie," I thought); Miracle on 34th Street, a movie I always find utterly charming and a far better time than It's a Wonderful Life; the late-eighties movie Prancer, which I had not watched in decades and still kind of enjoyed; White Christmas, which my dad and I watched on Netflix at his house on Christmas Eve even though I nodded off through about half of it; National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, which Shobhit and I watched Christmas Evening after getting back from Olympia; and finally, this one I had never seen before which I went over to my neighbor Alexia's condo to watch: the 2011 animated feature Arthur Christmas. It's a bit over-busy but still quite entertaining, and littered with surprisingly bent humor, which I found to be a pretty delightful surprise.

Look at this bullshit. You can't see the Space Needle from the rooftop decks of my condo complex anymore! I used to get a shot of it from up there most New Year's Eves. I'm all for progress, but who said it could block my view! Don't these people know who I am?

I love this photo. It's taken out of the PCC office, through the windows that have the view of the Space Needle—but it also picks up reflections of distant light from within the space, where most of the lights were off, but had Tracy's Christmas lights turned on. So, you see the Space Needle directly here, alongside a reflection of the Christmas Tree.

All right, now I'm going to go through a bit of recent history none of you asked for.

PCC moved its central offices to its current waterfront location in 2016. I was quite excited to discover that much of the office had this quite nice view of the Space Needle, which meant I would have a warm and dry place from which to watch the New Year's Eve fireworks. And, that's precisely what I did the first three years, ringing in 2017, 2018 and 2019. In fact, ringing in 2017, my parents came up from Olympia to stay the night in my condo complex's guest room that can be rented; my friend Danielle came up from Renton; and the five of us went to the PCC office to ring in the New Year together.

The next two years, 2018 and 2019, it was just Shobhit and me. It was just the two of us again when it was time to ring in 2020, and having been in the office the past three years, we decided we wanted to get a more up-close view of the fireworks than we'd had since ringing in 2015 (Shobhit was in India when we rang in 2016). So, what happened? High winds! The fireworks we went to KOMO Plaza to watch from just never happened, and instead we got a so-called "laser light show" that was frankly lame.

And: we all know how ringing in 2021 went. Mid-pandemic, before any vaccines at all, it was all virtual, watching from home. No fireworks in person at all, to discourage any crowds from gathering. The virtual show was actually very cool though and I got a bunch of great screenshots from my iPad.

So how about 2022, then? The actual fireworks returned! But, again: Omicon was changing the pandemic metrics and changing the game. They still closed Seattle Center to any in-person crowds. But, I still like what they did: they did a hybrid program, with "augmented reality" virtual graphics over the actual fireworks on the Space Needle on people's TV screens at home.

Or other places! Because, knowing there would not be any other staff there (there literally never has been; I am the only office staff that ever comes to the office to ring in the New Year), I decided I wanted to go down and watch the fireworks from there anyway. So, Shobhit and I did just that.

Did I mention the office also has a TV room? This was a big reason I loved the idea of returning to the office this year, because that way I could watch the fireworks in person and see the virtual show!

Now, there is no view of the Space Needle from the windows around the TV room–you gave to go several yards further north in the office space for that. Well, I came up with an ingenious solution: I would set up my laptop and just record the TV screen with that, while I recorded video clips and took photos of the actual, bare fireworks with my iPhone.

Saturday, January 1, 2022

So, guess what? We get all the way down the office, and once the fireworks start, the goddamned smoke almost completely obscures the Space Needle the whole time! Oh well, I got a few halfway decent shots anyway. This one was the best of the shots I took directly of the Space Needle with my phone.

I later watched the recorded broadcast on King 5 and took several screenshots of the virtual show, such as this fun one with Bigfoot strutting across the tip of the Space Needle. To be honest, I thought the virtual show designs last year were way cooler, but, I did really like how many hyper-local references this year's virtual show made.

This was the final shot of the virtual New Year's show, which featured an animation of the Space Needle taking off like a rocket and flying into a virtual moon.

If you want to get the full Matthew Experience of New Year's Eve, just click to play above, for the video I made, which is its own kind of hybrid: I took a screen recording of the King 5 virtual broadcast and used that as mostly the "base" video, but sprinkled in cuts to both my own video clips directly of the Space Needle fireworks, and my iPad recording of the big TV screen in the PCC office TV room. I'm pretty proud of it, actually.

So, I was headed back to my parents' house again on New Year's Day. Shobhit wasn't, as he had a shift that day, starting at 9:45, so I drove the car and dropped him off there, and headed south straight from there.

The thing was, Shobhit's windshield was filthy, and his car's windshield fluid hasn't worked in years. He suggested I stop at a gas station and use their washers to wash the windshield. I pulled into on Shell station on 15th Avenue, and they had none of these things at all. I pulled into another one on Denny Way, and at first I was very confused, by how many of these had no liquid in them at all. Finally I found a couple that did have water in them . . . sort of. Duh, it's been below freezing for a week! The ones still with water in them were solid ice!

This one was far too frozen; I just took the picture to show the ice. I did find one with a bit of loose liquid in it, though, still under ice—which I had to bash into pieces with another squeegee handle just so I could get to the water underneath. At least I got the car windows cleaned. I did wonder if anyone inside the gas station was staring at me hammering on something out at the pumps.

Did I mention I had an unusually eventful New Year's weekend? In years past, I have sometimes stopped my Gabrie's place on my way to Olympia on Christmas Eve—something not possible when I take transit down, as I did this year. I was texting with Lea about getting together sometime soon, and I remembered that I would be going to Dad and Sherri's again on New Year's Day, so I said hey! Why don't I stop by on my way down then?

I hadn't gotten Gabriel a Christmas present in a few years. I decided I would get him some bourbon for this visit. I know nothing about whiskey or bourbon, but Shobhit works at Total Wine & More and staff there helped him find something "fun and different" (as they put it) for the whiskey connoisseur I noted Gabriel is: McFarlane's Reserve 12 Year Bourbon. Here he's holding up the package after I admitted to him that when it came to gift wrap, he literally got my scraps.

He liked the bourbon.

You know what else Gabriel does every New Year's Day? The Polar Bear Plunge! Here hey's psyching himself up to jump into the frigid January Puget Sound waters—much colder even than normal due to the snowy weather of the past week—just a few blocks from him Federal Way home. He noted that he would be doing this and figured I could be the person recording it for posterity while I was there. That works!

My dad decided a month or two ago that, even though my sister hosted the Christmas Day family gathering, he wanted to host a New Year's Day family gathering at his house—something his family used to do years ago, and he wanted to reinstate the tradition. (This also served as an effective way to utilize an excess of leftover Christmas Day sweets.) He established this plan before the Omicron variant was upon us, and even though it began spiking wildly between Christmas and New Year's just as predicted, they never changed this plan.

I told my dad I would come. I knew he would want me to be there and would be bummed if I wasn't, so I still went. Should I have gone? In terms of calculated risk, probably not—especially considering my cousin brought her boyfriend and three kids, and among that family of five, only my cousin and one of the kids are fully vaccinated. This meant that, in contrast to Christmas where I'm pretty sure everyone was vaccinated, at this gathering there were three people present known to be unvaccinated.

My parents are big supporters of being vaccinated, but won't draw any lines in the sand about it. He didn't want to not invite them, so he did. There had been 19 people gathered on Christmas; this New Year's gathering had 15. At least I knew who the three people who weren't vaccinated were, I guess. Sherri kept saying, "I think just everybody's going to get it," which perhaps may not be far from the truth in the end, but I also think it's a dangerous attitude to have, and I said so. She's just so completely tired of the pandemic overall, and how certain restrictions either threaten to or actually do return. You know, like basically everyone.

In any case, between these two family gatherings one week apart, that's another reason for me to be cautious and just go ahead and work from home for the next week or more, to make sure I don't develop any symptoms. It could be argued that it was not the right thing to do to visit unvaccinated people in an indoor space (I absolutely won't allow that in my own home), but working from home for a bit directly after doing so, I think, is the right thing to do. I don't want to endanger any coworkers needlessly.

My grandnephew, Enzo. "A-what do you want-a?!"

Oh has anyone mentioned snow? Or how it hasn't gone away in literally a week? This is the bird feeder in Dad and Sherri's backyard on New Year's Day.

I had no trouble whatsoever on any of the roads driving down, not in Seattle, not on my detour in Federal Way—until I went to turn left onto my Dad's street. The car decided it was going to continue going forward. It even spun around a bit. But, it wasn't going too fast, and I regained control pretty quickly. It was all good. Actually my worst experience in the snow was walking with Gabriel and his family down to the beach when I slipped on ice and fell on my ass.

Sunday, January 2, 2022

So there you have it: my work setup starting 2022—right back where I was working at the start of 2021. As you can see my test of the HDMI cable was a success, giving me a notably larger external monitor than even my dual monitors at the office. I can be far more efficient with two monitors, but at least with this I don't have to work with only the small screen on my laptop, as I had done for five months between March and August 2020. The hope, and largely expectation, is that the disruptions of this sort due to Omicron will be far more brief than they were for the early days (and then the next year and a half) of the pandemic. But, for now, this is where I find myself, heading into 2020.

I still think it'll be a better year overall than 2021 was. And its massive and widely varied amounts of bullshit notwithstanding, 2021 was still objectively better than 2020. And my 2020 wasn't even all that bad, all things considered! I lead a charmed life, really. I mean, how could I not, when I ramble on and on in these travelogues and people stay interested in them?

[posted 12:54 pm]