Happy New Year 2023

Hey everyone, it's January 2! Twenty twenty-three! Yesterday morning, as I do every morning, I was scrolling through my Memories page on Facebook, and came across this post from January 1, 2021: Did anyone else have a very brief feeling like you were suddenly living in the distant future when you first saw "Happy New Year 2021" on your TV? If you're under 25, shut up, no one wants to hear from you in this conversation. That was two years ago now. After even only that much time, I read a post like that and just think . . . how quaint. Also: the reference to "on your TV" dates it in a very specific way, which is to say it was the date that closed out the Horrible Year 2020. It was the closing event of a stay-at-home holiday season due to the pandemic. It was not the first time I rang in the new year in the condo building I live in—it was the second time that happened—but it was the first time I rang in the new year from inside the condo itself (we rang in 2008 watching the Space Needle fireworks from the roof, learning the hard way that it was really too far away), and thus the only time since I've lived in Seattle that I saw the year flip over while watching my own TV at home. Last year was back to a fairy standard night with just Shobhit and me, watching the Space Needle fireworks show from inside the PCC central office by ourselves. Shobhit resisted somewhat but I was all about getting down there, I need to make New Year's special in one way or another, even if the mileage may vary wildly depending the year, where I am, and who I'm with. And of course, there was a key difference this year: Shobhit's niece, Shivi, is with us visiting for the first time. After several days exploring the city quite independently on her own (in some cases somewhat defiantly; Shobhit was annoyed when she wouldn't let him pick her up from the ferry terminal and she insisted she wanted to take the bus—he was irrationally scared of her getting bothered by drug users, even though it was literally at like 8 p.m. on a Wednesday), we had a day to spend wandering around, just the three of us. Shobhit did call in sick on Tuesday and they hung out all day that day, but Saturday was the first day with all three of us available. In fact, I had briefly had this idea that maybe I could just go down to Gabriel's in Federal Way so we could finally watch Tár together, since his initial suggestion of Sunday would not work as I had other plans, and for all I know Gabriel would himself have been unavailable Saturday anyway. When I first posted this idea to Shobhit, saying it would save us the time of having to drive by Gabriel's place on our way to Olympia Sunday morning, he was initially open to the idea. But then, quite reasonably, Shobhit said he would prefer that I spend the day with him and Shivi, and I can go down to Gabriel's another day. Thus, I never even got to the point of running the idea by Gabriel, and I'm actually glad we made this choice. I had a very nice day with Shobhit and Shivi on Saturday. As you can imagine, I took a lot of pictures (39 before we even came back home after our first outing that day). First stop was the Gingerbread Village, still open on New Year's Eve day, and incidentally, still shockingly not-crowded on that Saturday afternoon: I added five new shots to that photo album. From there we walked over to the Fairmont Olympic Hotel to find the last day of the "Teddy Bear Suite," which I had gone to for the first time by myself in late 2018; returned to with Laney in 2019; and after two years of it being canceled, this year I was able to return again, now with Shobhit and Shivi. I got a new, 20-shot photo album out of that, thus bringing this year's Christmas collection to twenty photo albums. I really need to settle down a bit with this stuff next year, although after making notes of certain things I should skip next year but a couple of things I want to do new or return to after several years of not doing, I've already got a list of 14 things to schedule for next year. Here's hoping I can keep it limited at least to that, and not go so overboard again. Indeed, I did so much shit this holiday season—all of it great fun, but still—it's actually a relief for it to have ended now. I feel released, for the time being, a good seven weeks until the next huge thing, which is the trip to Australia. Except, a couple of things still to do this week: write about New Year's weekend (that's this very post you are reading); take the Christmas Tree and decorations down (which Shobhit has already started nagging me to do, give me a fucking break already); meet up for lunch with Shobhit's cousin Abhishek and Vinaya today; maybe dinner with Karen and Dave and Anita tomorrow after work. But, at least, there's nothing left likely to yield a ton of photos to deal with, for the next month and a half anyway. Okay, let's go briefly back to the Teddy Bear Suite. As you may have guessed, that was where we were when I took the shot of Shivi at the top of this post. She was particularly enamored with that huge teddy bear on the floor, and immediately fell down to give it a big hug. I lifted my phone to get a picture, and was barely too late. But, thanks to Shivi's generally open hearted agreeableness, when I said, "Do that again!" she immediately and happily complied. I then texted the photo of her, and when she looked at it she said, "Ohhh, I look so cute!" The Gingerbread Village had more people than there had been when I took myself one afternoon the week prior to Chrstmas while I was on PTO, but was still sparsely attended enough that we walked right in, no waiting in line. The same happened, and actually even better, at the Teddy Bear Suite, where just one other small group was in there when we arrived. They left shortly after we arrived, so for about ten of the twelve minutes we were there, we had the entire suite to ourselves, which made it a lot easier to get great photos, uncontaminated by strangers crowding into shots. The next group was walking in literally as we were leaving, so that was perfect, So anyway, Saturday yielded new photos for the Gingerbread Village album; an entire new album for the Teddy Bear Suite; and I also created a dedicated album just for Shivi's visit, which contains a lot of crossposted shots from other albums, but also shots just for this album, such as our next stop on Saturday: we walked one block over to the Central Library, where we went to the top floor so Shivi could see that beautiful building, one of Seattle's local crowning achievements of architecture, and I got several great shots, a lot of them better than any photos I've taken at the Central Library in a long time. After that we walked over to Fran's Chocolates, where they disappointed Shobhit yet again by not passing out any samples (I did point out the confections mosaic that still hangs in there to Shivi, and she replied, "I want to get my portrait like that!"), and from there we meandered through and around Pike Place Market. On over to Zara at Westlake Center, after which we barely missed any possible busses back up the hill, so we wound up walking all the way back home, just as we had walked down—totalling probably about three miles. Not that much really, except that a lot of time just moseying around can also exhaust you sometimes. My legs were killing me by the time we got home. We must have been back home by around 1:30; we had left shortly after 11 a.m. This left us time enough to watch a movie, and I thought, why not see if there are any holiday movie options. HBO Max had a collection specifically to browse through, and one of the options was When Harry Met Sally. I asked Shivi, who was born 11 years after that film's release, if she likes romantic comedies, and she said she loves them. I asked if she had ever seen this movie, and she said it was on her "bucket list" to see. Well all right, then! And how perfect, also, that the movie ends at a New Year's Eve party? Perfect all around. I think there's an easy argument to be made that this is the best romantic comedy ever made, and we all had a great time watching it. Interestingly, I had gotten the suggestion from HBO Max, but when I spoke the title into the remote mic for the Xfinity box, it played it on Netflix—rare that a film is available on both streamers. And then when the movie ended, a note came up saying it was the last day it was going to be available on Netflix. I have no idea whether the same will be the case on HBO Max. Shobhit then spent some time making pear salsa out of the four pears Alexia gave us more than a week ago, so they wouldn't go bad because we don't eat fresh fruit often enough. Shobhit found the recipe online, and I must say, it turned out spectacularly. It was even a hit at the family get-together yesterday; I'll get to that momentarily. Also: Shobhit used lemon juice from the many lemons I got from Sherri, bringing them home after Christmas from Olympia because she didn't have a use for so many. We killed some time in the evening. We watched the Sydney Harbour Bridge fireworks on my iPad; I learned for the first time that they are apparently world famous, largely because it's the first city of its size in the world to ring in the New Year (strangely, Brisbane is a bit further east than Sydney, but is in a later time zone in the state north of New South Wales; Auckland is even two hours ahead Sydney but isn't near as big). Seriously, I cannot imagine how spectacular that fireworks show would be in person but we were wowed by it even just on video. I also found the videos of the fireworks at the Burj Khalifa and in Hong Kong, but after the Sydney display, we just didn't find those as impressive. And then? Once we got down to Seattle Center, nothing really had prepared us for how jaw-dropplingly impressed we'd be with the show at the Space Needle this year. First, though, we went down to the PCC office so I could pick up some things, some crackers and the bottle of gin a broker left me last week. Shobhit and Shivi came up with me and she was suitably impressed with our views. We went back up toward Seattle Center and set about looking for street parking, after several minutes finding parking at about 10:15 on 7th Avenue,  a solid half mile from the Space Needle. On the way, though, we decided to stop at A Pizza Mart for some pizza, the cheese and crackers we had earlier in the evening turning out to have been inadequate. They sold single slices for a ridiculous $6 apiece, so Shobhit decided we'd just split a medium pizza between the three of us. Even that was $21 and a bit too much, but it was admittedly very tasty. And, it killed some time, as by then we still had an hour and a half until midnight. We walked from there over to Seattle Center, cutting through KOMO Plaza (where Shobhit and I had tried to watch fireworks ringing in 2020, only for them to be canceled due to high winds; we just got a fairly lame laser light show instead), and when we reached Denny Way a lady doing some crowd control told us we could get inside the Space Needle but they would be closing gates at 11:00. She said that spot was the best for viewing the show, and I didn't really trust her and was glad I didn't. We pushed along with the huge crowds into Seattle Center, going through bottlenecking gateway points due to fencing clearly meant to keep people off the grass in certain areas. We went into the Armory, which was insanely crowded but Shivi got a quick peak at the Winter Train & Village model set (thus also adding one more photo to my Seattle Center Winterfest 2022 album), and then we went back outside, made our way to the center of Seattle Center just beyond the International Fountain, and we literally just stood and waited for an hour. I'm so glad it wasn't raining. There was also no breeze to speak of, which meant the smoke from the fireworks that did eventually go off at midnight kind of hung there, largely obscuring both the Space Needle and the fireworks themselves. Gabriel, who was watching from home, texted a photo of his TV with the note, The needle is just smoke. Well, you can see from the video I put together later last night (see above), that was the case for much of the time in person too—but not all of the time. And, I knew drones would be a part of the show for the first time this year, but had no idea in what capacity. While we were waiting, we spied isolated ones high in the air above us, and I started to think maybe they would cast laser shows of some sort above the entire crowd, filling the sky above us. Then, I thought maybe they were just cameras, and that was all they were referring to when they said "drones." And then, as is evident in the video, we were stunned by what actually happened: I just learned there were a solid 200 drones used, each with their own lighting capacity, programmed to fly in formations that created 3-D images or neatly written messages with astonishingly straight lettering. For real, we were all kind of gobsmacked by it, the whole thing was so far beyond our imaginations. I kept thinking about the time that would have to have been spent programming it. There was only one evident glitch: the fireworks were correctly timed, counting down correctly to midnight. The drones did not start counting down, forming a literal countdown clock in the air, until 12:02. This is why, in my video, for the first time I figured out how to do varying opacity on overlaid videos, so that in the video the fireworks countdown and the drones countdown occur concurrently. Also I didn't want to have to buy a new song so I could put a copy of the file into the video, and instead inserted Pink Floyd's "Time", in spite of its rather ominous sound. It was actually a happy accident when I discovered the album it was from, The Dark Side of the Moon, was released in 1973—exactly fifty years ago. I found that very fitting. When I was putting the video together last night, I rather wished I had actually taken more video clips than I did. There was even moving images projected onto the waters of the International Fountain, also new. Speaking of which, several idiot revelers kept running through the water in that fountain. This is fine at, say, Pride, when it's summer and hot and dry. It was barely 41° when people did this, and it was before they would be sticking around to watch the fireworks. There was someone with a flashlight clearly telling people to get out of there, but one person did it and so something like ten or 15 people more followed suit, very much outnumbering them. Idiots, the lot of them. We didn't even care about the drone display's two-minute delay. It was amazing. They didn't go super high into the air, so a lot of people in the area definitely didn't see the drones as well as we did. We were in a great spot to see them though, and it was fucking amazing. I can see them becoming commonplace each year from now on and thus not as amazing, but this year, we were all genuinely wowed by it. We all inched our way along with the crowd out the exit that got us to 5th Avenue, and we just walked straight up to 7th and took that back down to our car, which was perfectly placed for us to drive home outside of the traffic immediately surrounding Seattle Center and so we made it home in great time. For the next hour or so the group chat with Gabriel and Lea and Mandy was on fire, to the point where I was in bed and desperately trying to figure out how to mute all the messages. Finally they just stopped though, and I got to sleep at about 1:20 a.m. So that brings us to yesterday, and our day trip down to Olympia for the Second Annual New Year's Day Gathering at Dad and Sherri's House. New Year's Day Party Roll Call! 1. Dad
2. Sherri
3. Gina
4. Beth
5. Brandi
6. Nick
7. Jaycee
8. Gianni
9. Enzo
10. Britni
11. Matthew
12. Shobhit
13. Shivi
14. Jennifer
15. Matthew
16. Hope
17. Chase
18. Ian
19. Ian’s friend
20. Aunt Raenae
21. James
22. Kylar
23. Thayer
24. Aunt Arliss
25. Les This was a lot more than last year, when there were 15—that’s a 67% increase. I think this works out well for Dad’s desire to have at least one family gathering at their house now that Gina and Beth host most of them. Plus, a lot more key people come to this than can make it to other holiday gatherings anymore, which are much more focused on Dad and Sherri and just their descendants now. Dad actually expressed interest in us coming earlier than the official party start time of 2:00, specifically because they wanted some time to talk to Shivi before a bunch of people showed up. I thought that was nice. So, we left shortly after 11 a.m., and arrived shortly before 12:30. That turned out to be perfect: just enough time for us to chat for a while just the five of us, but not so much time that it might get awkward. In retrospect though, I don’t think it would have ever gotten awkward, so at ease was Shivi from the moment we arrived. A few hours into the visit, Dad said to me in the kitchen, "I wanted to tell you, I really like Shobhit's niece." That was sweet to hear. And then he added, "She isn't shy!" No, she certainly is not. I had already noticed how she laughs a lot when she first came to visit at Shobhit's and my place in Seattle. She settled in quite comfortably with my extended family, and laughed just as much there and with them. It was lovely, especially to see how I needn't have worried at all about her being uncomfortable around a bunch of people she didn't know. Later, on the way home in the car, Shobhit asked her if she had fun, just as I was going to ask if she had an okay time. She immediately replied, “I had a great time. I love your family!” Indeed, she didn’t even feel the need to stick with us the whole time, and there were whole stretches when she hung out in a different room (in the living room while Shobhit and I were down in the family room, for example). When we got out of the car at home, she even told us this was her favorite day of her visit so far. I just kind of thought . . . wow. And Dad and Sherri were certainly very friendly with her, telling her she was welcome back any time, even if she’s not with Shobhit. Ha! To be fair, they say that to pretty much all visitors. I also learned later in our time hanging out earlier today (which I will write about tomorrow) that Sherri told her about being my "Bonus Mom." Shivi just referred to her offhand as "your bonus mom," and I was like, "Did she tell you about that?" I guess that would be one of the times she was hanging out with my family while I was in another room. I then showed her that I have Sherri listed in the address book on my phone as Bonus Mom. So anyway, what else can I tell you about yesterday's family gathering that isn't so focused on Shivi being there? There was that moment when Aunt Arliss started going off on how spanking children isn't "beating" them, and that as long as it's "done right," spanking is fine. Jennifer noted that she didn't spank any of her children and they all grew up very polite and well behaved (which is true). Classic "moving the goalposts" of an argument, Aunt Raenae chimed in with, "Well, every child is different." I tried to interject with the idea that spanking children is both pointless and harmful, but Aunt Arliss, whos is 75 years old, was having none of it. Pretty quickly I started to realize there was no reaching her—or Aunt Raenae (who is 74), for that matter. I had gone into the kitchen for a drink, and Jennifer walked in, saying, "That conversation about spanking was annoying me." I mentioned to her that there is now loads of research supporting the idea that spanking is an ineffective form of discipline, but that wouldn't matter to them. I didn't know why I even tried to argue; "She doesn't even fucking matter anyway," I said. That said, the whole conversation with the older women relatives (one an aunt, one a great aunt) felt like a working metaphor for trying to discuss many ideas with people like them—not people their age, necessarily, but certainly people with their sensibility, namely people who are absolutely convinced that their idea of Biblical instruction will always trump any kind of science or research. There was a few minutes there where Hope was talking about working at the gas station Eric (Jennifer's ex) owns in Shelton, and how often people come in and point blank ask her, "Is this place White owned?" Holy shit. Apparently another time a group of well-dressed Asian people came in just to use the bathroom, and a White person asked her, "Are they the bosses?" Hope kind of danced around it a little but still seemed to get how such questions are racist, whether or not most of the gas stations in the region are owned by people of color. Aunt Raenae, of course, interjected by trying to give people that ask these questions the benefit of the doubt: "Maybe they just can't understand the other people when they're talking!" That's not the defense you think it is, Aunt Raenae. Mind you, this conversation never got horrible, but I was still kind of glad Shivi wasn't in the room when it happened. It seemed to stop just short of getting uncomfortable. There have been conversations at family gatherings in the past that were far more problematic than this, so this wasn't as bad as, let's say, it had potential to be. Anyway, speaking of Aunt Raenae and Aunt Arliss, I know this had come up many times before, but we finally got it settled when I asked Aunt Arliss directly: "What year were you born?" 1947, she told me. Aunt Raenae, who is Arliss's niece, was born in 1948. I had forgotten that Grandpa's parents had six children over a span of 18 years. And a new thing I learned from Aunt Arliss: their parents had three kids starting with Grandpa in 1929; then waited 12 years before having another three children. Talk about weird. Aunt Raenae also informed us that, early on in Grandma and Grandpa's marriage, they were separated—twice. What? I had no idea! Aunt Raenae said that early on Grandpa couldn't hold a job, and she wouldn't tolerate it. Once he got the job at Simpson Lumber that he then held until retirement, they never separated again. Although maybe they should have; they sure fought constantly enough. Incidentally, Aunt Arliss—who I was actually kind of surprised to see there yesterday—is one of only two left among my paternal grandfather's siblings. Aunt Roxanne, who suffers from mental illness and always has as far as I know (her two children were raised separately by other brothers), remains in a home of some kind. That leaves Aunt Arliss the only one left with any real autonomy. I'm not positive about this but I think it was her son Tobin who came as well. There's a few of my dad's cousins who are within just a few years of my age and I get them all confused. Wait, maybe not: Tobin was the guy arrested in 2016 for accidentally killing a woman with a stray bullet while he was shooting at someone stealing his car. The guy in that picture does not look like who was there yesterday. It must have been either Les or Larry. [UPDATE: Jennifer confirmed it was Les. That had been my first guess but then I kept changing it due to being unsure! Jennifer added this tidbit over Facebook Messenger: "Tobin is still in prison I think." All righty then.] I feel like there are other things I could have mentioned but I'm running out of brain power and want to finish and post this. It was a nice time, anyway, and I was really glad to have made it again, and to expect this to be a new annual New Year's Day tradition. It was around 5:30 when we left, so we were down there a good five hours. I really though Shivi might be bored, but, apparently she wasn't at all.  I guess if there were anything disappointing about the day, it was that Angel never made it over. I heard she was planning to, but if she came by it was after we left. I was bummed not to get to see her. When I later mentioned Gina and Beth to Shivi, her face lit up and she said, "I loved them!" Kind of funny, because earlier Sherri actually asked her, "Are you used to being around so many same-sex marriages?" She was like, "Oh, yeah." Shivi is 22 years old. Just because she's from India and living in Indiana (that's a coincidence) doesn't mean she isn't hip to these things. In fact just today she told Shobhit and me about her dad telling her "I'm going to tell you a secret about your uncle" when he first brought her to come for college three years ago. When the revelation was that Shobhit is gay, she was apparently like, "Oh yeah I already knew that." It does seem like kind of a long time, three years in the U.S. before she came to visit us, but that's okay. Shivi clearly has already carved out her own life of intentional independence, and I feel confident she'll thrive here. She already has a plan mapped out for herself for suburban living, which alone is something I kind of bristle at, personally, but whatever: to say "to each their own" goes both ways. [posted 6:47 pm]