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Okay, my use of my non-Pride-related, non-Christmas-related, balance of unused Daily Lunch Update (DLU) photos from last year's Australia trip has officially shifted to comparatively more sporadic use: only the photo in the center of today's DLU is from Australia. I'd love to do more posts where all three of the shots are from Australia, but now I've moved into a phase that's a bit connected to my OCD tendencies, and the reasoning is sort of cosmetic: the vast majority of unused "DLU photos" from Australia are vertical shots. Although I will make occasional exceptions—as I did on Wednesday, when the photos were vertical-vertical-horizontal—my preference, for the sake of visual symmetry, is always for the three photos to either
all be horizontal, or for the sequencing to be, top to bottom, horizontal-vertical-horizontal. I hate ever having to do three shots that are all horizontal, it just doesn't look as good.
After today, until Pride Month, I have five Australia shots left to use. (Side note: last year's trip to Australia yielded just over 1,500 shots. I have now used 262 of those as photos in my Daily Lunch Update posts over the past year. My
total balance right now is 16 shots left to use, 10 of those earmarked for use in June for Pride Month and two in December for Christmastime.) I used just one of them in today's post, and the way I looked for the two others was to find shots that have similar or complementary colors to them. The shot at the bottom of this post was a beautiful sunrise I caught from the PCC office balcony in mid-December.
So: I chose a sunset shot from Shobhit's and my anniversary trip to Port Townsend last June as the top shot. This reminded me that we went up the street and around the corner to
visit Uncle Imre during that trip—and that, I have forgotten until now to mention, Valerie texted the family group text on Valentine's Day that he had entered hospice the week before.
The text began with,
The time for Dad to rejoin Mom is coming soon. He is 91 years old. There is no question the man has had a varied, deeply fascinating life. He was born in 1932 in Hungary, and to this day has a thick, often indecipherable accent. When he and Auntie Rose got
married in 1963, he was already 30 years old. I don't remember what decade this was anymore, it would have to be either the sixties or seventies, but I know that for several years Uncle Imre had a job in Alaska that had him away from home for half the year every year—this was something Auntie Rose and I discussed a lot in the early days of Shobhit living in New York to pursue acting while I stayed in Seattle. They served as a guiding light for how a couple can make a long distance relationship work for them.
I never got close to Uncle Imre, who historically just existed in the orbit around my close relationship with Auntie Rose. When Auntie Rose was the sole person from her generation to come to Shobhit's and my wedding, Auntie Rose brought Valerie as her plus-one rather than Uncle Imre, who was always just around whenever I visited Auntie Rose otherwise. After Auntie Rose's passing, though, I kind of gained a new affection for Uncle Imre, largely because Auntie Rose kind of lived on through his love for him, somewhat similarly to my affection for Bill in the year after Mom died, until Bill himself died of covid. It now warms my heart with gratitude that Shobhit and I went to visit Uncle Imre last year.
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As for last night, I took myself to a movie:
Drive-Away Dolls, which I was not super impressed with. It had kind of squandered potential, which is unfortunate for a movie that apparently Ethan Coen and his wife Tricia Cooke had in development for two decades. Between this and Joel Coen's
The Tragedy of Macbeth, though, it seems clear to me that the Coen Brothers absolutely work best together rather than separately.
The movie was at 5:00 at Pacific Place, really the sweet spot (in both time and location) for me to see a movie after work: I can leave at the regular time at 4:30, and get to the theater right about the time the movie is supposed to start. I just walked the rest of the way home after the movie ended. Shobhit worked last night, and I spent roughly an hour writing the review—which I then had to edit slightly this morning, after learning from a podcast this morning that Tricia Cooke is queer after all, still married to Ethan Coen but with a lesbian partner of her own. That skews my judgment of the movie slightly, but not a great deal.
After my review was written I watched the second episode of
The Curse on Hulu, already one of the most painfully cringey and uncomfortable shows I have ever seen. This episode was almost unbearable on that front. But, I'm going to stick it out, not just because it's what White viewers of the show deserve, but because I know about the wild, surreal turn it takes in the season finale and I want to experience it.
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[posted 12:30 pm]
