I've got to say now how much I appreciate Beth, who not only humored me and indulged me yesterday to a degree I honestly did not expect—she got legitimately invested in making what I wanted to do work and a success. I should hang out with her more often!

I had texted her during the day while I was at work, saying that assuming her evening was free, I had a kind of odd request: I wanted to recreate a shot I had taken of the two of us together in front of the falls at Waterfall Garden Park in Pioneer Square, back in 1999, during her first-ever visit to Seattle. That visit, before the current one, was the only one that had no connection to Barbara (her mom); she had just decided to take a solo trip to Seattle, by herself, and we hung out. And one of the many things I took her to was Waterfall Garden Park, which I'm pretty sure Auntie Rose had previously introduced me to. (Mind you, in April 1999, when Beth visited, I had been living in Seattle for all of ten months.)

Specifically, in the middle of my 2021 project, which I spent nearly two months on, digitizing all of my old home videos so I could split them into clips and upload them to my Flickr account, I had made an animated gif of the two of us standing in front of the falls and then breaking to run past the camera on either side of it. That was what I wanted to recreate after work yesterday.

I told Beth I could probably get to Waterfall Garden Park at around 5:00. I left work and went up to Denny & 1st to catch the #1 bus, and it got me there at an incredibly punctual time: the bus stop was two blocks away, and I was in the park at 4:58.

Beth arrived at about 5:05 or so, needlessly apologizing for being late. I had already been tracking her location; somewhat to my surprise, very soon after she arrived, she just texted us the link indicating that she was sharing her location, apparently indefinitely. I don't think most people would just volunteer something like that, thinking of it as too private. I wonder if her two years living in Korea has changed anything about that, or if it's just a Beth thing. In any case, since I could see she was about three blocks away after I checked, in a minute or two I just walked out to meet up with her at the end of the block.

Strangely, Beth could remember almost nothing about when she had visited us for our condo housewarming in 2007—in fact when she first got inside on Tuesday night, she looked around and commented on what a nice place it was. When I said, "You've been here before," she was like, "No I haven't!" I had to look up 2007 photos of her in the condo to prove she had been. (I later looked it up and not even I had remembered that her arrival had been kept a surprise, and I had been shocked she would fly all the way out from Virginia for the surprise; the first several paragraphs of my LiveJournal post at the time was all about this.) Anyway, my point here is, strangel, although she had almost no memory of the 2007 visit, she has a pretty good working memory of previous ones: when she came in September 2003 for Barbara's "Epitaph Party" for her birthday; when Barbara and Danielle and I all went to D.C. for the Millennium March on Washington in 2000 (and stayed in the basement at Beth's paternal grandmother's house); and even having been to Waterfall Garden Park in 1999.

Here's the thing we could not remember: exactly how we had propped the camera when taking the shot in 1999. We used Beth's phone this time around, which actually made it easier in multiple ways because her iphone cover edges are squared and made it easy for it to stand on its side on its own, set on the side, flat lip of a nearby garbage can. We kept wondering if we had set it on a garbage can or a table or what back in 1999; the angle in the 1999 shot did not show the ground the way the new angle did. Still, with the use of Beth's camera, we could position that as best we could while using the 1999 gif on my phone as reference: where the waterfall and the surrounding rocks were in frame; which one of us was on the left and which on the right; even how we turn our hears after a slight beat and then break, and the positions of our hands. I'd have never gotten it as right as I did without her help.

We did not stay there long, but both of us quite enjoyed it, both the park on its own merits and how much the little project we were doing cracked us up. We walked up to Marion Street and then caught the #12 bus back home; Beth said she was okay with walking but that the hill back was too steep.

I then spent far more time on getting these two clips combined into one clip, which I could then post to my socials, than many would consider worth the effort. A bit challenge in getting them combined into one clip was that one was already a gif and the other was a clipped-out video clip.

Beth tried to achieve this with her own apps she already uses, but wound up giving up. In the end I just found the original video clip from which I had made the gif to begin with, and edited out the same clip as a video again, just as I had in 2021 before turning that into a gif. Now I had two video clips I could combine and turn into one looping gif.

But, then I also remembered that I could not post a gif directly to either Facebook or Instagram, so I also saved a video version, knowing that on those platforms they would run on a loop anyway. (And just this morning, as I was writing this, I also thought to post it to TikTok, this time adding a subtle background music clip . . . naturally titled "Waterfall.")

I even commented on how I spent entirely too much time on this, but I was very happy with the final result so it was all worth it. Shobhit was at work and Beth and I were in the living room, and I had my MacBook handy already, so I used the Apple TV box to screen share to the TV and showed Beth a bunch of video clips from her visit to Seattle in 2003, which also featured her kids Chloe and AJ as infants, stuff she had not seen since I recorded them. This effectively kept her attention for a pretty good amount of time.

— पांच हजार छह सौ पैंतालीस —

Shobhit got off work at 10:00, and by the time he got home around 10:30, Beth and I were deep in discussion about corruption in U.S. government, which she has pretty fatalistically cynical about. (To be fair, we are on the same page regarding the idea that anyone who desires the position of President of the United States is not to be trusted. She went out of her way to note that President Obama was not excluded from this.) Shobhit fixed himself some dinner, and we engaged in some idle chat for a while afterward, now kind of naturally veering away from politics.

Beth had already said about an hour earlier that she was going to bed, but she had an itch for something sweet and settled for a bowl of my Honey Bunches of Oats cereal. That plus the political conversation kept her up for a while. But then it was also time for me to go to bed, so we both did, while Shobhit stayed up for a while. Then I realized I should really process and upload my photos so I'd have access to them from Flickr today, and that kept me up a bit longer than I would have liked.

— पांच हजार छह सौ पैंतालीस —

Here's the other headline of the past 24 hours: yesterday was our Office Summer Barbecue, long planned and scheduled by Office Manager Mel, who actually just left PCC, their last day having been Friday last week.

I had long had no idea what I would bring for the potluck. Finally I decided on something super simple but very tasty: something Shobhit often makes with dinners he cooks, fresh wedged cucumber coated with salt and pepper. When we made it this time, he insisted on pouring a bunch of lemon over it as well, which gave it too much liquid to sit in, in my opinion.

I kept it in one of the mixing bowls we got at the White Elephant gift exchange at Christmas last year, which has the handy feature of plastic lids that fit air tight. This is the biggest reason I did not ride my bike to work yesterday as I otherwise would have preferred; I was holding that bowl in a tote bag and I took the bus, walking down to 15th & John to catch a #8 so I could take just one bus and not have to transfer downtown. On the way back, though, with only a few of the cucumber chunks left and most of the liquid gone, I still put the airtight lid on the bowl, wrapped the bowl in the tote bag and stowed that inside my backpack for the bus ride down to Pioneer Square.

In the meantime, shortly after I arrived at work yesterday morning, I just went to the kitchen with the bowl, found a strainer, and poured the cucumber into it so I could get rid of all that excess lquid. Then, later, when all the food was being set out, two other people had brought super simple cucumber salads! Sheesh! I was surprised as much of mine got eaten as it did in the end, considering that. There really wasn't that much of it left. People must really love cucumbers. (One salad where the cucumbers were sliced had something rather spicy in its simple seasoning; Shobhit would have loved it.)

Anyway. Once noon rolled around, people helping set up—something I have typically done as a way to help out with these sorts of events in the past but just didn't bother signing up for this time—were still not quite ready. I would go back to my desk and go to the kitchen, which I did like three times until I finally found myself at the end of a line I could have been at the front of! By the time I had actually loaded my plate and gone outside to the patio, most of the table spaces were taken. I found a table Gabby was sitting at and appeared to have one available seat, and when I got closer I saw that someone's drink and dish were there. I turned to look back again, and saw an empty seat next to Michelle from Accounting, who saw me and called out, "Matthew! Get over here!"

I went and set next to her, which happened also to be across from Noah. To Noah's left was Mia from Graphics; to Mia's left Chris J from accounting, who used to be in Merchandising and was my boss for a while once upon a time. On the other side of Michelle was another person from Accounting, a new-ish woman with a name I had never heard of for a woman before: Kevin.

If I were to include anyone from yesterday's barbecue in my next Social Review, it would really just be the people at this table. I didn't really hang out with anyone else over lunch yesterday. I certainly ate way too much. I had rather small servings of a ton of different dishes, many of which, to be perfectly honest, I did not find to be that good. Don't tell anyone I said that.

Gabby complimented my cucumbers twice, though. (And for the record, she made caprese skewers that were perhaps my favorite thing besides the veggie hot dog, which is always a fun eat. In any case I wanted to be clear that her dish was not one of the ones I didn't like.)

We had a pretty significant meeting at 1:30 and so I actually headed back to my desk by around 1:00, even though historically I have lingered at events like this. I'm still very grateful we had it, on a Wednesday when most people come into the office anyway (well, in Merchandising anyway; it's an official ask of the whole department). It was a beautiful day with beautiful views at any rate, as you can see from the photos included here.

— पांच हजार छह सौ पैंतालीस —

[posted 12:30 pm]