— छह हज़ार एक सौ एक —
Okay, so what can I tell you about yesterday? Not much! I spent a ton of time working on
the New Mexico travelogue, both the email version (which I started while we were still in Albuquerque on Tuesday, but still had to write most of at home), which I probably wrote up half of on Tuesday evening and the other half of yesterday morning; and then the blog version, which is a fair amount of work itself as it involves a lot of added html commands for formatting purposes (both in text and for embedding the photos).
I'll often add extra things to the blog version here and there, usually to embed video clips since I can't do that in the email travelogue. I didn't really do that this time, though; the blog version is nearly identical to the email version, mostly because I included a bunch of links to video clips anyway. The one major difference, which is always the case, is that in the blog version, if you click on any of the photos it'll just go to the Flickr page for that very same photo—same as happens with any photo I embed in blog entries, just like this one. In the email versions, though, I change what these links are to create "easter eggs" of sorts, and you get a surprise new image to look at. (I used to format blog posts to do the same thing, until I learned from Gabriel that changing where the links go in the blog posts makes the photos appear weirdly stretched if you try reading it on a mobile device, and I cannot abide by that. I kind of like how this adds a little something special exclusive to the email travelogues, though.)
Speaking of the links I spread all over the travelogues, Shobhit and I went to Costco yesterday afternoon, and he realized only once we were in the garage at home that he was wearing his reading glasses and forgot his regular glasses up in the condo. Rather than go back up to get them he asked me to drive, and I was like okay fine. This was very shortly after I sent out the email, the recipient list of which of course he is on, so he spent the drive out to Costco reading the travelogue email on his phone. And all the links? He didn't click on any. Not once!
In all likelihood the vast majority of the recipients read the travelogues the same way—if they even read them at all; plenty of people don't even do that, and they just scroll through looking at the pictures. The first response I got was from Frank, 27 minutes after I sent the email out. I saw that there was an email from him and thought:
There's no way he actually read the whole thing. His one-word message was just:
beautiful, so I feel like that supports my theory.
— छह हज़ार एक सौ एक —
— छह हज़ार एक सौ एक —
I didn't even finish the blog version of the travelogue until much later last night, because I went to see the 4 p.m. showing of
Digger, which was absolutely flawed but I enjoyed way more than the reviews had me primed to. And there's a
lot to say about this movie—my review exceeded 1,500 words.
Anyway, I barely had time to make and drink chai after we got back from Costco but before I went to the movie, which I rode my bike to at Pacific Place. It let out right around 6:38; I rode my bike home; I posted the link to the review at 8:23. Under normal circumstances I might have tried to find something to watch with Shobhit for the rest of the evening, but I needed to finish up the html/blog version of the travelogue. As I write this, I still need to post the Bluesky digests I did not keep up on while traveling; I only posted there a couple of times anyway, but I am still two days behind on that—I got just one of them posted while having my bowl of cereal for breakfast this morning.
In any case, I'm sure glad I took yesterday off work as a buffer PTO day. This works out really well even for domestic travel, even if it's far more critical after returning from as far away as Europe. But, I had no time to work on the travelogue while we were there, and barely managed to keep up on the
massive number of photos I took (more than 650 for the five-day trip—I took barely more than half that on my four-day trip to the Twin Cities last year, but then, that had been my second time there; I took 552 during the trip in 2023, though that had been eight days).
Now I can also go to a movie after work today, and maybe tomorrow too, and no longer have to worry about getting my written record of the trip all finished up. It's done!
I suppose I can direct you to full photo albums for the trip, though:
This collection combines all 17 separate photo albums for the entire trip in one spot;
This collection contains actually two separate collections specific to Albuquerque, one being exclusive to the
International Balloon Fiesta (5 albums) and one exclusive to
non-Balloon Fiesta activities (8 albums);
And
this collection covers the day trip to Santa Fe (4 albums).
Very few of these photos are captioned, except for any of those that were included in the travelogue, since captions were already written and I just copied and pasted them to the photos' Flickr pages.
It's going to be a while before I need to do this sort of thing with a large number of photos again. I mean, I'll certainly have a ton of albums for the holidays and especially specifically for the Christmas season, but that aside, this won't happen again, probably, until my Birth Week. I had been aiming to visit Barbara in Louisville next year but as Shobhit noted we just saw her for my Birth Week this year so perhaps I should punt that to 2028. The problem with that is all the travel already slated for 2028, none of which can reasonably be rescheduled for earlier in 2027. I'll figure something out, I always do!
— छह हज़ार एक सौ एक —
[posted 12:31pm]
