CoronaQuarantine, Day 49 / Birth Week 2020, Day Six / Virtial Quarantini #6: Masala Chaitini
Last night I had my first-ever video chat with Lynn—I've known her 27 years, had never video chatting with her before this—and my second-ever Facebook Video chat, in as many days. As with Dad and Sherri on Tuesday, it turned out Facebook Video Chat was just easiest with her and Zephyr.
Lynn is still working, as she works in the chemistry lab for the Washington State Department of health. Her specific lab tests mostly soil samples from the Hanford cleanup site for radiation, and on the days she can actually go in, that's still what she's doing. The overall facility is slammed with work regarding COVID-19, but the other work they already do, like radiation testing, still has to be done; they're just doing the bare minimum, and one of the things Lynn has been tasked with is maintaining consistency of the work, or something to that effect. Not being a scientist of any sort, I can have trouble retaining the details. I do know she is only being allowed to work at work once or twice a week, and as she does not have a chemistry lab at home, the days she's working at home she's been saddled with paperpwork regarding federal government grant submissions.
Yesterday was when we had originally planned to visit a state park together, and she had even been granted her request to take the day off, but then when her work had to rearrange all sorts of schedules for COVID-19 related stuff, she got rescheduled to work at her office yesterday. So, she worked until around 6:00 and thus was not available to get onlne to chat with me until around 7:00.
And then, we had several minutes of technical difficulties. Lynn and Zephyr do not have very up to date computer equipment, and they had to reboot the browser or restart the laptop three or four times before things started actually working. In the end, they somehow managed to switch back and forth between both the laptop's internal camera and the external webcam they had plugged into it, so a couple of times at random it would switch, and it was like watching a multicamera TV show. Except in neither case was the picture quality especially good. But, I'll take what I can get!
Shobhit had a somewhat short shift at Total Wine & More yesteday—I learned yesterday that, in contrast to Big 5 where he is not always wearing a mask (even though he absolutely should be), at Total Wine they not only all have to wear masks but they even take all employees' temperatures before entry—and he got off work at 4:15. So, not only did we have plenty of time to eat dinner before the call with Lynn and Zephyr, but Shobhit was around for most of the call as well. Another Social Review point for Shobhit! That'll give him at least three of them from during my Birth Week.
Anyway. An interesting thing about Facebook Video: like in FaceTime, there is a white button you can push that will take a snapshot. The key difference is, in FaceTime, the snapshot takes only the camera feed of the front-facing camera on the other side: it does not include the little box that shows yourself on your own side. Faacebook Video does take a snapshot of both feeds, but instead of it showing your own feed as the smaller insert box, it snaps both images in equal size and creates a square image cut in half that includes both images. As in the above shot, which shows Lynn and Zephyr from their laptop's internal camera.
The shot below, at the bottom of this post, shows them from the angle of their external webcam, which after a while was what it stayed on. For a while we got to talking, yet again, abotu Hawaii and Zephyr's naive Hawaiian heritage—he's apparently roughly one-third native Hawaiian, and he knows a lot about Hawaiian history, as had also come up to a great deal during our Birth Week dinner last year—and that led to a lot of politics in discusson between him and Shobhit. At one point, bored with their politics, Lynn started sending me text messages in Facebook Messenger on the side. That didn't last too long, though.
The overall call sure lasted a while: the longest of any so far this week, lasting about three hours and twenty minutes, including the several minutes at the start with the technical difficulties. At the very beginning she would get the video on but I couldn't hear her, and her computer's mic was not being recognized. They clearly never use their laptop for this purpose. They could have used one or the other's smartphone, but, understandably, they wanted to be able to look at a larger screen. I don't think they have any kind of tablet device.
Zephyr had another friend he was planning to get online with at 8:00, and that got bumped to 9:00, so for a bit more than the last hour, it was just Lynn and me. I let Shobhit get back to watching TV and I took Lynn on my iPad back to the bedrooom. It's strangely reassuring to talk to her about the pandenic stuff, because even though she doesn't work directly with anything having to do with it, she's around the information, and especially local data, and she's trained to process large amounts of data, so she has a pretty objective overview of things. She expressed understandable frustration with the abysmal federal response, but she otherwise does not get too anxious about things; she stays pretty even-keeled. This has a somewhat calming effect when I talk to her about it all, even as she stresses that we'll be dealing with this for a pretty long time to come.
So, we talked plenty about the state of the world, and the state of her job, and the state of her bathroom, which currently looks like it's in the middle of a remodel and will stay that way for probably some months. This is because they had a giant tub clog they had to contend with, plumbers are considered "essential workers" and one had to rip out part of the wall, but drywall workers are not considered essential. So, as she put it, we're having to deal with a lot of inconveniences, but nothing we can't live with, so long as we don't get sick. She also repeated more than once that "the odds are against" people like her or me getting sick. Well, we'll see, I guess.
I'm taking the day off work today, and Shobhit and I are driving up to Skagit Valley to view the tulip fields. I think I'm going to avoid posting anything about it online, though. I plan to be extra cautious and take great pains not to be around any other people; in fact the vast majority of the time we will be in the car, until we get back into town and do some grocery shopping. All that is less relevant, though, than that I just don't want to appear as though I am encouraging things like "lesiure day travel" among others, who, statistically, are not likely to be as careful. So, I'm still going to do it; I'm just going to be a little less open about it. And, this part is also important: I've no itention of doing anything like it again for many weeks, if not months, to come.
It's just . . . it's my birthday, goddammit! I'm actually hoping there are tulips from these very fields at Costco when we get back and do our shopping. I'd like to buy some to support them, but it's still better to only go inside stores in my own city, and make it worth their while to ship the flowers out.
