CoronaQuarantine, Day 28
So, the first weekly family Zoom meetup last week featured a total of eight call feeds, making a gathering of 13 people. This week's, which happened last night and lasted longer, only got up to seven call feeds, but due to some rotation as compared to last week, still featured 13 people: Dad and Sherri; Gina and Beth; David and his girlfriend Jackie; Christopher and Tristen (from the same house but both on their own separate devices); Nikki, TJ and Cheyanna; Shobhit and me.
I guess if you want to include pets, both Gina and Beth's two dogs as well as Guru on my end made appearances.
I learned that Beth has a paid account for her work, which means that since she always hosts the meetings, even though the rest of us have free accounts that would otherwise be limited to 40 minutes per call, there is no limit to these calls, thanks to Beth. Yesterday I was the first one to get onto Zoom and waited for Gina to start the meeting, which happened at just before 5:00. It was just Gina at that point, as apparently Beth was still on a work call in another room.
Soon enough, though, all of the others joined within just a few minutes. It was a nice surprise to see Nikki and TJ join the call this time. This meant we had calls coming in from five separate cities: Olympia (4 people), Spokane (3 people), Seattle (2 people), Vancouver WA (2 people) and Wallace, Idaho (2 people). Several who had joined last week never did this time, including Angel, as well as Ricky, Rachael and Raiden. The four new ones this week were Jackie, who had been working last week; and then Nikki, JT and Cheyanna. Sherri in particular was delighted to see a great-grandchild she almost never gets to see. Conversely, precisely because Cheyanna doesn't know the rest of us that well, she was mostly all about engaging verbally with Tristen, her uncle. More than once she would just bust out with something like, "I love you Uncle Tristen!" Other times, when some of the rest of us were talking about something that did not interest her, Cheyanna and Tristen would play silent peek-a-boo with each other. It was kind of adorable.
I also mentioned this last night: things like these Zoom meetings would easily be useful even after the pandemic has subsided. The geographical barriers remain, and Christopher and Tristen, for instance, never get far away from Wallace even in the best of circumstances. This is one way we can all still connect as a group, well into the future. I hope we do.
I was surprised that Brandi still did not hop on the call, although we have to give her a pass as she just had her third baby. I have no idea why Angel did not join this week; Gina told me she had texted all of them, including Angel, Brandi and Britni, that the call was about to happen, about 20 minutes earlier. Still, none of them joined. It would be nice to see Becca and Tyler join too, and they live up in Lake Stevens.
Conversation did kind of start to peter out before an hour had gone by, but then I found some questions to ask Nikki about what her job as a school counselor is like right now (still going, working from home, no cuts in hours or pay), and we heard some things about David who is a cop and Jackie who works in the dispatch office of the same police department down in Clark County. Christopher did not contribute a whole lot to the conversation, but then a) he rarely does; and b) Mom and Bill's wifi signal is clearly the weakest of all of our connections. His picture quality was always terrible and when he did speak it was often hard to understand him. Maybe it was also his device—Tristen would have been using the same signal, and it was easier to talk to him.
The big news with Christopher, though, was that he shaved off his Duck Dynasty beard. We never did find out why. I should ask him the next time he gets on. Everyone on the call was surprised and delighted to see it as soon as he joined the call though.
Anyway, my own free Zoom account won't show me call histories, which is annoying, so I can't confirm exactly how long the call lasted. I know for sure it was after 6:00 when we all hung up, though, so we for sure well surpassed the 40-minute limit on free accounts. We also well surpassed the time we were all on the call last week. I did say I really wanted to do another one of these on Sunday, so we could at least all see each other on Easter since gathering at Dad and Sherri's for dinner as originally planned is now out of the question. Dad and Sherri had a big ham that is way too big for them to cook for just the two of them, she said, so she wasn't sure what they'll do for dinner that day. I decided I am at the very least still going to make deviled eggs. It'll still be Easter and I want to have fucking deviled eggs! I want to be able to show them on the call too, if they aren't all already eaten. And maybe, just maybe, some new people can get on the call that day too.
Shobhit got home from work during the middle of the call, just like last week. He did nearly all of the dinner preparation, though I did late help him with deep frying puris we had with it. For a few minutes I moved the iPad into the kitchen so both Shobhit and I could visit on the call, but then he put on the oven fan and it was too noisy, so I moved back to the dining table.
I had hoped to maybe sit outside on the balcony during the call, but there was just no easy way to do that, I discovered. I could take a chair out there, but there was no table or anything to set the iPad on. The dining table was just easier.
Also, just like last week, I took several screenshots, and had to keep four of them, just because no single screenshot either showed everyone total who had been on the call (Shobhit is only one of the shots, for instance), and otherwise different shots just had better pictures of different assortments of people. I suppose technically I could have discarded the one where Gina kept poking a Peeps marshmallow bunny into the shot, but I had to keep that one too because it was silly and fun. Another one I kept because Guru peeked into frame, and so did one of Gina and Beth's dogs.
These shots all go into my "Corona 2020" photo album on Flickr, which already has 52 photos in it. You'd think self-quarantining would yield a lot few photos, but nope! I've had plenty of Zoom screenshots and photos of street art and of food and of pets to take. By and large I imagine these photos will be very interesting to look back on many years from now, assuming society is functioning then. Climate change continues to loom over all this shit as well, after all. And on that uplifting note!
I guess Gabriel was bothered by what I wrote about him in my post on Monday. He took the rare step of texting me so yesterday, calling it a "mischaracterization." I went back and re-read it and continue to stand by everything in it; it's not by any means a mischaracterization of my own experience. That said, while I have to acknowledge the unfairness of putting such things out there with him given no ability to speak on his own behalf in a clearly public online space (and my desire to note how very few people actually read this blog has much less relevance than I want it to have), the post itself served as a purging of my feelings about it, and I have moved on. Even in this blog, the more the days go by, the more it gets buried in archives, never to get more eyes laid on it again. It literally has less meaning or significance with every passing second.
I just "got back" (all the way from the dining table in the living room) from lunch with Karen—just as we did two weeks ago, via FaceTime. My scheduled lunches with Karen by default are twice monthly, every second and fourth Thursday; this means that while two weeks ago I just had a FaceTime lunch with Karen and last week I just had a family meetup on Zoom, this week I got to have both, two days in a row. Then I also have Virtually Happy Hour with Laney set for tomorrow night.
As could only be expected, my hour-or-so-long discussion with Karen was very COVID-centric. She is doing well under the circumstances just as I am, though, and is having no shortage of work to do herself. She told me there was an email sent out by one of her company's most direct competitors, offering training services while work is "slowing down" for them; apparently Karen's company is still getting so many projects that even now they don't have time for trainings or those sorts of things.
She did ask me how PCC is being impacted and whether people were shopping more or less. It's definitely more! It's only within the past week that things are getting less crazy, and yet I understand the stores to be still getting very high volume sales. As I noted to Karen, for many weeks that was panic buying, with customers cleaning product off the shelves—it's why I had so many new items to enter on a nearly daily basis for about two weeks. That aspect has let up significantly this week, though. I'm certain sales are still high, and will be for some weeks to come, just by virtue of so many fewer people being able to go out for meals (all restaurants remain closed except for take-out or delivery services, which certainly won't be making those places as much money as before). People are going to be buying more groceries than before because they have no other choice. Also, as Karen pointed out, being stuck at home every day, people are also cooking and baking just as a means of passing the time and entertaining themselves. Shobhit himself baked two different pies in the past week.
Anyway. It was nice to see her as always, and now I should maybe get some actual work done. I feel like this may have been my least productive morning since I started working from home. Shobhit has theorized that I've actually been more productive every day than I have been at the office, on average, but I feel like it's been about the same, really. Possibly I'm slightly more productive at home since there are no conversational distractions around me here, especially when Shobhit is gone at work himself. But right now, today I really do need to make a dent in the backlog of my work load that still stretches back to when I was on vacation.
[posted 1:04 pm]