dinner at the park
Well, since I already went ahead and wrote about Alexia's and my visit to the Seattle Great Wheel on Saturday in a post yesterday, there's not a huge amount for me to catch you up on over the weekend, aside from Friday, which I'll get to in a minute.
I've been spending a lot of time trying to catch up on captioning photos, as both the trips to Long Beach in June and to Wallace, Idaho earlier this month still need to be finished, and then lots of random photos taken in between major events like that, also need to be captioned. Basically I just went all the way back to the end of the trip to Australia in my Flickr timeline, and have been tabbing forward and captioning anything not yet captioned. It appears pretty much all of my Birth Week photos actually were finished, and that was the next relatively major thing to happen with lots of photos; the Seattle protests came after that—which are still ongoing, apparently, but now that they are not at the East Precinct three blocks from my home, it's easy to go days without realizing anything has happened. (And I almost hesitate to share even that link, seeing as I find it difficult to trust such accounts, even from local news sources, after experiencing first hand how notoriously unreliable they can be in terms of how they represent and characterize both police and protesters in their reporting.)
I still need to tab through to the photos at Long Beach, and the trip to Idaho, both of which are mostly only captioned where photos were used in my email travelogues. Once those particular captions are found, really all the information needed is there, but I still like to have all my uploaded photos captioned if I can help it. I managed to caption all of the more than four hundred photos from Australia over the course of several weeks in March and April; there's no reason I can't catch up otherwise as well.
And in doing all this, I am putting my ongoing frustrations with my iTunes library on the backburner, and I've got this wackadoodle situation in iTunes where tons of tracks are duplicated not just once, but in many cases seven or eight times. I tried to delete such duplicates from Finder and I just get an error saying I can't perform that action on a file from a backup. So who the fuck decided to put eight copies of backup music files in there? It sure as fuck wasn't me. I probably need to call Support again when I can get the chance, which will get further complicated by my computer now being in macOS Mojave, thanks to my five-year-old computer just not being able to cut it with Catalina; downgrading it to the previous OS has actually eliminated several other persistent issues I was having, such as Firefox crashing on a consistent basis. That's not happening anymore.
But, I seem to have lost a whole bunch of music files ripped from CDs I no longer have in my possession—something that is making me resent Shobhit's insistence that I did not need to keep my CDs on hand since I had ripped them all. Now, so far I have only found files disappeared from CDs I had burned from the library, but "so far" seems to be the operative phrase there, as I have no idea how the hell my computer can tell the difference. My entire catalog of tracks burned from the Beatles albums from the library is now gone. I don't know where in the process they disappeared, only that there is no hope of recovering them after the Computer Love guy had to wipe the hard drive to get it working again, and those tracks are nowhere to be found on my external hard drive even though I had moved the entire iTunes library there.
They do still exist on my iPod Classic, and I'm still trying to find out of there is any way to retrieve them from there, but I can find little evidence that there is; it seems syncing can only go one direction, and if I try syncing the iPod Classic now, it will just wipe out my catalog on the device with the fucked up state of things in iTunes at the moment, where those tracks do not exist.
What a fucking pain in the ass.
Anyway! Let's talk about Friday, which was the day I left shortly after work finished, with a thermos full of margarita, walked to La Cocina Oaxaqueña, picked up my beloved Quesadillas Fritas dish (which I ordered via the phone while walking down there), then walked back up the hill again from there to Cal Anderson Park, where Laney was already waiting for me sitting on her own blanket.
Laney said she likes to keep a 10-foot distance rather than just the 6-foot recommendation. Just to make sure we were accurate, I brought a tape measure. We decided the blankets being a little less then ten feet apart was okay, so long as we were ten feet apart.
And we proceeded to have the loveliest Happy Hour in months: the weather was warm but we were mostly in shade and it was perfectly lovely and comfortable; to our relief and surprise, the park was not crowded with people at all and so we had no worries about other people being too close to us. And best of all, since Laney brought her dinner with her, as opposed to the five months in a row of virtual Happy Hours over Skype, where she consistently had to disconnect by 7:00 so she could get her dinner, we had no particular time limit forcing us to end our time together earlier than I would have preferred. We must have stayed out there in this case until at least 8:00, by which time it was actually starting to get chilly.
And, we had plenty to talk about. We even got to a point where both of us had to pee, and I noted that I really didn't want to have to go home yet. Laney wondered if there were still a port-a-potty over near the public bathrooms that, last we heard, had been closed; I decided to go check, and . . . it was no longer there. But, the bathrooms were apparently open again, albeit with doors that seemed unable to lock. They are now just four separate one-toilet rooms, and I decided to just go into the one open room and I attempted to pee standing up. I couldn't do it. And even though a woman opened the door and immediately apologized and left while I had stood there with my back to the door, for some reason, even in the more vulnerable position, I was only able to pee once I sat down. Luckily no one else came in after that, and I went back and then Laney left to pee herself, winding up using the same bathroom.
It was sort of awkward, the whole thing; there are still a few tents around and it felt like those bathrooms are currently still being used mostly by homeless people. But, it wasn't too terribly trashed or anything, although oddly there was a jacket hanging on the inside of the door handle. But whatever, it bought us both some time and we probably sat and chatted for another good hour or so.
Not long before we kind of just made the mutual decision it was time to go home, both of us starting to collect our things without even making any announcement, I had mentioned the "safer hugging" scenario I had seen not long ago on TV, referencing that very New York Times article from a couple of months ago: two key elements being masks, and facing opposite directions. Probably most important, being outside.
I had not brought it up to make any suggestion at all, and it had been several minutes since it was even discussed, but when we packed up our stuff and stood with outstretched arms to give a mock "air hug," Laney said, "Should we do a real one?" I was so taken aback, and actually mildly shocked, I went ahead and did it, and I still can't decide if it was against my better judgment. We did it exactly as recommended: no face touching; masks on; facing opposite directions; we were outside. Still, I said, "I'm amazed you're willing to do this," and she was kind of like, "I know!"
We probably shouldn't have: Laney is over sixty, on medication since a heart attack some five years ago, and in a high-risk category for multiple reasons. She won't even go to a restaurant with outdoor seating. So I'm still kind of stunned she did that, but in the moment I was so delighed by the chance for a hug that I went ahead and did it, rather than declining. Given the full scenario, we were probably still fine. I still like to make decisions based on probability, after all. And it's not like this means I'm going to go around hugging everyone from now on. And you know what? It sure was nice.
Weather depending, we will meet at the park again for our Happy Hour in September. I quite look forward to that. In the meantime, we've made plans for our next virtual meeting, a "Netflix Party" viewing of Uncut Gems two Saturdays from now.
[posted 12:34 pm]