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Once again, I actually posted at least one
regular blog post over the weekend—something I have not done regularly in years. But, it was also once again an eventful weekend, although at least this one was just a regular two-day weekend rather than a three-day holiday weekend like the one before. My post yesterday focused on two things: the last days with Ivan, including dinner on Friday and the fairly brief amounts of time I got to spend with him in the morning and in the evening on Saturday, before and after his winery tour but before he flew out to Philadelphia (from which he took the train to Lancaster, where he grew up, and where his parents now live, in a house he'll stay in for the next week or so).
Thus, I have nothing further to say today about Ivan's visit, except for this: the one kind of disappointing thing about his not joining Alexia and me for Seattle Pride in the Park is that I got no new photos of him, as I had hoped. I figured I would get at least one picture of him there, probably more. Thus, the photos from
our birthday dinner at Saffron Grill remain the most recent I have taken of him. That's fine, though; he's well into the habit now of sending me photos of himself while on any travel excursion he goes on. This was something I all but demanded when he left for his three months in Eastern Europe in early 2018; which he continued quite regularly during his year in New Zealand 2019-20; and which he still does virtually anywhere he travels to for fun, which I very much enjoy. He even messaged me two photos from his stop at Snoqualmie Falls on Saturday, one of them of him, so that's actually the most recent shot I have of him—just not the most recent one I actually took. I just haven't uploaded it to Flickr yet.
In fact, ever since he returned from New Zealand, I stopped saving all the photos he sent to me and creating Flickr collections after his most recent move back in with us, last July: my "
Ivan's Travels" collection of photo albums really only cover his Eastern Europe, New Zealand, and immediately subsequent California travels. In retrospect, I probably didn't even need to keep the photos from California, although I did love the pictures he sent from both San Francisco and Berkeley. (He recently tried to downplay how long he had stayed in Berkeley, but he was there fully seven months—after a month or so in San Francisco that proved to be disastrous due to the job he got and the part of town he had to work in; his most recent time living with us was itself only nine and a half months, from July through April, all of about a month and a half longer than he was in the Bay Area last year. He was in San Diego about a month before flying directly from there to Seattle last July.)
Anyway, even after he moved back in with us last summer, he would regularly take weekend trips to places, and he never stopped sending me photos: of a weekend trip here or there to Portland; or last month, his Alaskan Inside Passage Cruise, or of his travels around Southern British Columbia. And even though most of those photos were gorgeous in their own right and of places I had mostly not been, they just weren't as exotic as places like Eastern Europe or New Zealand, so I felt no need to keep them. Besides, he proved a few months ago that he could actually find one of his photos from an old trip as far back as 2018 on his phone in a matter of minutes, whereas I had been thinking my organized photo alums on Flickr might make it easier for him should he need to find an old photo at some point. I wasn't really doing him as much of a favor as I thought. So, even though I still appreciate it and hope he continues sending me photos—and fully expect that he will—I no longer feel compelled to save them, or clutter my Flickr account with photos I didn't actually take myself. Of course, that is, with the occasional exception, such as the one of him at Snoqualmie Falls, which I want to keep only because it was indeed taken on the last day of his last visit, during which I got no photos of him.
There's a sort of irony with my photographic history with Ivan, in contrast to that with other friends: I now have
350 photos of him on my Flickr account, only about two thirds of which I took myself; the other third are all of him, mostly selfies, taken on his travels and then sent to me on Facebook Messenger. He sent me about 80 photos of himself in Europe and Morocco, and then 30 from New Zealand and about four from San Francisco.
By comparison, among my other closest friends, I have 1,629 photos of Barbara (still #1 among my friends, astonishing considering she hasn't lived in Seattle since 2010); 1,619 of Danielle (clearly she will soon finally overtake Barbara); 1000 of Gabriel; and 696 of Laney. Note that this excludes family members—of whom Shobhit is way past anyone at over 8,000 photos; I have over 1,500 of Dad and over 1,400 of Sherri, and even just over 900 of Gina. The point is, I've know Ivan for a while now—eight years—but still far less than I've known any of these others, and a full third of the 350 photos I have amassed of him to date were taken by him when he wasn't even with me. Ivan is very picky about how he looks in photos, though.
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. . . Okay, well. I didn't really intend to write quite so much about photos of and from Ivan. I guess it works for filler. Which you likely didn't find all that interesting to read about. Oh well!
The social event of the day yesterday was Laney coming over for yet another Sunday movie—something of a sporadic routine for us now, as she quite likes being able to find nearby street parking for free on Sundays. We decided we would burn through a
Scream marathon, so yesterday we watched the original 1996 movie
Scream.
There was a just a reboot / quasi-sequel
Scream this year, which I still haven't seen but have heard good things about. I had brought it up, and Laney mentioned she hadn’t seen any of them. Thus this plan was born, although that was when I thought this new one was the fourth one made; I totally forgot there was a
Scream 4 released in 2011, eleven years after
Scream 3. I never saw the fourth one either. I guess I will now, sometime this summer. It's probably dumb as shit, but that's all right.
The original, on the other hand, holds up surprisingly well, for a meta slasher movie from 26 years ago. Except, of course, for how many times people refer to "a cellular." Like, what? There's even a kind of hilarious line when an adult asks a high school kid, "What are you doing with a cellular phone?" The kids responds, "Everyone has them now!" These days, hardly anyone has land lines, and I literally can't remember any time that people regularly used the term "a cellular."
I was looking up information on IMDb and completely forgot how quickly they cranked out a sequel: the very next year!
Scream came out in 1996 (December 20);
Scream 2 in 1997 (December 12). They waited another three years before the comparatively tepid
Scream 3 was released in 2000, though. I saw all of those in theaters but, as I said already, skipped
Scream 4 in 2011. There were 11 years between 3 and 4, and another 11 years between that and this new one. Will they just make another one every 11 years until Neve Campbell finally dies of old age? (She's 49 now.)
I guess they are already filming another movie. But, apparently, it
won't star Neve Campbell, for the first time in the franchise, due to a pay dispute. So, we'll see how that shakes out.
Anyway. We all found ourselves very entertained by the original
Scream—even Shobhit, who was clearly approaching it with skepticism. Some of the meta humor doesn't land as well now as it did in 1996, but a lot of the more straightforward humor still does, as do the unusual plot twists. Both Shobhit and Laney were surprised to learn that (spoiler alert!) Drew Barrymore doesn't survive past the opening sequence—a rarely used tactic that, prior to that, no one else had done so famously since Alfred Hitchcock killed off Janet Leigh eighteen minutes into
Psycho in 1960.
Laney left not long after the movie ended, and Shobhit and I spent most of the rest of the day catching up on TV: the first three episodes of season three of
The Boys; this week's episode of
Barry. I tried to get some reading done of my library book, which is now so overdue my account has been suspended. But dammit, we have all this great TV to watch!
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[posted 12:35 pm]
