— पाँच हज़ार नौ सौ अड़सठ —
It's a relatively quiet week this week, although I did make new plans for tomorrow afternoon, when the
Seahawks Victory Parade will go right by my office on 4th Avenue. This is quite the departure from the Victory Parade that happened in 2014, with 700,000 people—more than the population of Seattle proper at the time—gathered, and it was 31° outside. Our office was still at our Roosevelt Way location in the U District at the time, so the only way I could have seen the parade in person was to have taken time off, which I did not do. This year the temperature will be in the mid- to upper-40s, which will make it easier for the crowds to push the one million mark. And now my office is literally on the parade route.
If I want to I can watch from the break room itself. The Corner Market store is going to be nuts, although Noah made the point this morning that it'll be like the Fremont store during Fremont Solstice: the store will be slammed but no one will be spending much money. They'll mostly buy bottled water or perhaps in a few instances a small snack here or there.
I fully intend to go outside, though. I can't miss a photo opportunity this easy and of this magnitude. Even better, Alexia texted Shobhit and me that she plans to come downtown to see it. Shobhit won't have time to join; he has two meetings before he then needs to head down to Olympia for the very first rehearsal for his play. Alexia plans to meet a friend of hers who lives on Queen Anne, and another friend will meet there too; they plan to walk downtown from there, and leave at 10:00 a.m. The parade starts at 11:00 but down at Lumen Field; it could be as late as noon by the time it reaches my office. So, they're planning to make their way to my office location to make it easier for me to meet up with them.
I even
wrote about the 2014 Victory Parade, and I kind of forgot that I got a bit caught up in it even then—and that time, I just watched the live feed on my second work computer monitor. That old post reminded me that several coworkers actually
did take time off and go down to watch the parade. This is the great thing, among so many great things, about this new office location: I'll already be here by default, and I have a private space I can retreat into.
Kind of amusingly, during the weekly Merchandising Meeting yesterday, Dave told us that if Wednesday is our usual in-office day and we want to skip it this week to avoid the traffic chaos that's totally fine. It was the opposite kind of conversation from what I wrote about in 2014: instead of people taking time off to go down there, this year we're talking about people actively avoiding the area. I work in-office every day anyway so it hardly makes a difference to me, and I'll get down here plenty early before the crowds do.
Shobhit noted yesterday that streets will be closed as early as 6:00 a.m. tomorrow. I can't find corroberation of that specifically;
this King 5 story says intersecting streets will be closed between 11:00 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. The parade
starts at 11:00, and
this KOMO News story notes bus reroutes will begin around 5 a.m. I'm happy it's easy for me just to walk to work now; I typically leave home around 7:00. Alexia is smart to park on Queen Anne and walk down.
— पाँच हज़ार नौ सौ अड़सठ —
— पाँच हज़ार नौ सौ अड़सठ —
There's not much else for me to report on—it's Tuesday, after all. We did briefly consider that last night was Naked Night at CC's, but I really wasn't up for it, and Shobhit was all good with skipping it. We even skipped the fourth-Saturday verion we usually do more to go out of our way to attend, which happened two Saturdays ago.
What we did do was go shopping. I had leftover pizza from Sunday to eat for dinner, and I made us chai, using a sample loose black tea I brought home from work—it's nowhere near as good as the Taj Mahal brand tea we usually use, but whatever; I might as well use it up. And when I was done eating, we drove down to Costco. Monday evening is really an ideal time to go there. Can you imagine if we went there Sunday morning, before the Super Bowl? The crowds tomorrow will be enough for one week.
We didn't even buy that much, like seven items I think? And still it came to $141 or so, largely because of a bottle of Makers Mark that we bought—I usually cover Costco with money from my bank account (Shobhit purchases with his Costco Visa card and I Zelle him) but he covered the whiskey so I wouldn't totally blow apart my budget.
I didn't do a whole lot else last night. I worked a little bit on my 50th birthday video. Aside from slight tweaks I'll probably continue doing here and there over the next couple of months, it's basically done. I'll want at least one last clip from the year 2026 to include, and then later I'll expand it with footage from the family birthday party, just like I did for Dad for his 70th birthday video last year. So, the video I share on my birthday will be 15 minutes long; after I expand it, I figure it'll be close to 20 minutes long.
So far, I must say, I'm really, really happy with it. It fills me with emotion to watch it from start to finish. The focus is on me with this one, so I try to limit the video clips to ones where I am actually in front of the camera. This does ultimately leave out a few of my relatives, which is kind of a bummer but they'll live. I have a couple clips that show me with both Nikki and Becca when they were
really little; there are no clips of me with any of Christopher's boys, though. Among Angel and Gina's kids (between the two of them there are five), I have only one clip of myself with any of them—a really fun clip of riding the Octopus with Britni at Lakefair in Olympia twelve years ago. She was 23 then, and I was 38.
A lot of this is just random chance as to workable video clips that include certain family or friends. I figure this is fine; all these people were already featured in other tribute videos I've made, for all three of my siblings and all of my parents. I am including one clip of Danielle that does not have me in front of the camera, but it shows her turning toward me from the hospital bed where she gave birth to Morgan in 2004 and saying, "Matthew I'm really glad you were here." It's a very touching moment to see now, and witnessing the birth of a child is a hugely momentous occasion, even if it's not your child. I was also there for Morgan's birth four years later, and I did videotape that but never did get a copy of that video; I only have the still photos I took. So to commemmorate that event I included a photo I took of the nurse holding up the horrifically bloody placenta in her hands. It seemed appropriate.
I have several friends who I usually spend time with during my Birth Week who did not make the cut. The original three "Untouchables" all get multiple appearances, of course: Danielle, Gabriel, and Barbara. I now put Laney in the same camp, and she shows up a couple of times. Until last night, Ivan had not made the cut, but in the end I decided to put in a clip from last year that features him. An early cut did feature Tracy but I had to cut it out for time; Karen, Claudia, Lynn and Zephyr, even Alexia—none of them have made the cut. If I had any video clips that were both good enough and featured them then any of them would have. I suppose I could at least find some still photos of them to throw in there, which would add 2 seconds each to the run time. Hmm, something to consider. They are all notable parts of my life, after all—although there's also the consideration as to how significant they are to the
entirety of my life. Lynn is my second-oldest friend but we were never especially close; I've known Ivan 12 years and he means a lot to me. It might be good to lean into being inclusive, though, even if only very briefly. I don't know, I need to think about it; I'm trying to keep the run time under a limit and every second counts. On the one hand, this is about me and not about them; on the other hand, a lifetime retrospective about me should arguably include them.
Okay, I just answered my own question. It's too bad I don't have access to my full Photos archive in iCloud, which would make this easier. But! I have access to the past two to three years, most of the photos in which were taken as "Live" photos. This means I just found photos of myself from the past couple of years with Lynn and Zephyr; with Claudia and Tracy; with Evan; and with Alexia that I could save as one- to two-second videos. That works! I couldn't find one I could do this with Karen—there's a great shot with her and Dave and Shobhit from Thanksgiving last year, but it was unfortunately taken in Portrait Mode rather than Live Photo so I can't save it as a video. I'll just throw in a still photo of her; I thus decided instead on the overhead shot taken last April at the Space Needle, looking down on us on top of the revolving glass floor. The still photos often still have some kind of zoom activity happening in my videos so it'll barely be noticeable that it's not a video, if I throw in all of these shots right next to each other.
Aren't you thrilled that we all worked through this together? In any case, this is why I'm happy to be this close to finished a couple of months early—it gives me a lot more time to make small tweaks that make me much happier with the final result.
— पाँच हज़ार नौ सौ अड़सठ —
[posted 12:31pm]
