So more waiting. And then another hour goes by. The staff answering the phones were giving estimated wait times to people, saying things like “an hour and a half” and then eventually “two hours.” And overhearing this, several of us in the waiting area laughed out loud. And in response to hearing “two hours” held up three fingers to one another. And began calling out “more like three hours” loudly, to one another.
It’s been a while since Liz and I did this, any of this, and it was great. No real deadlines, no rush, just ambling around.
Liz and I spend too much of our time at home, sitting at a desk, working. And to carve out a full day where we did the exact opposite of that… felt really good. And in many ways, felt like a reminder of a normal day.
To be honest, I still have a sense of trepidation about Covid. I’m having a hard time adjusting my thinking to the idea that everything is ok or normal again, or at least a kind of vaccinated normal.
It’s hard to know if I truly feel it’s safe to travel. Or if I want to travel so badly, that I feel it’s safe.
It was a lazy Saturday for us today, and I ended up with an itch to get some new board games for us to play. Liz and I have a very small collection of games, and I’ve gotten a little tired of the ones we have.
So I venture out to our nearby toy store (Toys et Cetera), and spent a good while browsing their wares.
“The original Coronavirus variant has an R0 of ~2.71. Alpha – the ‘English variant’ that caused a spike around the world around Christmas – is about 60% more infectious. Now it appears that Delta is about 60% more transmissible yet again. Depending on which figure you use, it would put Delta’s R0 between 4 and 9, which could make it more contagious than smallpox.”
This was my first visit downtown again in… a year and a half. I snapped this photo right before walking across the street, and looked up to see this guy standing a few steps into the intersection, yelling “Hey!” loudly and repeatedly.
Liz and I decided to use a rainy Sunday as our excuse to trek up to Logan Square, and to have breakfast at one of our old favorite spots: Lula Cafe.
But for me, the act of cutting my hair is almost like an admission that things are back to normal. And deep down, I still feel like we are far from normal. And that I don’t yet know what the Fall brings.
“When used by a trained accountant to carry out double-entry bookkeeping, a long-established system with inbuilt error detection, Excel is a perfectly professional tool. But when pressed into service by genetics researchers or contact tracers, it’s like using your Swiss Army Knife to fit a kitchen because it’s the tool you have closest at hand. Not impossible but hardly advisable.”
I ended up arriving between waves, as one set of folks were leaving and another showed up. We had a ton of rain (and some tornado sirens) earlier in the day, but by the time the party was underway… there wasn’t much more than the occasional slight drizzle.
I’m super bummed to see Shyamal leave, as he’s one of those rare devs that kicks out a tremendous amount of code, and it’s all high quality stuff. He’s also got a savvy ability to see things at the 10,000 foot level, and has a good sense for not just project deliverables but the whole project overall.
By all accounts, this was our first vacation in a long while. And our first, true travel since the pandemic began.
With the crazy long work day we had yesterday, Liz and I were both pretty wiped out today.
We’re both nearing the two weeks after our second shot, but we’ve been sequestered for so long… going out to eat anywhere still feels distant. I think it will take us a considerable amount of time before we feel comfortable doing something like that again.
I took the day off work as a “recovery” day, after hearing a lot of reports that this second shot is what does people in. I expected flu-like symptoms, and to be more or less out of commission. I heard some people experience symptoms 10-12 hours after the shot, others 24+ hours.