lockback
Well, here we are again: renewed stay-home restrictions, as of today. The thing I keep thinking about is how many people already expected this, even weeks ago. I was walking through Pike Place Market once in early October, looking for a prop for my Zoom Halloween costume, and I passed by a barber with a sign on his door that said GET YOUR HAIRCUT BEFORE LOCKDOWN HAPPENS AGAIN.
I've gone back and forth in regards to the haircut thing, by the way. Shobhit's gotten his hair cut at least twice since the pandemic started, but I have not. My hair is already much longer than I've ever wanted it to get back to, and it was already the plan for that to be the case by October, thanks to my getting a haircut two months earlier than usual for the trip to Australia, getting it in February rather than April. Under normal circumstances I'd have gotten it cut again in October as usual, but I still haven't. I very nearly made a private appointment with Casey at Bang Seattle when I got an email stating she was taking private appointments at the Pine Street salon, but by the time I tried to book it, she was already full up. I just took that as the sign I needed to continue letting it go for a while. In all likelihood I won't get it cut again until spring sometime, and it will thus be well over a year since my last haircut—the longest I've gone without a cut in years and years. And I keep it shorter now for multiple reasons, both my receding hairline and just easier day to day maintenance. I've basically decided to think of this as an unexpected "last hurrah" with the long hair I loved so much when I was younger, and also this is just my "covid hair." It's not the end of the world.
Anyway, I'm digressing. I see a particular difference between these new lockdown measures and when the first ones were implemented back in March: familiarity. All of this was far scarier and unknown and unfamiliar in March. And the thing is, anyone who's been doing what they should have been doing all along will be almost entirely unaffected by these new measures. I haven't been going to movie theaters anyway, right? Outdoor gatherings are still allowed, albeit limited to five or less—and though I've met at parks with friends, it's always been one at a time.
In fact, with one exception, I have been meeting these renewed, current guidelines all along, so my day to day life won't change at all—aside from, perhaps, having to stand in line more often to get into grocery stores. Big deal. The one exception, by the way, was the day trip I took in September to the "family vacation" in Leavenworth, where over 20 people, quite insanely, shared a single large house as an AirBnB rental. Maybe it was VRBO, whatever. In any case, even there I was the single person who declined to rent a room, and I only hung out outside and socially distanced. And even there that was the one difference from what I was doing then and the current restrictions: it was certainly a gathering of more than five people.
Our plans for ZooLights on the 29th remains a question. For now, I'm advocating a "wait and see" approach. This is still an outdoor thing, and it was already timed entry tickets for limited capacity. So that one thing, I am actually hoping can still happen. We'll see.
Another key difference between current restrictions and March is that all retail remains open, just at 25% capacity—including grocery stores, which apparently Governor Inslee said is only 5% less than it had been before. Really?? Tell that to Costco. I'll give Trader Joe's some credit here: it's the only grocer that has still had someone at their entry keeping tabs on capacity inside the store. Not even PCC has been doing that, although I'm not sure they were above 30% capacity any time I've been there anyway.
In any case, these restrictions are only going to change the social lives of people who were getting careless anyway. I'm hardly going to notice any difference. I do feel bad for people whose jobs will be affected, yet again: gyms and restaurants are again closed to indoor business. (Again: aside from the one time Shobhit and I ate at the Shipwreck Café in Olympia in June, I have not ever eaten out inside a restaurant anyway either.) I will admit, I was moderately tempted to see Tenet at Pacific Place over the weekend, when I saw that not a soul had bought a ticket to the first showing on Saturday, as I walked to the office and passed by it. But, I had a broker gift bag to lug home on the bus from the office, it turned out, and that movie was not that important anyway. And now theaters are closed again.
I feel kind of bad for the restaurant on the ground floor of the building across from us on Pine. They only just recently took the boarded window coverings down and were clearly gearing up to reopen. So much for that! Maybe they will still do takeout, who knows. But they had also clearly waited to reopen until indoor seating was allowed again. But, then they waited so long that now indoor seating is disallowed again.
So, what of the rest of my weekend? I had November Happy Hour with Laney on Friday evening—back to virtual, on Skype, after managing to meet in parks in August, September and October (those being after doing virtual Happy Hours every month from March through July). There's been something useful about these virtual Happy Hours with Laney, though: even before the pandemic, we planned to do these virtually during her retirement travels next year. So, now we know how easily workable it is to do it this way. The only concern, really, is that she be somewhere there is wifi.
It kind of sucks from her end that she can't get Skype to work properly on her antiquated laptop, so she has to use her smartphone, which makes me a tiny little image on her screen. I speak to her on my iPad at worst, and I hoped to run Skype on my iMac but for some reason suddenly there no longer seems to be a Skype application for Apple desktops. I tried to run it in the browser version but it wouldn't connect to my camera for some reason. I wonder if it's an issue with the browser I was using; I may have to test that.
Anyway, it was a lovely time hanging out with Laney on Friday as always, even if it had to be back on Skype again.
As for the rest of the weekend, Shobhit had work shifts every day and I spent much of the time on my own. I had a library book to pick up at the downtown library on Saturday, which I did on my way home from going to the office to swap out paperwork, now lugging a very heavy tote bag full of pasta sauces and snack samples from a broker. I might have walked home otherwise, but this bag was way too fucking heavy. I rode a bus first south along Third Avenue to the library—two assholes three seats ahead of me talking to each other with their masks pulled under their chins—and then had to wait 20 minutes for the #12 to take me up Capitol Hill via First Hill home from there.
I'm basically finished with all the calendars now, and just need to do some spot checking and proofing and possible tweaking here and there. I'm now doing preliminary things for the eventual "2020 in Ten Minutes" video, and keeping it to ten minutes is going to be a huge challenge. It's easy to assume there's not much else, at least comparatively, after the massive amount of stuff I want to cram into it from the Australia trip, but I was realizing last night how very much other stuff I have photos and videos of that I'll want to fit in: my Birth Week; the anniversary trip to the ocean; the state parks tour to and from Wallace, Idaho in August; the family vacation in September; some less-fun yet still-vital stuff regarding Black Lives Matter protests and wildfire smoke; and we haven't even gone through the holidays yet, which will yield plenty of photos even with social restrictions in place. I'm going to have to get uncomfortably ruthless with cutting stuff out that I wish I can fit into those ten minutes. And the ten minute limit is a hard limit, since YouTube won't work with me anymore on these videos to which I want to add music, and Flickr limits all videos to ten minutes. That's a stretch as it is for any average viewer attention span anyway.
[posted 12:29 pm]