semispontaneous walk
I'm fairly happy this morning, having controlled my food intake pretty well, my weight down a reasonable amount this morning, also having gotten an unusual amount of exercise yesterday.
First, I rode my bike to the office and back, pretty much right after I finished my work day. It was unusually warm yesterday, a high of 83° when the normal high is 69°; we have the same scenario facing us today. I feel like it was unusually early in the year for this but we already broke out our fans, for both the bedroom and the living room. In fact, kind of amazing, it stayed warm enough in the bedroom that we kept the fan on all night with the window open and never got chilly. I really hope this isn't a harbinger of the summer to come, but, whatever. What can I do about it now? Well, I can complain for sure. And believe me I will.
Anyway! It was still a nice ride to the office and back. I was afraid my new stack of paperwork would be unruly-thick after the long weekend, and it as surprisingly manageable . . . which honestly probably just means tomorrow's stack will suck. This is one of the reasons I can't wait to be working in the office again: it's so much easier to manage receiver paperwork when I can get through much smaller daily stacks instead of getting far thicker stacks only twice a week. It really disrupts my work load otherwise and I'm pretty tired of it.
Then, I was only home a few minutes when Alexia texted me to ask if I wanted to go for a walk. I had been thinking I would watch a Netflix movie for review, but I bumped that to today and took Alexia up on her offer instead. I put on some sunscreen and, after I was done eating my dinner and we left at 6:45, we walked up to Volunteer Park, walked a fair amount through the park interior, then walked back north via 12th Avenue and then back up Pine Street to our building. We had plenty to talk about and it was quite nice and pleasant, and it was nice to do some more socializing.
We talked a lot about some of the stuff I wrote in yesterday's post, about where I'm at with strictness of coronavirus protocols as known risk levels shift around. Unsurprisingly, she agreed with me—maybe even slightly more than she should: I am still following the guideline of wearing masks in indoor public spaces, after all, and somewhat to my surprise, when I met her outside her condo door, myself in a mask, for the first time she did not bother putting one on herself. Granted, we had just a short distance to the stairwell and no one else was around, but it was still a noticeable change. Also, just to be fair to her, I'll note that when we returned to the building after our walk and some other guy (with no mask on himself) was carrying boxes into the lobby, in that instance she did put her mask on when we came inside—as did I. of course.
I still keep an updated tab open for the Seattle Times coronavirus daily updates page, and every morning I pay particularly close attention to the infographics near the top. Curiously, they have removed the block showing daily test-positive rates, with space rearranged a bit now that they include vaccination rates for the state. I know that right now the major threshold goal for further loosening of restrictions is 70% full vaccinations, and as of today, we're at 43% of all residents and roughly 53% of those 16 or older. King County's numbers for those are a fair amount higher, which is very encouraging: 54.1% of all residents now fully vaccinated and 65.9% of those 16 and older. Accounting for ages 12+, which amounts to all eligible residents, King County is at 62.5% fully vaccinated and 74.3% having at least a first dose—which puts us well on track to meet the 70% goal by the end of this month, I think.
And, honestly? Now that I have seen those numbers specific to King County rather than all of Washington State, I actually feel better about my decision to start seeing movies in theaters again. In my own area things are even better than I realized, because I had been spending too much time looking at the state rather than county data.
After we got back home I basically spent the rest of the evening scrolling through TikTok.
Whoa, I nearly forgot about Office Lunch Meetup today! And I just finished the Microsoft Teams call, which for about 45 minutes was, once again, with only Rebecca. I really thought we'd be back down to just two people for this week, but then right at 12:45 Marie from IT hopped on and we chatted with her for about ten minutes.
Most of the call with Rebecca we talked about movies and TV. It was nice and pleasant as always and I remain grateful that we keep doing these weekly virtual office meetups, even if attendance is sparse. Now I need to post this so I can join another call, a Merchandising Department meeting. On to the next!
[posted 12:59 pm]