PSA

In general, I post photos to Flickr first before blogging or putting photos on other social media sites. Here's a link to my photostream:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/90295829@N00/

I took a bunch of photos of the garden this morning. Too many to post here (although as you know I don't let that stop me most of the time). The "before" and "after" will be interesting.

The Dark Dahlia *might* have survived.

There's also a handful of bad tourist photos from the train because I couldn't help myself. I saw one person swimming shortly before we arrived in Hudson, 3 sailboats sailing, and an obnoxious uncounted number of jetskis and powerboats blasting around. Anytime I take the train down towards the City I'm going to be watching the water a lot to get a sense of what to expect for a river-based expedition in the future.

Failure to achieve escape velocity

I remember as a kid being very impatient when it was time to leave for a big trip. Eventually my siblings and I determined that any time our parents declared a roadtrip departure time, the actual departure time would be 2 hours later.

...this is my way of saying that I failed to achieve escape velocity today, so I'll be departing tomorrow instead. Thankfully roadtrips are more flexible than trains, airplanes, or boats, and the extra day here has been put to VERY good use.

A meme of sorts, I guess

On another social media site, a friend asked:
What state of mind are you in these days regarding covid? What are things like where you live? What is your current "normal?" 🛸Have you been vaccinated, and if yes, how has that changed your life? Are you still wearing a mask? Why? Why not? What bugs you? What do you fear? What makes you happy?



My reply:
After it was finally determined that vaccinated individuals transmit the virus at MUCH lower rates than non-vaccinated, I felt a sizeable sense of relief. It felt weird to return to unmasked activities at work, but my small college paid careful attention to the science, improved building ventilation, got the majority of students vaccinated, had zero positives over the final month of classes, and will require vaccination in the fall. As a whole my current state has around 70% of the population with at least one shot, and fairly good compliance with public health requirements. It still feels weird to engage in activities with crowds, even outdoors. I am happy to still have excuses to avoid large indoor crowds because I didn't care for them even before the pandemic. I will continue to put on a mask in crowded indoor spaces because it's not hard for me to do now that I have the habit, and seems like it doesn't hurt - not just for Covid but for a billion other communicable diseases, too. I am about to roadtrip out to Arizona, which is going to be REALLY interesting. Plan is to camp along the way with my cat to reduce human contact, but we'll see how that goes. I'm disappointed but not surprised that this country has taken a selfish/individualistic approach to the virus, continuing to ignore the vulnerable who depend on society-wide efforts to reduce exposure to deadly communicable diseases.


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Feel free to borrow the question or respond for yourself in the comments!