Summer Continues

Well, here we are on the 1st of July. The month of American Independence. Fairly ironic considering that we've now been socially distancing for over three months now, held back from our liberties by mandates to stay at home and avoid people and wear masks and on and on. Restaurants and bars were just ordered to close again today for dine-in services. Seems like they just opened. Well anyways. People like to panic when numbers of infections spike. All in the name of public health. We've already been warned, as a society, not to have gatherings for the 4th of July.

Meanwhile, I take walks every morning and every evening and sometimes in between. And especially in the evening, you can see people playing basketball and volleyball at the park. And the playgrounds are full of children. The parks are essentially re-opened. Even though they're not. Guess we can't enforce that. But we can make Chili's close so that I can't go and have a pleasant sit down meal by myself. Sigh. Anyways. Moving on.

So it's July, and I'm still (not) working from home, owing to the fact that there's simply no volume of work to do. All of our summer events were cancelled. Haven't heard yet about the fall. The public schools are proposing a two day a week schedule for children, with learning from home the other three days of the week. Not sure how that's supposed to work with many parents working full time. Who has time to also home school? I mean I'm still hopeful that I'll actually be returning to work at some point. Well who knows, maybe I'll win the Publisher's Clearing House sweepstakes so I can quit my job and then I can homeschool my kid.

Speaking of my kid, we did a beach day at Crissy Field Beach in San Francisco this past week. It had been a couple of years, it seems, since I took him to the beach. He loved running around the sandy beach and into the waves, and hunting for little pieces of seashells in the sand. Unfortunately he only lasted about an hour and a half before he was ready to go home. Four hours of driving back and forth for 90 minutes at the beach. Well it was a good experience for him, anyway. Though it was a little colder than I had anticipated. Sure was nice to get out of the 100-degree weather of the central valley. But now I'm back in it. Slowly melting away.

And life goes on. No idea what the rest of the summer may hold. I mean at some point I need to return to work, right? Paid administrative leave and vacation time can only last so long. l suppose this is what retirement must be like, frittering my days away going for walks and watching TV and playing Minecraft and reading. Yeah, that's it. I'm doing a trial run of retirement right now. Oh and yeah, I play Minecraft now. Connor got me into it, or rather I started so that I could share that with him. It's actually a fun and stimulating game. And we're playing on a family-friendly server run by a 15-year-old and his dad from Seattle. So that's fun. I was never a gamer, admittedly. It was just never something I got into. We had an Atari 2600 when I was a kid, and an Apple IIe computer that could do rudimentary graphic games like Speed Racer. But that was about it. So gaming is, or at least was, a bit of a foreign world to me. But now I'm learning. God forbid.

Anyways. So continues the summer.