... more like a sign for our times:
I noticed it on a brief lunchtime walk at a local park I hadn't been to for a while. And I've never encountered a similar sign anywhere else - makes you wonder what happened to cause the sign, and how do you enforce it?
Hmmm, I've not been posting many photos on this blog recently. I want to rectify this, but honestly I don't have many opportunities to rectify this. I'm not exactly getting out and about to many new and exciting places. Almost all my walks/hikes are to places I've been to before, are not very far away, and are not exactly photogenic. I don't think I can change that during the week when I'm working - especially now that I've actually started to get quite busy at work. So I think I need to change my weekend habits - and make an effort on at least one weekend day to go to somewhere I've never been to before. That's a tough ask - but I might try now that we're past Labor Day and the more popular sights tend to be slightly less crowded. I've just renewed my State Park annual pass and National Parks annual pass (both of which I can actually expense through work via our wellbeing benefit!), so let's actually make better use of them.
I've been watching quite a bit of the US Open tennis this week - an event that I wouldn't mind going to watch one year (though knowing my luck, the day I would go would be a bit like that day in New York this week where they had that torrential rain and wind and flooding). But as I'm watching some tennis this evening, I'm trying to remember the last time I actually played a game of tennis. I think it's been a long while. I don't recall ever having played a game since I moved to Seattle. Which is quite surprising, since there are some courts not too far from where I work and I know it's been discussed with some of my work friends before. I definitely played when I was in San Diego - in fact I remember many an enjoyable afternoon at work playing tennis with my boss. Good times. But I must have played since then because I've got a tennis racket and balls upstairs. They wouldn't have come from San Diego or the UK, so is it possible I played in the year I was in Orange County, California before moving up to Seattle? I guess so, but I have absolutely zero recollection of this - and this would have been nearly 15 years ago. Yikes. However, the possibility of playing sometime soon has come up. I have a friend who is interested, though he currently has a foot injury so I don't think it's going to happen this year. And there are some courts near where I live that we could play at. So I hope it does happen - though I fear how bad I'll be, from both a lack of practice as well as a lack of fitness.
Last night I watched Mario Puzo's The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone. Which is really just a re-cut version of Godfather Part III with a new overly long name, and which was released just last year. Now I have seen the original Godfather III, but it was a long time ago and it must have been so bad that I have kind of erased it from my memory. So does this version fix the mess? In a word, no. It's so difficult to judge this film when it is preceded by 2 masterpieces in the The Godfather and the Godfather Part II. But I haven't seen either of these for a while (and watching this has made me really want to re-watch them just to see how good this genre can be done), so I think I can somewhat judge this film on it's own merits. And it just doesn't cut it for me. It's not particularly engrossing, not particularly memorable, and regrettably Sofia Coppola's awful performance has not been erased from the film. I had forgotten that this was the Godfather film with the quote "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!" - so at least it has one positive going for it. But overall, just a surprisingly average movie. And this re-cut version does nothing to dispel that overwhelming feeling of disappointment and that it could have and should have been so much better. 2.5 stars.
It's Labor Day on Monday, one of those rare bank holidays here. And the norm at work on the Friday before a bank holiday weekend is for upper management to send out an e-mail saying we can leave early - or in the current working from home climate, to log off early. Did we get such an e-mail today? Did we heck. And so I ended up "working" this afternoon - and by "working", what I really mean is keeping my computer open so that it looked like I was online and working. I had no intention of doing any actual work, as is tradition. But what to make of this lack of e-mail? Has there been a shift in thinking by upper management? I am reading too much into this? Are we expected to work a full day now on the Friday before a bank holiday weekend? If so, this is a most unwelcome development.
In a telling sign of how the fight against the pandemic is going locally, masks are going to be required for outdoor events with 500 or more attendees. Regardless of vaccination status. Yep, we are in the midst of a full on resurgence in the number of COVID-19 cases. And I think this new mandate came about because a recent music festival here turned into a super-spreader event with loads of new cases. I read somewhere that our state is averaging about 3,300 new cases a day and hospitalizations are up 40% over the last few weeks. And that 95% of the people hospitalized are not vaccinated. Hardly a surprise, given that about 40% of our state are still not vaccinated - and probably never will be. Which is why we're never going to reach herd immunity.