Outdoor visiting
Apr. 22nd, 2021 11:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livI am getting sucked into Twitter and away from DW, which is bad for lots of reasons, one of which is that it's endorphin-seeky behaviour and not healthy for me. So let me get back into the habit of posting by journalling about the last few weeks.
So it is now lawful to socialize in small groups outdoors, and it was very cold for much of April but I do appreciate this level of freedom. Both on a personal level because it gives me much-needed human interaction, and epidemiologically because my interpretation of the evidence is that small, local outdoor socializing is almost completely safe.
So during Pesach we visited my parents and brother in their extremely lovely garden, for the first time in about half a year. They are extroverts and somewhat disabled by online-only socializing due to deafness, but they seem to be coping. And we went to sit inceb and diziet's extremely impressive built from scaffolding gazebo, and under ptc24's cherry tree to celebrate an imported version of blossom festival with sweet tricolor dumplings and sake. All of those involved wearing lots of layers and coats and enduring very cold wind and even flurries of hail and sleet in stoically British fashion. And none of them felt even slightly normal, they were momentous First Time Social Events after months of hiatus. But it is so good to see people in the flesh.
This week the weather has been a bit warmer.jack has managed a pint and chips in a pub beer garden, though we haven't yet arranged to coordinate sociable outdoor beer. Yesterday we took a day off work and returned to the astonishingly pretty Coton Manor gardens where we met up with his mother. We made a few trips to Northamptonshire in the autumn last year, the last one just before Christmas when restrictions were far too belatedly imposed. I suppose discovering the pretty bits of an entire new county that we'd previously only ever passed through on the way to somewhere else counts as a very small silver lining.
I still owe several people video calls from at least December, but I've managed to have a few good online conversations with friends, including the wonderfulhatam_soferet. Also lots of hanging out with our lovely OSOs and the kids, eating post-Pesach pizza, doing my giant 2000 piece Noah's Ark jigsaw, playing a bunch of video games and some board games mostly with the adults. Notable new acquisitions are Bunny Kingdom with card drafting, territory control and lovely little bunny meeples, which was an afikomen present, and Genotype, a game literally about Mendel and his peas and Punnett Squares which I couldn't resist backing on Kickstarter. The art is extremely lovely, the gameplay is fairly standard worker placement, doing clever things with rolling dice to represent plant breeding. Also a fair amount of old favourites like Marco Polo and Food Truck Champion.
Mood-wise, I have days of optimism that maybe something like the actual end of the pandemic is in sight (at least in the UK, not globally of course), and days of near despair. I still enjoy the fun things I do, but the mood boost fades almost immediately after the activity is over, and it's easy to get into downward spirals. Still notking vaccinated.
So it is now lawful to socialize in small groups outdoors, and it was very cold for much of April but I do appreciate this level of freedom. Both on a personal level because it gives me much-needed human interaction, and epidemiologically because my interpretation of the evidence is that small, local outdoor socializing is almost completely safe.
So during Pesach we visited my parents and brother in their extremely lovely garden, for the first time in about half a year. They are extroverts and somewhat disabled by online-only socializing due to deafness, but they seem to be coping. And we went to sit in
ceb and diziet's extremely impressive built from scaffolding gazebo, and under ptc24's cherry tree to celebrate an imported version of blossom festival with sweet tricolor dumplings and sake. All of those involved wearing lots of layers and coats and enduring very cold wind and even flurries of hail and sleet in stoically British fashion. And none of them felt even slightly normal, they were momentous First Time Social Events after months of hiatus. But it is so good to see people in the flesh. This week the weather has been a bit warmer.
jack has managed a pint and chips in a pub beer garden, though we haven't yet arranged to coordinate sociable outdoor beer. Yesterday we took a day off work and returned to the astonishingly pretty Coton Manor gardens where we met up with his mother. We made a few trips to Northamptonshire in the autumn last year, the last one just before Christmas when restrictions were far too belatedly imposed. I suppose discovering the pretty bits of an entire new county that we'd previously only ever passed through on the way to somewhere else counts as a very small silver lining. I still owe several people video calls from at least December, but I've managed to have a few good online conversations with friends, including the wonderful
hatam_soferet. Also lots of hanging out with our lovely OSOs and the kids, eating post-Pesach pizza, doing my giant 2000 piece Noah's Ark jigsaw, playing a bunch of video games and some board games mostly with the adults. Notable new acquisitions are Bunny Kingdom with card drafting, territory control and lovely little bunny meeples, which was an afikomen present, and Genotype, a game literally about Mendel and his peas and Punnett Squares which I couldn't resist backing on Kickstarter. The art is extremely lovely, the gameplay is fairly standard worker placement, doing clever things with rolling dice to represent plant breeding. Also a fair amount of old favourites like Marco Polo and Food Truck Champion.Mood-wise, I have days of optimism that maybe something like the actual end of the pandemic is in sight (at least in the UK, not globally of course), and days of near despair. I still enjoy the fun things I do, but the mood boost fades almost immediately after the activity is over, and it's easy to get into downward spirals. Still not
