Sunday, September 20th, 2020

Back-up Pool

After yesterdays full day, today I did mostly nothing. Surprisingly my pool slot at the Y moved from waitlist to confirmed, so I rushed to make the 10am slot.

After the rather fresh outdoor swim yesterday and not having a slot today, I had reached out to a new gym to potentially sign up with them as they have a pool. They had offered me a free trial which I had also scheduled for today. As a result, I ended up with two swims, one in the morning and one in the afternoon making up for the slot I missed on Friday so to say.

The Bethesda Health and Sports Club features a 25 yard pool. Not as nice as the pictures suggest, but functional. Cleaning protocols are nowhere close to those of the Y, where everything is cleaned every 30 minutes, which is also the reason for the 15 minute breaks between swims, but the cleaning protocol seemed sufficient. The S&H pool appears a little tired and a little dark, despite the skylights and reminds me of the disliked A-pool at the Y; just not quite as bad and warm. The S&H pool will do as a back-up, now that outdoor swimming is no longer an option and my Y slots are limited to three a week. I will probably join the S&H just to have more options. What was nice is the availability of lanes. I arrived 40 minutes before my allotted time and they still had a lane open and let me swim more than 30 minutes. Their protocol is that you can continue if no one else has a booked the lane after you and seeing my inital booking had been for 16:15, I knew the lane would be free and I stayed without anyone shouting at me to get out. Nice. My take way: getting more time is largely a question of figuring out “unpopular” times to book. Also, the two memberships (Y and S&H) are still less than what I paid for my Equinox membership; and it includes EM – at least at the Y. The Y is also thinking about bringing the swim team back, which would be awesome; no meets, but at least practices would return.

EM is doing well with her exercise routine. She says she will new jeans as they are all to big now! I am so proud of her. She is coping well with school and on top of what needs to be done (save for the website, but I shall work on that with her to push over the finish line. Today she is off to the beaches of Ocean City with her BF and his family to celebrate his birthday, which is tomorrow. I am not sure it will be warm enough for them to swim.

Rather unusual for COVID days this meant I had the day entirely to myself. I was mainly mooching around the house; reading and contributing to EM’s website. Now she needs to clean up all the content I have added and insert links. It seems absurd to write this given no one is going anywhere, but I do wish I had more time to dedicate to this project.

The neighborhood Listserv has been entertaining again. For the past two days there has been a discussion about Go Carts cruising around our streets. Mainly whether they should or may or should not. It quickly moved towards a legal discussion. As far as I am concerned the kids are welcome to cruise around as long as they adhere to traffic rules and keep safe. My biggest concern is that they are fast and hard to spot making them an accident waiting to happen. But like the leaf blower discussion it seems everyone has an opinion.

Speaking of, the press is full of opinions and election predictions in the wake of R.B.G.’s death. The scumbags of the GoP are salivating at the prospect of appointing their third supreme court judge and many of the senators who are on record saying they would not appoint one in an election year have now conveniently forgotten they ever said such a thing. The discussion around how such an appointment or possible appointment during the lame duck phase of a presidency will affect elections and voter turn out has been dominating and displaced all Corona news.

Not that there is much news other than the moron in chief now announcing a vaccine at the end of the year rather than for October and of course a continuous uptick in infection numbers. Today global infections have reached 30.9 million cases and numbers in the US are increasing again, as they are in Europe who is coping with a second wave, while we are still dealing with the first, never ending wave. New infections rose to 43k per day (from 33k a few days ago), which is twice what Europe is reporting when viewed in relation to total population. At 6.89 million reported infections the USA is now close to breaking the 7 million ceiling.