Saturday, March 27th, 2021
A beautiful day for practice in the park today.
As L. is away, I have taken on sending out the email with time and location for practices and have receive the first complaint. M. does not like the temperature to be announced in Celcius, thought I did include an estimate of the Fahrenheit equivalent. Of course, I will use this in the next invite to taunt him as he gave me the full formular for conversion. The simple version is times two add thirty.
It was so beautiful out that some of us hung around and chatted after Fred Sensei’s 31 Jo Kata demonstration. It took me an hour to remember all thirty-one cuts but am hard pressed to recall them now. Maybe if we spend another month on all thirty-one, they will become ingrained.
From the park I headed to the pool to find three lanes available and got a good ten extra minutes of swim time. The gym has a new process where now one has to check into the activity on the phone after arrival, which is a bit of a nuisance. For lunch we had some wonderful pulpo, lobster, shrimp and octopus’ salads with great baguette before EM headed of to work, while I proceeded to make the best of the sun and played lizard on the love seat.
Making the most of the nice weather my French neighbor came by to pick me up for a walk around the Hood. Spring is showing in all its glory. The cherry trees as well as the Magnolias are in full bloom competing with the Daffodils and the Hyacintas. Nature is out in full force. We ended the evening on my patio with a glass of my favorite Graham Beck rose champagne. All the while I got to practice my French and she endured. She has an infinite amount of patience with my stumbling speech.
All in all, a very active day! Not that any of this combats the belly fat. No idea how to get rid of that. C. did ask me what I would do once fully immunized. I at first said the same as now. That of course is not true. The big change will be Aikido as the dojo management has decided fully vaccinated people can return to partner practice. That was the key driver for getting the shot sooner rather than later. And the first thing I will do as of April 30 is go to practice. And I will be on the mat every day there is class! Thankfully a number of our instructors are having their first and second shots, so hopefully there will be a class every night! And the tumbling for sure will help combat the excess body fat! Only five more weeks.
While vaccines are being rolled out many States have reopened. Clearly to early as numbers for the past three days have been on the rise. Over the past twenty-four hours 77k new infections have been reported. That is 10k more than yesterday and 20k more than the day before, bringing the total number of reported cases to 30.9 million. Clearly the concerns expressed by CDC over premature reopening’s are well founded.
There is not much news on the Corona front. Scientists are expecting people to become infected with a variant of COVID every two to four years. This is not necessarily a reason to worry. If people are vaccinated it will become like the common cold or the flu.
The other two items dominating US news relate to voter suppression after the State of Georgi has passed legislation making voting much harder by not only limiting access but also banning providing food or water to people in line to cast their ballot. To Europeans standing in line to vote for eight and more hours is inconceivable to start off with. This is no democracy at all.
An item, which I find somewhat funny, is related to a container ship stuck in Suez canal. Somehow the pilots have managed to wedge the ships across the canal to it is now stranded on land on one side (the stern) and the back on the other side, completely blocking the canal. All hands are on deck trying to dislodge the beat, but to no avail.
If it would not have a major impact on global supply chains a ship stuck across a canal would be funny.