Tuesday, April 20th, 2021
Today was the most beautiful spring day with temperatures going up to 25C and sunshine all day!
I had an earlish start to the day (7:00). Once upon a time of course, when people still worked in offices that was my normal start as I would leave the house with EM. She would make her way to the bus I would make my way to the office every weekday at 6:50. This now seems like a life time ago, a faint memory.
With our (mostly) online world my timeline shifted sometime during the last summer as online school did not start until 9:00 and lunch break was from 11:15 until 12:30. Now that she is back in school every other week and I work East Africa time zone our household has become confused.
The days she is in school I have a small lunch while I work. To compensate on days like today not only do I move my office outside, I take a sun break and soak up the warmth and my swim slot is at 17:00. During virtual weeks I cook and we have lunch at 12:00 as her classes start again at 12:20 and I head to the pool for a 13:00 swim slot, resuming work upon my return.
The time not spend on calls today was taken up by commenting on what must be the worst paper ever written and I am not looking forward to having to make my way through four more of these poorly structure and badly edited 280 page reports. At least knowing what to expect I will not even try to edit, but rather provide broader comments; like this needs to be restructured, tighten, less repetition and so on for entire chapters. I would not have expected such poor quality from EY.
My foul mood was only lightened by moving from the waitlist to a confirmed lap lane in the early evening (I was late booking last week so did not have a confirmed slot). Swimming is a great way to get rid of frustration! As is weapons practice which was my evening entertainment.
We are back to Bokken (sword) practice. After ten months of Jo practice this feels weird, but it was fun, even if my back is killing me now. There were some feeble attempts to hold a beer waza, but relocating people to someones patio does not prove to be feasible, so we just hung out in the park chatting for a bit before everyone made their way home. Weather permitting I shall just grab a couple of beers and schlepp them to the park next week. Our days in the park seem numbered. All of the regulars have had one if not two shots so there are plans to return to open hand practice in the dojo - hurray! It also means rolling pracitce again and another chance for me to bang up my shouldes, which ache just thinking about it. But no pain no gain.
However, because of all this I had no media time, hence no links today. Suffice to say the USA reported another 51k new infections over the past twenty-four hours, all concentrated in a handful of States, bringing the total to 32.5 million nationwide since the beginning of counting.
Today mum celebrated her 83rd birthday with her three friends playing cards and enjoying a nice meal. My sister and I had sent her 50 Tulips, which she was pleased about. Given numbers in Germany are not good and severe restrictions are in place, mum worried about whether her meeting with three friends was even permissible. Given all four are fully vaccinate, I believe they are perfectly fine. There must be some upside to having taken the shot. Certainly, based on the guidelines Montgomery County has put out today they would be okay. Here fully vaccinated people are even allowed to take classes together in a gym and unmasked at that!
So you go mum, you rock!