Month: August 2020

I have no idea how this happened, but I am clearly on the RNC mailing list.  I regularly get stuff from conservative politicians asking for money.  Here is what I do.  I pull out my pen and I make some middle school marks on the photos—you know, devil horns and such.  Then I go through the letter and put comments in the margins pointing out the idiocy of their positions.  Lindsay Graham got “John McCain is looking down embarrassed by you.”   Martha McSally (who the hell is Martha McSally?) got a lot of comments along the line that she is a Trump bootlicker.  You get the point.  Then I fold it all back up and stuff it into the pre-paid envelope and send it back so they have to pay for the postage. They probably think there is a check inside.  Instead they get snail mail trolling.  I’ve been doing this for years.  It is very satisfying in its own I-do-what-I-can way.

The one thing I miss most during this pandemic is swimming.  I love to swim. I want to be in water.  I have had five shoulder surgeries and yet, I persist.  But the pandemic put a stop to it.  The pool I usually go to has been closed since March.  It is indoor and it has a sand filter.  It does not rely entirely on chemicals to clean the water.  So as you can imagine, they are trying to figure this out.  Other indoor pools are open but you have to make a reservation to swim and that is not easy with limited lanes and a whole lot of people who want to get in the pool.  Not only that, it is indoors.  I am not fully comfortable with that because swimming entails a lot of exhaling and inhaling and spit kind of going everywhere.  Without proper ventilation, it gives me pause.

We decided to try the outdoor pool.  The have limited capacity and you have to make a reservation.  Lap swimming is first come first serve and one person per lane, which is a good distance apart.  We went on a Sunday evening figuring there would be less people there.  It is true, the number of people from normal pool capacity was far less.  But here is what I realized.  People forget to distance when they are having fun.  Or maybe they just don’t care.

When we arrived, the lap lanes were all taken so we had to make do with an open area, trying to get some laps in. (Matt does water running.)  There was a group of young men, teens and early 20s, going off the diving board and just horsing around.  The problem is that horsing around entails yelling and laughing and jumping and splashing.  And it also entails not really paying attention to other people around you.  So they were getting mighty close to us as they chased each other round the end of the pool we were occupying.  It made me cringe.  I just wanted them to go away.  But they did not because they were oblivious to the stink eye, Matt and I and every other swimmer were giving them.

After a while the lap lanes opened and we were able to segregate ourselves. But it was not an encouraging experience.