Dog Days of Summer

When we last left off, I was sweating in my apartment, watching lots of Netflix, and working my way through 3.5 pints of ice cream (chocolate peanut butter). Well, guess what? I’m still sweating in my apartment, watching lots of Netflix, and working my way through my carton of ice cream (it’s time for a new flavor soon). Coronavirus county numbers look decent, just in time for school to start and thousands of students to converge on campus. Ann Arbor public schools start out virtual this fall and will reevaluate as circumstances change; U-M seems determined to continue with move-in and ~30% in-person classes. So far at least UNC Chapel Hill, Notre Dame, and Michigan State have walked back plans for in-person activities, but it’s possible they may have been less strict about some things than U-M is being. I don’t know for sure, but I’m willing to try this reopening thing out since Washtenaw County looks okay (low hospital occupancy, no deaths for the past two weeks, 1-2 dozen cases a day for ~370,000 people), but I’m also ready to kick people out again if cases start taking off for the stratosphere. With that, here’s how I spent August.

I kicked off the month on Saturday, August 1 by cutting my own hairs and making a pot of curry that I ate for most of the week before freezing the rest for later. It rained on Sunday, August 2, but I was desperate enough to get away from the screaming children that I hiked out to a nature area by the river. Pros: low traffic, few people, nature, mud. Cons: a little damp. Over the week, I finished my single jar of kaya hand-transported from Singapore and picked up when I went home last Christmas, plus did research and all that other stuff.

Kayakers on the Huron River.

On Sunday, August 9 I continued my quest for Ann Arbor parks and summer game points in southwest Ann Arbor. (S)LPT¹ – Make your 82-degree apartment feel cool by biking 18 miles in sunny, humid, 88-degree weather in the middle of the afternoon. When you get back, it’ll be like you have air conditioning, except only for about ten minutes, and you don’t actually have air conditioning. Actual LPT – Have a cold fruit waiting for you in the fridge. It’ll be the best fruit of your life. I did basically nothing of interest the rest of the week besides finish Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and start the 80s mass-market fantasy book I picked up at the library bookstore for 50 cents months ago.

I headed to southeast Ann Arbor on Saturday, August 15 for my second-to-last group of summer games parks. I don’t go down there much because it’s not commercial so there’s not much in the way of places of interest, it’s not a bike commuter corridor so most of the way doesn’t have a designated bike lane, and the main roads aren’t residential so your options are questionable sidewalk (great for lower body massages) or “sharing the road” with five lanes of “35” mph traffic. Sunday, August 16 was laundry day and was also cool enough to bake a batch of banana walnut muffins. I continued doing little of interest throughout the week, though the internet drama regarding colleges starting fall semester in-person began mounting. I completed my mandatory online courses on sexual harassment (summary: don’t be a creepy jerk) and returning to campus in the times of coronavirus (summary: don’t be a jerk who parties mask-less while sick) to get them over with on Wednesday, August 19. And on Thursday, August 20 after group meeting I visited my last batch of summer game parks, again in the southern regions of Ann Arbor. With that done, I can now decide if I want to fill in the parks I skipped because I didn’t need to visit them before the end of the month or return to some of the hiking areas that didn’t suck to bike to/have bike parking. Or both.

August 20 was the same day the Revolution returned to regular season play (again), playing the Philadelphia Union at a fan-less Gillette Stadium to a 0-0 draw. It looks like the plan for MLS is to schedule about a month of games at a time with near-ish opponents so that the away team can arrive and return on the same day via charter flights. After the shortened season, playoffs will commence, culminating in MLS Cup on December 12. On Friday, August 21, my second major accomplishment of the week was finishing my rewatch of Avatar: The Last Airbender. It remains worthy of being my favorite TV show.

That weekend, Saturday, August 22 and Sunday, August 23, I took a break from hauling myself across Ann Arbor and started The Legend of Korra. I’d seen the first season before but remembered very little of it. Over the week I took a couple walks in the woods as students moved back to campus, and finished up my summer game badges. The Revolution beat D.C. United 2-1 on goals from Gustavo Bou and Teal Bunbury on Tuesday, August 25 in their first multigoal performance of 2020. On Saturday, August 29, friends from Cornell and I had a Skype call where we talked about, among other things, cat backpacks, jigsaw puzzles, and electric kazoos, and played skribbl.io, basically online Pictionary where I had to draw with a mouse with my nondominant hand, which went about as well as I expected.

Post-thunderstorm still pond.

I finished out the month with field trips to Target on Sunday, August 30 for water filters and sunscreen (bad idea; all the students were shopping for towels and plastic storage bins) and to the library to check out my first book since March. The library is doing contactless pickup so you request a specific item, then they put it on the pickup shelf for you to collect. When you arrive at the library, you’re watched over by a librarian on a TV screen who you can say hi to and who will also answer any questions you might have. Today, Monday, August 31, was the first day of classes (first day of 21^st grade!) but I don’t actually have any classes, so I stayed in my apartment all day thinking about my micelles. Lunch this week is ham and cheese sandwiches, so I made a batch of spicy peanut tofu for dinner.

I’ll be keeping an eye on the coronavirus situation, but it’s already shaping up to be an interesting fall to go with an interesting spring and an interesting summer.

¹LPT = life pro tip. The S makes it the opposite of a LPT on a subreddit. It stands for something else on Reddit, but here we’re going to say it means “subpar.”