10/8 puzzle - just gonna take this one off :) been busy wrapping up projects before winter. Be back on the 18th!
A couple nights ago, the Seattle Kraken played the first (preseason) game in their history. Even cooler than that, it was in Spokane! Right down the street from me! Tickets sold out in about 15 minutes, and I was fortunate enough to snag four. Once again, bought them back in the summertime, and as cases and hospitalizations began to rise, we were debating whether or not to go. As some of you may know, we also planned a trip to The Big House to watch the UW @ Michigan game a few weeks back. After a year and a half of awfulness, oh how naive I was just a few short months ago to think "oh cases are down, and we have vaccines...thank goodness we're almost done with the pandemic!" :( :( :(
We ended up cancelling the Michigan trip, but keeping the Kraken tickets. Big difference in 100,000 people vs. 10,000 people. Even bigger difference was that Michigan had literally zero COVID protocols for the game. In contrast, Washington required vaccinations or a negative test within 3 days + masks all the time (I would guess maybe 80% of the arena kept their masks on the whole time...pretty good for Eastern Washington. Although boo to John Stockton who was sitting behind us unmasked...). I was a little nervous beforehand, but am really glad we went. It was a blast, the arena was rocking, the boys had a great time, we got to witness history, the Kraken won (yeah yeah preseason, shrug).
I always have struggled with sorting out my emotions and thoughts - takes me a while to process and really figure out how I feel, and it's even harder to try to explain it to others. The pandemic has sucked, and it has sucked even more so knowing that so many people are making extremely selfish choices and prolonging the misery for everyone. It's a personal struggle reconciling the fact that it has sucked for us, yet has sucked for so many people so much more, and becoming comfortable being uncomfortable with how privileged we are, and actually doing something with my time and money and efforts around how absolutely fucked and inequitable our society is. I think back to this May. May absolutely sucked for us - I really don't wish having to take your 2-year old to the ER twice with COVID and a 105 degree fever on anyone. Anyways - it felt really good, for one night, to do something fun and "normal" and probably pretty safe. Go Kraken baby!
