Saturday in the Park, think it was September the 5th

Yesterday was the grand opening for a neighborhood park in Leander. Because of COVID, they were taking reservations for two-hour spots, and since they had a splash pad, I hopped on that puppy.

An aside -- Having to preplan to use the greenbelt or water features has been a major pain in the rear for a lot of people, but for myself, who rarely just thinks, "Let's get in the car and go hike!" out of the blue, this has been absolutely one of the best things about enforcing physical distance between people. I loved it at Jellystone when the pool was at 1/4 capacity, and it turned out GREAT for us yesterday at Lakewood Park.

So much room, so few people.

It's a neat park, too. Will likely be packed with folks when we return to "normal," so I appreciate our getting to explore it with a dozen or so families instead of the whole town. They had vendors, too, and we made sure to buy a drink from one because I'm sure they would have had a better time with it packed out.

The limiting admittance thing has been my absolute biggest plus of the past few months. I do not say this to be callous; I realize people are struggling and that there is illness and loss. It's seriously the luck of privilege (our circumstances, location, etc.) that has minimized the true suffering in this pandemic. I do not take that for granted.

But a lot of people have been quite vocal in advocating that we return to full open to all green common spaces (and when I say "we," I really mean Austin) since tax dollars pay for it (and the same could be said about our local park, which is closed on holiday weekends to minimize excessive wear-and-tear as well as outsized burdens on our small local EMS and police force). However, we're seeing that just hordes of people "enjoying" nature also harms it. There is garbage, foliage trampled, and dog feces in and around the trails and in the water. Noise pollution doesn't irreparably damage those spaces, but for the people who are there when a couple of other folks have music playing on their phone speakers, it definitely blunts the quiet communion with nature.

So if, going forward, they decided to open half of the spots up for reservations and the other half walk-up, but then close entry until other people had left, I would not complain. 

One more kind of cool thing from the weekend:

Friday, the live-action film of Mulan was released on Disney+. We certainly would have gone to the theater if that had been an option, so we went ahead and paid for premier access. It was great (except that the trope of scarring the bad guy is lazy and needs to go away; there were plenty of warriors in the film, and somehow only the villain has facial scars? Do better.). Really a beautiful film that I look forward to watching again soon.

After that, we went to Moonie's to get burgers, and then took them to Veteran's Memorial Park for a picnic. The sun was going down, it was a relatively cool day, and because we've just been home for so long, it felt like a really big deal.