what's in a word?: Tuesday - working from home

Tuesday, May 11, 2021

Tuesday - working from home

I received the second vaccination shot against the Covid-19 virus on April 1. On April 12, I took Metro-North into Manhattan for the first time since shortly before election day last November. It was a long fall and winter, sheltering in and around the house, always wearing a mask when outside, being especially careful around strangers in places such as the supermarket, and so on. We managed to get through the time, made even more stressful by the extended period of tallying ballots and the dastardly and treasonous attempts at undermining and stealing the election by twice-impeached Donald Trump, whose lies and the lies of his minions poisoned the political atmosphere and led directly to the attempted putsch on January 6 by a band of his loyalists. After Joe Biden and Kamala Harris took the oath of office on January 20, we breathed a little easier if no less cautiously.

Getting appointments to be vaccinated required some effort. I finally secured spots in mid and late March, from the state but the Town of Mount Pleasant came to the rescue, securing a tranche of vaccines from the County Dept. of Health, for seniors in the town. I hopped on the phone and spoke with them moments after getting the email and two days later, on March 4 we spent two hours winding our way down the line of other 65+ years olds in the gymnasium of Westchester Community College to get our first shot.

What a relief even if we weren't yet fully vaccinated!

We left with appointments for the second shot, already feeling like the end of our sheltering at home was almost over.

Since then we've eaten out a few times in restaurants and, as I said at the top, I began commuting into Manhattan again.

The first two photos were shot at the station where I board. Despite it being what at other times would be the rush hour, the parking lot is nearly empty. On the platform, a hand sanitizer dispenser for us to use to protect both ourselves and others.

The rest of the photos were shot as I detrained in Grand Central Terminal and exited from the North Entrance of the Terminal. It is almost eerie, how empty the North exit corridor is, and how few people were heading for the exits.

One technical note about these photos: while fiddling with the settings on my still new camera, I managed to change the one for the file format. These were shot and saved as JPEGs. I usually work with RAW and develop into either JPEG or TIFF depending on what I'm doing with the photo.

I'll be posting more from both morning and afternoon commute.