Finally made it out to the botanical gardens up in the hills for a hike. They’ve actually stayed open this whole time by requiring reservations to limit the number of people on the grounds at a time. (Also face masks, distancing, and closing off benches and some sections.)

Ironically there were more people there than I usually see. The limits must be against an increased demand due to the fact that they were actually open!

More photos on Photog.Social and from this and other visits on Flickr.

Went out for a walk. Group of jerkwads in a pickup covered in conspiracy slogans about Bill Gates, beaches, and Wal-Mart were driving around shouting about not believing stuff and “freedom.”

First time we got stuck at the same light, I studiously ignored their attempts to get my attention. (I was the only one at that corner, and I was wearing a mask.)

But when they drove by again later I couldn’t help but shout “GROW UP!” as they passed.

So much for a relaxing walk.

The whole mentality of “I object to this solution, therefore the problem must not be real and everyone is lying about it as the direction of some powerful person/group” just doesn’t make sense to me.

Nobody actually likes the lockdown. But most of us understand it’s the only practical thing we can do right now to avoid overflowing hospitals and massive death while people figure out what we can do long-term.

But of course it’s the same attitude that a lot of conservatives have about climate change. They don’t like some of the proposed solutions, so instead of proposing something else, they insist it can’t be real because “leftists” or “statists” are just using it to push a “socialist” agenda, all the while insisting that they’re just looking at it rationally, and I look at these screeds and think…there’s nothing rational about that line of thought. At all.

The kid has been watching a zillion teardown/repair/dismantling videos of various devices on YouTube, and wants to learn to repair phones.

So I took the old phones and tablet that I’d set aside for e-waste collection, and the tools I used to do battery replacements on a couple of devices a while back, and let him at them.

He disassembled and reassembled the dead Nexus 5x that got stuck bootlooping two years ago. Plugged it in. Waited.

It actually powered on enough for us to get it into recovery mode!

Unfortunately I should have left it in fastboot mode, because now that I’ve downloaded an image to install, I can’t get it to power up again at all.

I found myself thinking back to the last “normal” weekend in southern California before it became clear that covid-19 was spreading locally and closures started. After a busy Saturday and Sunday morning, I went out for a calming photo walk at the beach.

Curve of beach with very few people on it.

Not many people were there. I’m not sure if it was just not warm enough yet, or people were starting to keep their distance already, or if they were just all at the other end where there was a kite festival.

The beach is closed now, along with the bike path and the sidewalk I was standing on. ALL of Los Angeles County’s beaches are closed.

Neighboring Ventura County just re-opened some of theirs with distancing rules in place, and while Orange County has resisted closing their beaches, they had so many people show up at the coast this weekend that some cities are thinking about closing them after all. (Well, maybe only on weekends when non-locals might show up. 🙄 )