I have absolutely no thoughts on the actual Super Bowl that just ended, other than to congratulate Tom Brady and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers for their victory, and to offer my condolences to Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs.
But all I can think of as the curtain falls on this year's event and the NFL season just ended, is where I was when I watched last year's Super Bowl. It was early February, and I was up at Bear Valley for a weekend of skiing with my dad. We watched the first half of the game at the pizza place at the Bear Valley Lodge, then drove down the mountain, in driving snow on a non 4-wheel-drive, to the Round Table Pizza in Arnold for dinner, where we caught the final quarter.
How was I to know then that it would be my last trip outside the Bay Area for a year and counting? Coronavirus was a thing, of course, especially because my girlfriend was traveling for work that weekend and had to take precautions, but we were still more than a month off from when my company had us start working from home, and from when the Bay Area instituted its first stay-at-home order.
At the time it was shaping up to be a normal year - I expected I'd do my usual trip to Europe, and hopefully take some other nice trip with my sweetie. Instead the farthest I've been from my house since then has been... San Francisco.
Gosh.
It begs the question of where and how I'll be watching the Super Bowl next year. Vaccines for the coronavirus exist now and they're filtering out into the population, but predictions are sometimes worse than meaningless. It'd be nice to be watching it at Bear Valley again, ideally not when there's a snowstorm and an hour-long drive ahead of me, but even that would be nice, as it'll mean we can leave home safely again.
And maybe I'll take this opportunity to hope for some improvements in America and the world. We're seeing some decent management from the new administration so far, even if the vaccine roll-out isn't going as well as we'd like, owing to the previous administration's incompetence and negligence. But more than good management I'll be hoping for vision - paying attention to the actual problems facing America and the underlying issues that leading to all this polarization and extremism.
It might be nothing more than a pipe dream, but I'm still keeping my fingers crossed.
No comments:
Post a Comment