Well, the joke is on me! I told a friend earlier this week that I didn’t think we were going to see any more days with temperatures below 50°F until November.
Of course, a day after that, a rain front moved through, the first two of them, and with them came a cold front! At least a cold front by Florida standards, which means that this morning, we got out for a walk at 6:30 am and it was 41°F out. Keely, of course, enjoyed it immensely! It’s possible that this time, it really is the last time we will have temperatures below 50°F for the rest of the year so I’m enjoying it as well. It at least makes for stunning photographs:
An interesting thing I have noticed, that isn’t very common but common enough, is that there are more businesses than I have ever seen before who are closing for lunch hour. I’m sure businesses used to do this before the pandemic, but it was exceedingly rare, and I can’t call to mind any specific ones that did so. I’m not saying that it is happening all over the place now, or is very common. Places like Keely’s vet, and a couple of stores at the cottages by Lake Ella, and even a couple of businesses in the Lake Ella Plaza, have signs up saying that they are closed during a lunch hour. Or, in the case of Keely’s vet, that they don’t answer phones during that time.
Honestly I assume that this is a staffing issue. Businesses are having trouble finding staff who will work for the exceedingly low pay most of them offer (I mean, let’s be honest about it. That is what’s going on). But on the other hand, I hope in a small way that it’s actually having to do with people gaining more respect for their time and energy. We talk a lot about the toll of the pandemic, and I’m not going to sit here and try to claim that it’s a good thing that it happened because in America over 1 million people died. It’s a tragedy.
But sometimes we have to wrestle good things out of the terrible, and this might be one of them. People are appreciating their time and energy as valuable commodities for themselves, personally, as opposed to just only being valuable as something they can sell. Food for thought, anyway.