Remembering how to be around people

Outside this sports bar, a Harley-Davidson is parked as a man in chino shorts climbs off his scooter and walks in. Two teenagers stand outside, staring across the street at the parade of Saturday-night goers beginning their nights.

It's been a while since the streets had this much life: a pandemic, an ice storm, and now a heat wave. A sense of normal has begun, and I've grown more comfortable with resuming something like normal life, but the memory of the pandemic isn't far in the rear-view mirror. I'm sure we all have some work to do to remember how to behave around others, how to smile, make small talk, or just not gawk at people. Probably something we could all work on.

How about you? How are you feeling?

Parlor & Yard

Parlor & Yard opened on West Sixth Street in February 2016, in the space that had been Arro. CultureMap Austin called it a sports and game lounge, with shuffleboard, darts, ping-pong and a patio that takes dogs. The sign on the wall in this frame says it more simply: sports, music, food, drinks.

It's one of the bars and restaurants along West Sixth. When they formed a business association in 2016, the local paper Community Impact wrote that the strip had a "late-night and hard-partying reputation", and that some daytime businesses felt it was hurting them.

The ice storm

Between 10 and 20 February 2021, three winter storms swept across the United States, Winter Storm Uri among them. In Texas, the power grid couldn't keep up. ERCOT, the grid operator, began rotating outages in the early hours of 15 February, and later said the grid had come within four minutes and 37 seconds of complete failure. More than 4.5 million homes and businesses lost power, some for days.

In Austin, the largest water-treatment plant lost power too. The city told everyone to boil their water from 17 February, and lifted the notice for all customers on 23 February.

The state health department's final count was 246 deaths, between 11 February and 4 June. Others think the real number is much higher. In May 2021, BuzzFeed News estimated it was likely four or five times the official figure at the time.

The heat wave

Four months later, the heat came. On Monday 14 June 2021, ERCOT asked Texans to cut their electricity use until the Friday. About 12,000 megawatts of generation had gone offline unexpectedly, and demand was forecast to pass 73,000 megawatts, above the June record of 69,100 set in 2018. ERCOT said rolling outages like February's appeared unlikely. The appeal ran to Friday 18 June, the day before this photo was probably taken.

Where Austin was with COVID

By June 2021, most of the rules were gone. Governor Greg Abbott's order GA-34, announced on 2 March, let every business in Texas open at full capacity from 10 March and ended the statewide mask mandate.

On 18 May, Austin and Travis County moved to Stage 2 of their risk-based guidelines, the first time they'd been that low since the pandemic began. Fully vaccinated people could dine and shop without precautions if the business allowed it, and everyone else was asked to keep masking and distancing. The same day, Abbott's order GA-36 barred cities, counties and other public bodies from requiring masks. On 21 May, Austin turned its mask rules into recommendations.

It didn't last. On 15 July, with the Delta variant spreading and cases climbing, Austin and Travis County went back to Stage 3.