Shelter-in-Place Journal, Day Nine

Once more, the day began with a walk; it was surprisingly chilly outside, with occasional rain, but it didn’t deter us from making our usual rounds. I hadn’t planned on going shopping, but we ended up at Whole Foods. There was an employee outside wiping off the handles of the shopping carts; he was wearing gloves (good) but he was just using a cloth towel to wipe them. We chose to shop directly into our bags, and came away with fish, veggies, fruit, lox, steaks, and a little pasta – I might have wanted to buy more, but the bags were heavy enough as it was. They even had toilet paper on the shelf, but we won’t need any for a while.

My main computer at home is a 15” retina MacBook Pro; I added a 27” 4K monitor a few months ago and have been running with the computer in clamshell mode, just using the monitor. But now that I’m doing a lot of video conferences, I found I needed to have the computer open so I could use the camera, so I put the monitor on a spare dictionary to get it high enough that the computer wouldn’t block it – and then realized I needed a taller chair than I’d been using. So I ordered one, a Humanscale Saddle Stool. They build to order, and in normal circumstances, they quote 30-day delivery times; I’m hoping to see it this year.

This evening, I attended the Toastmasters Tall Tales and International Speech Contest from the comfort of my room. While I missed being able to see the contestants speak in person and the chance to talk with my friends, it was nice to have a nice dinner (and wine!) with Diane instead of Subway sandwiches at the contest. And we ended almost on time, which hardly ever happens at a “normal” contest. There weren’t even many technical problems – people are getting used to the technology.

I tried to stay away from the news most of the time, rather than wallowing in Facebook and Twitter (sorry, friends); we did watch last night’s Daily Social Distancing Show, which was newsy enough for me. After that, we watched a few short videos from Paula Poundstone’s blog and Stephen Colbert’s beard video – and that will do it for tonight.