Shelter-in-Place Journal, Day Ten

It was Thursday, so I had two Toastmasters meetings. The first was for my home club, Silver Tongued Cats; we held it on Zoom. It was better-attended than last week’s meeting and went more smoothly. Since it was the last Thursday of the month, we followed the meeting with a coffee social, also on Zoom; the discussion was, unsurprisingly, dominated by coronavirus talk.

After that, I prepared slides for the speech I was giving at Toastrix – as a Citrix club, they use GoTo Meeting, which used to be a Citrix product. I’ve used GoTo Meeting for years, and I have to say I greatly prefer Zoom, which I’ve used for two weeks – sometimes, a fresh start really buys you a lot of usability. My talk was “To Cull or Not To Cull”, mostly about my photo library, but also about all the crap I have in my office – I’m trying to shame myself into doing something about the clutter.

After lunch, Diane and I finally took a walk together – we ended up at Lunardi’s, where we filled our bags with a few days’ worth of supplies. There’d been a change in procedures at Lunardi’s – now, they’ll only bag your groceries if they’re putting them in a new bag. Otherwise, you have to bag them yourself, which we did. We were able to keep our bags from touching any surfaces at the store, so I feel like we did the right thing.

Tomorrow is trash day, so we did some yard cleanup and filled our compost cart. Then I made steak for dinner while Diane sautéed kale and bok choi.

After dinner, Diane watched Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell while I edited, geotagged, and culled photos – I’m finished with August, 2000! Less than two decades to go!

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.

Shelter-in-Place Journal, Day Eight

We took a longer-than-usual walk this morning, going all the way to Office Depot (which looked like it was open, though I didn’t actually go in). On the way home, we walked by the Los Gatos Trader Joe’s, which had a huge line outside – people were six feet apart, and the store was only letting a few people in at a time. Bravo!

When I went out to the grill to cook lunch, I was surprised to find ants all over it – I’d never seen that before, but then again, this is an unusual year. I poured a few liters of boiling water on the grill, and that seemed to get rid of the ants, at least long enough to make lunch.

We took turns walking again while waiting for UPS to deliver my shoes – it’s amazing how long the truck takes to go from “In Your Area” to “Almost There” to “Delivered”! But eventually, the shoes arrived – I’ll unbox them sometime, I guess.

In normal times, tonight would have been trivia night at Khartoum in Campbell; the theme was announced two weeks ago (before their planned St. Patrick’s break) as March Madness and Spring Training (not my strong points). A good part of the group got together on Zoom with appropriate beverages – someone had a trivia game, so we played it for a while. It was good to see everyone, even if only on the screen – we’re going to do it again next week (and maybe bring in our members who’ve left the area).

And so it goes.

Shelter-in-Place Journal, Day Seven

Last night, a nurse made an appeal for N95 masks on our local NextDoor group. We had most of a box left from the fires a couple of years ago, so we donated them to her this morning. And while we were out, we drove to Lunardi’s and picked up food for a few days – I wish I’d bought olive oil, though, because we’re going through it a lot faster than we normally do, and it was on sale!

Our new toaster oven arrived this afternoon (a day early!), courtesy of Amazon and the USPS; UPS was supposed to deliver some shoes, too, but even though the truck drove past our house, it didn’t stop. Fortunately, I’m in no hurry for the shoes.

Because we wanted to have someone at home in the event of a package arriving, Diane and I took separate walks this afternoon; I think that’s the farthest apart we’ve been for more than a week!

I had a Toastmasters meeting this evening with the Silicon Valley Storytellers; it went pretty well, with hardly any technical glitches. People are getting used to using Zoom.

Really not much exciting today – and I don’t mind.

Shelter-in-Place Journal, Day Six

We started the day like any other Sunday, with a quick trip to the Los Gatos Farmers’ Market in hopes of finding fish and a walk along the Los Gatos Creek Trail. Our favorite fish vendor was at the market and had the tuna we liked. I was slightly surprised that she still only takes cash (most of the vendors had signs asking people to use Venmo or other touch-free methods). My purchase was $19.75; I told her to keep the change! This was the first cash I’d spent in at least a week.

The Los Gatos Creek Trail was a little less busy than it would have been on a typical Sunday (though there were occasional clumps of people – we were able to avoid them by waiting or speeding up), and it was good to get some distance underfoot.

A few years ago, we installed can lights in most of our ceilings – at the time, LEDs weren’t available, so halogen bulbs were the preferred choice. One of those bulbs finally gave up the ghost – which means all of them are likely to go soon. I’m out of halogen bulbs, but I did have one LED retrofit can light left, so I’m OK for now, but I need more – the local Home Depot has a good supply, but I don’t want to go into the store, so I ordered six for delivery late this week (I hope).

I had two Zoom meetings in the afternoon – one for Shir Hadash and one for Toastmasters. I haven’t had two conference calls in a row since leaving IBM – at least these were effectively run and produced results!

Dinner was a take-and-bake pesto pizza from Tony & Alba’s. Yummy!