Today dawned chilly, with frost on the roof, so we decided to postpone our morning walk until it warmed up a bit. Instead, we talked with our son in Boston – he’s doing OK and staying busy at work (in his room, of course!). He’s been doing movie watch parties in the evening – I didn’t know that was a thing!

We decided today was the day to do “big” shopping, so I warmed up the car and we hit Nob Hill and Lucky for sale items and things too heavy to carry home by foot. The Lucky shopping center has quite a few restaurants, most of which were open for takeout (although Yogurtland is closed for the duration); we decided to pick up another take-and-bake pizza from Tony and Alba’s and had it for lunch.

Earlier in the day, Diane’s ophthalmologist had let her know that they had submitted a refill for one of her prescriptions; it was ready right after lunch, so we walked to CVS to pick it up and then got a few smaller items at Lunardi’s.

Oregon Shakespeare Festival announced that they were not going to start the season until September, so I spent the afternoon cancelling our hotels for our June and August trips to Ashland.

I’m still waiting for United to officially cancel our flight to Taiwan so I can get a refund instead of a credit – I think that’s what is required, and even then, I’m sure I’ll have to do a chargeback with Chase. If anyone has gotten United to cough up a refund, please let me know how you did it!

We took yet another walk this evening and stopped at Safeway for salad fixings; the store was pretty empty, which made me happy – it was easy to maintain social distancing. Like the other stores, they now will only bag into new bags, but since we only had three items, doing it ourself was easy.

And then we came home and sang along with Friday Night service from Shir Shabbat.

Shabbat Shalom!

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!