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.

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.