It was Easter, so we didn’t have to decide whether to brave the Farmers’ Market because it was closed. And we didn’t walk in Downtown Los Gatos, either – all three of our walks were in our own neighborhood (as usual).

Our friend Dale led a mask-making Zoom class at Shir Hadash; she showed us how to make no-sew masks from fabric, pillowcases, kippot, and even a disposable mask using two coffee filters. She also showed how to sew masks according to the Kaiser Permanente instructions. We’ll be making some masks before our next trip to a store!

I did some work for Toastmasters and backed up my old laptop’s SSD so I can put the laptop in the mail to Apple sometime this week and complete the trade-in process. I also seem to have found a reasonable compromise between screen resolution and readability on the new laptop – I have it at 1680×1050 with several apps set to bigger fonts (the old laptop was 1680×1050 but had a 15” screen).

We watched the second half of Silicon Valley Shakespeare’s 2018 production of “Much Ado About Nothing”; it brought back nice memories.

But the sound had a lot of noise and distortion – I wound up buying a copy of Rogue Amoeba’s SoundSource 4 in hopes of notching out the worst of the noise, and it helped somewhat. Strangely, the first act (which we watched yesterday) seemed to have better sound.

I read the May issue of QST today; they were scrambling to include information about the effect of COVID-19 on DXpeditions, special event stations, and Field Day (as well as the cancellation of the Dayton Hamvention). As I was looking through the issue, I noticed one special event station had planned on operating at the end of May in honor of the “Mike the Headless Chicken Festival” in Fruita, Colorado; it seems unlikely that they’ll be able to do so, but reading about the festival brightened my day!

QST also reprinted their letter column from 1970, which was largely devoted to hams condemning or supporting the “National Student Information Net” which served as a clearinghouse for the National Student Strike that year. Politics was nasty then, too – maybe we’ll change some day.

When I woke up this morning, I found an email from United that they’d “noticed I’d made some changes to my flight” and that if there had been “significant changes” to the schedule, I might be eligible for a refund. I thought cancelling the flight qualified as a “significant change”, so I decided to call them after Torah Study.

“After Torah Study” became “after Torah Study, lunch, and a walk”, but eventually, I sat down to call the Premier desk (I’m a lowly Silver, but I’ll take whatever help I can get), prepared for a long wait on hold. The system asked me for my Mileage Plus number, then it made me answer one question, and ten seconds later, I was talking to a human being – I was shocked.

She looked at my record and said she’d forward the request to the Refunds Department and that I should expect to hear from them in a couple of weeks. Here’s hoping!