Let’s start with the good news:

• United refunded our tickets for Taiwan/Japan! I called them on Saturday; the agent told me that it might take ten days or more before the refunds department did anything, but this morning, I saw a refund for our tickets had been posted to my Chase Sapphire Reserve account.
• The Humanscale Freedom Saddle Seat that I’d ordered on March 25th from 247ergo.com arrived yesterday – not bad for an item that quotes 30-day delivery times under normal conditions. It was in a huge box, which I took apart on the front porch and just brought the chair inside. I think doing that reduced the chance of contamination; it certainly was easier than dragging the whole box in.
• We ordered 10.5 cubic feet (7 bags) of potting soil to refill our raised beds late last night, and it got delivered this morning. Much easier than going to the garden center, even if I did still have to haul it into the back yard. We have to weed the beds (we haven’t planted anything for a couple of years because travel – not a problem this year!) and then we can plant some veggies for the summer. I also have EarthBox refills on order, but they may take a week or so to get here.

Diane has started to make masks; she thought it would be easier if she had some bias tape, so we walked to RiteAid and looked in their sewing section. No bias tape, but they did have a pair of sewing scissors and some hair elastics.

Both my Toastmasters meetings went smoothly; people are getting comfortable with the tools.

And Passover is over for the year; pizza tasted REALLY good today!

I’d forgotten that today would normally have been Tax Day until we walked by our neighbors and found them greeting us on their lawn:

Of course, I made sure to be at least six feet away when I took the photo!

I’m continuing to have good Internet connectivity with my own modem (Xfinity’s is still in its shrinkwrap). An all-day ping to my Linode server has only shown three dropped packets, which doesn’t seem too terrible. But I’m going to wait another couple of days before I return their modem, just in case.

Speaking of returning things, I sent my old MacBook Pro to Apple for recycling and trade-in. I’d bought it just under 10 years ago, soon after being laid off from IBM. My manager allowed me to hang on to IBM’s MacBook Pro for a few weeks until Apple’s new models were available, for which I’m still grateful; I’m sure if I’d bought the previous model, I would have had to replace it a long time ago!

Now I’m erasing my old Time Capsule – it was never the most reliable form of backup, and it’s time to put it out to pasture, too. I guess I should get a small hard disk and use it for Time Machine; I hardly ever have restored a file from Time Machine (partially because doing it from a Time Capsule was painful), but there’ll be a time sometime when I need to…right?