Shelter-in-Place Journal, Day Seventy-Five

It’s been a busy day. Yesterday, our neighbor dropped off some basil and kale for us to plant in our raised beds. So Diane rose early this morning to work on the garden – she pruned the tomatoes we’d planted six weeks ago, which had grown far more than I expected (and which already have fruit, though it’s still weeks from being ready) and did other cleanup work so that we’d have a place for the new plants. Then she went to Shabbat Morning services.

In the meantime, I went to the annual Toastmasters District 101 Conference. Even before the lockdown, they’d lost their original venue and had had to find a replacement – and then they had to move it onto Zoom. Patricia Fripp was the keynote speaker (and had good advice and suggestions, as always); after that, we held the Tall Tales Contest. By then, services were finished, so we had lunch and then finished our planting.

This evening, we did the Daily Kos “Flip the Senate” pub quiz. Some of the teams were pre-assembled groups of friends or colleagues; ours wasn’t – we called it “Strangers on a Team”, but we did pretty well, finishing 7th out of 30 teams. It was a lot of fun – Diane and I tried to guess which questions Jeff had created (we figured out one for sure).

Tonight was also the Shir Hadash 40th Anniversary Gala – we didn’t have to dress up this year. We didn’t even have to attend at the right time because everything was recorded in advance to avoid technical issues. There are other events scheduled to celebrate the 40th anniversary – I hope some of them can take place in the real world instead of on a screen.