The numbers were good this morning: I’d lost the four pounds I’d gained on Cinco de Mayo, and Apple had actually refunded the trade-in value of my old laptop.

I spent most of the day doing Toastmasters work – I reimplemented the Silicon Valley Storytellers agenda template as a native Google Document to make it easier to edit and modify. The old template had started life in Microsoft Word, then been imported into Docs and not everything transferred perfectly (and it may have made other round trips in the intervening few years).

After I got the agenda updated, I used it to run tonight’s Storytellers meeting as Toastmaster; Zoom behaved and there were only a few small glitches. We even ended almost on time!

We also made a run to Summerwinds Nursery – we only had to wait in line for about 15 minutes, and we found most of what we wanted to plant (no eggplant or basil, but they’re supposed to be getting more on Wednesday). We planted peppers and cucumbers in the EarthBox, and bok choi and chard in the raised beds. There’s still room in the raised beds, too.

Happy Mother’s Day!

As usual, we went to the Farmers’ Market for fish and strawberries. We got there early enough to have good selection and fairly short lines, and discovered that our fish vendor (Santa Cruz Seafood) takes pre-orders – we’ll try that next week.

Diane coordinates the Shir Hadash Book Club, which met today (via Zoom, of course). I don’t usually participate, but this time I decided to read the book (Goldie Goldbloom’s On Division) instead of starting this week’s Economist; I thought it would be lighter reading. I’m not sure; it was the story of Surie, a fifty-seven year old grandmother in an ultra-Orthodox community in Brooklyn who becomes pregnant. For the first third of the book, her interior monologue reminded me of that of Thomas Covenant in Lord Foul’s Bane (and far too many sequels) – he kept calling himself “unclean” (he’s a leper); she keeps telling herself how her being pregnant would affect and appall her family and make her children unmarriageable. Eventually, she starts doing and thinking more interesting things, but she is not one of my favorite characters of all time. I did learn a lot about the ultra-Orthodox Jews of Brooklyn, so reading the book wasn’t a waste of time, but I don’t feel a need to dive back into that world any time soon.

I’m preparing some old equipment to send to Apple for recycling. When I upgraded my Mac mini to an SSD, I kept the old 1TB hard disk, thinking I’d use it for backup or file transfer or something like that – but since then, I’ve bought several new, larger disks, so it was clearly unnecessary. I didn’t want to send it back with data on it, but I seem to have gotten rid of all of my USB disk enclosures, so I couldn’t reformat it. Instead, I disassembled it and took out the platters – I was surprised to discover that it only took two 2.5-inch platters to hold a terabyte! They are now safely gone; I reassembled the drive and will send it in so Apple can recover any precious metals on the circuit boards.