Last fall, we realized that our deck was showing some severe signs of wear, including a few boards that felt rather unsteady under our feet. Since we were replacing gates in our fence, we had the same company replace the bad boards – but the problem didn’t go away completely. The company, on the other hand, did – they said they’d come out to estimate the additional work, but it never happened (I guess it was too small a job).

We did have another vendor who we’d used a few years ago for re-staining the deck, so we called him – but he had decided to take the entire winter off, and by the time he was ready to open back up in the spring, COVID-19 had arrived. He did remain responsive by phone, though, and today, he came out to the house to give us an estimate.

It was strange to hear the doorbell ring, and to know that there was someone outside waiting to talk with me. He, of course, was masked and stayed far away; I told him to meet us in the backyard. And by “meet”, I meant “stay six feet away from us” – but that wasn’t a problem; we could communicate just fine at that distance.

A few minutes later, we had a plan and a deal; sometime in the next few weeks, I expect to have a re-stained and repaired deck. Progress!

My cousin Mickey made an interesting comment on Facebook to my blog entry yesterday: “You are NOT sheltering IN PLACE as you have traveled.”

As far as I can tell, our travels have been within the limits of the order for Santa Clara County, but we definitely have been moving around a lot. But some things have definitely changed.

There are many places we can’t go because they’re closed: the JCC, Temple, enclosed malls, sit-down restaurants, wineries, and most stores. And, of course, we can’t get our hair cut.

Our chiropractor is open, but we haven’t seen him since the lockdown started.

We make many fewer trips to the supermarket and drug store (we used to go to the supermarket almost every day; now we go weekly). And we’ve given up on Whole Foods – the Los Gatos location is too cramped, especially the produce section.

On the other hand, we do significantly more shopping at Safeway than we used to because their salad lasts longer than what we buy elsewhere (and they tend to have good prices on Talenti gelato) – and if we’re going there, we want to get the most out of the visit.

We still hit the Farmers’ Market most Sundays, but now I pre-order the fish so we can get out faster.

We’ve stopped our Sunday walks on the Los Gatos Creek Trail – it’s far too crowded for social distancing (and the cyclists are dangerous even in normal circumstances). Instead, we walk a few miles on downtown and adjacent streets – once we get a couple of blocks from the Farmers’ Market, we see very few people.

We’ve gone to Tony and Alba’s Pizza for take-and-bake pizza a few times – that’s something we never did before, and we might keep doing it when things get back to normal.

And yes, we walk several miles every day – our goal is 15,000 steps per day, and we can’t do that inside the house. But in the old days, we’d often combine at least one of our walks with a small shopping trip – no more!

Tomorrow, the shelter-in-place order will be eased a bit more, but I don’t expect to take advantage of the changes any time soon.

Thanks for making me think through this, Mickey!

This morning, I realized that I was trying to do far too much to fix the problem I talked about yesterday. All I really needed was a list of clubs (including their name and alignment) that had been active during this Toastmasters year – and that list was already being provided in the performance reports from Toastmasters; all I had to do was use that list. So I did. End of problem.

The rest of the day passed quietly – it was shopping day; Lunardi’s was busy but not ridiculously so. We had lunch from Los Gatos Meats for variety, and a Dark and Stormy with our Trivial Zoom session. And after dinner, we started watching the National Theatre’s production of Jane Eyre – it’s interestingly staged.

Seven years ago, I was an Area Governor for Toastmasters. In that role, we’d get monthly reports showing how well the clubs in our area were doing in membership and progress in the Distinguished Club Program – it seemed like it would make sense to consolidate the two reports, but they came from different parts of the Toastmasters website, so it couldn’t be done. My reaction: “that’s just a small matter of programming”, and I sat down and did it.

The rest of the District 4 leadership liked what I’d done and encouraged me to keep doing it – and to automate more and more of the reports that the District needed. I was willing, and kept writing code, eventually joining the Webmaster team and then, when District 101 was carved out of District 4, I became the District 101 Webmaster and Statistician. And my code kept growing.

Today, I had to look at some of the oldest code that’s still running. When I wrote it, I made an assumption that, if I asked Toastmasters for a complete list of clubs in the District, I would get a complete list of clubs in the District. Silly me.

Apparently, it’s possible for a club to ask to be kept hidden from “find a club near you” search. But that also means that the club is excluded from the list of clubs in the District. A hidden club DOES show up in other reports, and that led to some inconsistencies.

I plan to solve the problem by adding hidden clubs to my table of active clubs when I build it so that the rest of my code doesn’t have to deal with the problem. I think I’ve figured out what I need to do, but the code that builds the table is old and cranky with lots of places where I’ve had to patch around other weird things Toastmasters has done over the years. Maybe I can simplify the whole thing instead of adding yet another layer of spackle – but that’s tomorrow’s problem.

The big events today were musical – first, a Zoom house concert hosted by an IBM colleague. The entertainment was by Lisa Gutkin and Lisa’s Pieces, although the limitations of the technology meant that each performer had to solo; check out her website for some samples (and she has a Zoom concert every Wednesday at 5pm Pacific, which I hope to attend). Beyond the entertainment, it was great to see and talk with many IBM friends (I think they’re all retired from IBM by this point, though I could be wrong), some of whom I haven’t seen for a decade. Thanks, Bill and Nancy, for inviting us!

We also Zoomed into the Gilbert and Sullivan Society of San Jose (aka Lyric Theatre) annual meeting. There were presentations and financial statements and a suspense-free election, but there were also G&S songs recorded by members of the company – one advantage to a Zoom meeting is that you can sing along as long as you’re muted, and we were!

Pre-ordering fish from Santa Cruz Seafood at the Farmers’ Market worked very well, so we’ll do it again next week (and the salmon was tasty, too). The cool and rainy weather probably reduced the crowd, but it was very nice not to stand in line anyway.