Shabbat is supposed to be a day of rest, and today filled the bill. We “went” to Torah Study and Shabbat Morning services and took a few walks. Diane had a Zoom session on photos, and I curated photos from January, 2005 – and that was about it. Lunch was leftover chicken, and dinner was the chickpea recipe I’ve made a few times in the last couple of months – the only novelty was a slightly different cocktail with dinner (note to self: don’t have cocktails AND wine with dinner – space them out next time).

There was a tiny bit of excitement on the tech front – we used the Amcrest webcam for the first time on our Zoom sessions today; I kinda wish I’d bought one with only a 70 degree field of view instead of 90 degrees, but even at 90 degrees, there’s much less of the room visible and more of us than there was with the WyzeCam. And some app on my iPhone decided to run hot and drain the phone’s battery – a hard reboot seems to have cured that problem.

I hope you had a restful Saturday, too!

One of my lockdown projects has been to curate my digital photo collection – get rid of the bad and duplicate photos, identify people, and title and geotag everything I keep. It’s slow going – I started on March 18 with photos from 2000 and just finished 2004 today, including a day touring Richmond, Virginia back in August.

I grew up in Richmond; my mother was born there and lived there most of her life, and my brother still lives there. And growing up there in the late ”˜50s and the ”˜60s, I lived through the era of Massive Resistance to desegregation and the commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the Civil War (often called the “War Between The States”). The restrooms and drinking fountains in the downtown department stores still had “White” and “Colored” signs, though I don’t think that was still being enforced. And I remember being bothered by language in my 4th grade Virginia History textbook describing the slaves as “happy” and the adulation of Robert E. Lee (see this article from the Richmond Times-Dispatch). Of course, Monument Avenue was filled with monuments to Confederate leaders.

None of my family was in North America during the Civil War, so I don’t have any Confederate soldiers in my past, but it would have been difficult to avoid the Lost Cause glorification. And it was all around me, so I wasn’t really conscious of it.

When I worked on those photos today, though, it jumped out at me. Most of the photos I took of statues at Capitol Square were of Confederates (Washington being the notable exception) – there was a huge statue of Stonewall Jackson; there was a statue of Robert E. Lee in the Capitol building; there was even a statue (from 1906) of William “Extra Billy” Smith, who was the oldest Confederate General and was a two-time Governor of Virginia.

We also toured the White House of the Confederacy that day. Today, its web page features an exhibit on the development of the Lost Cause mythos and its effect on current culture; back then, the museum glorified the Lost Cause. The photo from the museum that I find most illustrative is not of anything from the Civil War era – it’s a fish from Richmond’s 2001 “Go Fish!” street sculpture project.

The text at the bottom of the plaque reads “Confederate History for All Virginians” – something to think about.

Happy Juneteenth!

Like everyone else, Diane and I have been doing a lot of video calls for the last three months. If we’re together on a call, it’s nice to put it on the big TV in the family room – but that means using a webcam, since the TV doesn’t have a built-in camera (go figure!). We’ve been using alternate firmware on a WyzeCam – it’s got a wide-angle lens, so the picture is a little distorted, and the sound is so muddy we had to use an external microphone. I wanted something better, but early in the lockdown, webcams were almost as hard to find as toilet paper.

On April 12, I saw an ad on Facebook for a webcam from a supplier in China. Their ad and their website led me to assume that it would arrive within a couple of weeks. “Assume” is, of course, a dangerous verb.

Two weeks later, I wrote the supplier and asked what was going on – they said they were in the burn-in process. A week later (April 30) I got a tracking number and thought “I’ll have it soon”. They even gave me a link to a tracking site which showed a status of “shipment authorized” in Shenzhen.

On May 8, I got a message from the USPS telling me that a shipping partner had picked up a package for me in Inglewood, CA (LAX) but that the USPS had not yet received the item. I thought “surely it will be here soon!”

On May 23, the status changed to “Warehouse Shipment, ready for flight” (still in Shenzhen). It made it to Shanghai on May 27, to Inchon (Korea) on May 30, to Tokyo on June 2, and to a US port on June 7.

It cleared customs on June 9, and on June 13, it arrived at a “shipping partner facility, awaiting last mile delivery”.

Activity really picked up late on June 16 – the package arrived at Brisbane, CA (near SFO, less than 50 miles from here) and in quick succession went through three status updates: “Arrived Shipping Partner Facility, USPS Awaiting Item”, “Shipping Partner: Pitney Bowes”, and at 3:15am June 17, it “Arrived at Shipping Facility”.

This morning, I was unsurprised to receive an update that it had been “Accepted at USPS Regional Facility”, but I was shocked to learn that the facility was in Des Moines, Iowa (1800 miles from here). On the other hand, the USPS is giving me an expected delivery date – one week from today, 74 days after I ordered the webcam. It’s the first expected delivery date I’ve had for this shipment, so I guess I should be happy, right?

In the meantime, Amcrest, who made the camera mounted on my garage, emailed me to say that they had webcams available and in stock on Amazon. I ordered this one on Sunday and it arrived today, as promised. It works.

We’ve got a place to use the other webcam if it ever gets here, but it may be a while before I order anything else from a Facebook ad.

Happy Medicare Birthday to my brother!

A few days ago, I decided I needed an app to track packages. The Mac podcasts I listened to have raved about an app called Deliveries (from JuneCloud) for years; it was $4.99 on the App Store, so I bought it. It works well for USPS, UPS, FedEx, and DHL tracking; you can even give it access to your Amazon account and it will track Amazon orders no matter how they’re shipped (and even before they’re shipped). It has an Apple Watch app; there’s also a Mac app, but it costs another $5. It’s attractive and makes good use of notifications.

But…it doesn’t support FEIA, the carrier that’s delivering my webcam. Instead, I wound up using parcelsapp.com to track that package – and after a while, I decided to try their iPhone app, Parcels (free, with optional in-app purchases).

Parcels is not as pretty as Deliveries, doesn’t have a Watch app as far as I can tell, and doesn’t have a Mac app. Notifications require a subscription ($3.49/year, which also turns off the ads, which are pretty annoying). But it tracks more carriers and goes into more detail. It imports orders from a few merchants (including Amazon and eBay), too.

If I’d realized how good Parcels was in its free mode, I would have tried it before buying Deliveries. But now I have both – I’m going to have to order more things!

If you’re looking for a package tracker, try Parcels first; it may be all you need.

We’re getting a little better at meal planning and shopping preparedness; this week, we had everything that we needed written down on one piece of paper and in a rational order for a short trip through the supermarket. And we almost stuck to our list – but at the end, we discovered that Diane’s cereal was on sale, so we bought a few boxes (we were standing in the cereal aisle waiting for the cashier anyway!). We have to pick up a couple of things at a different store tomorrow, but then I think we’ll be finished for the week.

We got our remaining airfare refunds for our cancelled trip to Iceland today. We also got a note from British Airways reminding us that if we want to cancel our flights to Portugal, they’d be happy to give us a voucher good through 2022. I plan to wait and see if they cancel the flight so we can get a real refund, but if all we can get is a voucher, it’ll be OK. I hope we can take a trans-Atlantic trip safely before 2022!