Shelter-in-Place Journal, Day 118

After our usual Sunday quick dash to the Farmers’ Market and walk through Los Gatos, we came home for two interesting sessions.

The first was hosted by Shir Hadash and was a panel discussion (well, three presentations) on “Medical Ethics: Rationing of Limited Resources During COVID-19 Pandemic”. The three panelists were all physician-members of Shir Hadash with well over a century of experience between them. The discussion touched on the history of dialysis (before it was added to Medicare in 1972), HIV/AIDS treatment, and, of course, COVID-19. The discussion was lively but sobering.

The second was much more fun – the Remote Shakespeare Company (two-thirds of the Reduced Shakespeare Company) took us on a quick and reduced tour of their material, including the first scene of “Hamlet’s Big Adventure (a prequel)”, which we were hoping was going to come to the Bay Area this year. Some day….

And speaking of “some day”, I got started on the first small bit of preparation for the High Holy Days. I do the data processing for the honors, but this year, we have a lot of changes to make because of COVID-19 – there will be far fewer honors (services will be online, not in person), but the Rabbi doesn’t want to lose track of what we normally would do (especially since we will have a new interim rabbi next year), so I had to figure out how to tell my programs to ignore honors we’re omitting.

That proved to be surprisingly easy – but what turned out to be hard was updating the master honors sheet to reflect what we did last year (I reworked most of my code last year, so this was the first time I’d needed to do this). I think it’s done, but I’m going to take another look tomorrow before I tell the Rabbi to go ahead.