No new recipes, international commerce, or email pruning to report on today, I’m afraid.

I made a trip to the dermatologist to look at some spots on my face that seemed to be getting a little larger and darker over time. They were benign, but she froze a couple of places that might have become problems later.

We did our weekly food shopping, I filled up my car, we had our weekly trivia social, and I attended a short officers’ meeting for my Toastmasters club.

Somehow, that filled the day – perhaps I’ll have something more interesting to talk about tomorrow.

I think I’m hooked on deleting old mail; I spent a couple of hours doing it this afternoon while Diane was working on photos from our trip to Asia last January. I’m down to 12,550 conversations and 2.48 GB!

We tried another new recipe today, Mark Bittman’s Fast Tandoori Chicken from the New York Times. Two of the words in the title weren’t accurate, as I would have realized if I’d only read the comments on the recipe before making it.

The “tandoori” is something of an exaggeration; the chicken didn’t have the zip of real tandoori chicken. Of course, I made it in a broiler-oven, not a tandoor, so I didn’t expect quite the same results, but if I make it again, I’ll use a lot more spice and let it marinate longer (as quite a few commenters suggested).

The “fast” was the real problem. Putting together the marinade was quick enough, and the chicken marinated on the counter while we were doing other things. The recipe only called for broiling the chicken breast for four minutes on each side; this seemed a little short, but if you can’t trust the New York Times, who can you trust? When I took the chicken out of the oven, it looked OK – but I always check chicken to make sure the interior is up to 165F for safety. This one had gotten up to an awesome 70F – barely room temperature!

I put it back in the oven to bake for a few minutes. And a few more. And a few more. And then I cut into smaller pieces and put it back in again. All told, it took about 16 minutes of baking at 350F after the initial 8 minutes of broiling. Many commenters told similar stories; I wonder what kind of nuclear-powered oven Mark Bittman used to develop the recipe?

In the end, the chicken turned out OK, but next time I try a new recipe, I’ll listen to my suspicions!

I decided to try a “new” email program yesterday – Thunderbird. It had to download my entire Gmail archive – and it ran into Gmail’s bandwidth limit, greatly reducing my access to my email account. New mail would come down to the computer, but anything I did to it (deleting mail, archiving it, moving it to a folder) didn’t go back to the server. I don’t understand why Google would stop me from deleting mail, but that’s the decision they made, and I have to live with it.

Fortunately, access to the mail through the Gmail webpage was unhindered, so I was able to deal with the little bit of mail that typically arrives on a Sunday.

And when we got home from the Farmers’ Market, I sat down at my laptop to clean up the mess. When I started, I had more than 28,000 emails, using 7.5 GB (three times the daily download limit).

I started by looking for emails with huge attachments – mostly photos I already had somewhere else, but there were lots of PowerPoint presentations, too.

Then I arbitrarily started looking at emails older than 1/1/2013 – when I saw one that didn’t look useful, I searched and deleted similar emails (by subject or correspondent). Goodbye, golf lessons! Farewell, ProMatch! Arrivederci, itineraries being forwarded to Tripit! Adieu, Toastmasters meeting agendas!

I still have a lot of mail that I could prune but I need to stop for the night. Google now tells me I have 14,600 emails (down by nearly 50%) and 2.52 GB (down by almost 2/3).

It was fun to visit the past, but it’s nice to say goodbye, too.

Even by lockdown standards, today was a quiet and homebound day for us. We took a morning walk before Shabbat Services, but that was the only time we left our property (we did get out of the house itself to cook and tend to the garden). Other than that, it was reading and working on the computer all day.

Speaking of the computer, the computer glasses I’d ordered from Zenni Optical arrived today. They’re going to take some getting used to, but I can see the difference that having single-focal-distance lenses makes already. Now I almost wish I hadn’t bought the cheapest (thickest) frames – I’d forgotten I’d be wearing them for Zoom calls!

This evening, we watched “Much Improv About Nothing” – improvised Shakespeare with improvisers from ComedySportz in San Jose, Portland, Seattle, and Los Angeles. The event was in support of Silicon Valley Shakespeare and was a lot of fun. The play, “A Quarrel of Lovers”, turned out to be a comedy (by audience demand) although Angie Higgins, the Artistic Director of SVS, was trying to influence the vote towards tragedy. I’m pretty sure they plan to put it on their Facebook or YouTube page soon.

We tried a new recipe for lunch today, Melissa Clark’s Pasta with Burst Cherry Tomatoes from the New York Times. I thought it called for too many tomatoes, so I only put in 1-1/2 cups instead of the 2 cups that the scaled recipe called for. It was a tasty meal, but having more tomatoes would have improved it! Sadly, our tomato plants are not being very productive this year (and our cucumber has hardly produced anything), so we’re dependent on what we find at the Farmers’ Market.

After lunch, we drove to Tony & Alba’s to pick up pizza for tomorrow. Al, the owner, has quite the bobblehead collection, and he added a new member very recently – Dr. Anthony Fauci.

I guess if he’s unable to appear on TV, visiting a restaurant is the next best thing!

We made Grilled Rosemary-Lemon Chicken for at least the second time during the lockdown. I’d probably made it previously, too, since I had a printed copy of the recipe (with a 2013 copyright date) from the late, somewhat lamented about.com. But as I was reading the recipe tonight, I noticed a curious omission. The recipe includes “lemon” in the title and lemon juice in the ingredient list – but it doesn’t tell you to do anything with the lemon juice! Clearly, you’re supposed to put it in the marinade, but neither the printed nor the online copy says so.

Perhaps I’m no longer a complete novice at cooking!