We’ve been members of Tobin James Cellar’s wine club for several years. Their wines are tasty, priced well, and don’t need a lot of aging before being ready to drink, which fits our needs well. Their shipments always include a little gift with the Tobin James logo; we’ve gotten serving trays, bottle openers, mats, and, a couple of years ago, a throw pillow which turned out to be almost perfect for Diane to use at night. She’s taken it on many trips; it’s showing its age. We looked for a replacement the last time we were at the winery, but they didn’t have any on display.

On Sunday, we got a call from Tobin James – they weren’t trying to get us to order, just reaching out to members. During the call, I happened to mention the gifts we’d gotten, and Shawna, who’d called us, said that they had some pillows left over. So yesterday, we ordered two pillows (50% off! $13 for the pair!), and to ensure free shipping, we also ordered 14 bottles of wine. :-) It arrived today; that should hold us for a little while.

Dinner tonight was a new recipe, possibly the simplest new recipe we’ve tried recently: Seared Mahi-Mahi with Zesty Basil Butter from the Food Network. The only tricky part of the process was remembering to defrost the frozen mahi-mahi! Frankly, I’m not sure it would have been any better with fresh fish – zesty basil butter covers a lot of sins.

To make the day even better, British Airways came through with the refund for our cancelled trip to Spain and Portugal, much sooner than I’d expected. The only remaining pieces of the trip to deal with are the flights between Spain and Portugal; I’m waiting in hopes that the airlines will cancel them, but if not, at least they were inexpensive.

Tonight was Library Trivia night at the Santa Clara City Library – our team (Bingo Slytherin) finished in second place, 1.5 points behind the Castronauts who only missed perfection by one song title (half a point). We had 13 people from four states on our team – not something that we could have done in the pre-Zoom era!

We didn’t cook anything new today. On the other hand, our shakers arrived this afternoon from Cocktail Kingdom and we felt compelled to use them before trivia, so I tried making Mai Tais. I’m not sure I’ve ever had a Mai Tai before, so I can’t compare what I made with a professional version, but it was tasty and made typing during trivia harder than usual, so I guess I met minimum requirements!

It was an uneventful day for us (and I’ve been trying not to keep a close eye on the news). We did our week’s shopping, made favorite recipes that we’ve discovered since the lockdown, watched A Late Show with Stephen Colbert now that he’s back from hiatus, and had our weekly Zoom gathering with our trivia group.

After the group chats for a while, we do some trivia practice with slightly-used questions from our host at Khartoum. One question tonight asked us to name the element with a one-letter symbol that would earn the most points in Scrabble. I thought it was Tungsten (W), but that only earns four points; the correct answer is Potassium (K), which earns five. Diane was right, and I was wrong, and the team told me I should admit it publicly, which I am doing now.

Happy Bastille Day! (I’m not sure that’s precisely appropriate, but it’ll do until someone corrects me.)

It was back to the JCC for outdoor personal training this morning. The JCC was planning to reopen the gym for indoor, socially-distanced training on Wednesday, and our trainer asked us if we’d like to move inside next week. Both of us said “No” with our first available breath, and our trainer said that had been everyone’s reaction so far.

But it became a moot question anyway this afternoon, since the Governor ordered Santa Clara County (and 29 others) to keep gyms (among many other facilities) closed because of the recent upsurge in COVID-19 numbers.

Dinner tonight was another new recipe, Priya Krishna’s Garlic-Ginger Chicken Breasts With Cilantro and Mint from the New York Times. All of the preparation happened last night and the chicken marinated overnight; the actual cooking was pretty straightforward, or it would have been if I hadn’t dropped the chicken the last inch or two into the hot oil, making a splash. And even though I gave the chicken the maximum time called for in the recipe, it was still a little undercooked when I lifted the lid, so I had to finish it in the microwave. I’m willing to try this recipe again, but not for a while.

And I finally finished editing (or at least culling) the photos from my trip to Beijing in April, 2005!

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.