I’ve been geotagging my old photos as I cull and edit them. Putting them in the right city would probably be sufficient, but I’ve been trying to locate them as precisely as possible. Google Image Search is the main tool I use, but sometimes I have to give it some hints, and one of the best sources of those hints is this very blog. I used to be fairly good about blogging about my trips as I took them…at least the first couple of days of the trip.

When I was working on photos from our trip to London in July 2005 yesterday, I used my blog to help me find where we’d gone, which reminded me that we’d taken several walks with London Walks on that trip, starting with the Old Westminster Walk. I decided to see if their website might have any info that would help me pin down the locations of my photos. It wasn’t much help, but I did see that they are back on the streets of London and also offering virtual walks on Zoom.

We hadn’t planned on going to London this year (we were going to change planes in Heathrow, but that hardly counts!), but a virtual London Walk sounded like a good change of pace. So this morning, we took The Magic of London with Richard Walker and really enjoyed the experience. The tour was a little over an hour long, but there was chatting before and after (we were a small group: one person from somewhere else in England and one person from Boston, plus us), and being able to see and hear everything without anyone in the way was a plus. It was a nice way to spend the morning.

It was a good day to stay inside and do things.

No matter whether you chose to believe Amazon, Apple, Ecobee, or Ambient Weather, the high temperature here today was somewhere around 105F. It’s 9:30pm and it’s still about 85F outside; the California ISO has declared a Stage 3 Power Emergency (rolling blackouts). We’re not helping much – our A/C has been running since about 10am (we did turn it off for a while very early this morning and brought in as much “cool” air as we could with our whole-house fan and I hope to do the same thing tomorrow).

Dinner tonight was another experiment. We made Sheet Pan Cilantro Chicken and Kale from the Mercury News in our small broiler/oven. I’d say it was in the spirit of power conservation for today, but it’s what we’d’ve used anyway. It was tasty and easy to make (the hardest part was remembering to marinate the chicken in advance). We’d run out of cilantro, but Italian parsley worked; next time, I’ll try to have cilantro and see if we can tell the difference.

I finally got back to working on photo culling and editing, starting with the 2005 RPI Reunion (boy, I took a lot of pictures of buildings with no people in the frame), and ending with the first day of a three-week trip to the UK. Let’s see if I can maintain the momentum.

Shabbat Shalom!