I went back to the eye doctor for my 3-week followup for my vitreous detachment; nothing had changed, which made both of us happy.

We tried a new recipe for dinner for the first time in a while – Sheet-Pan Salmon and Broccoli With Sesame and Ginger from the New York Times. Fresh local wild king salmon season is over, but it would have been wasted in this recipe; we made it with wild coho from Lunardi’s. I was in a hurry and didn’t realize until I was typing this entry that I hadn’t rescaled the recipe for two portions instead of four, so I made twice as much glaze as I probably needed – I had enough that it puddled in the pan! Fortunately, I’d put parchment paper under the food, so clean up was easy anyway.

I was booked for a speech at the Silver Tongued Cats Toastmasters club today; it had to be humorous, include stories, and have a message. I decided to talk about my baking experiences (especially last week’s pretzel production), and it went over well. We continue to consume the pretzels, too – we’re more than halfway through the batch. I guess they’re good!

We watched the West Wing not-a-reunion benefit for When We All Vote and really enjoyed it. The appearances by Michelle Obama, President Clinton, and others during the act breaks were good, too. You need to subscribe to HBO Max to watch it, but they offer a 7-day free trial.

Santa Clara County entered the Orange Tier on Tuesday, and indoor restaurant dining was officially allowed yesterday (with significant capacity restrictions, of course). Restaurants are emailing to let us know that they’re open again; I wish them well, but I don’t expect to be dining inside for at least the rest of the year (we haven’t even taken advantage of patio dining at restaurants, and I don’t feel the urge for that, either).

Today was Dentistry Day at Chez D².

Diane went to her dentist this morning for her long-delayed cleaning – it was supposed to have been in April, but….

We go to different dentists for historical reasons – when we moved out here, we used the same dentist. He retired around 1995, and Diane just went to his successor; one of my co-workers’ long-time girlfriend was a dentist whose office was close to work, so I switched to her practice, and then followed her when she joined another dentist, and then I stayed in that practice when she retired, and then stayed on when that dentist sold her practice and retired. Diane’s dentist is a sole practitioner; mine is in a multi-site, multi-dentist operation.

I needed a crown to replace an old one that had deteriorated – when that’s happened previously, it’s required two visits. But my newest dentist said she could do the whole thing in one visit of 2-1/2 hours, which sounded good to me.

The first step was numbing, as usual, and then the removal of the old crown. Then the dentist put a camera in my mouth for a few minutes, moving it around until she was happy with what she saw on her screen. After that, she told me to relax for a few minutes and left; a whining sound started from an adjacent office, and the screen started a countdown.

I got up and found the whining sound – my crown was being milled on the spot in a CEREC machine.

A few minutes later, the dentist came in to do a fit test; the crown was purple because it hadn’t been fully baked yet.

She made a few adjustments and took the crown away to bake it, then came back and finished the installation. The purple was gone, and that was it (except for the most painful part – the bill). The whole process took about 2-1/2 hours, as promised. I was impressed. I’d rather not do it again, though.

It was Prime Day today, and we were ready!

I’d had a cabin air filter for Diane’s car and a set of three OXO measuring cups in my cart for days, waiting for the right time. We even bought spaghetti and couscous from Whole Foods over the weekend to earn the $10 Prime Day credit they were offering.

As we got ready to order, the excitement was palpable. I checked Consumer Reports and The Wirecutter to see what other products they recommended – The Wirecutter told me about a very nice All-Clad stainless tri-clad frying pan that looked good.

I went out to Diane’s car and looked at the cabin air filter. It was clean (I guess we’d only driven the car a few thousand miles since I last changed it), so I took it out of the cart.

The All-Clad pan wasn’t available from Amazon (but I might get it from Williams-Sonoma, since it’s discounted there).

I even checked on LED “75-watt” bulbs, since the old incandescent over the kitchen table blew out this morning. The Wirecutter recommended the Cree bulb, and Amazon had it for $12; Home Depot has it for $6.

I pushed the button – one set of measuring cups is on its way at a $10 discount.

Oh, the excitement of it all!

I had to give a speech at Silicon Valley Storytellers today. I’m on the “Engaging Humor” path, but not all of the speeches have to be funny; I decided to talk about the upcoming election.

No, not about the Presidential election, nor even about any elected office. I talked about the propositions on the ballot. And I didn’t even give my opinion of any of the propositions; instead, I gave a presentation about how to research the propositions instead of relying on the limited information in the Official Voter Guide and the even more limited information in ads.

People seemed to find it useful – in fact, I got requests for my slides, so I put them online here.

I did something different in preparing the presentation – normally, I just start creating slides, but this time, I made a mindmap with iThoughts. I reorganized it a few times as I was pulling the presentation together, which would have been difficult in PowerPoint! When I was happy with the mindmap, I exported it to PowerPoint. I still wound up reordering the slides to make more sense as a sequential presentation, but it was pretty easy to get the flow I wanted.

I also experimented with the “Design Ideas” feature of PowerPoint to get away from plain bullet lists – instead, I had pretty bullet lists and boxes. I added pictures to a couple of the slides, and my evaluator suggested I do more of that. I have to give a speech to my other club on Thursday, and I might just reuse this one…with more pictures.