We had to rush our trip to the Farmers’ Market today to get home for the Shir Hadash Book Club; Diane’s the coordinator and had to handle the Zoom logistics until Rabbi Aron could join in. Today’s book was Jews and Words by Amos Oz and Fania Oz-Salzberger. Their thesis is that knowledge of Jewish texts (the Bible and Talmud, especially) is what kept Judaism going after the exile and that it’s still the most important factor today – even for non-believers like them. The discussion was lively.

In the afternoon, we tested our faith by cutting each other’s hair (to be more accurate, Diane cut as much of her own hair as she could see and trusted me to handle the back of her head). We’re still speaking. :-)

And we started watching Ted Lasso this evening – we pulled ourselves away after two episodes.

All in all, a nice and relaxing day.

Happy Diwali! Celebrating the victory of light over darkness, good over evil, and knowledge over ignorance seems very timely this year.

This evening, we attended a live concert by Laura Benanti in support of performing art organizations around the country (in our case, Oregon Shakespeare Festival). We’d only seen her as Melania on The Late Show , but that was enough to pique our interest; she’s much more interesting in her own right, and I really enjoyed her singing (especially her 15-minute My Fair Lady). She asked viewers to post a selfie of us enjoying the concert on social media, so here’s ours.

When I looked at my iPhone this morning, the home screen was missing a row of icons – I had five rows of apps instead of six. I hadn’t intentionally edited the home screen, and I certainly hadn’t deleted four apps!

I scrolled to my leftmost home screen and found the missing apps there. “No problem,” I thought, “I’ll just move them to their normal place”. But, try as I might, I couldn’t get them to move – they’d snap right back to the leftmost screen.

The phone’s software hadn’t updated overnight; there weren’t any reports of similar problems on any of the Apple sites I frequent; I was at a loss for ideas.

Finally, I realized that I’d somehow deleted a “medium” widget from my leftmost all-widget home screen, and iOS had insisted on filling the space with apps from the top row of the next screen. I put a new widget on the leftmost home screen to occupy the space, which made iOS move the four apps over one screen, and all was well, though I had to reorganize that screen to get things back to where my fingers expect them.

Then I deleted the widget home screen and recreated it to the right of the app home screen; that should prevent a recurrence of the problem. I hope.

I still don’t know what I did to trigger the problem, but I think Steve Jobs had the answer during the iPhone 4 Antennagate scandal.

I had been thinking about changing the name of these entries to something more cheerful like “Pandemic Life”, but given the latest trends in infection rates, I’m going to stick with “Shelter-in-Place”.

I had also been thinking about going to Costco to pick up a few things, but that’s not going to happen, either – fortunately, most of what I really need is available through their website.

On the brighter side, I went to two Toastmasters meetings today and won “Best Table Topics” at each one. Wish I could remember what I said….

I have to admit to being rather tempted by the new Mac Mini that Apple announced yesterday; it would be a good fit for the office. And if I traded in the 15” 2017 MacBook Pro that I’m using here now, it wouldn’t cost too much out-of-pocket. This MacBook Pro will probably never go anywhere again (maybe not even to another room!); I have a 13” MacBook Air that will become the traveling computer if I need it (not to mention the iPad Pro that I bought to avoid carrying a real computer in the first place).

I might have pulled the trigger on the purchase yesterday if I hadn’t remembered that I have friends at Apple who have offered their friends-and-family discounts; it turns out that the new machines aren’t yet available with those discounts, but I can wait.

In the meantime, this machine is perfectly capable of doing anything I want except running iPad apps (that requires the new M1 chip), and, unlike the new Mini, it can run Windows in a virtual machine (which I would miss). And I wouldn’t have a second display if I moved to the Mini.

Decisions, decisions….