This morning started with Torah Study and Shir Shabbat services, as usual. I was the leader for the service, and Diane read Haftorah.

During the service, we say the blessing for the study of Torah – in order to ensure that it’s not an empty blessing, the leader brings in a bit of text to study, which can come from the Written Torah (the Five Books of Moses), but usually doesn’t, at least at our services. Most of the time, it’s one of the readings in the prayerbook, but today, I decided to bring in a few quotations from Martin Luther King:

“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”

“If you can’t fly then run, if you can’t run then walk, if you can’t walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.”

“We must come to see that the end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience.”

“If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.’”

I was even able to tie the last one to the famous Hasidic story of Zusia, so it was all kosher.

This afternoon, I got back to working on photos, making another pass on photos from my 2004 trip to Japan – this time, ensuring that they all have titles (and getting rid of half of the ones from the first day in the process!).

And this evening, while continuing to battle Google Flights, the earth moved slightly – there was a 4.2 quake about 40 miles away. I felt a couple of light bumps and heard something clatter a bit – by the time I realized it was a quake, it was all over!

We Zoomed to Shabbat services at Shir Hadash this evening; one new custom that has developed during the pandemic is for the Rabbi to offer up a question and then send us to small breakout rooms to discuss it. Tonight’s question was “has there been a thorn you’ve encountered in your life this week, or was there a rose, or are you seeing a bud that will blossom in the future?”

I didn’t get a chance to speak, but if I had, I would have mentioned something which is both a thorn and a bud. Today, Santa Clara County announced that they’ll be starting to offer vaccinations to 65-and-up Real Soon Now – and that prompted us to start looking at travel again, in particular planning air travel for the Africa trip we hope to take in the fall, which is complicated by my 50th high school reunion’s timing – we’ll have to fly from Kilimanjaro to Richmond with very little margin for delays.

It was wonderful to contemplate traveling again for fun – but I’d forgotten how aggravating the process of finding flights for a complicated trip is! C’est la vie!

Do you know where you were 10 years ago today? I do — I woke up very early that day because I had a very important appointment to have a plumbing problem fixed.

The problem was in my heart. I’d been born with a bicuspid aortic valve instead of the usual tricuspid valve, and it was failing. I’d been told I had a heart murmur a few years previously, which might or might not have meant anything. But one day at the gym, I found that I couldn’t run for more than 10 seconds – and when it happened again a week later, I went to my doctor to see what was going on.

After a few tests, they gave me the news – I had a defective aortic valve. It would get worse and worse until it failed – but I probably could wait up to 18 months before doing anything about it. Probably. And the only option was a valve replacement, which required open-heart surgery.

I did a lot of research, talked to people who’d been through the procedure, and eventually settled on Dr. Vincent Gaudiani. And on the morning of the 14th of January, 2011, I woke up bright and early (actually, it was 4:30am, so early it was still dark outside) to be his first patient of the day – I was at the hospital (Sequoia Hospital in Redwood City) by 5am, and unconscious not long afterwards.

I’m told the operation went well – I slept through it, and didn’t really wake up fully until the morning of the 15th. A few days later, they discharged me, giving me a lovely card for my wallet.

I still carry it.

Today was, I hope, the last piece of plumbing work for a while. When we had our drains cleaned last month, the plumber noticed that our water pressure was very high. He tried to adjust the pressure at the regulator outside the house and discovered that it was broken (and leaking!) and suggested we get it fixed “soon”, which happened today.

Tom showed up at 9am as planned. We wanted to go out for a walk while he worked (especially since the water would be turned off), but he said he’d like to be able to bleed the air out of the system and test it, which would require access to a sink and faucet. Since there was a working faucet in the garage (finally!), I left the door open and asked him to text when he was finished.

He said he didn’t text to keep his cellphone number private. I thought about it and told him to ring the doorbell when he was finished – that way, the Ring app on my phone would alert me so that I could close the garage door remotely. He agreed, and (somewhat to my surprise), it all worked. He rang, we chatted, I closed the garage, and he left. When we returned a few minutes later, we had a bright shiny regulator and running water.

It would have been even easier if I had a camera that showed me all of the front of the house. I’ve got a camera on the garage, but it can’t quite see the porch, and it’s already at the limit of its pan adjustment. I guess I’ll have to live with incomplete information.

The blinds are in the same state as they were when I wrote yesterday – but I fixed a broken tray table (I hope – it still flexes more than I’d like), picked up my new glasses (which I’m still getting used to), and Apple finalized the trade-in on our old Macs and sent the money, so that’s something, right?