I had high hopes for today. Warnock had already been declared the winner in his Senate race when I woke up, and I hoped that Ossoff would be declared the winner sometime today. And I expected that Congress would confirm the results of the election, especially after reading Mike Pence’s letter disavowing the theory that he could unilaterally discard electoral votes. I was even thinking of opening some champagne to celebrate.

Around 11 (Pacific), I turned on the TV to watch the joint session and listen to the speeches – but, of course, that didn’t last long. I wish I could say I was surprised that there was a riot and insurrection, but I wasn’t – it was clear from the rhetoric from the White House and allies what they were inciting, and they got it.

I was surprised that Congress was able to go back into session this evening to continue the process. I had hoped that today’s coup attempt would stop the specious objections, but I clearly underestimated Josh Hawley’s perfidy (as I write this, Congress is “debating” Pennsylvania based on Hawley’s objection).

On a brighter note, we tried making Delicata, Radicchio, and Black Rice Salad again. Unlike the previous attempt, we were able to find Delicata squash and that made a big difference. I remembered to cook the rice ahead of time – next time, I’ll make the squash early, too!

I spent most of an hour working with the new District 101 Webmaster on turning over the website; he knows Divi and WordPress better than I do, which is terrific. We spent the time talking about why I’d set up some things the way they were so that he can make the appropriate changes. I’m looking forward to seeing the site get better and more useful!

Dinner tonight was another new recipe for us: Ayesha Curry’s Sweet Sambal Cod from Parade magazine, and it came out pretty good, despite using a fairly thick seabass filet instead of cod, putting the cornstarch into the sauce right at the beginning instead of after the liquid ingredients had combined, and putting far too much oil in the pan. We also substituted sriracha for the sambal oelek, which we’ve done in other recipes. Next time, I’ll try following the recipe more closely!

We were supposed to go on a cruise to Japan and Korea last April. Needless to say, it got cancelled in early March. The travel provider (Criterion Travel) offered us a full refund or a 20% bonus if we transferred our payment to one of their 2021 programs. They were planning a trip to Sicily and Malta that looked interesting – it was at the end of May 2021, which seemed far enough away to be safe, so we took them up on their bonus offer.

Today, we found out that they are doing the responsible thing and cancelling the May 2021 trip, too. They’re still building their 2022 schedule – maybe they’ll offer Japan and Korea!

We spent a quiet day today – a quick trip to the Farmers’ Market for fish this morning, Halibut with Rosemary Potatoes for lunch, Slow-Cooked Spiced Lentils with Veggies for dinner, and three walks to hit our goals for the day.

I’ve added yet another home repair project to the list – the faucet on the sink in the garage is leaking, so I ordered the parts to fix it and they should be here in a couple of days. It’s supposed to be an easy job. We’ll see.

I also discovered that my office setup is critically suboptimal – I was on a call about the District 101 website when I accidentally kicked the switch on the power strip under my desk and turned off my computer and monitor. I guess I should fix that.

There are times that I realize that I don’t understand Facebook. No, I’m not talking about the Dreaded Algorithm that chooses what you see in your feed and often builds opinion bubbles; I’m confused about how Facebook chooses whether to put an image into a post that links to a website, such as my post yesterday to my blog.

I had put a photo of the zester I bought into yesterday’s blog entry, expecting Facebook to show it and add a little life to the Facebook post – but it didn’t. And I don’t know why. So I won’t go out of my way to find a photo for tonight’s entry.

After we watched City Lights’ version of A Christmas Carol last week, Diane said that she’d really enjoyed the version of the story on Topper. Somewhat to my surprise, it was easy to find that episode on YouTube; I downloaded it so we could use Plex to watch it on the big TV. As I was downloading it, I noticed that YouTube offered “automatically-generated subtitles”, so I downloaded them, too, in case the audio was bad.

Unfortunately, YouTube’s automatically-generated subtitles are in “Timed Text Markup Language” (TTML), which Plex doesn’t support – Plex supports SubRip Text (SRT) files. No problem – there are lots of converters on the web, and some converters written in Python on GitHub. I’d rather run the conversion on my own machine, so I downloaded alexwlchan/ttml2srt from GitHub and fed it the file I’d downloaded from YouTube. And I got an error message.

A little investigation showed me that the YouTube TTML file doesn’t come close to conforming to the standard. In particular, it doesn’t have a body element, and the timestamps are given as decimal seconds without a unit (10.3 instead of the correct 10.3s, for example). But it was easy to add support for the YouTube file to the program and generate the subtitle file I needed (and of course, I have offered my changes to the owner of the program).

I added the subtitle file to Plex and made sure it worked, then we sat down to watch the show; the audio was good enough that we didn’t need the subtitles – oh, and the automatically-generated subtitles weren’t all that accurate, anyway (the subtitle in the photo should say “Topper”, not “copper”).

But now I have a tool for the future – that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it!