We saw Silicon Valley Shakespeare’s production of Twelfth Night this afternoon – it was a lot of fun, and we got to see old friends like Jeff Kramer and Doug Brook on the screen. It should be available on their YouTube channel in a week or so – it’s a fundraiser for the Gastric Cancer Foundation, which we were happy to contribute to.

I made another attempt to photograph the Moon this evening – I find myself wishing for a longer lens! I tried building an HDR image in Photoshop from the bracketed exposures and didn’t think it was any better than just choosing one of the images, so that’s what I did.

Diane read Torah today at Shir Shabbat and I led the service and managed the Zoom session. The last few times we’ve been in those roles, we’ve connected from different rooms, but today, we decided to share one computer. It worked pretty well, except that I had to keep turning mute on and off in the Zoom app and also advance pages in the Kindle app and the screen-sharing toolbar in Zoom kept blocking the page number field in Kindle. Eventually, I figured out that I could move the Zoom toolbar to the bottom of the screen, and that helped, but it was still clumsy.

After the service, I figured out a better way – I used Keyboard Maestro to build an automation so I could hit Command-Shift-A in Kindle and send it to Zoom to toggle the mute state. It’ll be a while before we’re leading services and reading Torah again, but it should help – and it was nice to be together during the service!

Dinner tonight was a little bit of an experiment – we had planned to make Delicata, Radicchio, and Black Rice Salad, but there was no delicata squash to be found. Google suggested substituting a sweet potato – it worked pretty well (and not having to scoop out the seeds sped the process).

After dinner, we went out for a quick walk; the full moon was low on the horizon and it was breathtaking. Unfortunately, I hadn’t thought to bring any camera other than my iPhone, and there was just no way to get enough moon in the frame to get a decent picture. But after we got home, I took out the Lumix FZ1000M2 with its zoom lens and took a few shots, even though the moon was much higher and not nearly as glorious. I tried using exposure bracketing and letting Photoshop merge the images – the result was better than I’d hoped for with hand-held photos.

Maybe I can plan better next time!

I thought I was going to avoid doing anything medically-related today, but CVS called our landline and reminded me that the prescriptions my oral surgeon had sent in for next week’s procedure were ready. I knew that they’d keep calling over and over until I got them, so we walked there. We needed a walk anyway, or so our devices claimed.

Our neighbor’s tulips are getting nicer every day.

Shabbat Shalom!

It was another Toastmasters-heavy day today – the Silver Tongued Cats contest was this morning (I won Table Topics, so now I’ll be competing at two different Area contests), and then I filled a mystery role at the contest for the club I mentored, Toastrix.

And after that, I went to the oral surgeon to schedule my extraction and implant, have a CAT scan, and give them another shot at my wallet.

Tonight is Purim, so I’m going to post this installment early – we are supposed to celebrate so much that we can’t tell Mordecai and Haman apart, and that might make it difficult to deal with WordPress.

Instead of a gragger, which wouldn’t work well on Zoom, we were encouraged to make “Boo!” signs – here’s ours:

I visited the oral surgeon today to discuss options for treating my failed molar. I could go into the details, but I suspect you want to read them even less than I want to write them – I have a pretty solid treatment plan, but the date isn’t set yet. At least they take Apple Pay, so I can get 2% back!

One good thing about visiting the oral surgeon today was that his office is an easy walk from home, and today was a wonderful day for a walk. I stopped to enjoy the flowers at the medical complex across the street, too.