We were season subscribers to San Jose Rep right up until the end; one of the plays which we were supposed to see in its final year was The Complete History of Comedy (abridged) by the Reduced Shakespeare Company. That show didn’t happen, of course, but we were able to see the play at the Marin Theatre Company a few months later, in December 2014. We enjoyed it and even went back to MTC to see Anne Boleyn a few months later – but the trip to Mill Valley was too much to make MTC a regular stop for us.

We stayed on their email list, though, and a couple of weeks ago, they sent the announcement of this year’s season. They hope to be in the theatre again late in 2021, but in the meantime, they’re streaming – which means distance is no obstacle. And the first play this season is by a favorite playwright, Lauren Gunderson – it’s The Catastrophist, based on the life and works of Dr. Nathan Wolfe, a virologist and her husband. We signed up for the virtual season and watched the play tonight – it was excellent. As the ad says, it’s “built of and for this moment in time” – it takes advantage of being on screen instead of grudgingly accepting the situation.

They have one or two more plays planned as part of the virtual season – I’m looking forward to seeing them.

And it’s not too late to see The Catastrophist yourself – it’s available by itself for $30 or as part of the virtual season, which costs $50. Details here – I recommend it!

Diane has been “away” all day at a Forever “Pixels 2 Pages” event. In a normal year, she would have gone to a hotel and spent all day on her computer with her friends, learning about ways to use the software. This year, of course, she stayed home and spent all day on her computer with her friends, learning about ways to use the software – at least we were able to eat together!

This afternoon was the Toastmasters Area B2 Speech Contest. The Table Topics prompt was “what have you learned about yourself during the pandemic?” – unfortunately, the contest wasn’t recorded, so I don’t know exactly how I responded, but I won, so I’ll be competing at Division level next month. One of my competitors is the person who put together Diane’s event (and who’ll be hosting us for Zoom Seder next week) – it’s a small world!

I made one final editing pass in Lightroom over my photos from last year’s trip to Costa Rica and Panama, making sure they were the ones I wanted to keep and that they all had titles. Then I went to Apple Photos and deleted all the photos from the trip there.

After that, I exported the edited photos from Lightroom to my disk as TIFFs, then used the Mac’s sips command to convert them to HEICs to put back into Apple Photos:

for file in *.tif 
  do sips "$file" -s format heic --out "${file%%.tif}".heic
done

Using TIFFs as the intermediate format instead of JPEGs is probably overkill, but with a fast processor, it doesn’t matter and makes me feel better.

I wasn’t sure if I was going to continue the daily journal after we got our second vaccinations and after the one-year mark, but I guess I am, at least until we reach “fully immunized” status or we spend a night away from home – at that point, I think the name would really need to change.

We planned a very easy day today to allow for side effects from the second vaccination – so easy, we didn’t even plan to cook. But we were lucky and had very few side effects. We were both very tired last night and went to sleep early; Diane’s arm is still sore, and she was tired until lunchtime; my arm was a little sore and I had a bit of a headache, but a couple of ibuprofen tablets took care of that.

We felt good enough to go out for our usual walks this afternoon, and we even cooked one of our quarantine favorites, Blistered Broccoli Pasta with Walnuts, Pecorino, and Mint for dinner.

So far, so good.