It was Diane’s birthday today. We went to the gym early this morning, came home, talked with Jeff, had lunch, and were almost ready to clean up when there was a knock at the door. It was our mail carrier – she’d just delivered the mail and happened to notice a leak near the porch, where the water line emerges from the ground and wanted me to know about it, which was a good thing because we hadn’t seen it when we got home an hour earlier.

She even gave me the name of a plumber who was on her route in case I needed one – and I did, because our usual plumber was on vacation. I called CMS Plumbing who told me they could have someone out in a few hours, which seemed pretty good for New Year’s Eve. And then a few minutes later, they called back and said the tech had finished his previous job early and he could be at our house in 20 minutes – and he was.

The problem turned out to be fairly simple – we’d had to have a new pressure regulator installed in January, and that plumber had put the Teflon tape at the joints on wrong, so it wore out over time and allowed water to start leaking. Today’s plumber (John) took everything apart, cleaned it, put on new tape, and put it back together – no leaks. From detection to repair was less than two hours, and we probably only lost a gallon or two of water during that time, so I think we got off easy.

I made one of Diane’s favorites for dinner tonight (it’s one of my favorites, too, so it wasn’t exactly a grand gesture :-)), Sesame Crusted Seared Ahi Tuna. And then we watched Don’t Look Up; it wasn’t the most romantic movie I could have suggested. Or the funniest. Or the most thought-provoking. But it was entertaining and interesting; it definitely reminded me of Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves and of the Golgafrinchan B Ark in Douglas Adams’s The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

Shabbat Shalom!

We made up for yesterday’s non-walk by doing the full 10K Year-Round Event in Los Gatos this morning. The route had changed in the two decades since the last time we did it – the second half of the route went along the Los Gatos Creek Trail instead of going through the residential areas west of Santa Cruz Avenue, so it was a good thing we took a map instead of relying on memory.

I didn’t get around to labeling and recabling the Mac mini, but I did ship its failed hard drive back to Western Digital for replacement. I wanted to erase it before shipping, but it was going to take the better part of a day to do so, so I settled for reformatting it as exFAT and writing junk to it, then re-reformating it as APFS. If I’d had an OS/2 machine around, I would have formatted it as HPFS and really confused anyone trying to extract data from it!

This evening, Diane and I split an experimental seasonal beer that we’d bought from Trader Joe’s. I finished my half; she gave up after a couple of sips, and I didn’t find it necessary to finish hers. It wasn’t unpleasant – in fact, it tasted quite a lot like a peppermint patty – but I’d rather have a beer that tastes like beer or a candy that tastes like candy than a combination of the two.