This morning, I listened to the most recent episode of the Automators podcast, where they were talking about Focus Modes on Macs and iPhones and how to use them. One of the topics was setting up a Shortcut to run automatically when you enter (or leave) a Focus Mode, and that was something I wanted to be able to do when I meditate.

So I spent the morning updating my iPhone, iPad, and my laptop. Now, when I enter “Mindfulness” mode, my watch face updates – but the rest of the process (setting a timer, mostly) doesn’t seem to be happening. Fortunately, I didn’t delete my old “Meditate” Shortcut, so I didn’t have to reconstruct it. And tonight, I’ll update my Apple Watch and I’m sure all will be well tomorrow, right?

I spent a good part of the rest of the day editing photos from our trips to Richmond and Boston; it had been a while since I sat down at Lightroom and I had to reconstruct some of that workflow. This time, I wrote it down – and even updated the script I use to extract photos from Apple Photos to get them ready for Lightroom so that it handles some infrequent oddities instead of requiring me to handle them manually.

No new photos today, but I edited this photo of a rose from Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden in Richmond today, so I feel justified in including it.

Dinner tonight was an old favorite (or at least a dish we started making early in the pandemic), Slow Cooker Spiced Lentils with Veggies, but it didn’t taste right – it was dull, lacking something. This was the first time we’d used the induction cooktop for this recipe, and I don’t think I got the oil hot enough before putting the mustard seeds in (they didn’t pop), but that didn’t seem to be sufficient to explain the dullness.

Diane took out the recipe and asked me if I’d put in the chiles (yes), the chili powder (yes), the garlic (yes), the turmeric (yes) – finally, she asked about the salt and I realized I’d completely forgotten it (I got distracted because we nearly ran out of lentils and I had to put them on the right shopping list).

We are not big salt users – we don’t have a salt shaker on the table, and we usually reduce the amount of salt in a recipe by half (including this one) and omit the extra salt for “season to taste” (except for baking, because chemistry). But there’s a big difference between a little salt and no salt!

It was another quiet Sunday. We took our usual morning trip to the Farmers’ Market followed by a long walk. I decided to wear a mask on the first half of the walk because there was a cold wind blowing – I knew there was a reason I should always carry a mask!

This afternoon, we went to the test site at Union Middle School for a Covid test; even though the theatre yesterday was fairly empty, I felt like it wouldn’t be a bad idea to get tested. They did both a rapid test and a PCR test; we got the results (negative) from the rapid test before we left the school, and I felt happier.

Tonight’s dinner was another new-to-us recipe, Spaghetti Aglio e Olio adapted from Ina Gartner’s recipe. It was easy to make, fairly quick, tasty, and filling – what more could we want?

We lost Internet connectivity this morning, sometime between 10 and 10:25am. I don’t know what was wrong, but I wound up rebooting the modem, router, and controller – and once I got some connectivity back, updating the firmware on everything. I wonder if the log4j bug had anything to do with the problem.

This afternoon, we saw Lyric Theatre’s H. M. S. Pinafore at the Hammer Theatre Center in downtown San Jose. Attendance was pretty light, almost certainly due to Covid – they mentioned that they were scattering groups throughout the theatre to maintain social distancing. It was a good production, and I left with the songs going through my head. Lyric Theatre has a tradition of having the cast, still in costume, greet the audience after the show – it’s a nice touch.

This evening, we tried a new recipe from the Times, Roasted Salmon and Brussels Sprouts With Citrus-Soy Sauce. It went together pretty easily; I might skip the jalapeño next time, though.

I made pretzels again today, and for the first time, I was able to roll them out to the 18-24” length that the directions suggest you need before making the twist. I wish I knew what I did right – was it:

• Letting the butter soften for 90 minutes before starting things?
• Adding an extra couple of tablespoons of water during the mixing process to incorporate all the flour?
• Mixing longer than usual so that all of the dough wound up in one ball?
• Letting the dough rest an extra five minutes before shaping it because we were finishing up lunch at the time?

Or was it some combination of the above? Or was I just lucky?

Boiling the pretzels on the induction cooktop was a real pleasure compared to the electric cooktop; at no point in the process did I worry that it was going to boil over (I usually had to move the pot off the burner a few times with the old top).

We wanted to watch the Worldcon Masquerade, but it was on at dinnertime. I thought it would be available for delayed streaming – and it will be, but not until after the con ends. Oh, well; at least I’ll know to plan time for the Hugos tomorrow.

After dinner, we did go to one panel: Science Talk 11: Space Exploration. We tuned in about 20 minutes into the first panelist’s talk – he had lots of slides with lots of words and he read them to us. The other two talks were much more interesting – Katie Mack’s “Mars or Bust?” went into problems with getting to Mars and living there (and possible solutions), and Geoffrey Landis took us through some possible uncrewed Titan missions.

Katie Mack finished her talk with a lovely photo of Earth, taken by the Curiosity rover. It’s not quite the same as seeing it first-hand, but it’s pretty amazing nonetheless!