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!