I had a small medical procedure scheduled for tomorrow, so I thought I’d better do a Covid test today to make sure I was still negative.

I wasn’t.

And neither was Diane (it was the first day she might have been able to test out of isolation).

At least we don’t have to isolate from each other now! It was nice having dinner face-to-face for the first time since we got home.

This evening, I led a workshop on “Impromptu Storytelling” for the Silicon Valley Storytellers; we had more visitors than club members, which was our hope. I started with the story of our recent trip and Covid infections (it was front of mind for some reason), then presented a few tips about structuring an impromptu story and avoiding the pitfalls of being too complicated. Then I had everyone tell a story using the Story Spine, giving feedback to each speaker. I was trying not to talk too much; my throat doesn’t think I was successful.

I woke up this morning to a message on my phone telling me to check Stanford Medical’s “MyChart” for an update; my PCR test was negative. This hasn’t stopped me from coughing a lot today, but I guess it’s not from Covid.

I decided that today was the day to get all of the photos from our recent trip into my master Lightroom library. When I started the trip, I intended to use Lightroom Creative Cloud to hold all of the photos and do some light editing, but I gave up on that plan when I realized that it has no map module; the version on Mac OS will display the location of a photo – you can even type in the latitude and longitude, but you can’t use, for example, information from a GPS tracking app to set the location of many photos. And Lightroom Creative Cloud on the iPad doesn’t even show the location of a photo. So I started using Lightroom Classic on the MacBook Air I’d taken on the trip.

It worked well – all of the photos in the blog posts I wrote on the trip went through Lightroom Classic, and I’d also labeled, geo-tagged, and rated many of the photos. I wanted all of that work to transfer to the Lightroom library at home; I just didn’t know how to do it properly.

Fortunately, I’d subscribed to the free monthly Lightroom Queen Newsletter a couple of months ago after finding the answer to some of my questions on their forum. The issue that arrived today had exactly one article: How to Use Lightroom Classic on Vacation. And it gave me the exact steps I needed to follow to do the merge – hardly any thinking required!

Two years ago, Google and Apple collaborated on the Exposure Notification System to help people find out if they’d been in close contact with someone who had Covid-19. Diane and I both turned on the feature on our phones as soon as it was rolled out in California and promptly forgot about it.

I was notified of a possible exposure to Covid-19 today; I wonder who it could have been?

Diane is still doing well; I am waiting to get the results from the PCR test I took this afternoon. I went to the test site in the Stanford Medical garage near me. In the past, it’s usually taken about ten minutes from the time I drove into the garage to be tested – and that includes driving up to the fourth floor. Today, it took 30 minutes, and the nurse said it had been like that the whole day.

I took another Covid self-test this afternoon and was happy to be negative, though that does mean that Diane and I still have to stay away from each other and wear masks in the house. She’s feeling well enough to go out for walks (still wearing a mask and avoiding other people), so that’s good.

Wild local salmon was available at the Farmers’ Market (I wore a mask and avoided people) for the first time this year, so I made that for Mother’s Day lunch.

I finally got around to importing the last couple of photos I took on the trip into Lightroom and ran into a problem with the way Lightroom manages timezones. It assumed that any times in the photos were in PDT (UTC-7) because that was what the computer was set to. Some of the time fields in the photos actually specified EDT (UTC-4), but Lightroom ignored that info. There doesn’t seem to be any way to edit the timezone info in Lightroom; I finally deleted the photos, set the computer to EDT, reimported the photos, and set the computer back to PDT and all was well. What a pain!