Happy Mother’s Day!

As usual, we went to the Farmers’ Market for fish and strawberries. We got there early enough to have good selection and fairly short lines, and discovered that our fish vendor (Santa Cruz Seafood) takes pre-orders – we’ll try that next week.

Diane coordinates the Shir Hadash Book Club, which met today (via Zoom, of course). I don’t usually participate, but this time I decided to read the book (Goldie Goldbloom’s On Division) instead of starting this week’s Economist; I thought it would be lighter reading. I’m not sure; it was the story of Surie, a fifty-seven year old grandmother in an ultra-Orthodox community in Brooklyn who becomes pregnant. For the first third of the book, her interior monologue reminded me of that of Thomas Covenant in Lord Foul’s Bane (and far too many sequels) – he kept calling himself “unclean” (he’s a leper); she keeps telling herself how her being pregnant would affect and appall her family and make her children unmarriageable. Eventually, she starts doing and thinking more interesting things, but she is not one of my favorite characters of all time. I did learn a lot about the ultra-Orthodox Jews of Brooklyn, so reading the book wasn’t a waste of time, but I don’t feel a need to dive back into that world any time soon.

I’m preparing some old equipment to send to Apple for recycling. When I upgraded my Mac mini to an SSD, I kept the old 1TB hard disk, thinking I’d use it for backup or file transfer or something like that – but since then, I’ve bought several new, larger disks, so it was clearly unnecessary. I didn’t want to send it back with data on it, but I seem to have gotten rid of all of my USB disk enclosures, so I couldn’t reformat it. Instead, I disassembled it and took out the platters – I was surprised to discover that it only took two 2.5-inch platters to hold a terabyte! They are now safely gone; I reassembled the drive and will send it in so Apple can recover any precious metals on the circuit boards.

One day may be much like the last, but Shabbat still has a different feel to it. There’s Torah Study (this year, we’re looking at the weekly portion with an emphasis on Mordecai Kaplan’s writings and diary), followed by a service. Early in the lockdown, the service was pre-taped, but now most of them are live, as was today’s – it’s much better to be together at the same time, even if we can’t be in the same place. I’ll be leading services and Diane will be chanting Torah in two weeks; as of now, we don’t have a lay Cantor, but I hope someone will volunteer between now and then.

The rest of the day was quiet; we had a Zoom call with friends we haven’t seen in a few months and took a couple of walks. We also watched the National Theatre’s production of Treasure Island – it was OK, but not compelling. The NT videos seem to be refreshing at about 10 frames/second, which gives them a very strange and jerky look, which doesn’t help.

And Apple sent me an email telling me my trade-in was approved and to expect a credit to my card within 5 business days – I’ll reserve judgment until I actually see the money, but things look very hopeful!