I made chocolate chip cookies today, mostly to give to neighbors. I followed the official DoubleTree Cookie Recipe with two changes:

• I omitted the walnuts in case of allergies
• I only put in 2/3 of a cup of chocolate chips instead of 2-2/3 cups – after I added the first 2/3 cup, I somehow forgot the entire bag of chips I was planning to add next!

I had trouble getting the dough to cohere properly while I was mixing it – I’m not sure what was wrong. I’d left the butter out for several hours, so it should have been plenty soft, but the butter and sugars didn’t seem to combine well in the first mixing step (and the mixer kept ejecting sugar from the bowl even though I had it on low speed), and I had to mix longer than I expected to get everything combined at the end. I think that’s why I got distracted and forgot to add the rest of the chips.

In the end, the cookies came out fine (though light on chocolate), so we gave them to our neighbors with a clean conscience. I have plenty of chips to make another batch, too!

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.