I tried to fix the leaking faucet in the garage that I mentioned a week ago this afternoon. I opened the blister pack with the “repair kit” to take out the removal tool, then followed the directions on a video on YouTube and set to work – it took just a few minutes to disassemble the faucet.

I carefully set aside all of the old pieces, then started on the new ones. I opened the bag with the new ball and was delighted to find springs and seats packaged along with it – but I couldn’t get them to go down all the way into the valve, no matter how hard I tried. I finally gave up and put the old springs and seats back and used the new ball – it leaked a whole lot less, but it still leaked.

I had to give up for the night because we had plans; I was just going to leave everything where it was, but Diane insisted I clean up so that things wouldn’t get lost in the event of an earthquake. As I was putting everything into a Ziploc bag, I happened to look at the blister pack and discovered another set of springs and seats hiding – they were smaller than the ones packaged with the ball, and I am hopeful that they’ll actually fit. But I won’t know until tomorrow.

Our plans for this evening were to attend Silicon Valley Shakespeare‘s “48-Hour Playfest”, which they hold every January. A writer, director, and four actors are given a Shakespeare play and a mandatory story element to weave into a 10-minute production – they start at 6:30pm on Friday night and go onstage at 8:30pm on Sunday. All of the story elements have something in common – for example, one year they were all sports-related. It’s great fun (at least for the audience).

Most years, the event is at Foothill College (and their Theatre department co-produces and hosts the event), but this year, of course, the event happened on Zoom. And the story elements were all related to Shelter-in-Place – a wrong DoorDash Order, Virtual Happy Hours, and The Great British Bake-Off were three of this year’s elements (paired with Taming of the Shrew, Macbeth, and Richard III, respectively).

The top two plays this year were “Blow Zoom & Crack Your Cheeks” (King Lear/Zoom Freeze) and “The Scourge of Verona” (Romeo and Juliet/Toilet Paper Shortage). Somehow, even the tragedies were funny this year!

Today was the first Torah Study led by the new Rabbi at Shir Hadash – I enjoyed his approach. After that, we Zoomed to services – the couple leading the service were actually at Shir Hadash in the chapel where we would have been holding services in normal times. It was good to see the place!

Last week, I dug through the pile of newspapers containing recipes that I’d been collecting over the last few weeks and pulled out the ones that looked promising. My goal for this week was to try a few of them – so far, we’ve had three: Sweet Sambal Cod on Monday, Salmon with Lemon-Herb Marinade yesterday, and Black Pepper Beef and Cabbage Stir-Fry tonight. They’ve all been worth adding to our rotation, though I hope to make less of a mess the next time I do the stir-fry.