Today’s USPS Informed Delivery email included an image of the above envelope. I was, of course, curious; a quick search took me to the FTB’s California Middle Class Tax Refund page, which explained that it was NOT a scam and that there’d be a debit card in the envelope to pay us a one-time payment to help compensate Californians for the high price of gasoline this summer (and to make sure the state budget surplus stayed below the Gann Limit.

I also found out that, unlike many rebates-by-debit-card, we could actually withdraw the cash or transfer it to a bank or credit union. Transferring the money required me to set up a login at the issuing bank’s website, including answers for two secret questions – but the whole process only took a few minutes, and now the money is on its way, and I should be able to throw away the debit card in a day or so. I guess I don’t even have to cut it up, since there will never be any money in the account again!

ETA: Most people’s payments were direct-deposited; only those of us who didn’t get a 2021 refund via direct deposit got debit cards.

I spent the whole day working on consolidating the various versions of my photos library.

I’m not finished.

That is all.

We took our usual Farmers’ Market walk today even though the Farmers’ Market was closed for Christmas; the streets and trail were much less crowded than usual (as we’d hoped). Safeway was open and we stopped in to pick up some cheesecloth for our lunch experiment: “family-style” latkes, following Micah Siva’s recipe. The version that we saw in the Merc a couple of weeks ago called for putting the skillet in the oven for part of the cooking, while the original recipe didn’t – we went with the original. We used up an entire package of cheesecloth squeezing out the moisture from the onions and potatoes; luckily, Safeway was running a two-for-one deal on the cheesecloth!

I forgot to take a picture of the latke, but you can see that we ate it all (I can’t take credit for the results – Diane did the work).

Dinner was one of our favorites, Chicken Tikka Pizza from Curry Pizza House.

When I rebuilt my Mac mini last month, something happened to the Photos library – that machine has 13000 photos, but iCloud (and my other Mac) only have 7000. And the backup copy of the Photos library I made before the rebuild has nearly 18000. I spent a good part of this afternoon and evening exporting all of those libraries; the next step is to combine those exports into one library and get rid of the dupes, then I’ll import everything into Lightroom.

My goal is to have only my best (most meaningful) photos in Apple Photos; Lightroom will have everything that’s worth keeping. It may take a while to get there.

Several people responded to my plea for help yesterday, all with the same basic suggestion: take the sheet pans out halfway through cooking and swap them (also turn them 180 degrees). Today, I made chocolate chip cookies and followed that advice, and both sets of cookies came out with a very similar degree of doneness. Thanks, Jessica, Lucinda, Mike, and Françoise!

We went out for a walk before going to services at Shir Hadash; the vultures were back at our neighbor’s house. I don’t know what they’re looking for, but they seem to have found a home.

We’re about to watch Die Hard for the first time ever; it seems appropriate for tonight.

Whatever you celebrate at this time of year, I hope you enjoy it! Happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas, and Blessed Yule!

I made pretzels this afternoon, following the King Arthur recipe as usual. I always need two baking sheets to hold the entire batch, and the pretzels on the top sheet always cook faster than the ones on the bottom sheet.

Today, the pretzels on the top sheet were completely baked to a nice dark color in 14 minutes. After I took them out, I moved the bottom sheet to the top rack and baked them for three more minutes, but they were still not nearly as dark as the ones that had been on the top rack the whole time, as you can see in the photo below.

Baking friends, any suggestions on ways to get the two batches to cook more evenly? I guess I could bake the two batches serially – if I did that, would I have to wait to boil the second batch, too?