It was Thursday, so I had two Toastmasters meetings. The first was for my home club, Silver Tongued Cats; we held it on Zoom. It was better-attended than last week’s meeting and went more smoothly. Since it was the last Thursday of the month, we followed the meeting with a coffee social, also on Zoom; the discussion was, unsurprisingly, dominated by coronavirus talk.

After that, I prepared slides for the speech I was giving at Toastrix – as a Citrix club, they use GoTo Meeting, which used to be a Citrix product. I’ve used GoTo Meeting for years, and I have to say I greatly prefer Zoom, which I’ve used for two weeks – sometimes, a fresh start really buys you a lot of usability. My talk was “To Cull or Not To Cull”, mostly about my photo library, but also about all the crap I have in my office – I’m trying to shame myself into doing something about the clutter.

After lunch, Diane and I finally took a walk together – we ended up at Lunardi’s, where we filled our bags with a few days’ worth of supplies. There’d been a change in procedures at Lunardi’s – now, they’ll only bag your groceries if they’re putting them in a new bag. Otherwise, you have to bag them yourself, which we did. We were able to keep our bags from touching any surfaces at the store, so I feel like we did the right thing.

Tomorrow is trash day, so we did some yard cleanup and filled our compost cart. Then I made steak for dinner while Diane sautéed kale and bok choi.

After dinner, Diane watched Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell while I edited, geotagged, and culled photos – I’m finished with August, 2000! Less than two decades to go!

Once more, the day began with a walk; it was surprisingly chilly outside, with occasional rain, but it didn’t deter us from making our usual rounds. I hadn’t planned on going shopping, but we ended up at Whole Foods. There was an employee outside wiping off the handles of the shopping carts; he was wearing gloves (good) but he was just using a cloth towel to wipe them. We chose to shop directly into our bags, and came away with fish, veggies, fruit, lox, steaks, and a little pasta – I might have wanted to buy more, but the bags were heavy enough as it was. They even had toilet paper on the shelf, but we won’t need any for a while.

My main computer at home is a 15” retina MacBook Pro; I added a 27” 4K monitor a few months ago and have been running with the computer in clamshell mode, just using the monitor. But now that I’m doing a lot of video conferences, I found I needed to have the computer open so I could use the camera, so I put the monitor on a spare dictionary to get it high enough that the computer wouldn’t block it – and then realized I needed a taller chair than I’d been using. So I ordered one, a Humanscale Saddle Stool. They build to order, and in normal circumstances, they quote 30-day delivery times; I’m hoping to see it this year.

This evening, I attended the Toastmasters Tall Tales and International Speech Contest from the comfort of my room. While I missed being able to see the contestants speak in person and the chance to talk with my friends, it was nice to have a nice dinner (and wine!) with Diane instead of Subway sandwiches at the contest. And we ended almost on time, which hardly ever happens at a “normal” contest. There weren’t even many technical problems – people are getting used to the technology.

I tried to stay away from the news most of the time, rather than wallowing in Facebook and Twitter (sorry, friends); we did watch last night’s Daily Social Distancing Show, which was newsy enough for me. After that, we watched a few short videos from Paula Poundstone’s blog and Stephen Colbert’s beard video – and that will do it for tonight.