It’s been a busy week (and a bit), but mostly filled with mundane occurrences, so when bedtime approaches and I’m faced with the choice of writing a blog entry or going to bed, I’ve chosen the latter.

Probably the most interesting thing that happened this week was being given “permission to operate” our solar system by PG&E; it’s been operational (and sending power to them) since late May, but now we’ll start getting credit for the power we send instead of donating it.

It’s been very hot this weekend, so we’ve been giving the new heat pump (air conditioning) its first real test, and I’ve been happy with how it’s working. Our family room gets quite a bit warmer than the location of the thermostat, so I have to set the thermostat to an absurdly low temperature to keep the family room comfortable, but that’s why we put in solar. And the heat pump doesn’t use a lot of power in cooling mode – as best as I can tell from the info I can get from the system, it tops out at no more than 1500 watts (usually a lot less). In comparison, our whole house fan draws 1100 watts at full speed (fortunately, it draws less than 350 watts at the speeds we usually need).

And there’s good news on the toilet front – the “fix” I wrote about on June 11 didn’t actually fix anything, so I called Korky and they sent me a larger flapper (their model 3060, which seems to be doing the job (i. e., not leaking)). I hope writing this doesn’t jinx it….

There was a Shir Hadash event far up in the hills overlooking Los Gatos on Thursday night; the view was wonderful (and so was the food, wine, and company). My term as Ritual Committee Chair ended yesterday; I’m glad I did it, but I don’t plan to repeat the experience.

On the other hand, I’m repeating my role as President of the Silicon Valley Storytellers; I was the founding President ten years ago. It should be fun!

Like I said, a busy week, but not one which makes for compelling blog posts.

Tyrone’s guest for today’s “Theatre Reflection” was the Nurse from last night’s performance of Romeo and Juliet, Caroline Shaffer. The discussion stayed pretty close to last night’s performance, and one of the first subjects raised (well, I asked the question) was the one I wrote about last night: why didn’t Friar Lawrence (Tyrone) tell Romeo about Juliet’s plan?

The answer: the Friar does try to text Romeo, but the text doesn’t go through. The original plan was to project an image of a “message failed” error on the back wall so the audience would know what happened, but they never were able to get it to work; instead, they added a line that the Friar says to let the audience know about the failed message. Clearly, that line didn’t register with me (or with any of the other people in the group who commented on the issue)!

Other interesting topics that came up included safety (there was a lot of climbing onto the top of a trailer using a rather flimsy ladder), the process of getting the script down to a playable time (3 hours versus the four-plus that their first run-through took), the difficulty of synching closed caption devices to the actual dialog, and mentoring younger actors.

And that was it for this year’s Road Scholar program at OSF.

We had an easy drive home – no significant traffic or slowdowns. We had planned to eat at Yaks in Dunsmuir, but it was incredibly crowded and noisy, so we left and had a very pleasant lunch at Dunsmuir Brewery Works, just a mile away.

We stopped in Redding for gas (it was cheaper than it was in Oregon, much to my surprise) and dessert at Dutch Bros Coffee. We’d been collecting stamps on their loyalty card for years (we only visit them on the way to or from Oregon), and today was the day we were finally going to cash in – except that they’d discontinued the card to go contactless during the pandemic, and we were well past the grace period for the cards. Oh, well – one less item on my packing checklist!