A few Silver Tongued Cats planned to meet for in-person coffee and conversation at Panera Bread 15 minutes after this morning’s meeting. I was game; Panera is a 20-minute walk from my house, so I expected things to be in full swing when I got there. So I was surprised when I got there at 9:20 and found no one from the club – I stuck around for a few minutes, walked home, and then Diane and I set off on our usual Thursday rounds.

Later, I found out that the other people arrived starting at 9:30, long after I’d left. The official start time will be 9:30 next time, and I’ll be more patient.

Lunch was another experiment, this time using a recipe for Salmon with Cilantro-Lime Topping + Pear & Nut Salad from Platypus Wine Tours who’d taken us on a Sonoma tour in July. It was pretty good, but I think we had too much celery and could have used more nuts.

Diane and I took a quick walk in the afternoon, and then we got busy on computers until dinnertime. At 8, I suddenly realized that I was 70 calories short of my daily goal. I’m pretty sure I won’t be able to hit it every day this year, but I’m not ready to give up yet, so I took a quick and boring walk up and down the block to make up the deficit.

The saga of my missing Costco shipment continues – I’d called them nearly two weeks ago to ask for a refund for the paper towels that they hadn’t included in the replacement shipment they sent, and I was told I’d see the refund in a week or so. It hasn’t shown up; this time, I decided to try their chat function so that I’d have a record of the conversation. The current promise is that they’ll process the refund within 2-3 business days and send me an email; after that, it’s in the bank’s hands. We’ll see.

On Monday night, I’d learned that one of the members of the Silicon Valley Improvmasters was the owner of Glazier Rolled Ice Cream on Santa Cruz Avenue in downtown Los Gatos. I’d been curious about the place but we’d never gone there; this gave me another reason to consider visiting.

This afternoon, we took a 5K walk through downtown Los Gatos with the South Bay Striders – I was a little hungry afterwards, but it wasn’t time for dinner, so I suggested visiting Glazier. Diane was agreeable, so off we went (we’ll do anything for more steps!).

Making rolled ice cream is an elaborate process – I don’t know how they’d cope on a busy day, since each order took more than five minutes. The result was interesting, but I think I prefer the texture of a traditional ice cream. But I’m willing to give it another try.

Our HVAC got repaired today – the tech replaced the gas valve and adjusted the air flow to direct a little more air towards our bedroom. The air coming out of the register in the bedroom was only 98F before he started working on the system; now it’s 112F, which should help keep the temperature in the room closer to the rest of the house.

And it was Jeff’s birthday – it would have been nice to see him in person, but we had a nice conversation.

And I kept working on recovering from the character set problem induced by installing WordPress 5.9. I spent a long time trying to get MySQLdb (an old Python to MySQL connector) installed on my M1 Mac mini to no avail; I eventually decided to give up on it and installed a pure Python connector, pymysql. I had to change the way I make the initial connection to specify keyword arguments, but that was the only change I had to make. People say that the pure Python version is slower than MySQLdb, which is partially written in C, but I doubt I’ll ever notice.

After that, I was able to actually work on the real problem, and I think I have code to safely convert the Latin-1 columns to UTF8. I’m not crazy enough to run it tonight, though!

I’m still trying to clean up the character encoding issues I created (or maybe I just uncovered them) last night. My brain hurts.

But today wasn’t totally without success – I achieved a goal that I thought was completely out of reach.

I use my Apple Watch to keep track of my activity. The watch tracks three dimensions of activity – standing, exercising, and burning calories, and there’s a goal for each dimension. Reaching the goal in all three dimensions gives you a perfect day; reaching the goal for every day from Monday through Sunday gives you a perfect week.

I’ve owned an Apple Watch since July, 2015 – six and a half years, 341 weeks, or 2391 days (not that I’m counting). In that time, I’ve only had 51 perfect weeks, even though I hit each of my daily goals at least two-thirds of the time – consistency is hard!

So I was happy to open up the Fitness app today and see the “Perfect Month” award on the screen. I wonder if there’s a “Perfect Year” award?

I upgraded this blog to WordPress 5.9 today, and all of my non-ASCII characters (such as typographical apostrophes or quotes or accented letters) got corrupted in the process. I’ve run into this before and I thought I’d fixed it, but clearly I still have an issue.

I tried to make a brute force “fix” and it made the blog look OK, but when I try to edit a page, I see the weird characters again.

So I shall write no more this evening and attack the problem again tomorrow.