I’m writing this early tonight because I have a Shir Hadash Board meeting in a few minutes. Our new Transitional Rabbi will be there, and I’m looking forward to meeting him. I’d signed up to bring snacks this month; Diane graciously made pumpkin muffins for me to bring (we kept a few for ourselves, of course), and I’m also bringing grapes.

We finished watching Only Murders in the Building – I’m looking forward to the second series whenever it comes out.

Other than that, it’s been a quiet day here – there’s been a little rain on and off all day, with hopes of more in the next couple of days. No progress on the cooktop front. No photo editing. Just quiet. We didn’t even walk as much as usual, and the only wildlife I saw was birds on the high school lawn.

Two years ago was different – we were in Bulgaria, where we learned an old Bulgarian proverb: “To err is human; to blame it on someone else shows management potential”. That was an interesting trip, indeed!

We started seriously shopping for a replacement cooktop today – ours is probably still fixable, but if one switch failed for no particular reason, can the other three be far behind?

We’d taken a look at Best Buy and Home Depot over the weekend and were under-impressed with their selection. Two friends recommended University Electric so we went there this morning. You could look around on your own or request help – we were serious enough to ask for help, and our salesperson quickly took us to the right section of the store. Consumer Reports strongly recommends the Bosch induction cooktop, so that’s what we looked at. We got a good price quote ($50 lower than anything we found online), but availability is a question (of course). More to come….

After shopping, we took a walk on the San Tomas Aquino Creek trail, which we’d never been on before; it goes right through Santa Clara’s semiconductor heartland (we passed AMD, Nvidia, and Intel), but we did see a little wildlife while we were walking.

We had planned to go food shopping next, but we were too hungry to be trusted in a supermarket, so we went to Athena Grill for some tasty Greek food; the deep-fried pita bread was almost worth the trip by itself!