The truly observant among you will have noticed that tonight’s “Pandemic Journal” number is two more than yesterday’s and might be wondering what happened.

I usually write these entries in Day One on my Mac, then I copy them into WordPress and publish them on the blog. Day One doesn’t have an automatic numbering feature, so I look at the previous day’s entry and add one when I write the new one. But I made a mistake on May 12th and just copied “Day 421” instead of incrementing it.

I might never have noticed if I hadn’t opened up the journal on the iPhone – the iPhone version of Day One shows the number of consecutive days you’ve created a journal entry, and today, instead of the 578 days I expected to see, I saw this:

Now I have to decide whether or not to fix the incorrect titles. Day One doesn’t have an API that would let me access the entries directly, but I can export the journal as JSON, figure out the fine details of the format, write code to fix the problems, re-import the journal, and do the same thing on WordPress so that the blog is consistent with the journal. Or I could just fix the numbering starting with today’s entry, which I’ve already done. Decisions, decisions….

I made pretzels again today – it was the easiest batch yet. I didn’t make a big mess around the mixer and almost all the flour was properly incorporated into the dough, which wasn’t very sticky (I didn’t even need to put extra flour on my hands or the paper when I rolled and shaped the pretzels!). I didn’t even have to fight the usual boil-overs for the last couple of pretzels.

That last improvement may have come with a price, though – I couldn’t use the double burner that I usually use for the pretzel bath. I couldn’t turn its knob – and when I looked more closely, I saw that the knob was sitting lower than its mates. I’m just glad that the switch failed in “off” position so I can use the other elements until we can get it fixed.

I found out that one of my classmates brought home bedbugs from Reunion; she stayed at the same hotel as we did (the Westin), so I guess we got lucky in our choice of rooms. Before the pandemic, I had started to use a hair dryer to heat up the bed and make sure nothing came out before unpacking – I think I’ll get back into that habit for future travels!