Today is our wedding anniversary. Instead of going out for a nice dinner, we'll .... do something at home. Maybe we'll remember a bunch of nice memories from the last fourteen years. Maybe we'll go through the Anniversary Gifts bot output and see if there's something we can make at home.

I've now sewn three fabric facemasks. For fabric I used old tech company tee shirts. For ties: elastic from free airline eyemasks, shoelace-like handles from fancy shopping bags, and the hemmed bits of the tee shirts. All of them are serviceable. I'll be trying to improve and, if I can get better, give some away.

We used this approach to gather and grow yeast using raisins, sugar, and water in a jar on a windowsill. Today Leonard's using it to make bread. We have some powdered dried yeast but are trying to save it. And we've been growing green onions in some jars of water on another windowsill. Their stalks keep pushing out new green growth. The most successful watercolor painting I've done so far is a portrayal of one of those bunches.

The pip 20.1b1 beta release is out. And Python 2.7.18 is out marking the very last, final, release of Python 2.7 and the end of the 2.x era. My household contributed to both of these things. Here's Leonard's pull request that adds an informational banner to the 2.7 docs. When I can concentrate on work or exercise or media it's better. The news is awful. I try to only listen to or look at it a few minutes per day.

There is light through the windows, along with the rain and lightning, and I see the tree branches in the wind, falling and rising, falling and rising. Every night at 7pm I know it's 7 because people start clapping and ringing bells from our windows and balconies, a gesture of support for the health care workers and all the other essential workers who are trying to keep us all going. I do it too. The other night I got out a little temple bell and started using that. Someone has a tambourine. A few nights ago someone started chanting "USA! USA!" and I recoiled; as I joked to a few friends, better to chant "South! Korea!" or "Germany!" since they're actually doing it right. And someone else has, a few times, played a recording of "The Star-Spangled Banner". As I mentioned to friends: well, the thing that works about that song now is that it's a question. Does that banner still wave? We don't know!

I also have joked: And is this the land of the brave and the home of the free, or the land of the scared and the home of the at home? But it's all those things, of course. And the rhetoric of that joke, as though you cannot be both at home and free, plays into the hands of foolish, even malicious shouters who prefer to swan around shedding and catching viruses, and to mob streets while braying about government restrictions, and refuse to love their neighbors.

I'm glad of the rain. It feels natural to be inside when it's raining.