One of the benefits from this stay-at-home period is that we’ve stopped eating restaurant food, and the positive impact on my weight has been notable.  We started tracking our weight daily over 10 years ago, and every week I’ve been consistently hitting new lows on the scale.  Since our last restaurant meal on March 16 I’ve lost 10 pounds, and I’m down 16 pounds since we returned from our Florida trip.  Kathy has been seeing similar progress.  So I’ve been wearing clothes I haven’t worn in years and starting to fill boxes for Goodwill.  It’s a problem I’m happy to have, as I’m guessing that a lot of people will be having the opposite situation to deal with, on top of whatever other challenges they face.

It looks like we’ve managed to avoid the first tropical storm of 2020, although it is gray and gloomy here today from a different system.  We got our walk in between the drops this morning, but will have to see about tomorrow when the chance of rain is supposed to be higher and the temperature lower.  After seeing 90 this past weekend, tomorrow’s high is forecast to be only 60!

I’m sitting at my desk this morning listening to my computer shovel data from my old 2TB hard drive to the first of my new 4TB hard drives.  It’s an interesting sound, somewhat reminiscent of the computer sounds of old.  Not quite the KA-CHUNK of the old floppy disk drives, but more than the silence from solid state drives.  I would have preferred solid state drives for the new ones, but the cost of drives that large is prohibitively expensive.  I’d much rather spend that money on photo gear and travel.

Our son and personal computer assistant Kevin helped me install the drives yesterday.  It’s interesting how relatively simple computer hardware can be, as long as everything works when you plug it in.  We learned yesterday – after a few attempts – the importance of first being sure that everything is plugged in!  But we figured it out and everything is working fine today.

Today I am working on getting all my data on to the two new internal drives and two new external drives.  I calculated that my old “backup” drives were at least 10 years old, so I was due for an upgrade/update anyway.  This should give me capacity for a few more years of travel and photography, even with the larger files from an anticipated new camera in the near future.

Kathy & I got out early for our walk this morning in order to beat the “heat.”  I say “heat” in quotations because we are actually – finally – seeing seasonal temperatures in the mid to upper 80s.  Our thermometer actually hit a high of 91 yesterday.  Pretty toasty.

When we get out early we can walk around the parking lot of the Walmart that is outside our neighborhood and stay in the shade most of the way.  The back of the store is often a target-rich photographic environment, which has provided me with content for the next few days.  I’ve never actually been inside the store, but have walked miles around the perimeter of the parking lot.  And taken pictures of their detritus.

These cameras have evidently reached the end of their useful lives, and were piled in an old shopping cart behind the store.  Probably waiting for someone to come and haul them away along with the old shopping carts.