Another week in lock-down has come and gone and I don’t have much to show for it. The DH and I reached the moving furniture phase (or at least I did. He is always accommodating). We moved the little-used stereo from our living room into our family room and took boxes of stuff to our UHaul storage unit. The newly improved house isn’t quite ready for photos, so that will have to wait. In the meantime, I can relate to this:

As usual, I attended several Zoom meetings, including a weekly department “Happy Hour” that I tolerated for about ten minutes. I loath Zoom. Recently, I came across a Zoom-meeting-reaction pie chart on the internet. It was amusing but did not apply to my situation, so I made one of my own:

What would your Zoom chart look like?

Meanwhile, my reading and watching seem to have reached a plateau, which is a nice way of saying that I’m in a rut. I can’t decide what to read and I’ve been binge-watching The Mentalist, a pleasantly average crime show that ran from 2008-2015.

In order to make peace with his tragic past, brilliantly quirky Patrick Jane (Simon Baker) acts as a consultant for the serious crimes unit of CBI (the California Bureau of Investigations). The Mentalist is rather old fashioned in that the main characters are decent people, the plots do not require a million twists, turns and betrayals, and the crimes are not meant to shock or titillate the audience but to show how clever Jane is. There is an overarching uber-plot that involves Jane’s search for Red John, the serial killer who murdered his (Jane’s) wife and child, but most episodes represent individual crime stories. So far — I’m only in season 2 — I have not found that Red John intrudes too much. The show asks very little of its viewers but it is not boring and I can usually manage two episodes before falling asleep.

Before I sign off, I’d like to point you to this week’s Melville Minute, in which son #2 and Vincent Price remind us of the importance of gratitude.  Though I certainly have much to be grateful for, I have to admit that life has taken a turn to the absurd, like something out of Alice and Wonderland:

 Mad Hatter: “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?”
“Have you guessed the riddle yet?” the Hatter said, turning to Alice again.
“No, I give it up,” Alice replied: “What’s the answer?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” said the Hatter.

Indeed, I haven’t the slightest idea what anything means, but I’m determined to enjoy it anyway.