Last week I began French language lessons with the Alliance Française de Santa Rosa. My instructor is a très sympa young woman whose family is from the Charente near Bordeaux. I signed up for level A2, and feel pretty comfortable starting at that level. The words will come back, and I hope the pronunciation will as well. There are two other students in the class who really are A2-ers.

Yesterday was a Sunday, and [my Feldenkrais practitioner] called me at 8 am, waking me out of half sleep. She was alerting us to the availability of COVID-19 vaccine through Kaiser Permanente. I held my silence until 8:45 and then woke Rachel, who took about 30 minutes to realize that getting vaccinated was more important than sleep. The next two hours were spent on the phone with Kaiser, at the end of which we both got appointments for next week, in Oakland for mine, and in San Francisco for Rachel’s. This was all due to the fact that after carefully setting up priority groups 1a, 1b, 1c, and 2 (Rachel and I are in 1c), the CDC and the California director of public health gave up after finding that 65% of vaccine doses were not being administered. And so Newsom opened the shots to all of us over 65 on January 13.

Rachel was so energized by the thought of being released from fear of the virus that she spent the rest of the day spreading the word about the Kaiser vaccinations to a dozen friends, all of whom got appointments within the next three weeks. Only [two friends in Southern California] decided not to run the Kaiser gauntlet, but rather to wait for their doctor to call them when their turn would come.

On Saturday out of boredom we had started thinking about a family Christmas in Hawaii, and found that rooms in Poipu, Kauai were already starting to disappear. So on Sunday, after the vaccine rush, we also started vacation planning for 2021 in a serious manner. Rachel booked a suite of rooms at Kiahuna for the week after Christmas, and I started my usual travel research for our September trip to the East Coast for weddings, and to France for walking with [those SoCal friends]. I am still hoping we can visit Provence and Marseille. There’s a drive between the Dordogne and Provence that goes through the Gorges du Tarn, and a château that we could stay at half-way through the gorge. But we will see; Rachel feels anxious about a long vacation, and we now have the “problem” of an additional two weeks of U.S. travel on this trip, due to a Labor Day wedding of [the daughter of a college classmate] in New York.

Another pandemic activity: massive housecleaning. We sent 40 pairs of shoes and countless jackets, dresses and other hardly-worn clothing to the Goodwill box.