For the third time in 14 months, I’ve gone to a restaurant and sat on their patio with other people.

The first time was for Sarah’s birthday last month, and we hadn’t yet been vaccinated. People’s interpretation of “wear a mask except when you’re eating or drinking” was too lax for my taste, so I told Rudi I wouldn’t be repeating the experiment until I’d had a shot.

Last week, post-shot #2, I went out for drinks after my volleyball game. I didn’t yet have full immunity, but given the latest info on outdoor spread, I decided I could take the chance.

Tonight, Sarah and I went out for pizza. We talked about her garden and past work evaluations (we’ve both worked places where they’ve asked supervisors not to rank employees as “excellent” on their annual reviews) and upcoming travel (she’s going to go see one of her oldest friends next month; I’m going to see my family later in May). It was so … normal.

I’m not ready to eat indoors yet. But it is a nice feeling to be comfortable eating outside again, particularly as we’re about to head into the time of year when that’s nicest.

Today wasn’t the most productive day, but there’s always hope for tomorrow, right?

There are definitely some things I’d like to cross off my mental to-do list this month in addition to the key one, which was to get my second COVID shot. But I’d also like to:

• See my family
• Clean my apartment, so I can have the pet sitter come
• Plant tomatoes
• Find my swimsuit (it might be in my travel bag, since I was on travel two weeks before the world shut down), so I can swim at the pool once it’s open
• Celebrate Rudi’s birthday when he gets home

I mean there are definitely others, like spend time with friends, socialize with my volleyball team, and be outside as much as possible. But those are the main five.

Are there things you’re still hoping to do this month?

Rudi and I had a nice final evening before he headed out to Salt Lake City to spend 10 days with his mom and sort some things out there. Despite the cool drizzle, we strolled down to the library and then on to Trader Joe’s. With pizza dough in hand for the night’s supper (along with salads made from greens from our garden topped with delicious Green Goddess dressing from the bakery at the farmers market), we moseyed home. While Rudi was cooking, I put on a livestream of authors Amor Towles and Chris Bohjalian chatting, courtesy of one of our local bookstores, Politics & Prose. It ended in time for us to watch the season finale of Magnum, and then we rounded out the night with Now You See Me 2.

Rudi’s flight leaves from Dulles early, so I anticipate needing to come home for a nap before starting the day for real.

Quite a bit of rain has fallen this week, so I expect there will be a correlative quantity of weeds to pull out of the garden and more twine to put up for growing pea vines sometime this weekend. I don’t mind. I’d much rather Mother Nature take care of watering the garden, although it’s easier this year than ever before, thanks to the faucet installed last year and the Y splitter we added this spring.

There’s a neighborhood arts walk/craft fair across town tomorrow, so I may head over that way in the afternoon. And, of course, I can take in the Saturday night park concert from our local band.

If I have any energy left, I’m putting it toward reading and knitting — and maybe replacing all the batteries of my jar lights. I told Rudi I was going to do some spring cleaning while he’s gone, but I don’t see any reason to tackle it on the day I already have to get up before sunrise.

One of the projects I supervise at work involves making short informational videos of 90 seconds or less. That amounts to 200 words on a subject. You can say a lot in 200 words, but you have to choose them carefully.

First, you have to know a lot about your subject (or work closely with someone who does). The less you know, the more you’re able to obscure that fact, intentionally or otherwise, by wrapping them in a blanket of clauses and phrases.

Second, it helps to be able to wordsmith on the go. I am here to declare that your experts are never, no matter how many times you emphasize there are constraints, going to give you which tradeoffs you should make when they edit your text for accuracy. They will only ever give you more words they think need to be included.

Third, people have different styles when it comes to removing words. I tend to get there by wielding a scalpel, cutting a word here, a word there. My colleague approached it with a big kitchen knife, taking whole sentences with her as she went. Both techniques can be mighty to behold, when you watch someone remove a fifth of the words without losing the meaning. And, in the end, the goal is to leave your audience without a clue you excised anything.

Fourth, don’t show off. Because we’re aiming our videos at the general public, our rule of thumb is to keep our language at an 8th-grade reading level or less. That means using shorter sentences, but more to this point, fewer long words. The easiest way for experts to keep their word counts down is to use long words with some frequency. If you’re talking to other people in your field, it’s a great hack! That’s why lawyers and accountants and tech experts exist. Laws and tax codes and computer manuals are written for others who already understand the same basics, even if your specialty is different. Keeping your reading level lower means using more words, but it also means widening your audience.

Fifth and most important, you have to use your thesaurus with care. Remember back in middle school, when you first learned what a synonym was, your teacher said that you couldn’t always substitute one for another in any old sentence? You had to consider context. When making educational materials, you have to also consider the baggage your audience is bringing with them. When you say “prove,” you might be intending to convey that research is overwhelmingly in support of what you’re saying. But if your audience doubts your sources, they may hear “prove” as indicating what you’re saying is in need of defense and extrapolate that to mean there’s reason for suspicion. “Make sure” is twice as many words, but causes way fewer red flags in many people’s minds.

Getting rid of those final words to hit your target is painful and takes time. But when someone watches your video and says it was a great introduction to a topic and made them want to learn more, there’s nothing better.

I got my second dose of vaccine yesterday. I felt so fatigued after the first shot, I’d expected to feel terrible this time around. But I didn’t. I felt fine.

So, yay! Now I get to start thinking about seeing my family, about eating outside, about going to movies and to baseball games, about hugging friends. I’m ready to shake this past year off and move on, even if I don’t quite know what the future looks like.

12 more days…

Rudi had a call this morning that allowed me to catch up on some sleep without a cat dropping a lamp on my head (Corey’s discovered that’s the only way to wake me up, but I refuse to give in to extortion and just shift further down the bed).

After a lazy start to the day, we headed to the Georgetown waterfront, passing by a family of nine ducklings on the canal. We had some snacks, soaked up some sun, chatted with friends, bought a book (a collection of Zadie Smith essays from the discount table in front of Bridge Street books), and then stopped at the Rock Creek Kings concert on the way home.

Tomorrow, I’m planning on an early trip to the farmers market (strawberries!); some time at the garden stringing my peas up further; park time with books knitting, and chatting with my folks; and an evening of excellent tv — The Equalizer, Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist, and His Dark Materials. (Our internet company has given us free access to a number of premium shows for a week and the first season of the Philip Pullman adaptation is one of them. We’re going to have to hustle, though, because we’ve watched four episodes in five days and now need to watch the last four in two. It’s excellent, but filled with tension, and, having read the novel, I expect that only to ratchet up for the remaining episodes.)