busy day

My determination to avoid as much physical human interaction as possible, in these covid-tough times, didn't prevent going out yesterday for more than the usual number of errands. In ordinary times, this would be an ordinary number of errands, but these are not normal times.

First to the post office with the payments for several bills, to drop them off at the drive-by outside collection boxes.
Third to the supermarket to pick up our weekly order. I've written before about our problems with this, but on fourth try we found a store in this chain which doesn't regularly make a mess of the pickup process. This week they even sent out a notification at our requested delivery time that they were running late. We'd never gotten such a notice before, and the stores have been later than they proved this time (about an hour).
When it works right - and so far it's worked right at this outlet - you park in one of a few designated spaces in front of the store, phone their designated line, give them your name and space number, and pop your trunk. Five to ten minutes later, they come out and deposit your groceries in the trunk. Everything was already paid for online, so off you go.
Second item was trying the same thing at a pharmacy, for some items the grocer didn't carry. First I'd tried CVS, only to learn after I'd already placed the order that they only do mail order and it won't arrive for a week. Never mind, we can always use more of this. Walgreens, however, does have pickup, and they claim it'll be ready in half an hour. But somehow I managed not to receive the confirmatory e-mail. A query phone call, however, took care of that.

B. had her last socially-distanced string quartet meeting of the season today (it's getting cold outside, cold by our standards that is).

I received a reviewer's link to the files from a new album, Occurrence by the Iceland Symphony conducted by Daníel Bjarnason, consisting of new music by Icelandic composers. I'm not under any compulsion to give this a full review, so I'll just say that the contents seemed to me to be mostly spectralism. Dark and ominous spectralism from Veronique Vaka (she's an immigrant from Canada, thus the unIcelandic name), bright and glittering spectralism from Þuríður Jónsdóttir (now there's an Icelandic name) and Haukur Tómasson, and just dark and ominous, in more of a Shostakovich/Weinberg mode, from the late and apparently great Magnús Blöndal Jóhannsson.