New theory about the little black box my neighbor keeps putting on his roof — maybe he’s measuring air quality, which is vastly improved? Except when the fog rolls in, distances seem crisper, more colorful.

My exercise now is a daily half-hour ride on my stationary bike in the early evening, while I work my way through Netflix’s The Roman Empire, narrated by Sean Bean. I’m curious about how he’s going to die this time.

For late-night viewing, we’re slowly working our way through international mayhem via Netflix, PBS, and Amazon. Last night we discovered Detective Montalbano, which we liked. Unlike Scandinavian, French, and British detectives, he’s refreshingly free of angst. So nice to see a series about a detective preoccupied, not with the dark traumas of his past, but with whether or not he can enjoy a good plate of pasta without a phone-call from his long-distance girlfriend or news of another dead body.

It’s almost 11:00 am. Soon, very soon, My supervisor will wake up and pick up her phone, and I will be, until 5:00 pm, enmeshed like Laocoön in emails and video-conferences.