B. and I share our home with, of course, two cats, and I wouldn't have it any other way. They're fascinating and adorable if sometimes exasperating creatures who both give and receive love and are a constant source of conversational topics. I never had a cat when I was single - I was away from home too often for it to be fair to an animal - but B. had one when I met her, which was a strong point in her favor as far as I was concerned, and we've been cat-enabled ever since.

So are most of our friends. If they have pets, it's usually cats. Just an occasional dog here and there.

And that's common in society today. I've seen statistics that there are more pet cats than pet dogs in the US. But it didn't use to be that way, not at all.

In my childhood, it seemed that just about every household in the neighborhood had a dog. And those dogs ran loose, and whenever I rode by on my bicycle, or even walked innocently by on the sidewalk, each and every one of those dogs would run up and viciously bark at me at top volume, threatening my life. This was especially frightening if I hadn't seen the brute coming. That alone should be enough to explain my lifelong aversion to dogs. Being constantly under attack by dogs remained the case for me into early adulthood, but somewhere around 30 or 40 years ago people started keeping their dogs locked up.

If there were any other pets in the neighborhood, maybe there was a caged bird or a bowl of goldfish. Never a cat. I cannot recall ever coming across any - until I went to university and started hanging around with SF fans. They had messy and colorful abodes, which nobody in my childhood did, with books and papers scattered around everywhere, and they had cats. I was quickly smitten with these charming animals that did not bark or unprovokedly bite, and knew I was in the right place.

I recently came across written evidence of the unease and discomfort that past society felt for cats. It was in the autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt. When she was a young woman and rather shy, one of her aunts suggested to her "that if I were stuck for conversation I should take the alphabet and start right through it," asking her interlocutor for her opinion on topics beginning with successive letters. For example, C was for cat, and the question was, "Do you have the usual feeling, Mrs. Jellyfish, about cats? Do they give you the creeps even when you do not see them?"

The usual feeling? The creeps? That is a deeply alien world that Eleanor was living in.

I haven't had anything to post for several days because I've been in isolation mode, on two counts.

First, B. and I have contacted the covid. First time for either of us. We've been highly vigilant so far, but we relaxed enough to go unmasked to a family gathering just when we shouldn't have.

Covid symptoms vary in nature and severity. Mine have been mostly cold/flu-like symptoms, plus the interesting one of loss of appetite. I cannot eat more than half of what I usually do. B. is having it much worse. Due to our age and condition, we're both on paxlovid. Picking that up from the pharmacy was just about my only exit from the house lately. We've got plenty of food and we're isolating.

Simultaneously, my computer was in the shop for a much-needed overhaul, prompted by a catastrophic glitch. This also took several days, so at the same time as I was isolating, I was isolated from the online world. I had access to e-mail, more to read than to write it, but I couldn't do much of anything else. Whole lotta book-reading going on.

But now it's back, and I can start getting ramped back up on work. I'm feeling better - so is B. - but I'm going to stay isolated for at least another couple of days before I take another covid test to see how I'm doing.

The Menlo Festival ended on Saturday, and today saw the publication of my review of the previous Sunday's concert. It was put off a week because it was a vocal program and the previous week's issue was clogged with three opera reviews. I had my review of Cabrillo in that issue instead. The put-off publication meant I had an extra day to write the review, which I appreciated after having just finished up the Cabrillo one.

I don't have much to add to it. My editors cut my 875-word review down to 650 words, mostly by cutting detail and context, but they left all my main points intact, so despite a few minor added glitches, I count this as good editing.

That Sunday concert was the last time I went up to Menlo this year. All the free concerts and coaching sessions I wanted to hear are online, and it's less time-consuming (a major issue for me right now) to watch them online than go up there. As for the two remaining mainstage concerts I wanted to hear, I bought livestream tickets for those and also appreciated them from home. Unlike the free concerts which are up permanently, these are available only to purchasers and just for a few days.

But it's fortunate you don't have to be live, because the first one took place on Friday while I was at Cabrillo. It was the Viano Quartet, old favorites from when they won the Banff competition six years ago, doing a standard program that even included an encore, which Menlo never does. I liked their crisp and witty Haydn Op 76/5 and their dark and wretched Shostakovich Ninth better than their attempt at jollity in Mendelssohn's Op 44/1 or the wet late-Romantic sop of a very young Anton Webern's "Langsamer Satz" (which means "slow piece," in case the German title impressed you into thinking it indicated something significant).

The other concert, on Saturday, was a must-hear for me because it featured my two absolute favorites of all string chamber music for larger ensembles. Brahms's Op 18 Sextet was a good performance, but I missed the sly and coy elements that make for a great version. First violist Tien-Hsin Cindy Wu showed just a little of the burning grit that enlivened her playing of the second viola part the last time I heard this piece here, four years ago. Mendelssohn's Octet, on the other hand, was all that could be asked for. The players were sorted as two quartets in dialog, which is how Mendelssohn wrote the piece, and the two quartets showed slightly different tone colors. First violinist Benjamin Beilman put all the necessary passion into his solos and drove the rest of the ensemble in speed and energy - with an unusual dark and mysterious quality to the slow and quiet passages.

Also on the program was 180 beats per minute by Jörg Widmann, which I heard here eight years ago in a student performance, at which time I called it "a concise technobeat moto perpetuo with some minimalist sensibility." The professionals put more heft into it than the teenage students did, but not more fire. (The student performance is still online, so I could make the direct comparison.)

Now all is over, and it will be quiet for two weeks until the beginning of Banff, which I'm also attending online only.