Woke up to a light blanket of snow this morning that slowly melted as the day wore on. Still cold out there. Sheltering in place is better when you can spend time outside comfortably, but the weather doesn’t care about merely human concerns.

Beginning in mid-March, at Ann’s request, we’ve been watching more TV shows and movies together than we usually do. As an old-timer, one of the shows I’ve suggested is the original Star Trek which, remarkably, she’s enjoying a lot, though only two episodes so far.

She likes them, she says, because they’re fun. Many more recent shows are too serious. So I think she’s taking them in the right spirit, which is to say, as entertainment. She also commented that the character dynamic between Kirk and Spock is particularly strong, which of course it is.

The two episodes we’ve watched so far are “Mirror, Mirror” and “Devil in the Dark” (last year sometime, we also watched “The City on the Edge of Forever” and “The Trouble With Tribbles”). They are all particular favorites of mine, so I recommended them. Who doesn’t like Spock with a beard?

As for “Devil in the Dark,” it has a special place in my recollections. It’s a solid episode, but that’s not it. In 1973, a San Antonio station started showing Star Trek in the afternoons, part of the cascade of reruns that kept the franchise alive, though no one would have put it that way then. I was in junior high, the perfect age to start watching Star Trek. The first episode the station aired, for whatever reason — such inattention to correct order would probably outrage fanboys these days — was “Devil in the Dark.”