As usual Joanne and I had a morning walk. Later I noted I was faced with a choice of things to do, I could (a) practice guitar or (b) work on my taxes, and it was actually a tough choice. Which says something about how I feel about practicing. Eventually I did both. And also fixed up the V-day card I bought the other day, ready to give to J tomorrow.
Also did some reading and some sitting around. It is now 6:15. At 6:30 we meet at the garage to go to a concert by Voices of Music. Just thought I’d get this post done so I wouldn’t have to do it later, or more likely forget to do it.
I had set aside time yesterday to go to the Bing box-office and get help fixing the problem I had with those Simon tickets. That worked really well.
I had set aside today, well, this morning really, to get help from the IBM/UHC website to get over the problem I had with it, that kept me from seeing anything about my account. And with yesterday going so well, I thought this would be good too.
Wrong. I ended up spending all day, from 9am to 4pm, interacting with the UHC website help chat. My original problem was that logging in was no problem, but after I had logged in, I couldn’t see anything. It would give me an error message and say try again later, That’s been a problem for months, and I went in going to solve it once for all.
And now I couldn’t even log in. So I spent the day trying to get the automated help, and then the first and second layers of web support, just to log in. And failed. Oh, there were lots of gaps where one person said they were transferring me, and there would be 30 minutes or an hour before the next person came into the chat. So I got some reading done. But basically a wasted day, and nothing accomplished.
First up, a hike with Joanne and Martha. I had proposed we do the Dish walk, the 3.6 mile loop past the Stanford Dish. However parking near the trailhead is usually a problem so we were going to take a Waymo there and back. But recently Waymo has been quoting strange prices, and today it wanted $47 to go the 2.5 miles. (It wanted $27 to do the return trip when we checked later.) So instead we used Lyft, under $10.
Anyway there was rain yesterday and showers forecast for today. It turned out the weather was great, unusual for here with shafts of sunlight through lots of clouds, occasional spatters of raindrops, and a rainbow.
Just a great walk. After lunch I wanted to go to the Bing Hall box office, and Joanne wanted to go to Menlo Park for a medical appointment. So I drove and dropped her off, then drove to the Bing. There a very nice young lady helped me resolve the problem I had with verifying and seeing my Paul Simon tickets. Drove back to Menlo Park just in time to pick Joanne up, so that worked out well.
This was the day for the monthly 6th floor meeting. No big news, just a fun meeting of neighbors, and dinner after.
At 7:30, a talk by Dr. Sara Cody. Recognize that name? If you are local, you do. She was the Public Health Officer for our Santa Clara County, and as such was the first to issue a shelter-in-place order in March of 2020. For which she took a lot of hostility. She recounted the details of those early months of 2020, how little info they had, why they made the choices they did. Her closing slide was a bar chart with three bars. Deaths per 100,000 population for the year 2020, that is, up to early availability of a vaccine.
Again, COVID deaths per 100,000: Santa Clara County, 90, California, 120, United States as a whole, 182. So what they did, worked, producing a death rate one-half of the national rate.
Really felt like a productive day. Got a lot of little things done I’d been thinking about doing.
Most of that in the morning before 10, along with tidying the apartment and sorting my laundry. At 10 I took over the as host of the zoom meeting for the writers group so Betty could head off on vacation. The prompt this week was “taking advice” and the only thing I could think of was a piece I wrote back in ’21, about me in 1968 learning the important diagnostic principle of “think stupid” (the more modern version of that is, when you hear hoofbeats, think ‘horse’ not ‘zebra’). So I found that and gave it a fast edit and had something to read.
Then did the laundry and something else. At 3 had a meeting with Bert and Craig and the new tech czar, a very cheerful fellow. I was thinking, that was about it, right? Then remembered I was supposed to be setting up dinner with Joanne and me and our new neighbors so I did that, and they accepted, so I reserved a table for that night. Thinking, well, pretty well cleared your list now, right? Well, no, what about this idea for group listening to contemporary music? So I put some actual thought into that, and decided on “fourth tuesdays” and made some notes and I can get that scheduled tomorrow.
Resident association meeting at 9. My new 6th floor neighbors Rob and Nancy were introduced. She has an MA in Physics then went to med school and practiced as a dermatologist. He has a PhD in I forget what. Despite having way more professional cred than me, they are quite nice people.
Rhonda introduced a couple of new staff people, including one I expect I will interact with often, Jean — she didn’t give his last name — who will be the czar of IT issues going forward. Seems very pleasant. The Tech and AV squads will meet with him tomorrow.
Then off to FOPAL. Frank had texted me a picture of 11 (fucking eleven!) more boxes in front of my section, and this is the pre-sale week. I have to get the whole thing tidied up and ready for the sale today or tomorrow, and I have no free time for that tomorrow. So I spent three hours down there, 11-2:30. Came back for a short walk with Joanne. Ordered a cheese sandwich as supper to take out. Picked that up at 5 and off to FOPAL again. Two more hours did it, I’m back at 8pm. Except one more little task to do.
I’m in my bathrobe with a shot of Grand Marnier to sip. and fuck all that.
Usual Sunday morning. Then off, not in Fred because Joanne is using him, but rather in a Prius belonging to my CH neighbor Prue. She is just off on a month of travel and asked me to drive the Pru-ius occasionally, so why not today. I needed to go to the Museum to lead the 12pm tour.
It was a nice tour, 15 people, very attentive and appreciative. Half way through I got a coughing fit and one guest asked if I needed some water. Nah, I said, and carried on. But 5 minutes later he rejoined the group, having walked all the way back out to the lobby to buy a bottle of water in the cafe. How nice was that? Not just a plastic bottle, either, it was a screw-cap aluminum bottle of hydration enhanced whatever. Must have cost him 8 or 10. I can reuse the bottle, I think.
All afternoon I’ve been reading books and reading the internet and deliberately ignoring the Superb Owl. No idea. Figure I’ll check out the halftime on Youtube later.
Puttered around in the morning. At 1, met with Joanne and we were off to the Bing on campus for a show. This was Batshit, a one-woman show in which Leah Shelton dramatized the awful treatment of women with mental illness. Her grandmother was instituionalized with schizophrenia in the 60s, and Shelton put together what I decided to describe as a beautifully staged tantrum about the way she and other women were treated then (hopefully not so much any more). It had some very clever staging and effects and made a point I can’t argue with. But we agreed we wouldn’t recommend it to anyone else.
Then we killed time for an hour by walking around campus and browsing the Stanford Bookstore, and having a coffee at the Tressider Union. Then off to have a casual supper at the Peninsula Creamery. No I didn’t have one of their famous milkshakes.
Back at CH it was almost time to set up for an event that Stew, Lou, David Greene and I have been planning, the first of what we hope will be a series of recorded, live rock concerts. To kick it off we had Roy Orbison: A Black and White Night. The smallish crowd of 40 or so loved it, so we will probably continue as planned with quarterly shows.
First thing, went for a walk with Joanne. Did some other stuff, Then did a quick edit of the video I shot of the Shakespeare troupe last night, put it on my dropbox, and emailed the manager.
At 11 I met with Pru in order to get to know her Prius. She is going off for a month and wants me a/o Joanne to drive it occasionally. Funny thing, we were going to drive around the block, but when I got into the ramp up to the street, there was a big red PAFD ladder truck blocking the exit. So I performed a 3-point turn and put it back in the garage. It’s fine. I’ll drive it some Monday down to FOPAL.
After lunch I joined a small work party of residents in the resident workshop, in the basement. Bert is organizing a major cleanup. I helped sort lumber into keep and toss piles. The resident workshop was overstuffed with duplicate hand and power tools. The result of years of old guys moving in, and bringing along the best stuff from their garages. Getting rid of a huge pile of tools and materials. Bert will ask Facilities to dispose of it. We all expect that the Facilities employees will cherry pick the pile and load up their pickups. Good.
After supper was a “songalong” group sing which is always fun.
Fun day. Off an on during the day I worked on the video of the book talk that I managed on Monday.
I walked over to CVS and got the different prescription that my cardio had set. I worked on a couple of other projects as well. I collected a couple of graphs that will go with my book talk in May.
About 2am I conceived the idea that it would be fun to do a talk on the Kessler Syndrome, which I recently read might be more imminent than previously thought. So for that, I went to Claude.ai and had Claude look up the relevant scientific papers, and then to help me find websites that show a good visualization of satellite traffic around the earth. (This is a good one.)
Finished the video and uploaded it, and checked my email and AHAH here was the notice from Stanford Live that the Paul Simon ticket pre-sale window was open! Two days ago I donated $250 to Stanford Live so I could be a “supporter” and get in on the pre-sale. And here it was!
So I clicked the link and entered The Worst 40 Minutes I Ever Spent With a Computer. Here’s the email I sent to Stanford Live 2 hours later. AXS is their unspeakable rubbish ticket vending web page, which is completely paranoid about preventing sales to ‘bots.
I just want to tell you — avoiding expletives with an heroic effort — that the experience of buying Paul Simon tickets was the worst 40 minutes I ever spent on a computer, and I’ve been using them over 50 years.
And it isn’t over yet.
I tried to get AXS to acknowledge me as human using two different computers, and three different browsers on each. Oh, and two different wifi networks. So, about 14 different attempts to follow that link from your email. EVERY TIME it gave me its chipper message about “are you a real fan?” and point me to its useless help page.
Finally I noticed a coy little remark about “change to mobile data”. OK! I go to my phone, turn off wifi, and using Safari over cellular, it let me in right up to the point at which I actually selected two seats.
Then it said I needed to sign in. Sign in to what? Not Stanford Live, no that password won’t work. By the time I had gone through the AXS password reset process — which of course included an email confirmation code and a text message — when I did sign in to AXS it no longer knew about the tickets I had selected. No cart.
So I repeated the ticket selection process and finally actually managed to pay you the $550+. Huzzah! I had made it!
Haha, not so fast, humble consumer! You don’t really have tickets; you have bought the right to download them into our so-special app that you must use instead of, oh I don’t know, Apple Wallet, like every other venue on the planet?
So I go and get the GV app from the app store. OK. And guess what? The GV app wants me to sign in. Oh, ok, reasonable — but when I enter the AXS email and password that I just reset 15 minutes ago, it blocks me with “Are you a real fan?” On my own phone!
Dear Stanford Live — THIS IS MY DAMN PHONE, I HAVE A RECEIPT FOR MY DAMN TICKETS. WHY IN HELL WOULD AN APP ON MY OWN PHONE THINK I WASN’T A HUMAN?!?!
Stanford Live — AXS is a reeking pile of garbage and I hate you.
Joanne is back from a tour of Baja — whale watching excursion got close enough to a gray whale that she could touch it — and we took a leisurely walk first thing, bringing each other up to date on a week’s happenings. Sherry, a mutual friend, has covid. Her doctor (who is also my new doctor) prescribed Paxlovid, and Joanne ran the errand for her to pick it up. It was $800!
I was exposed to Sherry. She ran the poetry out loud meeting Monday afternoon. So I was 5 feet from her, in a room with the doors closed, for an hour. So today we made a stop at CVS to pick up some more flu/covid test kits. I’m clear so far, cross fingers.
I sat down to try to clear my mailbox. I only keep in my inbox, emails that I need to respond to in some way, or follow up on. There were about a dozen, I did enough follow ups to whittle it down to 6.
At 3 I put on my walking shoes and walked to PAMF for a routine consult with my cardiologist. She made a small change in meds and recommended I do a stress-echo, so that is scheduled.
Between two walks I ran up nearly 11K steps and 4.4 miles.
Codgerville 