Saturday 5/30/2020

Almost half way through the year. Mind you, this blog’s “year” starts on December 2.

Little catchup. A few weeks back, while surfing the internet looking for visual references for the 1951 Chevy, I stumbled on an eBay sale of an old plastic model of a 1951 Chevy, still in a sealed box. I was the only bidder, and it arrived yesterday.

The copyright date on the box is 2004, so it isn’t really an antique. It’s by the same company as made the new one I have started assembling. I’m very interested to find out if the parts are any better molded. There’s nothing wrong with the new one, but injection molds do age with time. But I don’t want to mix them up. So I broke the 15-year-old plastic wrap and took a very cursory look and put it away for now.

I went out about 8:30 to deposit some checks, and thought I’d stop in at the Farmer’s Market which just reopened. Figured I’d be there when it opened at 9am, when it isn’t crowded.

Yeah, right. The line was 2 and a half blocks long. The market’s up ahead, the line goes down past our classic Post Office and around the corner.

Middle of the day I watched the streamed launch of the SpaceX Dragon capsule to the space station.

SpaceX, one of Elon Musk’s companies, is the real deal. They are the outfit that returns the big first-stage rocket for a soft, upright landing on a barge. They did that today, too. This soft vertical touch-down is thrilling to me; it is exactly like something out of 1950s science fiction.

Somewhere in the morning I put in an hour on the novel. I found a place to add one small thing, so a little more “stuff” happening.

Evening, I ordered pizza and Patty and Gwen and I had supper in the lobby. Along with the mail I picked up two of the many packages I’ve been waiting for. One was the model paints including “rust” and “semigloss black”. So now I can resume with painting the engine.

Tuesday last I posted a picture of three giant crow sculptures on a nearby house. I have learned since the story behind them. Well, it doesn’t really explain them but it tells about how they were brought here. “It’s art, ok?”

Friday 5/29/2020

I went for a run this morning, which felt particularly good. I’ve commented before on how, for no obvious reason, some runs seem very effortful and some easy. This was easy.

And that was about the end of productive work for the day. I just frittered the time away. That was one of my mother’s expressions, frittering time away. Hah, well, not unique to her, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary it is from the 18th century. Thank you, internet.

One useful moment: one of our residents, Ilsabe (Ilsa-bee) had put in a tech call. I know Ilsabe from before I moved here. She uses my realtor Chuck as a financial advisor, so when Chuck heard I was thinking about CH, he referred me to her. Initially I was thinking about taking one of the one-room units, and she has one of those, so she very kindly showed me around her place and talked about CH. Eventually I took the two-room unit I have now.

Anyway, Ilsabe wanted to join the Current Events weekly (Zoom) meeting yesterday, and while she did get in she got no sound. Lennie tried to help her by phone with no result. During that, something she clicked on, guh knows what, told her her computer, a new Macbook Air, wasn’t suitable. So I was called in as a “mac expert”. I talked to Lennie and we had an idea. As of last Friday’s Rhonda meeting we can have “gatherings” of up to 3 people, but only in the main lobby. So how about we three gather in the lobby with our laptops and work this out?

That worked quite well. We, well Lennie mostly, walked Ilsabe through reinstalling Zoom and joining a meeting in progress (one of Victoria’s fitness classes was on), and she had sound. So she’s pretty confident she can join the next Current Events meet.

The rest of the day was fritter, fritter, fritter. I don’t know where the time went. Or care. But I am disappointed with myself.

At 4pm it was time for CEO Rhonda’s weekly general meeting. Over 100 people dial in for these, most on their phones. I guess a few use the computer. Rhonda talked about how frustrating it is to read about “reopening” and “recovery” when in fact the pandemic hasn’t gone away, and per the Cal and SCC Depts of Health we in a retirement community are in an ongoing “medical emergency.”

They have finalized their testing plans: the 25 residents in SN will be tested monthly. 100 staff members who contact those in SN will be tested every 2 weeks. Remaining staff (including Sodexo food service) will be tested monthly. Assisted and Independent residents are on their own; if you want to be tested get authorization from your PCP and go to any of the SCC testing centers.

She and staff have reviewed the CDC guidance on books, papers, etc. You may have heard those were not considered a vector? Wrong. Communication through the air is primary but all surfaces can carry the virus and the CDC says “objects that cannot easily be disinfected, such as books, should not be shared.” So she strongly urges that the informal swapping of papers and books (that we all knew was going on) be stopped.

They are formulating a plan for setting up a meeting area where residents can meet with families. More news next week.

They are formulating a plan to have garage-return hours five days a week instead of just Wednesday, details next week.

We were recently fully audited by a disease-control expert from our licensing agency and got their highest rating of “no deficiencies found”. That’s a real achievement. That, and having zero infections.

The management staff have taken on the extra duty of being “phone buddies”; each has a list of 16 or so residents they should call weekly, and are calling a few each day. Expect a call from your phone buddy soon. I’m conflicted about this. I really am not suffering for loneliness. While I don’t mind chatting briefly with somebody, I kind of hate to take up a hard-working staff member’s time. We’ll see when I get my call.

Thursday 5/28/2020

Did Veronica’s 7:15 cardio zoom. After a pleasant interlude of internetting I started the process of cleaning. About 9:30 my InstaCart shopper began shopping, and about 10:45 she arrived. I distributed the stuff to my two neighbors and my own refrigerator (I’ve got Sriracha now, as any well-equipped home should), and then got back to cleaning. Finished all that by lunch.

Along the way I had a phone conversation with Marc Lacrampe. No big news, just keeping in touch.

In the afternoon I did a little proofing at PGDP. About 1 an email arrived from the Computer History Museum. “Sadly we don’t see any way of reopening before July 6, etc.” Not a problem for me, as I won’t be back there before CV day (Covid Vaccine).

Later an email came from Jannette who runs FOPAL, detailing how they plan to go about reopening in a month or two. See CV, above.

About 4, came an email from Gretta and Aurora, curators at the Museum, inviting their usual volunteers to participate in a project. They’ve been going through the catalog trying to sort out and add consistency to the categorizations people have used for our 100,000 artifacts over the years. They’d put together a long (22pg) document listing all the topic words and phrases they’d found, with their proposed definitions, and invited us to edit it based on our industry experience.

Oooooh a chance to edit a bunch of technical definitions? Count me in! So I worked on that from 4pm until supper arrived at 6:15.

In the midst of that came the usual, daily, COVID-19 update email from the City of Palo Alto. Usually pretty boring stuff, but this time something caught my eye. The City has renegotiated their lease on the Cubberly community center. Cubberly is an old high (or middle?) school that was closed many years ago by the PA school district. The City leased most of it and rents out many of the old classrooms, offices, and portables to community and nonprofit outfits. Prominent among whom is FOPAL! So here’s what I saw today from the City:

the City will continue to lease the athletic fields, gyms, pavilion, and theatre from the school district. The school district has a need to take back the remaining buildings on their property and have requested that the City and its tenants vacate these spaces. This will impact community groups with leases on spaces owned by the school district.

Well, that’s a bit of a shock. I may have misunderstood the scope, but I’m thinking this means that FOPAL is going to be kicked out of its two portable buildings and its four classroom spaces. So much for reopening.

Finally, I found a cheat. I have several free iPhone games. Just nice mindless entertainment apps, which are free to download. They’re annoying, however, because between every game or every round, they show an ad for some other app.

Yesterday when I was killing time on car freedom day, I was down in the valley of Foothills Park, where there’s no cell coverage. I was playing one of those games and… it didn’t show ads between each game. Hmmm. So tonight I just switched on Airplane mode and… my free games can’t show any ads! Hahahahahahahahah!

Wednesday 5/27/2020

Went for a run. Put together an InstaCart shopping order, mainly for me, plus 2 other neighbors. What do I need? I realized I was lacking Sriracha Sauce, which would spice up some of the dinner entrees. Also some chardonnay.

Did a little writing. That was it.

Tuesday 5/26/2020

Started the day with Veronica’s morning cardio. It’s a nice 30-minute warm-up at the very convenient time of 7:15. Today there were 2 other people zoomed in. Then I read the internet for a bit. And decided if I was going to have a walk, I better take it before the predicted heat moved in. So I put on my panama hat and went out. My destination was to find a sculpture I’ve noted a number of times from the car, these crows.

Why would you, having a modest Eichler on University Ave, in between much larger houses, decide to put three 8-foot-tall crows on your lawn?

Anyway, walk complete, I found myself back in my room at… 10:30am. Time passes rather slowly.

I spent a pleasant hour and a half auditioning videos for a little side project. Back in March, when SFJAZZ announced they were canceling the 2020 Boogie Woogie Festival, I was looking at videos of people playing that style, and wanted to share. So I sent out a post to the house BB titled “Hump Day Boogie Woogie” with a video of one of my favorite players. Several people said they enjoyed that so I started doing it every Wednesday. There are a lot of boogie woogie videos on the net. But they aren’t all good. Some don’t have good audio, or good video. So I have to be a little bit selective in what single video to share. Plus I like to listen. So I put on my noise-canceling headphones and auditioned a dozen or so to select the next couple of weeks’ posts.

There are at least a dozen videos of people performing the Bumble Boogie, the boogie-woogie version of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumble Bee. You know who does the absolute best version? With the cleanest technique, the most panache, and the most solid left-hand beat?

You’d never guess. The dude rocks!

Later I spent an hour on the novel, editing the first few chapters, tweaking a bit of dialog here and there, but not finding anywhere to insert more action.

Afternoon I sat out for an hour on my balcony. The thermometer said 93º but, thanks to my Eastern exposure I was in the shade with a pleasant breeze and it was nice.

Evening, I finished watching The Titan Games. I still like that show, the inventive challenges, the serious athleticism (the ripped bods). I recommended to my neighbor Patty at our cocktail hour the other evening. She wrote today saying she tried it but “not my thing, sorry”. Well, tastes differ.

Monday 5/25/2020

Memorial day, although that has never had much significance to me. Other than nephew Dennis, who served in the Marines in Viet Nam, I have no connection to the war experiences being commemorated.

I started with a run. Then a little this, a little that. One little was an hour reviewing the chapter by chapter synopsis of the novel that I prepared a couple months ago while ramping up to submit to agents. Trying to think where among these points I could add a couple of different incidents of action or crisis — the primary criticism I’ve had is, not enough stuff happens.

I watched some videos about building model car kits. That was helpful. I learned a couple of new things, and was reminded of a couple of mistakes not to make. Also realized another few things, tools, paints, that I should have, so ended up putting seven small items into my Amazon shopping cart. When I checked out, Amazon broke it into three different orders. I already have two hobby-related Amazon USPS orders being tracked, plus two from eBay. Plus my Peet’s coffee subscription is due to ship. So in the next week I should be getting at least one package a day for several days.

In the evening I found two, 2-hour shows on my DVR, The first episodes of each of Titan Games and Naked and Afraid XL. I watched an hour of each.

Sunday 5/24/2020

Pretty much a standard Sunday-Rona. Paper, puzzle. Shocked when my morning weight was 174.8, highest in some time. Whyyyyy? I’ve been controlling my intake with care the past few months and had been bouncing around 173+/-1.

Watered the plants. Did some proofing at PGDP. They, along with Zooniverse, appear to be benefiting nicely from quarantime. Lots of people with time on their hands and computers.

In the TV section I noticed with pleasure that The Titan Games series is coming back. I really enjoyed that last summer. Beautiful physiques both male and female, doing amazing athletic feats over very cleverly-designed obstacle courses. It’s good mindless entertainment. Speaking of which, I also enjoyed Ultimate Tag the other night. Not as inventive as Titan Games, but again, gorgeous people doing athletic stuff.

In the middle of the night — maybe this should go in tomorrow’s blog, but whevs — I woke up with a decision: I won’t pursue Crafting Interpreters but will instead start spending my “real” computer time on the novel. I haven’t heard back from two of the three beta-readers I sent it to, but I have had enough feedback to know it mainly needs “more action”. More stuff happening. And a couple of other things. Rewrite time.

Saturday 5/23/2020

Saturday. What did I do in quarantime? Well, I spent some time with Crafting Interpreters, and was disappointed. In this book we are at a major breakpoint. The author, Bob Nystrom, has led us through building a working interpreter for a small programming language. His implementation was in Java; I made the same program in Python. The result works, executes code written in this language. But it executes slowly; any test of serious computation quickly stretches to seconds and minutes to complete. Not too surprising, because the implementation is not optimized at all. Dozens to hundreds of statements in Python are executed in order to execute a line of a test program.

His next step is to completely rewrite all the work done to that point, in C. It’s been a while since I wrote any code in C, although at one point I’d have classed myself as good-to-expert in it. Do I want to continue with the book? His presentation style annoys me. Every time I finish a chapter, I want to go back and rearrange it, present things in a different order. “Bob, look, it would be so much better this way…” So maybe I’m done with it, or boredom may drive me back to it.

In the afternoon and evening I spent a ridiculous amount of time on the question of how to get the correct body color on the Chevy model. Pat suggested DickBlick art supplies and that is a trove of paint colors. I went through all their liquids and sprays looking for something like the right color. I found a GM brochure from 1951 online, and by sampling it I prepared a swatch, see alongside here.

Compare it to the photo; of course amateur photos in uncertain light are not reliable color sources.

I’ve also looked at all the hobby paints in online hobby stores. I can say that Sherwin Williams “SW 6444 Lounge Green” is pretty close, but of course their paints are only available in quarts and gallons. And probably too thick to spray on a wee little model car.

Then I found trycolors.com, a fascinating site, where I can put in the hex version of my RGB formula (#839A78) and it tells me I can mix something that is within 99.3% of that using a ratio of “4 drops of yellow, 5 drops of magenta, 5 drops of cyan, 3 drops of green.” Now we are getting someplace! So back to Dick Blick and order myself some bottles of acrylic paint in primary magenta, cyan, yellow and green. I have days and days before all this shit arrives in the mail. I can spend that time worrying about how I can get an air-brush. Do I want to buy one? Maybe somebody around here has one already. Maybe the paint will look ok, brushed on.

OK, it passes the time.

Friday 5/22/2020

Started as usual for MWF with a run. I’ve been quite consistent with the running MWFs for some time now. Yay me.

I spent a bit of time trimming and fitting a couple more engine parts.

But now I really have to stop until I get paints. I could continue snipping bits off the, what’s the word for the stick with parts hanging off it like little grapes? The thingummy, and sanding them and so on, but then I’d have to keep track of many little individual parts loose in the box. Much better to have them on the thingummy where they have identifying numbers. When I can cement the bits together to make a bigger bit, fine. But I can’t do that until I have painted them. Or at least, I think painting will be easier this way. For example, the few parts in the picture need at least four colors of paint. I’m sure it would be much harder to paint the exhaust manifold rust color after I cemented it to the block which needs to be dirty iron color.

So, back in the box and put it all aside for a week. But! Thanks to that project, I got an email from someone I knew in the 70s who has, it seems, been reading this blog! The need to comment on the car model motivated her to get in touch. Hi, Pat!

At 4pm it was time for Rhonda’s weekly phone conference. No real news; except there were some questions from people wanting things to relax, and quiet but firm pushback from Rhonda. “This is a medical emergency. My concern is, if we get an outbreak, what will people ask us? Why did you allow this, what were you thinkng?” So, no to riding in another resident’s car; and no to reopening the library, although several callers wanted it. Apparently lots of people still read physical books, and miss our house library.

Could we open it, I wondered. OK, one person at a time goes into the library, selects books (or DVDs), goes away. When the items are returned, they go in a closet for a week to let the hypothetical viruses die. But then they have to be re-shelved, which means, handled. OK the librarian wears a mask and vinyl gloves. But, what about that borrower? In going around the library, they were touching things and breathing on things. Scenario: somebody borrows a book on Monday, has symptoms Thursday, and their test comes back positive on Saturday. They can have left live virus in the library on Monday, which means that now, every library user from Monday to Saturday has to go into 14-day isolation, and be tested! And every person they had contact with in between! And every person they had contact with… Take the library out of the picture, and the contact chain is much shorter.

So Patty and Gwen and I did our marginally-legal thing we had done the prior week. This time we ordered from Darbar, an Indian restaurant. Pat called the order in; Gwen drove to get it. The restaurant was supposed to pack three different orders, but they actually wrapped the three portions of Naan in one foil packet. I carefully unrolled the foil and we could each take the top piece of naan without touching other pieces. Also they provided only two boxes of rice, so Gwen dished out of the larger box with her clean spoon, slid the box to Patty who served herself.

Anyway it was a nice change from house food. We had picked Friday because it was Mac&Cheese night on the weekly menu. Tandoori chicken, rice and naan beat that hollow. Now I have half a plastic container of chicken and sauce, and half a small box of rice. I guess that will be Sunday breakfast, maybe.

Thursday 5/21/2020

Started the morning with Veronica’s aerobics class. Then a quick shower and out the door at 8:15 to walk to Midtown for coffee with Harriet. This is, if one wanted to be a troublemaker, a “gathering” in that I spent half an hour about 5 feet from a person not in my household. When I got back to CH, fortunately the person taking temperatures at the door did not ask me if I had attended any gatherings. It’s a gray area, all right?

Waiting outside my door was the Thursday plastic bag of fresh towels and sheets. So I got to work changing the bed and doing all the other cleaning. Finished, and feeling very well exercised, about 12:30. I mean, seriously: half an hour of step aerobics, followed by a 3.6 mile walk, followed by 90 minutes of wiping and vacuuming? Phone says 11,000 steps for the day, and well it might.

After lunch, I started, slowly and carefully, to work on the model car. I got to the point of completing the 6 pieces that comprise the engine (left and right halves of the block, left and right halves of the head, oil pan and valve cover).

This was a learning experience. The pieces are nicely detailed but they are not perfect. Nominally-flat surfaces tend to be a little bit bulgy, so two flat faces don’t quite mate. I made quite a bit of use of the sanding stick to make things flat and line up nicely. Not complaining, mind you!

I glued the halves of the block together, and the halves of the head, but stopped at that point, realizing that I would like to paint these pieces separately before assembling the engine complete. The oil pan should be gloss black but the block should be metallic dark gray (and I just noticed that little oil filter on the side, that should be orange!). Which made me realize that, oh crap, in all my buying of this and that, I didn’t buy any paints or brushes. What a doofus. So I spent a while on the ‘net buying a dozen bottles of Testor’s of various hues, as called for on the plan sheet. Such are delivery times these days that it will be over a week before they arrive. Which means, there won’t be much progress beyond this point.

Around 4pm, a cheerful guy from facilities showed up to hang my pictures. I’d put in the request for this last Friday, and heard nothing since, but here he was. So that got done.

Probably, next year, when the 6th floor gets its act together and redecorates the lounge, I expect at least the Yosemite painting will go to a more public location. But for now this is my private gallery, down here at the far end of the hall where nobody comes.

Notice that the Linsky landscape is hung on an ordinary hook, by the wire across the back of the frame. The Carol Aust one is not. Back in February I got a touch paranoid about how easy it would be for someone to grab a painting off the wall, take four steps through a door, and disappear down the freight elevator which opens to the street. Somehow that painting feels steal-able to me. The Linsky one, which is nominally about 3x its value, is more conventional and, frankly, a bit drab, in comparison.

So I went to the frame shop where I had an old print framed (Day 1.064) and asked about secure hangars, and they had some. That’s why that painting doesn’t lean, but lies flat to the wall. It took the facilities guy an extra 15 minutes to mount it, because the mounts need a drill, and screw anchors, instead of just nailing up a hook. But nobody is going to take it away casually.