Wednesday 5/20/2020

Car freedom day! Started with a run. Then after only a little time catching up with the internet (the various blogs and webcomics I follow in my RSS reader), I headed out in the car. My only destination was to visit the tree we planted for Marian last spring. It looks good!

The one beyond it, planted the same day… not so much. It’s just a stick.

Then I killed the 90 minutes until the garage opened at 11am just sitting in the car by the park, and driving slowly back up El Camino.

Back home I found an email asking me to do my first official act as Residents’ Association Treasurer. The steering committee has decided to put together a bonus for the staff. Tipping is banned, but there’s an annual Appreciation Fund drive every fall that nets a bonus for staff members. Given the extra stress they’ve been under, it was felt right to show a little financial appreciation sooner. So as I have physical possession of the R.A. checkbook, I got to write the check for that. Of course owing to the quarantine, I have not been able to go with the former treasurer to the bank to sign a signature card. So I made out the check, then left it in her mailbox for her to actually sign.

Yesterday I initiated an InstaCart order for groceries for me and 3 other 6th floor residents. It was supposed to be executed between 12 and 2pm but at 11:30 I opened the app and found that the shopper had just finished and was on her way. So I had the grocery bags upstairs, sorted out, and delivered by 12:30 just in time for my lunch tray to arrive.

In the evening a big box from Amazon Prime finally arrived with the foundation of a new hobby. Ever since I was tinkering with that metronome, I have been itching to make something. Making software is fun and all, but I really want to make something physical. So, obviously, a model car. Obviously? Not exactly. I last fiddled with model cars when I was 16 or so, because my best bud at the time was heavily into them, and I tried my hand at it. Anyway, why not? Should be good for some slow “quarantime”.

What car? Well, there are some gorgeous European models, 1/16 scale with hundreds of parts, but maybe I should aim a little lower. I looked around the ‘net for something that resonated, and, aha: a ’51 chevy, such as we had when I was 16-18. (I think it was because this kit was on the way, that I immediately thought to write about that car for the writers’ group this week.) I have some tools but decided I needed a better selection, so I ordered a Japanese model-maker’s kit, along with the car. And that package arrived tonight.

The tool kit is decent; well, the screwdrivers are junk but I have good ones. The white thing is actually a manicurist’s tool, a battery-powered thing with a selection of little abrasive heads for doing elegant nails. But it repurposes well for plastic model building. The kit itself looks great, highly detailed, many parts, opening hood, detailed motor, working suspension.

It’s a Bel Air coupe where ours was a Fleetline 4-door sedan, but that can’t be helped.

I ransacked the internet looking for a body color paint that would match my extremely clear memory of our family car’s color. I learned that GM called it Aspen Green.

Pea Soup Puke more like it. Here’s a restoration that’s pretty close. However, that is a very difficult color to find either as model paint or anybody else’s spray paint. I ordered one can from Home Depot; it came yesterday but sprayed out too yellow. I have another spray color coming from Michael’s Crafts. No rush; it will be weeks before I get to the point of spraying the body panels.

Tuesday 5/19/2020

Don’t know what I did. I can remember passing some time with this and that but… jeez, sorry. Must blog the same night.

Oh, right. Tuesday was Channing House Writers’ group. A dozen elderly people on a Zoom meeting, each in turn reading out some piece of writing they did, in response to a “cue” put out by the group leader. This week’s cue was “my life with automobiles” and there were a lot of interesting reminiscences. I think I will just dump mine in here to take up space.

There’s a “kodak” of me, age 3, absolutely enraptured, staring into a foglight on the bumper of a ’37 Hudson. I’ve been mesmerized by cars right from the start.

In high school, however, my driving was limited to what my family owned, which was a 1951 Chevrolet 4-door sedan. It was a drab pale green in color and devoid of any of the exciting performance features that I could read about when, each month, a new issue of Road and Track arrived at the school library to alert me further to the unattainable possibilities of performance cars.

The Chevy did not have a V8; it had a straight 6 engine that was ignored, when not positively derided, by the columnists of Road and Track. It did not have a stick; it had General Motors’ worst attempt at an automatic, the abysmal “powerglide” transmission. With that engine/transmission combination, if you “floored it” coming off a traffic light, all you got was a louder hum as the engine revved up. Then, with the stately motion of a battleship leaving the dock, the car would slowly accelerate, gradually working up to the speed limit.

But that was what I could use when, after I had my driver’s license, I could ask girls on dates. Before one particular Saturday night date, I spent most of the morning cleaning the Chevy, inside and out. I don’t recall what I did that afternoon, but I was away while my father used the car.

It is important to know that we were a farm family. Ours was a working dairy farm, with a small herd of cows that had to be milked morning and night. We had a fairly elaborate milk-processing system, milking machines to automatically divest the girls of their bounty and a refrigerated tank to store it until the tanker truck from the farm co-op came every second day to collect it.

Cows age and get retired (as meat products for the family freezer), and have to be replaced, so there were always a couple of young heifers being raised up as replacements. My father chose this particular Saturday as the time to go to a nearby farm and bring back a “weaner calf”. Nothing to do with sausage; a “weaner” is a calf that is old enough to eat solid food and has been weaned from its mother: a young cow, perhaps a bit larger than a Great Dane, easy enough for a grown man to handle.

My father chose to transport it in the back seat of the Chevy.

The calf was deeply upset about being separated from its home and put into a strange green humming box, and expressed its distress as calves often do, by pooping and peeing. Actually not as much as it might have done; perhaps it hadn’t been fed lately.

To his credit, my father made an attempt at cleaning up the car. He didn’t apologize, though, although I’m sure I made my distress known. It was a farm car and it got farm uses, and that was how it was. I put more hours into cleaning. I honestly don’t remember how the date went, or even which of my few high school girlfriends it was with. I hope I had the sense to make a funny story out of it up front, rather than keeping a window open and trying to pretend not to smell the lingering odor of cow poop.

And while I really never forgave my father for that event, I did come to get along with him in later years.

That Chevy will be mentioned again here in coming days. (Foreshadowing!) Here is the Kodak of me age 3 (so, 1945). I spent quite a bit of time on the internet trying to work out what make of car that is. That grille is very distinctive. I believe it is a 1937 Hudson.

Monday 5/18/2020

Normal Monday. Went for a run. Did some stuff. Emailed the 6th floor asking if anyone wants to shop this week. Got a couple replies, so will do that, set up an Errand.com run Tuesday night.

On my run, my podcast started to break up. What? Eventually I realized the problem was that the little lightning port to stereo jack dongle was broken. It had flexed once too often in the middle, I guess. Fortunately I have another one, and maybe I’ll get out my magnifier and soldering iron and see if I can splice the teenytiny little wires.

The new phone arrived in the evening, a day before it was nominally scheduled, three days after it got to Menlo Park. I opened the box. It looks exactly like the old one! I will just have to take Apple’s word that the electronics are way faster and the camera mungs it pixels more cleverly. I didn’t set it up yet.

Sunday 5/17/2020

When I got up there was a bit of a rain shower, clouds and damp streets.

Had a pleasant morning reading the paper and doing the big puzzle. And watered the plants and then it was 9:30. Oh dear. So I went for a walk, a bit under 3 miles, onto the Stanford campus. My destination was Andy Goldsworthy’s Stone River, which we always thought of as the Stanford Snake.

That was pretty much the interesting part of the day.

Saturday 5/16/2020

Just for fun I mixed up a meal replacement shake from powder for breakfast. I have three bags of different flavored powders, left over from last year, but I’ve been breakfasting on ready-to-drink ones. Well, that was my exciting breakfast.

Then I went for a 3-mile walk. Time to catch up on podcasts. Did some coding, watched some youtube. The usual.

I should say, over the last couple of days I’ve triaged a few more games. The oddest one was A Mortician’s Tale, in which you play a trainee mortician learning how to prepare bodies for burial or cremation. (Play the trailer at that link.) It was a teeny bit interesting at first, but after each procedure, you have to go into the chapel and attend the funeral, meaning listen to the chat between the different mourners. That’s about as interesting as it would be, attending a funeral every five minutes in real life. Uninstall. Next was Into the Breach, a turn-based game in which you deploy your robots to defend the Earth against alien invaders. Sort of a cross between chess and Dungeons & Dragons. I got bored very quickly. (“Why am I short of attention? Got a short little span of attention” — Paul Simon, “Call me Al”)

One that’s marginally a keeper is Osmos, which is visually pretty, and slow enough I can actually play it, and not full of annoying puzzles. I can put on my noise-canceling gamer headset and zone out to it. Sscchhlrrrk!

One more package of support for my new hobby arrived. About five to come including the most important. A package that did not arrive was my new phone. It is still at FedEx in Menlo Park with status “Package not scheduled for delivery”. So I called Apple support, and the guy there said, it is scheduled for delivery on the 19th. So, what, they just have to hold it until… yup. Can’t deliver it sooner than promised, apparently.

 

 

 

Friday 5/15/2020

Went for a run in the morning. Fiddled around with programming for a couple of hours. Read a chapter in a book. So fun.

Rhonda’s weekly meeting had some news. She talked a lot about her interactions with the Santa Clara County and California state departments of public health. We, and all other group living facilities, are under new mandates. CDPH emphasizes that lifting some restrictions does NOT mean there is any reduction of risk. We are in an emergency, and facilities must implement “stellar” infection prevention. It is ok, says the state director of public health, to be fanatical. Every facility to have a general plan insuring screening, PPE use, training, public surface cleaning methods and materials, etc. by the 1st.

To implement the “stellar” infection control, the state told facilities they should have a “brigadier general” in charge. Rhonda has promoted Angela LaMothe, the woman I’ve worked with before moving in and who has been running the upgrade project, as our “general” to implement and manage this. A resident commented later Rhonda couldn’t have made a better choice, and I’d concur. Angela rocks.

SCC adds the mandate of a testing plan. By the 1st they have to decide who to test (staff? residents?), how often, how to pay for the tests. At a later point Rhonda commented she was impressed with the state and county managers, all knowledgeable and they do listen.

Meanwhile, and irrespective of any loosening of restrictions for other people, we are not to participate in any “gathering”. Over several questions it became clear that a “gathering” was any meeting with a person from a different household. Where a household is your apartment. There is “some flexibility” to allow fully-masked residents to meet in the lobby or their floor lounges. But if you go out to a relative, or a meeting of any kind, or to the emergency room or Urgent Care, you will on return enter a 14-day period of room isolation.

Exceptions are “essential activity” including: scheduled medical and dental appointments (because doctors can control access and infections, where the emergency room can’t), grocery stores, the farmer’s market. Not excepted: riding in another resident’s car. So when Patty and Gwen went out in Gwen’s car to pick up our restaurant orders? Violation. (Don’t tell!)

Coincidentally, I got a cheerful email from Janette, the FOPAL director, outlining their thoughts on when they might reopen, and asking when we volunteers thought we might come back. I replied “2021” although at greater length.

My new phone has traveled from Schenzen, China to Menlo Park, but FedEx didn’t feel like delivering it today. I did receive one of the six different things I ordered for a new hobby. Five others in transit.

 

 

 

Thursday 5/14/2020

Half-way through Veronica’s 7:15 cardio class, her video froze. OK, only half a cardio. No matter, I’ll get my exercise cleaning house. Yes, by 9 my bag of fresh linen was outside the door, and I launched into the apartment-cleaning routine. All the wood surfaces, dust with nice lemony Pledge. Carefully moving my little birds and other keepsakes aside, not flinging them to oblivion with the dusting rag. Then start on the hard surfaces with spray cleaner: kitchenette counter and sink and microwave. Then the bathroom. All around the bathroom, the mirrors, inside and outside of the shower. Then make up the bed with the new sheets.

In the living room where there is a hard floor and area rugs, move all furniture onto the rugs. Sweep. Then “swiff” with the wet mop thingy. (Last week I forgot to sweep and the swiffer pad clogged up too fast.) Move all the furniture off the carpets onto the hard flor. Get out the vacuum and vacuum two area rugs and the bedroom carpet. And done! 90 minutes, about. Who needs cardio class?

In the afternoon we will have a floor meeting via Zoom. I told our floor leader, Jerry, I want to talk about hanging my two oil paintings near the lounge. His wife Betty expanded that topic to the general question of what to hang in the lounge, but to decide that we need to decide how to decorate the lounge. We have a $20K budget for redecorating the lounge, as part of the renovation project, but The Covid got in the way. We can’t redecorate because the in-house facilities guys are all busy and outside contractors are not allowed in the building. So likely nothing will be decided.

…and I was right, nothing was decided. Nobody wants to hang any paintings until they decide on a color scheme for the lounge, which can’t happen until the quarantine is over, so — a year from now? I pointed out that it is easy to move paintings around; if they decide to go with yellow, for instance, they can then go around and grab any piece that fits with yellow and move it. But no. And one person thought my painting “Leap #2” looks “kinda weird”. Just for reference,

I thought it would be a wonderful thing to have hanging opposite the elevators so anybody entering the floor would see it and be cheered up. But I also said (to myself) that if there was one veto, I wouldn’t push it. And there was. So pretty soon I will have it hung in the hall outside my unit. I “own” that wall. Downside, almost nobody comes down here but me. And one other neighbor. Not the one who didn’t like it.

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In the daily COVID-19 status email, CEO Rhonda clarified some of our rather touch restrictions.

A gathering is defined as a meeting of people that do not live in the same household. Gatherings are strictly prohibited, especially for people who live in Retirement Communities. Santa Clara County Public Health issued a memo specific to this in April. This directive gives the Retirement Community the authority to prohibit the resident from entering the building upon his/her return from a Gathering. Or, to require a 14-day isolation.

Channing House has strictly followed the directives from the County for Gatherings. If you have a meeting of people that does not fall under one of the exceptions for a Gathering, you will be required to isolate for 14-days.

I know that the Hartzells, a couple I’ve talked to several times, came back from a family birthday party, and are now in 14-day confinement. Rhonda goes on:

You are no doubt seeing the lifting of restrictions occurring around us as retail stores are opened in limited fashion. But, congregate living will continue to follow a different set of rules because the risks are much greater if any one of us were to be exposed to COVID-19 and bring it into the building.

As a reminder, the lifting of restrictions will not mean that there is a lower risk of contracting COVID-19. The lifting of the restrictions means that the healthcare system is better prepared for an influx of positive cases.

My emphasis. I haven’t seen this spelled out elsewhere.

Wednesday 5/13/2020

This morning, instead of a run, I walked to the old Palo Alto Cafe in Midtown, to meet Harriet for coffee. This was the first time I had a cappuccino in — six weeks?. We sat a few feet apart in outdoor chairs and chatted. Then I walked back.

Hey, iPhone Health app? You are so busted. Google maps knows that it is 1.8 miles there and back again, so 3.6 miles walking. You only show 2.8. Unfair!

Anyway I was back in time to take the car out. I drove up 101 a few miles, turned around, came back. Traffic on 101 is running at 70+ in the slow lane.

Did some more coding, and writing about the coding. Nobody wants to see that.

In the afternoon, I called in my order to the Peninsula Creamery: grilled cheese sandwich and a chocolate chocolate shake (i.e. made with chocolate ice cream, not with vanilla plus choc. syrup). Patti and Gwen went in Gwen’s car (she is parking it outside, it isn’t quarantined in the garage) to pick up the orders. At 6:10 we three were seated with appropriate spacing around the dining table in the 6th floor dining room. As with last week’s pizza, it was a nice change to eat a meal while talking to other people.

Oh, I should mention, I killed another game off my bundle of games. Hollow Knight is one of those games where you control a little avatar guy running and  leaping through a complicated dungeon world, slashing at everything, defeating monsters small and large, and collecting tokens of various sorts. I got about 5 minutes into it and I needed to make my little guy leap from a cliff to a floating platform to another floating platform, to another cliff edge. I tried about 25 times to master the timing of the first leap, from cliff to platform, and I kind of got that but could not master the skill of then, continuously (because if you stop to think about it, you’re toast) leap to the next platform. Right. Escape key, quit, go into steam, “manage this game> uninstall”, byeeeee.

I watched 15 minutes of a YT walkthrough of it by a skilled player. If you have the twitchy reflexes to handle this sort of thing, it might actually be fun.

Tuesday 5/12/2020

Oh damn it happened. I didn’t do a blog post last night. Now it’s Wednesday afternoon and I cannot remember what I did yesterday. Seriously. Like I was in a coma from Sunday to now. Wait… (Checks the “sent” folder of emails) … ok, I remember something.

One, I polled the 6th floor residents to see if anyone wanted to do any shopping this week. Nobody did.

Two, I got called by a resident who wanted help with her TV. She called me directly, which is a kind of a no-no. The appropriate thing is to call the Tech Squad hotline and Bert would assign a squad member to help. I didn’t think fast enough. I asked a couple of polite questions and then I was committed.

The lady was set up some time ago by somebody with a very large, at least 60-inch, LG TV and a Bose sound-bar. She drives it with one of the old, small Xfinity boxes and the old-style remote. Her problem was that the TV only showed snow. She said she had been “on the phone with XFinity for hours and they were useless.”

Indeed they are if they couldn’t figure out what a screen full of snow means. I knew from 30 seconds into the call what was wrong. I’ve seen it once or twice before, here. Somehow they manage to switch the input-select of the TV away from “Cable” onto some other source. HDMI-3 or something. Or in this case, to “Live TV”, which is how the menu on the LG screen described it when I hit the “input select” button on the remote. I.E. it was switched to “antenna”. There was nothing connected to the antenna socket, hence: snow. And if the XFinity call center couldn’t suss that one out, they were really bad.

There is a vicious button on the top corner of both the old and new Xfinity remotes, “TV Input” which — if the remote and the cable box have been properly paired with the TV — will call up the TV’s input source list. Unfortunately, many of our residents have no idea what that means, so they ignore it, and then they end up with this problem, a blank screen. It bugs me, too, because it is really easy to hit by accident; and once you hit it, the remote can’t be used to tell the TV to dismiss the damn menu. I have to go pick up the TV remote where it is gathering dust in the corner, and use it to dismiss the source menu.

Anyway, I figured it would not be possible to talk her through the fix on the phone, so I broke all the quarantine rules and went to her apartment and stood in the doorway and used her remote to pick “cable” from the TV’s menu, and instantly there was CNN or whatever. She was awestruck at my technical mastery.

Oh, and the Bose sound-bar? Not working. I strongly suspect it is powered off. I asked if she had the remote for it. She didn’t think so, or if she ever had one, didn’t know where it was. So I set the TV to use its internal speaker.

So that was Tuesday, pretty much.

Oh, one more thing! I ordered some stuff from Amazon that I will discuss after it arrives. Quarantine time-filler stuff.

Monday 5/11/2020

Went for the usual run, which felt just fine. Spent several hours coding, working through most of chapter 11 of Crafting Interpreters. Author doing some really clever stuff. I enjoyed translating it.

I didn’t mention yesterday, that I finished the game HiveSwap. Well, I say finished it; I mean, finished with it. I got to another point where I was stuck, so I turned again to the YT video play-through and watched up to the point where I was stuck and a little more to see what I had missed. Then I did go back and play through that puzzle (and one more achievement that the video guy had missed, ha ha). Then I realized that the video play-through had only about 20 minutes to run, so the game was nearly done. Heck with it, I just watched the rest of the video. Glad I did, because it turns out, the game so far was only chapter one of a much longer story. It ends on a cliff-hanger with Jodie and Xephros riding away from the evil Heiress on a Lusus and…never mind.

Since they produced this game back in 2017 and haven’t added another chapter since, it probably won’t ever be finished. Too bad. It had nice characters, a good script, clever art. But I can’t recommend it even as a freebie, because it isn’t finished.

I am getting a lot of entertainment from Youtube videos. There is such an endless range of subjects and personalities. You want something that will chill you right out and leave you calm? No, not meditation. Spend half an hour watching this guy restore a painting. I watch a guy designing and building a computer from scratch. I watch a woman rebuilding a Toyota MR2. I watch a machinist adapt a piece of equipment. People doing stuff, skillfully, that’s what I like. It’s soothing.