Wednesday 7/8/2020
Went for a run in the morning. Worked on the model a bit. There’s just a long punch-list of things to finish up on. Pretty sure it will be wrapped by the end of the week. I’ll take a gallery of pictures and then… what? I wonder if I can sell it through the CH gift shop?
This was a day of three zoom meetings. At 2pm the Residents Association Executive committee met. One topic was the upcoming RA general meeting. There is an on-going issue — well, it is an issue in the minds of a very small but determined minority of residents — and the question was, should it be put on the agenda.
Here’s the issue. A decade ago, CH signed a contract with T-Mobile allowing the telco to put an a cell tower on the roof our our building, which is the tallest building for some distance around. CH gets a nice rent, over $30K a year, and all was fine until a year ago when Certain People got a bee in their bonnet about the “health hazard” of having radio frequency energy all around. The matter was presented to the Board (a bunch of local luminaries who set policy and manage the finances of CH) and during that deliberation, it emerged that the contract with T-Mobile was so written, that CH could not unilaterally terminate it for another decade, assuming they wanted to, without severe penalties. Not that they wanted to, the Board deciding there was no problem.
The cell tower was brought up a couple of RA meetings back, and Rhonda, responding for the staff, recounted how CH had paid for a rather expensive technical survey to measure RF energy all through the building, and levels were well below the FCC recommendations. Which of course satisfied none of the people who are deeply suspicious that all that RF will rot our chromosomes or something. (I could have saved them the survey money just by showing them my T-Mobile cellphone, which consistently shows only 2 bars of signal inside the building. The antenna on the roof is designed to radiate horizontally and serve phones all around us; it is designed not to waste energy radiating downward, and my phone suffers for it.)
So the Executive committee decided the item would not be on this month’s agenda. It will no doubt be brought up during the open Q&A at the end of the meeting anyway.
At 3:30 we had another book talk; this by Susan Hartzell reading from her new biography. Fun stuff about growing up in the 1950s in various places.
And at 5pm we had our 6th floor meeting. Joined by Maggie, normally my two-doors-down neighbor, from the porch of her cabin above Fallen Leaf Lake, next to Lake Tahoe. Much joshing about how she had sworn never to have internet installed in the cabin her parents built in 1929, and here she was with her laptop, pine trees behind her. She’s not in a rush to come back, because by current rules anyone who sleeps away from CH has to go into 14-day isolation on return. She might not be back until the first snow.
During that meeting there was discussion about the new comet, NEOWISE (named for the telescope that found it; what are they going to do for the next comet it finds? NEOWISE-II I suppose.) So I went to bed a bit early planning to get up and look for it.
Codgerville 