Saturday 8/15/2020
Morning of a heat wave. For the first time ever I took my coffee and paper out onto the balcony. Very pleasant.
At 9am I walked over to the bank to deposit a check; then to the CVS on University. I was braving an enclosed space because I wanted a bottle of isopropyl alcohol, a simple thing that is useful cleaning up paints and stuff on the model. They didn’t have any. Apparently it’s a COVID casualty?
From there to the Farmers’ Market, where all I bought was a single packet of raspberries. Back home I considered. I could eat the raspberries right now, but I’d really like to have a little sugar on them. I don’t have any sugar… and my eye fell on the bottle of hummingbird food.
Story here: The number of hummingbirds that populate the artificial cliff-face of Channing House East side is growing. One might almost call it a swarm. Any time you are on the balcony or near a window your eye will be caught every few seconds by the darting motion of a hummingbird, usually chasing another hummingbird. Last month they were emptying my feeder in six days; now it is more like three.
I’m not complaining, but the problem is keeping the food in stock. Back on Tasso street we mixed our own, one cup white sugar to four cups water. I don’t want to stock sugar, don’t have the big 1Qt pyrex measuring cup, etc. So I am buying it, in 64 oz plastic bottles. Initially from Amazon but last time they were only offering like 3-week delivery times, so I ordered from PetSmart. They said “we shipped!” on the 10th but now are predicting delivery on the 17th. Meanwhile my 64oz jug has been drained except for dregs. Dregs that I poured over the raspberries in a bowl and they were delicious.
On the way back from the market I saw another resident sitting in the driveway, trying to make his new garage clicker work with no success. I shared with him that was my experience, too. He was more adventurous than I, though. He got out of the car and stepped further down the curving ramp to where he had a clear view of the entry gate. From there, the clicker worked! The problem had been that, if you stopped where you previously stopped to wait for the gate to open, you were out of line with the receiver. You just had to roll another car-length down the ramp.
I went inside and retrieved my clicker from the front desk where I left it last night, took it outside, and verified that from the correct angle it worked.
So after eating lunch, I went down and got the car off the street, drove to Midtown, got a bottle of isopropyl from the CVS there, drove back and put the car away in the garage.
While my two loads of laundry were running, I got in a couple of hours work on the model, lots of little bits of detail painting, also sanding and polishing the body paint.
The way we are scheduling the meal delivery, the package reception, and the market cart operations is with online sign-up sheets. I put up a new sheet, announce it on the BB list, people can grab the times they want to work. Some people are not happy with this. They want the certainty of knowing they will be working every Tuesday Lunch, or whatever. Marcia ran an opinion poll and got about 20 responses from people with this desire.
She and I were to meet at 5 to talk about this and orient two new delivery volunteers. But then everything got crazy. There’s a heat wave, and the utilities are predicting possible periodic outages. So Kim Krebs wrote us at 4pm that for the evening meal, dining services would be putting two bottles of water on each tray, and the delivery people need to point these out to each resident, explaining that they are for drinking water in the event of a power outage. Our pumps are not on the emergency power system, so in an outage, there’s no water to floors above the 2nd: no drinking, and no flushing. (Well, you get one flush, as Kim pointed out.)
So Marcia and I met in the lobby and talked over the scheduling thing. She is willing to keep track of the people with fixed time preferences. Each time I make a new sign-up sheet I am to send her the URL. She will fill in the desired times of those people before we make the sheet public for other signups.
Then we were getting ready to explain about the bottles when Kim emerged from her office with new news: deliveries are to use the freight elevator, not the normal ones. Because the freight elevator is on the emergency power system, and they don’t want to risk a meal delivery person being caught between floors when power cuts off. That meant that we would be wheeling carts to the south end of the first floor, which is normally off limits to residents, to separate us from staff. And using the big, slow freight elevator, and coming into each floor through a very stiff door.
The first cart, for the second floor, had to be brought back, because some kind of fire door was closed across the 2nd floor elevator access. Facilities manager Chris H to the rescue; he went up and released all the fire doors, and put hinge blockers up to hold the stiff entry doors open.
So that was all settled down and operating by quarter to six and I came back to my unit, just in time to realize that this was the night when I’d canceled my dinner request, figuring I would order pizza or something. Now it was 6pm and I was hungry and tired. So I had a wonderful supper of sandwiches, a cheese with mayo and mustard, and a PBJ. And a beer.
Codgerville 