Tuesday, 8/18/2020
Up at 4:45am to dress and make a cup of coffee before the scheduled meeting of volunteers who are willing to deliver newspapers! About 95 newspapers arrive every morning at 5:30am: SJ Mercury, WSJ, NYT, Chronicle. The distributor has marked them with the subscriber’s room number. They have to be sorted by floor and put in a cart and delivered, slipped under the room door. I’ve always been pleased that about the time my coffee water is hot, around 6:15, the paper magically appears.
This is one more of the jobs that staff said, could be handled by resident volunteers, freeing up an hour of staff time. It took a while to find enough volunteers but I finally had five, and we were all to meet this morning and try out the job. Well, not me; I am the coordinator and I have no plans to be up and dressed and in the lobby at 5:30 on any regular basis.
Today, I got one sip of my coffee and then realized that, owing to mask regulations, I couldn’t take the cup with me. Unless I wanted to suck coffee through the mask. Rats.
Anyway, it all went well. The morning staff guy, whose name is Beethoven, has decided he will keep the sorting job. But he will turn over a cart full of nicely-ordered papers to a volunteer at 5:45 each day, to be distributed to all nine floors. The five volunteers organized themselves into a schedule, two of them taking two days so we have seven day coverage, and we’re off.
Back to my room to drink cold coffee and skim the paper, then back down to check on the start of the breakfast meal delivery. Staff still is worried about power outages, so all meal carts have to take the freight elevator, and I wanted to make sure those volunteers got that word. And back to my room again to await the crew from Valet custom cabinets to build my new closets.
Here’s the deal on the closets. Two big closets in my bedroom, which date from the late 60s when the building went up.
The doors are heavy, and they always seem to be in your way no matter which side you want. The drawers are crude by any woodworking standards. When I moved in they had a nasty sour mildewy smell. Last July I spent some time in the basement workshop, sanding the insides of the drawers and coating them with Varathane. That got rid of most of the smell and the splintery bits but they still were heavy to slide. So that was then.
The new doors, which are not fully installed because they ran out of track? Or something? Anyway they are 1/3 width, triple-tracked, so you can expose 2/3 of the closet. And they are light and roll smoothly. And the drawers have handsome bronze handles and are soft-close, just a little push and they swooosh themselves shut.
I have to move a bunch of those shelves from the default spacing the installers left them at. But after I do there will be a nice array of bankers’ boxes in the hall closet, and a couple of shelves for model building supplies, and so on. That’s all for tomorrow.
Codgerville 