Monday 05/10/2021

Went for a walk starting early-ish in order to be back in plenty of time for the monthly Residents Association meeting. Thus I had time for coffee and a pastry at our own dining room coffee service. While I was munching, Ian sat down to ask a favor.

Ian has been running the A/V committee for several years. I’ve been a member since I moved in. We do the mics and lights for presentations in the auditorium and on the 11th floor. I’m sure I’ve written about my adventures with A/V equipment before but can’t be bothered to search for posts.

Anyway, Ian’s wife has had a mild stroke and is rehabbing, and he feels a bit stressed. He wondered if I’d take over the committee. I said OK, as long as he’d be available for consultations. Of course he would.

At the RA meeting, somebody asked Rhonda when we would get back the use of the Auditorium. She said the staff were using the Auditorium for several things like Covid testing, and it would likely be months. Well. That takes a lot of pressure off the AV committee, since there won’t be any events to support for months.

---

After lunch I got busy cleaning up the balcony. There was a mess of stuff, mainly flower pots, that I’d pushed to the back corner and left for someday. Several of the pots had soil and dead plants in them and all were dirty. On the end of my walk I’d dropped into Whole Foods and bought a roll of large bio-bags. Now I emptied the flower pots into bio bags.

One pot had a fuschia I bought last summer at a nursery in Half Moon Bay. It had never thrived, and most of its branches now were dead or halfway. But it was putting up a little cluster of new shoots about two inches long around the base. So I dug it out, cut off all the dead wood, and put the core with the little shoots and a reduced root ball into a smaller pot. I put it back against the wall, so it will get less direct sunlight. It’ll be fun to see if it recovers.

I carried the old pots inside to the bathroom one at a time and washed them out in the shower. In the course of that, the shower hose got away for a minute and soaked the bathmat, so I had to hang that out on the balcony rail to dry. Anyway, job done. I swept up all the loose dirt and bagged all the debris. Tomorrow I have to carry the bio bags down to the composting containers in the basement and rearrange things on the balcony neatly.

---

On Wednesday Tara Vanderveer will address us as a visiting speaker. I’ve been tagged to introduce her. So I sat down to write my introduction speech. That took an hour. Reads pretty well. Then I called the guy who’s running the Zoom meeting because I’d heard he would want a rehearsal. (This is David Morrison, or as I think of him, Dave 3, after me and David Golden, and before David Thornton, in alphabetical order. Somebody said there’s yet another David moving in later in the summer.) ANYway, he said he was under pressure just now because his wife Karen had fallen for some kind of scam and they were trying to clean up her ID. So maybe no rehearsal before the actual show.

Sunday 05/09/2021

While watering the plants this morning I told myself it was time and past time to do some garden work on the balcony. Last year I bought a couple of fuscias, they have not thrived, close to dead. I have two lovely pots I bought from an artist on Etsy that I’ve never filled.

So after reading the paper and doing the puzzle I took myself off to Yamagami’s Nursery and just wandered around in the houseplants and shady plants area and bought three things. Dang I don’t even remember the names now. Pink cigar plant is one. Arabian Jasmine. And a little striped-leaf thing for inside. Got them planted, but now realizing what a big mess I have on my balcony with unused pots and stuff. I need lots of bio-bags to compost the extra stuff. Have scheduled that for later in the week.

I also set up the hummer feeders again. They’ve been down for most of last year because there was one little brute who took ownership and wouldn’t let any others in. Hopefully he has died or moved away and we can go back to having 5-6 hummers at a time.

Watched Austin City Limits and it was Alan Toussaint. In the closing interview he mentioned Professor Longhair and I thought, dang it has been a while since I heard any Prof. Longhair, so I went to the YouTubes. Here’s “Mess Around”. Nice close to the evening.

Saturday 05/08/2021

First thing in the morning I went for a longish (3.5mi) walk, ending as appropriate for Saturday, at the local farmers market for a chocolate hazelnut swirl.

At 10:30 I had a date with Grace to work on her issue of Apple wanting her to pay for more storage space on iCloud. Her iPhone has about 900 pictures on it, which date back to her first iPhone in 2014, and which fill up the 5GB storage you get free with iCloud.

This is a sweet racket that Apple is running. iCloud is a genuinely useful service. Any picture you take (plus various other things you might store on the phone, like passwords) is instantly and silently backed up to Apple’s servers, and is immediately available on your iPad, MacBook, whatever (and lots of people around here have both an iPhone and an iPad, or a MacBook, or an iMac too). It even works on a Windows PC if you install iCloud for Windows. Or on the web from anywhere, at iCloud.com.

So wherever you go, there is your stuff. And it’s free as long as you keep it down below 4.5GB. But when you get close to the 5GB free limit, you start getting emails and notifications. They make it attractive to level up to the 50GB limit, a mere $12/year. Most people see that as a small price to pay, to avoid the alternative. The alternative? Start deleting pictures and videos until you are below 4.5GB. Who the heck wants that tedious job? A buck a month to avoid having to tidy up and organize my last 5 years’ pictures? Here, Apple, take my money, please! Like I said, a sweet racket. (*)

Grace feels like she doesn’t take many pics any more and she spleens against paying Apple. So I (having done my research) got her to sign in to iCloud.com on her PC and we worked out how she can walk through her pics from oldest toward newest, and click the little garbage can to delete ones she doesn’t need. I thought about trying to show her how to control-click to select multiple pics, but we were already straining her tech abilities. So I left her to delete pics one by one. I assured her that if she could delete just 50, she’d probably stop getting dunning emails. Hope I was right.

After lunch I went to Stanford for a baseball game. They only just now began allowing a limited number of fans into Sunken Diamond and I was looking forward to this.

I was disappointed. The Stanford opening pitcher was immediately in trouble. Arizona batted mostly around. The first inning ended after 50 minutes with Arizona up 3-0. Meanwhile, the sun was full on the seat I’d been assigned, and I was thirsty and the concessions were not open (damn you, Covid). I stood up in the shade through 2 innings and then called it a day.

I decided to get the car washed, and did. When I got back to CH I tuned into the game on the stream. It was then two hours into the game, they were in the fourth inning, and the score was 13-2 Arizona. Soooo glad I didn’t stay at the park.

---

(*) You might ask, can’t you just shut off the backup feature, not backup new pictures but keep the old ones in the cloud? Ha ha ha, No. This is where it becomes clearly a racket. If you go into settings and try to turn off the Photos component of iCloud? It asks you, are you sure you want to delete all your pictures? And if you insist, it will delete all your pictures. They disappear from your phone, your iPad, your Macbook…

Surely that isn’t necessary, why would they do that? Because, fuck you is why.

OK, you say, I will download my pictures to somewhere safe, a thumb drive or external drive. Yes? Maybe. On your Mac (laptop or iMac), open the Photos app. Select all photos. Choose File> Export. Select a folder on some drive. Wait patiently while Photos copies the images from the secret place it keeps them, to your destination folder or drive. Now you can go to iCloud settings and turn off Photos backup, accept that it will delete all the pics, fine. Success, yes?

Well, somewhat. Except now those pictures are no longer on any device except the one where you exported them. Not on the iPhone or iPad. They are no longer in the Apple ecosystem. You have to manage your pictures using some other software than Photos (Adobe Lightroom? ACDSee?). And you can develop a way to share them using an independent service like SmugMug or Google Images. And from now on, whenever you take pictures with the iPhone or iPad, if you want to back them up or share them, you have to remember to manually transfer them to your main picture device. And the ones you want to share you have to manually transfer to your sharing site. No friendly iCloud to instantly and silently back them up and share them.

Apple whispers, is it not worth $12/year to avoid all that?

Wednesday 05/07/2021

As planned I and Patty left at 8am and drove to Mountain View to pick up Jean Pawek. From there we drove up and over Mt. Hamilton past Lick Observatory. The Observatory, which we all remember touring at various times over the last 30 years, was of course closed to the public.

The car’s GPS directed us up Quimby road which is extremely steep. I was sure this was not the route I took the two times I rode my bike up to the Observatory. Eventually Quimby intersected the correct road, Mt. Hamilton road, which was the route I remembered. I remembered it particularly because it is not a difficult bike ride, because it was originally made for the mule trains that carried construction materials for the Observatory in the 1880s. Mules can’t handle steep grades, so the road is quite comfortable for bike riders too.

There was a fast-moving fire last summer that drove through this area. It destroyed one residential building but did not damage the several telescope domes, nor caused any harm to people. Blackened oak skeletons were all around.

From the top of the mountain we continued East and North another 40 miles to Livermore. This is very sparsely settled country, a ranch maybe every 3 or 4 miles. There were signs of the fire all along the first half of the route.

Downtown Livermore was crowded; we had a hard time finding a parking space and all the restaurants along the main street were doing well. We had Thai food for lunch. Then drove by freeways on to Mountain View to drop Jean and back to CH on El Camino. 147 miles, 55mpg (go Prius!), seven hours.

Thursday 05/06/2021

Not much, pretty ordinary day. Aerobics. Futz around the apartment. After lunch I went to FOPAL where there really wasn’t much to do. There is some kind of a hitch in sorting, so not many computer books to manage. But when I went to do some sorting, there weren’t any books to sort, either. Something’s off, but there was nobody around to ask.

At dinner there were three new faces among the servers and hosts, so they are indeed expediting the hiring process. Two of these who took orders at our table had clearly had restaurant experience.

Wednesday 05/05/2021

First thing today was to go downstairs at 8:30 to board a bus. The first Channing House Event Committee expedition since pre-Covid, a bus trip to the deYoung museum in the City. There are two exhibits going on there. One, Frida Kalo, is sold out. I’d rather have seen that but too bad. The other, PIcasso/Calder, was designed by the respective grandsons of Picasso and Calder.

The artists were contemporaries, and important and influential about the same time, but in fact they only met three times in their lives and as far as I can tell, didn’t pay much attention to each other’s work. But somebody (the grandsons?) thought it made sense to have an exhibit of some stuff by Picasso and some stuff by Calder. It was arranged so that works done in the same year were next to each other, but still, I didn’t see any relationship. I was not blown away by either, although generally I get more from a Calder mobile than a Picasso abstract. So I finished walking through in less than an hour and then I had two hours to kill until the bus departed.

I spent some time sitting in the sun (the fog was in, and despite the fact that I’ve lived around SF for going on fifty years, I didn’t think to wear a jacket to the City in the summer) and reading. Had a snack at the museum cafe, and then it was time to go.

Back at CH at 1:45, just 15 minutes before the Resident Association Executive Committee met. Nothing too important was discussed.

After that I finished getting a decent opaque coat of paint on the Golf model. Just in time; I had been working in the bathroom and I needed to move the spray stuff out to the balcony before Wanda cleans tomorrow. Now the Golf sits at least a day for the paint to harden. Then I use masking tape and set up to paint the black areas on it. There is black like eye-shadow around all the windows and a black stripe down the side and it is going to be fussy as hell getting it all on neatly.

Tuesday 05/04/2021

“May the Fourth be with you,” said a couple of people. Relieved of the responsibility of trying to make the dining room hosting effort work, I felt very loose all day. Did the aerobics, then put more coats of color on the model. (Decided I had thinned the paint too much, which was why the color wasn’t as strong as I expected. Added more paint and it went better.)

Had lunch in the dining room. Did not care for the daily menu, so opted for a dish off the “every day” menu: avocado toast. That consists of a slice of toast on a plate. On top of the toast is a sprinkle of greens and a fried egg. On that is about a third of a ripe avocado, sliced pretty and fanned out artistically. Later I found I could have asked for bacon, and a couple of slices would have been added under the egg. Nice lunch anyway.

Spent two hours at FOPAL. Because tomorrow, normally laundry day, is full of activities on my calendar, I ran my laundry this afternoon. Fortunately there was a suitable hole on the community schedule board for the 6th floor laundry. Bought a few groceries on the way back from FOPAL, and then decided to do my own supper, a lovely sandwich of thin-sliced salami, cheese and mayo, and a beer. (Beer not offered in the dining room, although now I think of it, I could bring my own. People bring their own bottles of wine all the time.)

Monday 05/03/2021

Today turned out to the be the end of the volunteer hosting program. At 7:30 I went down and with Marcia, performed hosting while also training Nancy. Kim the HR came by at the start of breakfast and agreed to talk to us at 10am.

We presented that we weren’t getting the number of volunteer sign-ups we needed, and that she and I were going to have to alternate working the meals for a week to get everyone trained. I urged that all they needed was about three more Alfonso’s. Alfonso is a 20yo college student that was hired to do the hosting job on weekends, and we found him a pleasure to work with. Kim agreed, and said she’d talk to Rhonda and other staff.

An hour later she emailed to say that yes, the volunteer program should end, and staff would take over Tuesday morning. I composed an email to everyone who had signed up thanking them. Marcia worked lunch, I went back to work the dinner shift along with our last volunteer, Colin (Colin is our 90+ tennis player). And that’s that for the Host program, which I found to be quite a relief; I was getting quite tired of it.

Also during the day I got in a medium walk and a couple of more coats of color on the Golf. For some reason the paint brand I’m using needs more coats to get a solid color. Or maybe it’s my spray technique. In either case, the new spray box is working very well.

Sunday 05/02/2021

I had to work the Breakfast and Dinner hosting jobs, training the one or two volunteers we have. Volunteers are not flocking to the sign-up sheet, for several reasons. One, in my opinion the feeling is different from last year, when staff shortages were due to a real peril, covid exposure. This staff shortage is due to a voluntary change in the dining services. One person said to me, “what are we paying for?”

Another is that hosting for 90 minutes or so is a real physical challenge for a lot of residents because they just can’t stand on their feet and be walking for that long at a spell.

Tomorrow I will talk this over with Marcia and I think we will ask management to bring back one or two of the staff people we are relieving. And strongly urge them to expedite the hiring process.

In between meals I worked on the Golf model. It is nearing completion. I have begun painting color on it in the revised spray booth.

That’s about it. I did some Sunday stuff, the puzzle, watering the plants, went for a walk.

Saturday 01/05/2021

Today was the start of the new volunteer business, acting as hosts or greeters in the Dining Room, and both Marcia and I worked all three meals, to support and train a few other intrepid volunteers. So that amounts to about 6 hours of standing around at the entrance to the dining room.

In between I finished the spray box. Here it is complete.

The fan pulls the cloth in. I will probably add two pieces of cloth flat on the sides. They don’t have to be sealed tight, just loosely attached flat to the box. When the fan is running it will pull the cloth tight against the open seams you can see.

Later I used the box to spray a first coat of color on the VW Golf GTI.