Thursday 08/19/2021
Ordinarily I would have tried to do the 8:30-9am aerobics, but I had that 9:30 appointment for dental hygiene, you know, rescheduled from Tuesday because I forgot the pre-meds? Which would uncomfortably tight, given the dentist office is a 10 minute walk away. But no problem because the instructor emailed last night that he couldn’t be there this morning. So an easy start to the day.
Dental hygiene went nominally; no new issues with my teeth. I did some good work on STIP if I do say so myself; this project just calls on my two creative talents, writing and programming, so is always fun.
At 1:30 I joined Bert in the auditorium where we went over in detail all the stuff that we wanted gotten rid of so the auditorium could be used for performances again. At the start of the pandemic, and all through it, as staff kept re-purposing spaces, turning rooms into COVID wards and into impromptu office space so staff could be isolated and so forth — every time they had something to move out of a space, it seemed they tucked it into the auditorium somewhere. Now, nobody knows where the stuff came from any more. For example a really nice white-board on wheels, or five (5) floor lamps, all different. A foam mattress.
A little after 2, Victoria, head of housekeeping, joined us as scheduled and we went over all the stuff with her. She’s a very cheerful, can-do kind of manager and didn’t see any problems. She will get some “muscle” to help and meet us early next week some time to move things.
At 5 we had a 6th-floor get-together, mostly to welcome our new “camper”, Jan, who has been displaced from the 2nd floor for the on-going improvements. Wine was provided by Oliver, who doesn’t live on the 6th floor but who has been collecting wine for years, and is now down-sizing, and giving his wine collection to other floors to be consumed. I had a few ounces of a wine bottled in 1970, which turned out to be a dessert wine, lighter than a port but still quite sweet. Two other people tried it and didn’t like it, so everyone insisted I should keep it. So I have this bottle I’ll probably never drink in my pantry closet.
Jan, it turns out, was born in the Netherlands, and came to the US on a Fulbright scholarship to the University of Oregon. Where in Spanish class he met his wife, who was on scholarship from Australia. For a decade around the 60s he managed his father-in-law’s men’s clothing store on University in Palo Alto, and then went into real estate until the 90s, in partnership with one of his daughters the last few years.
Codgerville 