Wednesday 09/29/2021

Went for the usual walk. On return had only an hour until my appointment time for a haircut, the first professional one since Day 2.157, 138 days ago, back on May 13. I would have had Leah cut my hair at least twice in that time, but whenever a staff member tested positive, they would shut down the part of the building where the little one-chair salon is, to prevent anybody walking through there to infect the AL and SN residents. But it finally opened up last week and I made an appointment right away. Leah did a nice job, here, let me grab a selfie.

After lunch I went down to FOPAL to deal with those multiple signed books by McCracken. Searching the used book market I found that two of the titles were selling over $30 so those five books (multiple copies of each title) could go to high value. The rest are selling around $7-8 dollars, which ordinarily I would price at $3-4 and put on the shelf, however I don’t frankly think any of our customers would want them. I mean, A Guide to Programming in FORTRAN IV, or the COBOL one, etc., are not hot movers. So I sent them to the bargain room. Maybe a hasty decision, and Frank the Bargain Room guy may send them back.

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OK to relieve the doom and gloom from yesterday’s essay, I thought I would put in a piece of writing by another member off the writers group, Susan. I thought this was just a very nice piece of writing and should be comforting. Remember, the topic was “What remains to be done.”

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The last jar of 2020 Pesto is almost empty, and summer is officially over.
What remains to be done is to make this year’s batch.
The basil plant on the balcony droops thick with big, juicy leaves. I’ve a new bottle of extra virgin olive oil, and there’s a head of fat garlic cloves on the counter. Checking the refrigerator, I see that I need more grated Parmesan and pine nuts and butter. This a good excuse for a walk to Whole Foods, which, for heaven’s sake, has no pine nuts. Nor does the Willows Market, when I drive by later. Ye gods! Is there a glitch in the pine nut supply chain? With trepidation I arrive at the Midtown Safeway. No pine nuts on the shelves under the produce. My heart is in my throat. But never fear … hanging on a rack in the baking aisle is a plethora of little bags of pine nuts. My mouth begins to water in anticipation.
All that remains to be done this afternoon is to exhume the well-washed half-pint jars from last year’s pesto and pull the blender from under the sink. I will set out all the ingredients—the oil, the peeled garlic cloves, the washed basil leaves, the Parmesan and pine nuts and butter and salt—in the proper amounts.
Next I will measure the oil into the blender and toss in the garlic. Setting the blender to “grind” (the lowest setting), I will watch the garlic swirl in the golden oil, gradually dicing and blending. At the proper moment I will begin adding the other ingredients, a handful or spoonful at a time, through the hole in the blender’s lid. I challenge myself to divide up the butter and basil leaves and cheese and nuts and small handfuls of salt so that they come out even as the mixture thickens and turns a gorgeous basil green. Occasionally I stop the blender to run a soft rubber scraper down the blender’s sides, making sure that everything is perfectly combined.
At last, the roar of the blender falls silent, and it’s time to pour and scrape the pesto into two of the little jars. If I’m very careful, none will spill and I can screw on the lids without making a mess. Of course a small spill will be the occasion for swiping a fingerful of pesto straight into my mouth. In either case, I’m the winner, and it’s time to repeat the process with the next collection of ingredients and jars. How many jars will I fill? Not as many as I used to, when I was a daily cook and had cooking friends to supply. But enough.
Yum!!

Tuesday 09/28/2021

Did the aerobics class. Asked leader A.J. about his “strength with weights” class. This because the cardiologist urged me to start working with weights to slow loss of muscle mass. Unfortunately A.J.’s class comes on Tuesday/Thursday and just doesn’t fit my regular schedule; anyway it didn’t sound like it would be enough of a challenge. I shall have to try to use the machines in the gym. Oh sigh.

The writers group met; the cue for the week was “What remains to be done.” Last night in about an hour I wrote up something that had been growing in my head for a while. I will put it at the end. Well received as usual, and several other people immediately made the connection to Yeat’s poem “The Second Coming”. We agreed that the lines,

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   
Are full of passionate intensity.

was the best description of Facebook that could be written. Or Fox News.

Went down to FOPAL and processed 6 boxes of computer books. The major find there was a stack, nearly half a box, of books by Daniel McCracken. He was a prolific and respected writer of books on how to program, from the 1960s into the 1990s. What’s unusual about these is that they are mint and are all signed by the author. So like he had a stack of new books to sign for some reason, and did, but they stayed together and got dumped on us 25 years later.

It’s a problem because they ought to be worth something but what, and to who?

OK here’s my cheerful little essay.

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What remains to be done is…

Nothing. And Everything.

For the Human species, an accelerating series of catastrophes will, I confidently expect, reduce global population from its present 7.8 billion by at least a third, possibly by half, at the end of this century. Sea levels will rise, deserts will expand, growing seasons will become shorter in the north temperate zones. All of these will contribute to natural disasters, and to huge movements of displaced, distressed people, and these will legitimize ever more authoritarian governments as nations “respond to the present crisis”, and the next crisis, and the crisis after that.

At least three of the Four Horsemen, Famine, Disease and War, will ride freely and in coordination. The drying, or flooding, or — in Northern Europe after the imminent collapse of the North Atlantic Circulation — the freezing of farmlands, will lead to famine; famine inspires desperate attempts to seek new food sources, causing people to pioneer for arable land in jungles and other new locations, which in turn brings pandemics of new zoonotic diseases. Famine and disease lead to mass movements of displaced, resentful people, which in turn lead to border skirmishes, armed intrusions, and all-out war. Eventually there will be jihads, righteous crusades, against the developed nations that stubbornly continue to burn fossil fuels and make the climate worse.

I don’t think the Human species will be wiped out, not even if some geriatric Caesar, in the last throes of nationalistic, racist rage, uses nuclear weapons. I do think that economies, borders and national governments will be reshaped in completely unpredictable ways, so that the geopolitical map of 2099 will be vastly different from today.

None of this will be pleasant. None of it will be pretty, or elegant; most of it will be carried out to an accompaniment of willfully-ignorant demagoguery, self-righteous bombast, and self-serving denial. Inconceivably vast fortunes will vanish, dry up and evaporate, leaving millions who thought they were secure, in poverty. New, smaller fortunes will be grubbed together by opportunists.

And people will die; there will be deaths, in percentages of populations, not seen since the First World War or the Black Death, but because the total is so much higher, the absolute numbers of deaths probably won’t be matched in history again — because the total population of a climate-changed Earth will never be as large as it is now.

People born in the current decade will grow up in this chaotic world, and the best of them will try to manage it, to maintain, sustain, hold things together until the species completes a vast “downsizing”. The luckiest of them might live to see a smaller, stabler world system beginning to emerge in 2100. They have Everything to do. Bon chance, kids.

We have — well, no, I won’t presume to speak for anyone else, so — I have Nothing to do. The ways are greased, the fuse is lit, the avalanche has begun to move; I can imagine nothing that I, personally, could do to alter the course of the Juggernaut that has begun to roll. Oh, sure, I’ll vote for, and contribute to, the right, or rather, left, candidates. I’ll keep my carbon footprint as small as I can, shrinking my grain of the global sandstorm. But I expect these things to have about as much effect as they have had in the past.

So I’ve nothing to do except pass the days as each comes.

Monday, 09/27/2021

First thing, I assembled a small spreadsheet with my morning and evening blood pressures for the last two weeks. Then at 9 I headed out by car to PAMF. By car because, the last couple of times I went there, the admitting nurse took my BP and got a nice low reading, 120 or 118. This is 20 points lower than my average, and I attributed the low number to the fact that I had walked there both times, and she took my BP while I was still nice and warm from exercise.

This time she got 135 so, hypothesis confirmed. Blood pressure was the main topic of my talk with the cardiologist. We agreed we didn’t like mine. She said, although the small mass on my adrenal did not seem to be having any measurable hormonal effect, it might still be having a “sub-clinical” effect, so she wants to try something new.

She prescribed a combination pill containing HCTZ, a mild diuretic, combined with Spironolactone, a drug specific to high BP caused by excess aldosterone, the primary output of the adrenal gland. In the event that my adrenal gland is overproducing, this should have an effect on BP. It takes a while to build up, and it can have side effects, so I’m to get a metabolic panel in ten days.

We agreed that Dr. Yalamanchi, the endocrinologist, was great; see Day 2.258 where I called her “the cutest person”; but Dr. DiBiase had more substantial reasons for liking her, praised her highly, said her notes on the patients she sent to her were “so helpful”, and called her a “star”.

We also agreed that since it is a year since I get my cardiac stent, I can stop taking the Plavix. Yay!

Then I bopped back to CH and set up to work with Connie in the auditorium. She is scheduled to do a poetry reading (as part of the Sunday at Home series) on 10/17 and wants to have a zoom simulcast. I had worked out how to do that, which I showed her.

After all the waffling and frustration about how to get an image of the stage into the computer and shared with Zoom, I had finally realized that Zoom will do it for me. I set a Macbook Air on the seat of a chair, and set the chair on the front edge of the stage, with the computer facing the performer, which in this case is just Connie standing by a lectern. The camera is wide enough that it gets the performer from below the knees up, and with room for them to move left and right a few feet if they want.

Start a Zoom meeting on the laptop. Set it so that everyone who joins is muted; and set the view to show the speaker. Anyone who joins the meeting sees the performer in the middle and hears whatever sound is picked up by the laptop’s mic. The volume was adequate. The sound had a bit of echo because the computer could hear the performer’s voice directly, as well as picking up the amplified sound out of the ceiling. But it was adequate.

This will do for the time being. It would be preferable to supply a feed directly from the audio console to the computer, that would eliminate the echo. But I don’t know any way to do that, not least because as noted on day 2.290, we can’t figure out how to get line output from the console. If we could, then we could try to figure out how to get it into the laptop doing Zoom.

Sunday 09/26/2021

After the usual Sunday start, I set out for a walk, thinking in terms of walking to California Avenue. However, a mile out, I had a feeling I should check my calendar. Yup, this is the day I am scheduled to visit the Anderson Collection at Stanford. So I turned around and headed back, and then shortly out by car.

I parked on The Oval and first walked across the campus to where I could get an OJ and pastry. There were lots of people, mostly families, walking around enjoying grass and sunshine — and no masks! Well, almost none. Surprising.

Then back past the car to the museum. It took me the barbarian less than an hour to walk all the works.

I was last at the Anderson on Day 1.168, May 2019. Much of the work has changed since then. Probably the collection has more things than can be hung at once. I wasn’t taken with what’s there now. There were several of the kind of thing that gives contemporary art a bad name:

Back here to attend a memorial on the 11th floor at 2pm. There isn’t usually an on-site memorial when somebody dies here. Depends on the family, I suppose. In this case the lady’s husband organized the event. They had lived here together for several years (and her mother was a former resident for 20 years before they moved in). As usual you learn a lot about a person from people reminiscing about them.

Saturday 09/25/2021

During the morning I prepped to show Connie options for her reading, and then she couldn’t make it. Rescheduled for Monday; and then when I realized I had a doctor appointment, rescheduled for later on Monday.

I also worked on STIP and concluded that it wasn’t working. I had started a major renovation of what I’d done already, and toward the end of that work, I ran into a brick wall, something that just wasn’t going to work. One problem too many. I didn’t trash everything but I shut down, made the Github repository private and deleted the Leanpub book project. Done.

At 3:45 I left for a memorial for Deb Gumbly. Deb was an even more rabid SWBB fan than we were, but much more. Marian and I were never close to her, I think partly because initially, back in the 90s, we weren’t at home with the gay crowd. Not that we had anything against them, but didn’t quite know how to relate. Anyway, Deb was always friendly with us, but we didn’t know her beyond saying “hi” at basketball games. Turns out, today, listening to all the tributes from her friends, we missed out on that.

Friday 09/24/2021

Went for the morning walk, although I took the shorter route, losing a half mile. No reason, just felt like indulging myself on a Friday.

Caught up with an ongoing project, the “online ERF”. Someday I will describe it. When it’s finished, if ever.

In the afternoon I met with Bert in the Auditorium and we worked for an hour trying to get audio out of the system into a computer or a camera. Without success. At length we proved to our satisfaction that although the audio system has phone jacks labeled, “CTL ROOM L/R”, “PHONES”, “AUX MON1” and “AUX MON2”, none, zero of these jacks has any audio coming out of them. You might think at least one of these would carry the mixed audio that is going to the house speakers, but nunh-unh.

Repeated emails between me and Stew about Connie’s upcoming poetry reading. Stew is the event coordinator for this, and he wants some kind of Zoom simulcast because he thinks there will be more than 50 people, the current Covid-limit on auditorium seating, who want to attend in some fashion.

Connie is one of my favorite people and I want to help make her reading a success, but this whole simulcast thing while obvious in principle, is just very difficult.

The least of the reasons is because we can’t figure out how to get stinkin’ audio out of the system into a computer — which means that the audio track of a Zoom session will not be same as what’s coming out of her lapel mic. It will be whatever the mic in the laptop that is hosting the Zoom session, can pick up, there in the auditorium. Which means a blend of the speaker’s voice and the sound coming over the house speakers. If that sounds like a great recipe for echo, if not for squealing feedback, hey, welcome to A/V Hell.

Thursday 09/23/2021

Joined the aerobics class — ha. I was the aerobics class, none of my usual classmates showed up. After which I tidied the apartment and filled the hummer feeders

I hadn’t had the usual email from Gretta saying which venue the various CHM volunteers should go to for the usual Thursday stint, and was debating whether to go at all. But decided to go to Shustek and see. Then as I was walking to the garage at 9:30 I received a group text saying which place: same as last week, so, Shustek.

Spent the day there photographing things. Cataloging has three big parts. One, creating the catalog record, itself a multi-step process involving a complicated form. Two, photographing. Three, transport from the catalog workspace at Shustek, to the Yosemite warehouse and storing.

The catalog crews had gotten well ahead, so today I and Sherman formed a photo assembly line and got probably 50 items done. The photos have to be taken a certain way and then the image files renamed to have the object’s catalog number in them. For lunch we all went to a new sandwich shop, Crusts, where the sandwiches all cost the same, $11, and all are made with sourdough bread made on the premises.

That’s all the news. For tomorrow I have made myself a short but beefy to-do list.

Wednesday 09/22/2021

Went for The Walk. Pretty much all the hip/back pane is gone. That’s nice.

Did some housekeeping. I have a wastebasket for non-recyclable stuff, and a flat basket for newspaper, a taller basket for bottles and cans, and then various bit like receipts and shipping cartons and six-pack carriers pile up. How can one person, living alone, no cooking, taking almost all meals out of the room, produce so much crapola? Got that all gone, then sorted the laundry and started it. And refreshed the hummingbird feeders. And mixed up breakfast shakes for the next week.

Lunch with Kent and Jean and Bob. This was at Kent’s invite from earlier in the week, I don’t even know what he was celebrating. But he wanted to reminisce about the Sacramento Jazz Festival, which apparently he was attending after he graduated from Stanford in 1960. I graduated from high school in 1960, but I didn’t bring that up.

Anyway, finished up the laundry and then went and spent an hour in the auditorium trying to understand/debug some of the systems. Had a minor success in figuring out why part of the console was getting no power. Well, didn’t actually figure it out, just turned switches at random and the power came back.

I have a sock missing. Hopefully it will turn up stuck by static cling inside one of my shirts. I know I checked the inside of washer and dryer both.

Tuesday 09/21/2021

For the first time in weeks, the Tuesday/Thursday 8:30am aerobics is back on the 11th floor. And for the first time in a couple of weeks, I didn’t have any significant back pain. So I went up for the aerobics.

I spent an hour researching blog sites. This made me very disappointed. There are several sites that purport to let you build a “free blog” (wix, medium, wordpress where this is hosted). But they put so much crap on the free page, it is really hard to see how to make a simple, technical blog, with a few diagrams but a lot of text and code. OK, I managed to tame wordpress to make this blog look old-fashioned enough to suit me. But the wordpress editor is just abominable. It works well enough for what I do here, but for serious editing… yechhh. And the others weren’t any better.

At 12 I took a sandwich from the grab-n-go service and went to FOPAL. Here I met with a total of twelve boxes of books for the computer section. It took four hours to process them all.

Monday 09/20/2021

After my walk I should have gone to the meeting of the event planning committee at 10. It was in my calendar and I was aware of it, but the time just went flitting by and I didn’t go. Another memory lapse.

Lennie intercepted me at lunch. She had been at the meeting and knew there were questions about A/V support issues that I could have answered. Mostly about the question of showing movies in the auditorium. We were joined at the table by John who was also interested in that along with his wife Francis. I was explaining about what could be done, and finally said, let’s go in the auditorium and experiment.

So Lennie went to get DVD player and John went to get a DVD, and I went to get a cable, and we met in the auditorium and had a very productive hour trying out different things. It turns out that the Blu-Ray player in the equipment rack, is also internet connected and has apps for Netflix and Amazon Prime. So I went back to my room and wrote up a brief account for the various event managers, and an email to the A/V committee.

About 4 I got an email from the tech squad, could I take a call from Lynn. She had a weird problem with Safari, where when she went to some websites, the page would be replaced with a big plain block of text, losing all its buttons and interactive features.

I had not seen anything like that. I went up to her apartment and she showed me. Yup, it did that. Firefox did not. I figured it had to be some kind of accessibility aid. So I searched the Safari preferences and there was something called “Reader” which was on. So I turned it off and that was that.

Lynn was very impressed with how fast I figured out the problem. My reputation as a Mac Genius continues to grow ;-p