Sunday 09/19/2021

Watered the plants, fed the birds, did the puzzle. Actually, didn’t finish it; several of the clues were arbitrarily bad (I say) and I didn’t catch on to the puzzle theme until the end.

Walked to California Ave. The market there is booming; it has expanded into two crossing alleys, and was jammed with people enjoying a bright, cool morning. Took a Lyft back to Ace Hardware where I bought a supply of AA batteries and walked the rest of the way.

Didn’t do much else. Well, a couple of hours on STIP where I am basically ripping up and redoing many hours of work.

Saturday 09/18/2021

Did my usual Saturday indulgence, a modest walk ending with picking up a chocolate hazlenut swirl at the farmers market.

I spent a couple of hours in the auditorium getting noplace with trying to set up for — what I have decided to call — a Simulcast. This would be to put the image and sound of an event on the auditorium stage, onto a laptop as a Zoom meeting. For the benefit of people who don’t want to, or can’t, come to the auditorium.

I was asked to set up the 11th floor TV to show the Stanford football game. It was on ESPNU, which the comcast unit there is not authorized for. However if I switch to the Roku box, and go through a whole magical 3-factor authentication dance to activate ESPN access under my personal comcast ID, the Roku can put ESPN on the screen.

I thought, sure 10 minutes is plenty of time for that. So at 4:50 I went up there and — the Roku didn’t work. Obviously not responding to its remote. Pulled the remote batteries; saw that the spring on the minus end of one battery was corroded. Took it down to the workshop on the 5th floor, found some sandpaper, shined up the spring. Back to 11 (and ten minutes is disappearing fast) and it still didn’t work.

Back down to my apartment on 6, look in the drawer for AA batteries — oh no, I meant to get some. I find only 1, of dubious age. Down the hall to Craig’s place and cadge a battery from him. Back to 11. Now the Roku works, yay! After I go through the authentication and activation ritual, it is 4 minutes into the game and Stanford has already scored. Fortunately only one other fan has showed up.

So, tomorrow? Buy AA batteries. Put 2 in the Roku remote.

Friday 09/17/2021

Went for the standard walk. Then diddled around not doing much until lunch. After lunch I met with Pam, who presents movies via zoom. She wasn’t sure her new Macbook Air would support the old Superdrive (USB DVD player) as it doesn’t plug into the USB-C port on the Air. I was pretty sure it would, and brought along a cheap adapter. Yup, it did. So that’s resolved.

She doesn’t want to show movies in the auditorium, though. Too much stress getting everything set up right. So she is looking to recruit someone else to do that, and I’ll train them.

At 4pm it was time for Rhonda’s Covid Q&A meeting. We had one breakthrough case two weeks ago. (Apparently I didn’t write about this.) After contact tracing it turned out that half a dozen people had had “extensive” contact with that person, meaning at least 15 minutes with masks off. At dinner, in fact. So all those people got ten days of quarantine. Two of them were Craig and Diane Allen.

Rhonda was happy to report there have been no further cases. She is going to travel to Colorado to attend a wedding, and she described her decision process, whether to go risking Covid, or not go and offend a “dear friend”. She will go; and on return will work from home for ten days while testing.

Thursday 09/15/2021

Drove to Fremont to work the day in the Shustek center, cataloging. We have a new volunteer, and in the afternoon I taught him to enter catalog data into the Mimsey database.

I received an order from Amazon: an HDMI to USB converter. With it I can put the output of my Nikon DSLR on the screen of the computer. This is a big step toward being able to hold “hybrid” events, live in the auditorium with its limit of 50 people, and simultaneously on Zoom for other people, like those in the Lee center (AL&SN). Will play with that a bit tomorrow.

Wednesday 09/15/2021

Since I did a walk yesterday, what exercise shall I do today? Neighbor Jerry had suggested that to keep back pain from returning, use the two machines in the gym that work one’s core. There’s one for abdominals, which is basically a situp against variable pressure, and one specifically for lower back, which is the opposite: you lean on a pad and force it backward, like leaning back in an office chair.

So I thought I would do that, and did about a dozen reps of each and started feeling it, so stopped. But I will return. Then I thought I’d ride the Cyber Cycle which I’ve done before, but it was inop. There was nobody around to help with it so I went outside and for a moderate walk.

Took care of a few minor chores. After lunch I went out on the balcony and started ripping up and re-doing the STIP project for an hour. The temperature on my balcony was 68, I had to go get a sweater.

For lunch I had a Channing House burger and fries which felt like a big meal, so decided to go out for supper. Driving down Middlefield I noted that Mike’s Cafe was open again for supper, so on impulse I went in there for a beer and a plate of pasta. It was really good. Actually the best part was their dinner rolls, which have a salt glaze, and I could dip them in olive oil. I haven’t dipped bread in oil in a long time.

My neighbor Carolyn who lives in 721, just above me, emailed earlier to say she was going away for ten days. It turns out she has been feeding hummingbirds also. She wanted to warn me that her three feeders would be out of action and I should expect more buzzers. Yeah. At several points today I had six birds on each feeder. The feeders only have 5 holes, but two birds were actually standing side by side on one of the little perches, taking turns at sticking their beaks in the one hole. Potentially I guess I could have ten at a feeder.

Tuesday 09/14/2021

Went for the usual 3-mile walk this morning. Since I didn’t do it yesterday, and since the aerobics class is on zoom only currently. Felt just a bit of sensitivity in the hip/glute/lower back when setting out and thought about cutting it short, but kept going and as I warmed up it was fine. Getting on top of this back pain thing slowly.

Again I didn’t have anything prepared for the writers group. Others did, of good quality as usual. One, Prudence’s, got a lot of chuckles and I am going to include it below just to fatten up this very ordinary post.

From that meeting I went to FOPAL where I completed the triage of my section, then processed two boxes of books. I was amused to find in the donations, a set of programming manuals for X-Windows and Motif. My that takes me back. That was one of the first GUI systems, back in, oh let me run ask Wikipedia, 1987. It was quite significant to me when I was working at Informix about that time.

Had dinner with the Craig and Diane Allen.

OK, here is Pru’s piece on the topic of “when I am sick”. Try to read it in an English accent.

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I do try to make a little sickness go a long, long way. I have to, because there is so little of it.

I last had a cold in 2013.

I last had a fever of over 100 in 1960.

The only interesting thing that my body has ever done is to grow lumps, and my lumps don’t tend to translate into scenes in which people bring you small meals, and wipe your brow.

The first of the lumps was the most interesting. I was thirteen, and can still remember the feeling of importance when I was told what was inside the lump. It was TB! I was somebody, finally. I was a person with TB!

True, it wasn’t the most dramatic form of TB. I wasn’t going to fade away in a garret, with a tenor lamenting my last breath. My TB came from a cow, and it had settled in a salivary gland, not the lungs. Still, it got me a lot of attention in my boarding school—and not just attention, but salad. At that time, my mother was in the thrall of an expensive quack called Dr. Latto, who had already engineered a remission of her own TB—the grown-up sort, in the lungs—by having her sing several times a day (although she was totally tone-deaf) and sunbathe naked lying on an army-surplus silk parachute. For me he prescribed jumping up and down in cold water, rubbing my neck with olive oil, drinking carrot juice and eating nothing but salad and a baked potato twice a day for a year.

It worked—or something worked. When I brought my once tubercular salivary gland to Palo Alto twenty years later, and it freaked out my new doctor, I was able to tell him, “It’s just a harmless lump.”

“We don’t trust any lumps in this country,” said the good doctor. He arranged for it to be removed—and the verdict? Totally harmless.

There was a little more excitement twenty years later, when another lump turned up and I had a return of that old “So this is what it feels like to have a real disease I wonder what dying is like” feeling because it was first misdiagnosed as a sarcoma of a particularly lethal kind.

Ooops.

Sorry, said the PAMF pathologists the next day. Our bad. It’s just another harmless lump for us to cut out.

Maybe that gave PAMF an idea for a business plan: search, and there will be lumps. If you find excuses to give people enough MRIs, might you not find one or two?

So yes! They’ve found lump No. 4—harmless, but out it should come, because, remember? We don’t like lumps.

At least it will earn me one or two of those elusive days in bed.

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Monday 09/13/2021

Today was the Residents Association meeting, which President Carol had moved back to its historic start time of 9am. So no exercise. My only part was to give the Treasurer’s report. The two months since the last meeting have been a wash, financially. We spent just a bit over $100 mostly on a stock of masks for the front desk to give out free. We took in just over $100 in profit from the literary quarterly, Scribble and Sketch.

Several new residents were introduced. In addition the Heritage Circle grants for the year were announced. The Heritage Circle is a trust built from contributions, currently $5 million. Each year residents present grant proposals and the trustees fund what they can. Interesting this year: a grant for bike storage lockers. I don’t ride any more but some do, and they park in the garage. Unfortunately that’s down a steep ramp, and stuff has been stolen from bike bags.

The meeting ended with a demonstration of how you can do online ordering of meals either for delivery or pickup. So for fun I ordered a sandwich to pick up. After picking it up I drove to Fopal and spent three hours doing the first proper post-sale triage of my section in more than a year. This means to look at every book (about 450 on my shelves) and decide what to do with it.

Depending on how long it has been on the shelf, I can either: leave it for next sale; lower its price and leave it; or send it to the bargain room. The book goes to the bargain room if it has already been marked down to $2 or $3, or if it has been in at least two sales and I just don’t like it, for its age or condition.

I got through about 2/3 of the section, and filled four boxes for the bargain room, in three hours, and felt fairly tired. No exercise today? 3 hours standing and bending down and standing up.

Sunday 09/12/2021

Well that was an unpleasant night. Waking up at 3am to realize that I had not gone to the play nor had I made a blog entry. Then tossing for a while thinking about other things. Today I got back on top of stuff a bit.

With my morning coffee I booked a seat at the same play, at the 2pm matinee today. Then, after I had watered the plants and done the big crossword, I executed a decision I had made about 3:45am. I gathered up all the parts of the Chrysler model and scrapped it. I had just f’d up the body so badly that it was give up, or else strip all the paint off it and start over. But I’ve no confidence I could do any better a second time around. I need to learn about acrylic paint and airbrush technique before I do that again. I have several more models in the closet that I could work on, but not right away. For the time being my modeling tools and materials are neatly put away and my desk is clean again.

Another decision was the software/writing project I’ve been working on for a few weeks, redoing the classic Software Tools in Pascal in Python, has several basic flaws. I won’t put the details here but I need to rethink that, maybe scrap it, certainly re-do major portions of what I’ve done.

After lunch I went to the play, Mothers of the Bride, at The Pear. It’s about Hannah, who is planning a perfect wedding with Reed. She’s trying to choose a gown aided by her birth mother, Kristy, who divorced her father years ago and in fact is now on her fourth marriage.

Kristy disdains Beth, Hannah’s stepmother who enter shortly. Beth married Hannah’s father years ago. She’s a very conventional, conservative Catholic, and the sort who tries to put a good face on every disaster. They are joined by Ginny, the birth mother of Reed, and so soon to be Hannah’s mother in law. She’s a free-spirited holdover of the 60s. And then enters Liv, the shockingly young wife of Reed’s father (Ginny and he were never married). Liv is a self-centered internet influencer and thrilled that Emma Watson is following her.

It takes quite a while to work all this out but it finally wraps up to a warm hearted conclusion about the value of marriage and family. Here’s the cast near the end.

It was kind of surprising that having everyone in masks didn’t seem strange or impede the flow of the play. There were a lot of mimosa’s drunk; they would very naturally slip the masks off to sip, and slip them back on.

Last thing, after supper I took the Macbook and the DVD player to the auditorium and tested it. It works just fine; the Macbook mirrors its screen to the projector perfectly and the sound system is fine. Perfectly easy to play a movie that way.

Saturday 09/11/2021

It was national Let’s Get All Serious About 9-11 day. Three thousand killed in one dramatic day with vivid television images. How about 250 times as many, 700 thousand and counting, lost to a virus in 18 months But not in one day and place no decent TV. Oh well.

Anyway, went for a pleasant walk, picked up a pastry at the farmers market, and basically passed the middle of the day in pleasant quiet.

Now, here’s the disturbing part. I had booked a ticket to see a play at the Pear theater, at 8pm. Put it in the google calendar. Printed the e-ticket and put it on the table by the door. Reminded myself of it in the morning. Had seen and deleted two emails from The Pear about “glad you are coming don’t forget your proof of vaccination.”

But from supper time on, I just forgot it entirely. Watched another episode of Firefly on the DVD player. Remembered that I’d taught Joanna how to set up the sound for the big TV on the 11th floor, and resolved to go make sure it was working for her, before her 8pm show. And did that, went up and hung out on 11 until 8 to see that her concert was well started. She had no problems; about a dozen people came to hear Verdi’s Requiem, and I went downstairs and watched the start of the Stanford-USC football game. And not long after half-time (latest-starting PAC-12 game ever), I went to bed.

Having forgotten all about the play, and all about making a blog entry too.

Now, this is not unique. I remember very well indeed how I had booked myself for the Boogie Woogie Festival at SFJAZZ, one summer Sunday in 2019, and forgot all about it until late that day. That still rankles.

Yesterday I wrote about Bill B., whose memory is shot, so he only remembers recent events for half a day. And knows it. And makes wry jokes about it. But it’s not a good life he’s living.

Shit.

Friday 10/09/2021

Went for the standard walk. My back tenderness is improving.

At 10am I met with Mary Ann to see why she couldn’t make her DVD player work with her new TV. I actually couldn’t answer the question. It seems that the DVD player itself is broken somehow. Fortunately she says her son asked her why she even had one, saying he never uses his. So she is going to have her son bring his unused DVD player and plug it in.

At 2pm I met with Joanne on the 11th floor. She wants to show Verdi’s “Requiem Mass” when broadcast by KQED tomorrow evening, on the big TV on 11, to a small audience. But she had to know how to turn it on, and to turn on the sound system. All of which is (IMHO) overly complicated. But I didn’t set the system up. Bert did, and wrote the instruction sheet. So we went through the instructions and she did it a couple of times, so should be good to go tomorrow.

Some months back, I loaned my Apple Superdrive — very small USB powered DVD player — to Bill B. Now I want it back so I can try playing a movie in the auditorium. Bill is a charming and likeable guy but he is also suffering from severe loss of memory. He cheerfully agreed that he probably did borrow the drive from me, but doesn’t remember doing so nor where it might be now. But he was happy to help me search. I found the drive where it should be, plugged in to the back of his iMac. I know it was in its fitted box when I gave it to him. We had a good look around for the box but couldn’t find it. He felt bad about that and I spent some time saying, no problem, and trying to ease his chagrin. Fortunately, as he said to me, “It’ll be gone by supper time.”

When I got back to my room I wanted to test the drive. Looking in my basket of DVDs (which I have not touched since I moved in) I grabbed the boxed set of the complete Firefly series and stuck the first disk in. Gosh, but that was a good show. I think I may just watch that.