Tuesday 03/14/2023

Gym machine round. Then followed up on an open A/V issue (more managing). There has been for some years, a monthly event, the First Monday Book Talk, where a speaker talks about (duh) a book, preferably one they have written. Preferably the speaker is a resident. I gave a book talk back in July 2020 (thank you blog).

The guy who has managed this event, finding the speakers mainly, is George, and George, now 96, decided he can’t do it any more, and at the last book talk (4.095) I read out his request for somebody to take over. Well, the person who was the speaker at that talk, Gigi, decided to take on that job.

Gigi is enthusiastic and I am glad she is going to do this job, but I also want to be sure that she does what George never did, which is to properly reserve the time and venue for her event and fill out our Event Planning Form in good time before the event. So I got hold of her this morning and we arranged to meet at 1pm in the lobby.

Then it was time for the writers meeting. The prompt was “inheritance” and I had written a thing, which I will put some of at the end here. I told them I had some qualms about this after I wrote it, because it felt like over-sharing personal info. Was that TMI? I asked. No, they assured me, your light tone kept it from being cringy.

I spent an hour with Gigi teaching her how to reserve the auditorium and fill out the EPF and distribute it.

In the afternoon I put in a couple of hours finishing up the chrome trim on the sting ray.

OK here’s my bit on inheritance.

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Inheritance

My parents were far from wealthy and I inherited nothing from them — except my genes. As I’ve aged, the shortcomings of that estate have become more apparent. To begin, there is my hair, or rather, my scalp. It is commonly said that a man inherits his hair pattern from his maternal grandfather. That’s certainly true in my case. Behold Mr. Samuel F. Neill.

The genetic bequeathment that has governed much of my life since age 60, I have reason to suspect I got from my father. That is the general poor quality of my vascular tissue. I’ve got really crap arteries. Where most people’s circulatory systems are, metaphorically, polished steel, or at least nice PVC plastic, mine is made metaphorically, of terra cotta and old boots.
This first manifested around age 60, when my primary care doctor, who was also a cardiologist, noted a heart murmur. My aortic valve wasn’t closing properly; it was “regurgitating”, which is how cardiologists talk about what plumbers call “back flow”. We followed it for a couple of years; then had some diagnostic scans.
Most people with this symptom turn out to have either an infection, or a build up of calcium collecting on the valve’s triple leaflets. My leaflets were fine; but they couldn’t close properly because the aortic annulus, the ring of muscle that frames the valve, was stretching wider. Cardiologists give this the fancy Greekism of “aortic ectasia”. I was just ectastic to learn that.
This is when I got to meet Dr. Vinny, Vincent Gaudiani, who is somewhat famous in local medical circles. He’s had his hands on more hearts than practically anybody. I believe he is still practicing now, twenty years after he rebuilt my aortic valve.
I remember very clearly when Dr. Gaudiani visited me, a day post-op. He wanted to talk about my vascular tissue. He explained how he had reconstructed the valve and also replaced the ascending aorta up to the arch with Dacron. Rolling his finger against his thumb he said the tissue he removed was “very poor quality, soft, almost Marfan-like.”
Marfan syndrome is a genetic aberration that affects connective tissue throughout the body. (Do feel free to read the very informative Wikipedia article.) I don’t have any of the external signs of Marfan, like unusually long fingers or toes, but I do have bunions, flat feet, and hammer toes, which can be associated with it.
But the main issue is the crappy arteries, which next manifested twenty years after my conversation with Dr. Vinny, in late 2020, when my descending aorta, the part Dr. Vinny hadn’t replaced, “dissected”, which is to say, split from its lining. Picture the lining of a jacket sleeve that comes unstitched from the shell. I got to meet a new surgeon, Dr. Amelia Watkins, who was delighted at the chance to install a set of wire stents all up the aorta. All fixed up!
A year later the porcine aortic valve Dr. Vinny had installed finally reached its best-by date and had to be replaced. I knew in 2000, when I opted for a tissue valve, it would need replacement some day, and at the time I confidently said, “By the time I need it, they’ll be able to replace it laparoscopically” — and by golly I was right! The new valve was dropped in a procedure so simple, it could have been done out-patient.
How long can this trashy patchwork keep going? My father, who again, I strongly suspect had the same issues, reached age 95, and died of general systemic failure, nothing cardiac. So who knows? I honestly don’t worry about it.

Monday 03/13/2023

Today was the day scheduled for my living room air handler to be repaired. What? This is a grille in the ceiling that distributes warm or cool air. It has a fan that had begun to make a tiny little squeak, like a very small mouse a long way off. Today the facilities guys came to replace the fan motor. It took them a couple of hours from 8:30.

Meanwhile it was time for the Resident Association meeting at 9, this month zoom only on account of covid cases.

I thought I mentioned, but don’t see, that a tech issue is pending. It has been a year since we bought our own zoom account for the A/V team. We’ve used it a lot but rarely has zoom attendance topped 50 people. The renewal notice mentioned that we will pay $800 for the large-meeting extension, allowing more than 100 attendees. So there was a question, should I renew that part of it, or just the $150 regular account? Well, today, the zoom-only RA meeting topped out at 113 participants. So that answers that question. As long as the Covid is around, causing occasional shut-downs, we need the extension.

Following that I went down to FOPAL and did the usual post-sale work: look at every book on the shelf, and any that had gone unsold through 4 sale weekends, either lower the price, or send to the bargain room. That, plus pricing another couple of boxes, took two hours.

Lazed around the apartment for the afternoon. Did a little work on the ‘vette. This is putting chrome surrounds on windows. There are two basic ways. You can paint on “chrome” paint. This is not satisfactory for a couple of reasons. The paint doesn’t really have a chrome shine, and it is just about impossible, for me anyway, to paint a straight narrow line.

So the other method is metal foil. I’ve tried proper metal foil such as is used by artisans embossing foil into book covers and such. It is incredibly thin and very hard to work with. Although I may give it another go. However the third route is Bare Metal, it’s a heavier foil that is easier to work with. Here’s me putting some Bare Metal around the windshield frame.

Sunday 03/12/2023

Ran down to FOPAL to tidy my shelves for the 2nd day of the sale weekend. Drove there through fairly heavy rain as one of a series of showers passed over.

Attended to an A/V issue. Jan, who runs the hearing support group, emailed that he wants their next meeting to be zoom-only, owing to the current Covid outbreak. Ian, who was scheduled to do A/V for that meeting, is not an experienced zoom host. So I had to get hold of Jan, to find out if he has a presenter, and if they will show slides, and such, and talked to Ian about running a zoom meeting. Back and forth. Managing.

Did a little work on the ‘vette, mainly, putting what is supposed to be chrome paint on the frames of just the little triangular vent windows. Not at all happy with the result.

Saturday 03/11/2023

This is the last day of normal time; tomorrow we spring forward. Wait, didn’t we vote…? Yeah we did, California passed a proposition in 2018 by a huge majority to go to permanent Daylight Savings, better known as Mountain Standard Time. Unfortunately actually doing so requires federal legislation. The House never acted.

Last year, the Sunshine Protection Act, sponsored by a bipartisan group of senators that includes eight Democrats and 10 Republicans, would have made daylight savings time permanent year-round across the country. It passed the Senate, but the House didn’t act. So we spring forward once again.

I have for years used the change of clocks to also change other things. When we “fell back” I put my poofy Japanese duvet on my bed. Today I took it off, and remade the bed using my beige blanket and a crocheted throw for color. I also rotated the mattress.

Starting tomorrow I will say a fond farewell to my large supply of turtleneck shirts which I’ve been wearing every day since “fall back”, and start rotating through my equally large supply of short sleeve polos.

Later in the morning I sprayed the sting ray with what I think is its final color coat. Next on the body, I darken the door cracks and apply chrome to the window surrounds, and any other little body trim bits. Then it gets about 3 coats of clear, and when that has hardened a couple of days, it gets polished.

I also spent a couple of hours moving parts of the Damned Novel around. I had about 5 separate files with pieces of fiction and chunks of background and synopsis and stuff. I got it all organized as one file of fiction, and one file of meta-text, synopsis, background etc.

At 1:30 I met with Lou and with Steve, who will be giving a talk in April, and wanted to be sure that his preferred medium, an overhead projector, would work in our auditorium. I resisted the urge to say “the eighties called, they want their overheads back.” It turns out, it works quite well. Set up on a card table below the stage, it nicely fills the center of our big projection screen.

Then it was time to help Chuck H set up to show his monthly opera DVD. This was a 2006 production by the Metropolitan Opera of The Magic Flute. I was in and out, it didn’t keep my interest and I wanted to work on my novel, but the costumes of this looked as fancy and complicated as The Lion King.

Supper time I wasn’t feeling the CH menu, and had a yen for some noodles. Gombei in Menlo Park, where we went several times a year for bowls of udon, has closed permanently. But there’s a Japanese noodle place, YaYoi, just a few blocks away and I went there. Very modern. Seat yourself, order off an iPad, food comes. It was good.

Friday 03/10/2023

Took a walk over to Town & Country to buy a pound of coffee at Peet’s. Then got to work on three projects, two I’d been putting off, and one that just came up.

The one that just came up is, an email from Zoom noting that our pro account we use for resident-sponsored events was coming up for renewal. We got this account a year ago, when we had conflicts with staff-run events. We needed a paid account so that we could have meetings run any length (the free account cuts meetings off at 40 minutes) and we paid a whopping $800 extra to host meetings with more than 100 attendees.

This account has been used heavily by everyone on the A/V team. But as far as I know, we’ve never had more than 50 participants on Zoom. So I put out an email to the A/V team asking if anyone knew a reason to renew that large-meeting option. By evening several had replied saying, dump it.

Second pending issue was to update the event-setup checklist for showing movies. I’m going to help Chuck H show an opera DVD Saturday. I have hopes of getting him well enough trained he can do it on his own. To that end I need a clear checklist. We used the previous checklist last month and I noted several changes to make.

So I edited that and sent him a PDF so he could review it, and I printed a paper copy and put it on a clipboard ready to use tomorrow.

Finally I turned to documenting our stage lighting. We have a black box for controlling the lights on the auditorium stage. It is literally a black metal box with lots of buttons and sliders, and also figuratively in that nobody understood it. Last month it stopped working, or seemed to, and then only four of the eight sliders worked. Bert investigated, and found some info. He tracked down the manual for the box online, and figured out that the non-working sliders were due to a breaker that got thrown during a power outage last month.

I did some more research, I read the manual, figured out the technology, and today made up a three-page document with photographs and a diagram explaining it so the black box is a mystery no more. Here’s the diagram I made. There are eight sliders and these are the lights they each control. I used Open Office Draw.

Thursday 03/09/2023

Did the gym machine round.

Main activity today was that I had signed up to do two docent tours at the Museum. Normally I sign up for one, either the noon or the 2pm. This time I signed up for both.

First tour was just a single family, mom dad and 3 kids, roughly 15,12 and 8. Very nice people. Said they were in a hurry so I edited myself to cut the tour down, and managed to finish under 40 minutes. They’ll never know all the good stuff I left out.

For the 2pm tour there were about 15 people, and they were very appreciative. One guy accosted me as I was leaving the building, and complimented the tour, asking if it had ever been video’d, it ought to be recorded. My goodness. What would be the point?

In Covid news, our little outbreak keeps breaking out. One of my 6th floor neighbors has it, I know because I walk past her place and yesterday it sprouted a red dot on the nametag. Then today came an email from another sixth floor person, just the subject “Oh no I have a red dot”.

Remember when I had a red dot? I forget when it was … oh yes, June 21, day 2.177. I had one day of fever but never tested positive for Covid.

Wednesday 03/08/2023

Did the laundry. Sprayed the first coat of blue on the Corvette body. That was about it.

Well, I studied up on the stage light system in our auditorium. I found out several things about it that I had not known.

In the evening I attended a lecture, via Zoom because I want to avoid the Covid Cooties when possible. Except I had to go down to the auditorium early anyway, because David M. called for help. He was getting audio feedback, which is a frequent problem, and couldn’t find it. Soon after I got there he found the problem by himself. So back to my room.

The lecture was about Dr. Russel Van Arsdale Lee, the founder of the Palo Alto Medical Foundation (PAMF) and of Channing House. He founded PAMF in 1930, and started promoting the idea of Channing House after retiring in 1960. Several current residents either worked under him as doctors, or alongside his sons who were also doctors, including Larry Basso. A couple of other residents were treated by him or his sons, or worked at PAMF in other capacities during his tenure. So there were lots of anecdotes. Lee was apparently a visionary but also a strong-willed character with some notable quirks.

Oddly enough, there’s no wikipedia page about him. Here’s a page about him:

https://www.paloaltohistory.org/russel-va-lee.php

Tuesday 03/07/2023

Did the gym round in the morning. Then tackled what had become quite a list of things I’d been putting off doing. Most of them got crossed off by the end of the day.

The writers meeting at 10:45-12 was entertaining. The prompt was, “precious things”. I didn’t write anything this time, but there were nice short essays on a favorite fringed-leather skirt, a necklace bought in a market int Yazd, Iran, and a very large teddy bear — the latter with photos of the bear doing his daily activities. Cute.

One of the put-off things was to read a document that Scott had passed along, about the using a debit card supplied as part of the IBM pension/health benefit. I had a blurry memory of getting that, except that it was mixed in my mind with the very similar California State debit card that I wrote about a few weeks ago (Day 4.071).

I took a casual look through the file folders in my desk, then wrote to Scott saying, I didn’t get one of these IBM debit cards. He wrote back to say, you did and you wrote about it. No I didn’t. Yes you did, he said, and pointed to Day 4.03. Oh! Look, a lengthy discussion about calling IBM pension support and getting info on this debit card. Well, shit. I went back to my desk and quickly turned up the exact IBM debit card, attached to a sheet with my notes on how to use it. (It can be used to pay for prescription drugs and dental care, mostly.)

Until I was looking at the blog post, I’d have sworn there was no such card. This doesn’t say good things about my brain.

Monday 03/06/2023

Two big events today, one to attend, one to run.

First up at 9am was a meeting chaired by Rhonda to introduce a new option for in-house medical care.

History: Until 2018, PAMF doctors held regular weekly office hours at Channing House. This was a result of the founding of CH by Dr. Russell Lee, one of the founders of PAMF. Around 2018 PAMF was bought up by Sutter Health and that relationship ended. Rhonda said that negotiations went on with Sutter Health for some time but Sutter was recalcitrant, insisting on a very sizeable regular payment for very limited coverage. In any event, the weekly office hours by PAMF doctors only benefited residents who used PAMF. That’s most of them, but there are some with Kaiser coverage, and others.

Recently a total of five PAMF doctors have announced retirement, affecting nearly 100 IL residents. So lots of people looking for new doctors anyway, and Sutter Health being typically slow and incommunicative about assigning new doctors. It seems there is also a doctor shortage generally. Problems problems.

So today CH has a new medical partner, Pine Park Health. This is a company that specializes in providing in-home medical care for residents of senior facilities. Their model is, they become your new primary care physician. Your insurance doesn’t change. Like any PCP, they bill your insurer for whatever they do, they have access to all your records, and they can make referrals.You keep all your existing specialists, cardiologists, surgeons, whatever. But you call them whenever you need something, or attend an in-house clinic day. They provide a minimum of 1 day a week of in-house clinic, 2 days a week or more depending on how many people sign up with them. They also provide phone consults, 7 days, 9-5; and do video visits if needed.

The in-house care is actually not by an MD but a Nurse Practitioner. The NP’s are supervised by an MD, one specific MD, Dr. Denise Yun, who was there at the meeting today to answer questions. Since she is the one-and-only MD they have for the Bay Area, how does she do it? She asserted — and I later verified with my neighbor Dr. Margaret — that a typical PCP has over 2,000 people on their “slate”. Most people see their PCP once or twice a year. (That’s still a lot of people. 2000/300 == 7 annual checkups a day, roughly. Do doctors do that many checkups, over and above whatever illnesses people come in with? No surprise it is hard to get an appointment.) Anyway, Dr Yun asserted that as the Pine Park Bay Area MD she has fewer, more like 1,800, people on her “slate”, and doesn’t see them directly except as the NP’s call her in.

So that’s the solution that CH is able to offer, for in-house medical care. If anyone wants to switch, they are making it very easy, and I’m sure the simplicity (no change of insurance) and convenience (in-house treatment) are attractive for the approximately 100 being jerked around by PAMF right now. My PCP is nowhere near retirement and I like her, so I don’t plan to change. I might at some future point if it got difficult to go to her office.

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That took until 10:30, which left just 30 minutes to set up for Gigi’s Book Talk. I have to say, that Gerald of IT made a hash out of the A/V for Rhonda’s meeting. She couldn’t advance her slides with the clicker; he didn’t mute zoom attendees as they joined so there was chit-chat from them; there were mic problems galore.

I am very pleased to say that Gigi’s talk came off perfectly. No mic or audio problems; she could advance her own slides, etc. Not only did it run smoothly but I was also able to make a video recording of the talk on my other computer. We have often talked about the ability to record events directly, but to date we have always run them as Zoom meetings and used Zoom to record. This wasn’t zoom, and I managed the recording all by my little self. Running two MacBooks like a boss.

The rest of the day was empty and I just wasted it. (But now I’ve made a list of like 6 things I need to catch up on tomorrow.)

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Late news: 6 IL residents and 3 staff members have tested positive for Covid. There was a bus load of people who rode to the Ballet in SF yesterday (Sunday) and someone among them had Covid. Now everyone on the bus is under contact warning, meaning they have to avoid the dining room and public spaces and wear masks, while testing daily. Unfortunately several have already tested positive.

More unfortunately (also ironically), probably some of those now testing positive, also attended this morning’s meeting about in-house health care. If so, we might be on the verge of a good solid breakout. Tomorrow will tell.

Sunday 03/05/2023

After the usual Sunday morning routine, I went down to FOPAL. This is the week preceding the monthly sale, and I need to process any waiting donations, and put my section in order for the sale. Ordinarily I would do this on Monday but tomorrow promises to be a very busy day, and today was not.

So I spent two hours pricing and shelving books. Then back in time for lunch. Later I worked on the Corvette model, finishing the 472 V8. The body paint I ordered has only shipped today so it will be a few days before I can paint the body, but I can start on the chassis if I like.