Thursday 12/15/2022

Off to the Shustek center to catalog artifacts. First time in months. Gretta, the archivist, is back from giving birth, well she has been back since August, but this is the first time I’d seen her since spring. There were three of us, me, Dave Bennett, and Steve Madsen, three IBM retirees.

Gretta assigned Bennett and Madsen to work together cataloging. At first I was going to do photography, but there were new problems with saving pictures that she needed the house IT staff to fix. So I was put to cataloging alone. I cataloged a complete New Internet Computer donated by someone who worked at that short-lived company. It was in effect, the Chromebook of its day: a cheap PC that couldn’t run anything but a web browser (Netscape Navigator!). Per the Wiki article I linked, it didn’t sell, and Larry Ellison took a financial bath on it.

We ate lunch at a tacqueria and I had a big lunch, so dinner was just an open-face PBJ in my room. Tomorrow I had signed up for a group walk in the Baylands, but it has been canceled due to Covid. So my tomorrow is open. I have things to do.

Wednesday 12/14/2022

Did the laundry. Tried to work with my new IBM health coverage, but could not. The problem is, for another 2 weeks I am covered by an AARP policy also administered by United Health Care. Every time I try to sign in, it sends me to that account. I talked to a support person who said, call back after 12/16, when support for the IBM policy should be better.’

I don’t really care, except that I would like to set up payment by EFT. I have received the first bill for the new coverage, pay by check, or sign in to the website to set up EFT. United already taps my SFCU account via EFT for the old policy. One would think they could continue to do that for the new one, but no, it’s a different system.

Did the laundry. Went out to a grocery store for paper towels and bleach.

Gouty foot much better, thank you. Almost normal by evening.

Looked at slide show options. I’m still thinking about making a slide show of the London Bridges pics, for the CH “Sundays @ Home” series. But it would be a lot of work trying to do a proper Ken Burns style show. I might do something simpler, no pan/zoom, just click click click with narration.

In the evening email, we have 4 new positives for a total of 22 active cases in the Tower. That would just about 10% of the population! Me, I’m just fine. Ate supper in the dining room. Maybe 20 people there, and service was much quicker than normal. (Silver linings.)

Tuesday 12/13/2022

In the morning I found that Charity Navigator was behaving itself so I did my annual donations, about $5,000 spread across a list of 25 or so outfits. One more big X-off from the to-do list. Saved the report of donations as a PDF in a brand new folder under Taxes, “tax info 2022”. Now I can start thinking about taxes. Bleagh.

I remembered one more London bridge, the Millenium Footbridge, which of course didn’t exist in 1977, but did when we were back there in 2003. I found we did have a good picture of it and I printed that up and added it to the gallery in the hall.

That left an hour before the writers meeting so I hastily threw together a few paragraphs. The theme was “childhood pleasures” and I wrote about cap guns. I was kind of surprised how many chuckles it got and how people liked it.

After lunch I went up to the 11th floor and really checked out all the equipment. More works than I thought, but still some problems. I wrote an email to the tech group about what I found. I also ordered some stuff or labeling and organizing cables. When it comes I am going to clean up the back side of the media cabinet which is a mess now.

I’ve been having gout running around my toes for the past few days. First it was the 2nd toe on the right, now it’s the big toe on the left. I tried going for a walk this afternoon and had to curtail it to a 4-block loop. But the toe is already improving this evening. This shit comes and goes.

Channing House has pretty well shut down. There are 18 “active” cases in the Tower, none in the Lee Center. Besides the 18, there are some others, I don’t known how many but it must be more than 10, who are in isolation because of exposure. They have to stay isolated until they’ve tested negative some number of times. It looks as if the center of the spread was the chorus, who rehearsed together a couple times last week. Several people with covid are members of the chorus. Or as somebody posted to the bulletin board after another person announced they had it, “Oh no, now it’s the altos.”

The number of people actually eating in the dining room is (I am told) greatly reduced, with lots ordering take-out. Like me. I had a sandwich for lunch, and had my dinner as take-out. I think tomorrow, though, I am going to go out.

Monday 12/12/2022

First event of the day was the resident association meeting, held on zoom only since the auditorium was closed yesterday. Nothing special, and I had no input, except during question time. When Rhonda was asked about the progress of a new contract with Comcast, which they are supposed to be negotiating, she indicated that Comcast had been unresponsive (or similar word) but recently had assigned a new representative so maybe things would get better. I put up my electronic hand and said, when Sodexo was unresponsive, we kicked them out and created our own dining services. There are other TV providers than Comcast… Rhonda said they had talked about that but only in a general way. I mean to pursue this idea at least to find out what the actual options are.

At this time we had, by Rhonda’s “unofficial” count, 5 positive covid cases in the building, 4 in the tower.

Then off to Costco because — and I forgot to say this yesterday — during the play yesterday I also got a text saying that my new glasses are ready. I’m wearing them now, and glad to have them.

On to FOPAL where I triaged all the books that had seen four sales off my shelves and priced on box more.

Back home where I actually began to plan a Barcelona trip. I assembled some websites (tripadvisor, lonely planet, etc) as tabs in a browser. After researching “best time to visit Barcelona” I chose actual dates: April 10-21. I figure to depart the evening of 4/10/23 arriving the morning of 4/11, and return on Saturday 4/21. With a little more reading I decided that the right district to stay in was the Gracia neighborhood. I picked a 4-star hotel in that district and booked my stay through Booking.com.

This all sounds very settled but in fact, I don’t pay anything up until 4/9/23, until then I can cancel the hotel with no penalty. When things will get real is when I actually book the flights. Not yet. More research to do.

And then came this email, sent at 6:55 pm:

We have 15 new cases of Covid-19 since Friday. 5 tested positive yesterday and 10 tested positive today. This brings us to 18 cases total in the Tower….

This large number of new cases in such a short time period is almost more than our nursing staff can handle. The nurses are  required to monitor every resident who is Covid positive multiple times each day, in addition to their normal duties.

Tomorrow, we will begin training administrative staff to cover duties, as appropriate, for the IL Nurses. So, don’t be surprised if you find administrative staff in the 3^rd floor nursing station as they work in support of the IL nursing team.

Santa Clara County and the California Department of Social Services (CDSS) will receive our updated report this evening. We expect that additional restrictions will be required. We will update you of the direction from those agencies when we receive it.

Ooops. Plague times again.

Note that I wore my N95 mask at Costco, and FOPAL today.

Sunday 12/11/2022

In the morning I spent a fair amount of time on emails related to, and planning for, the CH Chorus Holiday Performances this week. It turns out that Bert tests positive, as does Jerry, so any A/V for the tech rehearsal on Tuesday and the two live performances on Wednesday, fall on me. Exchanged several emails and phone calls.

The basic tech is simple, all they need is a couple of mics. But I would also like to record the performance, as Jerry did a couple of years ago. That meant figuring out how to get some video into a computer, especially video superior to the ceiling camera in the auditorium.

I thought to use my Nikon which takes excellent video, and then I found that it has a size limit on video files, which amounts to a time limit of about 20 minutes at 1080p resolution. Well I can do that, I’ll just have to two times during the performance, go over to the camera and hit the record button twice, to end one and start another. Plus an iPhone on a tripod for another stream from another angle. But how to get good audio into the laptop? I need another adapter to get audio out of the system, so I ordered that off Amazon, arriving tomorrow.

That settled I was looking at some youtube videos from channels I subscribe to, and one by coincidence had some footage from… Barcelona. Very handsome public spaces. This pretty much decided me, the town I am going to visit next is Barcelona.

At 1pm I joined the carpool of 6 people in all, going to the Pear Theater. The play was Frankie and Johnnie in the Claire de Lune, and I didn’t much like it. Highest respect for the two actors, their memory capacity to start with. It’s a two-hour conversation between two people, and just remembering all that dialog and delivering it with expression and no mistakes is a feat. But the people spend two hours talking and end up right where they started, as far as I could tell.

During the intermission I checked my email (as one does) and there was one from CEO Rhonda, saying that owing to the sudden rise in Covid cases (I know of 8 people in quarantine as of this evening) it is time not just to start masking in the public spaces (see Friday’s post) but also: the Auditorium is closed for the duration.

Which means, one, the resident association meeting tomorrow is zoom-only, and two — no Chorus Performance! I felt a real emotional lift on realizing that. It had been kind of weighing on my mind I guess.

Saturday 12/10/2022

First thing I walked over to the Apple store to buy a lightning-to-HDMI adapter. A resident wants to put the screen of her iPhone on the big 11th floor TV. I ordered a cheap lightning-to-HDMI adapter from Amazon and it came Thursday. Friday I tried it connecting my iPhone to my TV, and it didn’t work. Cheap Chinese-made knock-off crap. So now I got one from Apple at 2.5x the price. And it did work, in my apartment.

Met Mary Ann on the 11th and — it didn’t work. Some problem with the setup there. I sent her away disappointed and emailed for help from the tech squad.

Also I printed up the final London Bridges series prints: six big prints of various aspects of Tower Bridge, the one whose shape everybody knows. I’ll leave them up for a couple of weeks. Then what? Don’t know.

Started to do my annual charity donations, but the Charity Navigator website was behaving very oddly so I put that off, maybe in a couple days they will get it straightened out.

I spent an hour investigating travel options. I decided that none of the Road Scholar tours do what I want to do, which is go and marinate in one city for ten days or so. They have a couple of tours that are just one city (Paris, Florence) and they are attractive, but just too organized. Or something. I may change my mind on that. On the other hand when I look at the TripAdvisor page for a given city, say Barcelona, there’s plenty of stuff to make up a tour of my own.

At 6, after a sandwich in my room, I left for a concert, Voices of Music, six classical pieces at the Unitarian Church over on Charleston street. You know what? I don’t enjoy classical music that much. I can respect the obvious skill and effort, but respect isn’t enjoyment. I was bored. I think next year I won’t sign up for V of M again.

Friday 12/09/2022

Off at 9am in the small bus, a group of 8 for SFMOMA to view the Diego Rivera exhibition. This was fun. They have brought the immense mural that Rivera painted for the great Pan-Pacific Exposition of 1940 (for which Treasure Island was created), to SFMOMA, along a hundred or more smaller works. Here’s the mural. Fortunately we had been primed with the URL of a site, riveramural.org, which has interactive explanations for many of the hundreds of details in the picture.

So you spend some time looking at that and learning about all the symbols and all the contemporary people he put into it. Then another hour or so on the 4th floor looking at many smaller paintings and drawings.

And then on to the other 5 floors of MOMA. I took a selfie in the colored hallway.

I had a very good lunch in the cafe. The bus didn’t come for us until 2pm which was about an hour too long, but I guess I’m lucky, the same tour a week ago didn’t start back until 3. Anyway.

At 7 was to be a concert by the Gunn HS chorus. The Gunn music teacher has associations with several people here and they perform at CH most years around this time. I came out of the dining room at 6:30 to find a crowd of 30 or so HS kids in formal black and white attire in the lobby, being ushered into the auditorium. I followed, and the AV committee member scheduled for this event wasn’t there yet, so I set up the microphones for them.

Then I sat down to wait and opened my email (as one does) and found a very recent email from Rhonda. Owing to several Covid cases in staff and a couple of residents, everybody please start wearing masks in public spaces and at performances. Ooops, there are people still in the dining room that won’t have seen this, and will be coming to the concert any minute.

So I appointed myself mask monitor. I ran up to my room and got a box of blue masks from the case that the resident association had bought, and ran back down and stationed myself at the auditorium entrance. And gave a mask to every person coming in without one. So virtuous I am.

Did the gym round first thing. Then at 9:10 I headed off to the Yosemite warehouse for a day of artifact work. The last time I went over there was June 30, day 3.210. Last time I was at Shustek, the other CHM storehouse, was in May. Somehow the days slipped by, with one thing and another preempting those volunteer locations.

Anyway everybody was welcoming, and Toni and I did a great job if I do say so, in packaging up and storing an original Magnavox Odyssey. The Odyssey was the first ever TV game console, predating Atari Pong by a few months. This one had all the many parts of the set, including 15 different translucent plastic sheets with different game patterns. You would put a sheet over the screen of your CRT television where it would nicely stick by static electricity, and create the playing field for tennis, or a ski run, or whatever. Then you plugged a module for that game into the console and you could play.

This was all in great condition, including an original Magnavox Odyssey TV, which had a push button to switch between the game and the VHF tuner. We packed all the small parts into a box, and I designed and made a custom platform out of cardboard to support the plastic sheets. I should have taken a picture. Too bad.

I should say that, sitting on a cart covered with foam sheet to keep dust off, was another new acquisition: the original laboratory prototype of the Apple Lisa. I will definitely take a picture of that next time I’m over there.

All during the day yesterday and today I have been having a running conversation via text, with Jenny, a sales person at Boardwalk Chevrolet. I started looking into getting a Bolt back on September 1 (day 3.263). I had pretty much let the matter drop since it seemed clear that Chevy was not making Bolts with the combination of options and color I wanted. Yesterday Jenny texted that one was being made and sent a link showing the car as “in transit” but verifying that it was “adreniline red” and had the adaptive cruise and infotainment package. Currently it is still in Michigan (or, I suspect, not even built yet) with no ETA. She’s going to contact me when she has an ETA.

This is sticking it to me. Do I really want to let go of the Prius plug-in? Ten years old but clean and shiny and runs great. And if so, how to dispose of it? Trade it in? Or private sale?

Wednesday 12/07/2022

I was thinking about this today: that the arbitrary number 80 is having an effect on me. Not strong, but every once in a while I find myself thinking, should I be doing that now I’m 80? Where that is something perfectly normal that I’ve been doing out of habit for a long time. Like putting on my socks while leaning against a wall. As if my brain is saying, come on, an eighty-year-old guy should sit down on the bed to pull his socks on. I’m not unsteady, no danger of falling, but my brain is acting like an over-concerned nanny trying to protect the senile old guy from himself.

I may have set myself up for this. For years I’ve been saying “when I’m 80, I’m going to start smoking again” — on the basis that smoking wouldn’t shorten my life. Something else would kill me before the tobacco could. So I got in the habit of treating 80 as a magic boundary: you cross that border and you’re into the land of sudden death. Anyway now I catch my brain wanting me to act “appropriately” for my age. Shut up, brain.

Oh well. I ran a zoom event again today, the last one for me for the month of December I’m happy to say. It went well, no tech glitches. When I was playing back the recording of the meeting I had a moment of panic because it seemed there was no audio. Ha ha, audio was fine; I had muted the speaker on the Macbook.

At 5, cousin Darlene and partner Jessea arrived as planned. Darlene was Marian’s second cousin, i.e. her mother was first cousin to Marian and Jean. Darlene at age 5 was a flower girl for Jean’s wedding, 70-odd years ago. I like Cousin Darlene very much, she is a character. I had invited them to have dinner at Channing House. I showed them around the 11th floor overlooking the valley, and then my apartment, and then down to dinner. I had reserved a table for 5, and I’d invited neighbors Connie and Carolyn, but Carolyn had to beg off with a cold. Neighbor Gwen was just passing in the hall when we learned that so she came instead. We had a very pleasant dinner.

All sorts of stress relief now: a social event successfully executed, and the last AV event of the year done. Sleep well tonight…

Tuesday 12/06/2022

I went down to the gym and did the machines. Then I worked on the to-do list. Trouble with it was, I kept thinking of things to add to it. But I cleared some items. I updated my spreadsheet of assets for the November results. (I’m still well to do.) I processed the video of yesterday’s lecture and sent a link to the speaker and to Lennie for posting on our website.

I edited the A/V checklist to reflect what I’d learned yesterday, and sent it out to my team. That was the checklist for setting up the hardest kind of event, where there is a speaker who has slides to show. Later I updated the next version, the same thing but for a speaker who will not be showing slides.

Then it was time for the writers group. Again I had nothing to contribute. Just listened to what other people had written on the theme of “Joy”. I think the piece I liked best was a very short one by Peter, who is currently quarantined with Covid. He basically said, there’s no joy going on in my life, it’s all boring.

I went out in the car and bought a moisture meter for the plants, and some 9-volt and AAA batteries. My old moisture meter had died two weeks back. I was supposed to remember to get a new one on my way home from FOPAL yesterday but of course I forgot. I took the batteries, and a battery tester, down to the auditorium, and replaced the batteries in the hearing-aid-loop tester and the two wireless mouse devices that we use.

That was about it. Fed the hummingbirds. Watched a lot of youtube videos, trying to clear the backlog that have accumulated.