Thursday 04/05/2022

Tidied the place for the cleaning lady as usual. Then drove around the Bay to the Shustek center. Had a few too many volunteers and not enough to do, for once. Steve and Dave B. spent the day cataloging somebody’s collection of very early transistors and diodes. Really. I made up boxes, folding archival banker’s boxes from flats, and not much else. Left early so as to be in time for the Strategic Planning Committee. The Strategic Plan is in pretty good shape and actually reads like a policy now. No credit to me; most of the work has been done by others. This was basically a group editing session. My only contribution was to point out two typos and suggest some wording in another clause.

After dithering about various methods of applying chrome to tiny features of the T-bird I decided to try the decals in the kit, which looked pretty good on close inspection. And yes, they look not bad at all. I put on the decals on one side and left them to dry. I’ll put on the other side tomorrow. I’ll take a picture then.

Wednesday 04/04/2022

First thing was to drive to PAMF Sunnyvale at 8am to have some blood drawn. When I saw DiBiase a week ago, she ordered some standard blood work, and this is me finally getting around to having it done. Results came in later in the day; BUN and creatinine are high, indicating some kidney issue (could it be the effect of processing the CT contrast fluid? but that was about 40 hours previous). Red blood cell, hemoglobin, and hematocrit are all marginally low but that is consistent over the past couple of years.

Home again in good time to do my bi-weekly laundry. While that was running I took a tech squad call. Grace has a consistent problem with dropped calls. She has AT&T and the same iPhone as mine, and often incoming calls go to her message without the phone ringing at all. I demonstrated that, standing there with a phone in each hand, calling from mine and twice it went to message. My advice was there was nothing the tech squad could do, this is between her and AT&T. She doesn’t feel strong enough to walk alone to the AT&T office on University; I studiously avoided volunteering to accompany her. Later in the day I emailed the tech squad list about this. Peter reported he has AT&T and the exact same problem.

Thing is she has wi-fi enabled and wi-fi calling enabled, and it doesn’t help. Ditto Peter. I think wi-fi calling is only of use for outgoing calls. Maybe for SMS. Anyway I noticed when in her apartment, on the West side, my T-Mobile signal strength was way higher than in my East-side apartment. So that’s another variable.

At 2pm I drove to the museum to lead a custom tour, MBA students from McGill? or some such university. Meh.

For my afternoon amusement I read the background material for tomorrow’s Strategic Planning Committee meeting.

Tuesday 04/03/2022

Today I needed to go to FOPAL. I’ve been going on Mondays, but didn’t go yesterday owing to having to get the CT scan. I knew there would be a heap of boxes to process. But I also had a date with sis-in-law Jean for after lunch, so had to go in the morning, meaning I had to miss the writers group.

There were indeed a heap of boxes, 8 in all, and it took 3 hours to go through them and price the keepers. Then I got a small lunch at the grocery next door, and then went on down to Jean’s in Mountain View. She was having some trouble with her Mac and I managed to resolve most of the problems.

In the afternoon came an email from staff: another staff member with a positive test for Covid. Yesterday they had announced another staff and one resident, saying “As of today, we have 5 active Covid cases in staff and 1 active resident case. This is considered a Covid outbreak.” Today, with one more staff member, they say “we recommend that resident meetings be held by Zoom, where possible, to minimize opportunities for exposure.” Which means the resident association meeting next Monday will be zoom-only, after just two in the auditorium. Ho-hum.

Monday 04/02/2022

Went for the standard walk, which felt fine (no unusual fatigue). At 9:30 I went down to the auditorium to set up for an event. This was an easy one, a talk by Professor Patnode, who has lectured here often. He never has computer slides, just wants a whiteboard and a lectern. No zoom complications.

I had messed up my timing; I was scheduled for a CT scan at 2:30 and the instructions were no eating for 3 hours previous. By the time the event was over my lunch window had closed. But they said liquids were OK so I had half a protein shake.

The CT was uneventful. It took a lot less time than the recent MRI. The contrast injection was just as weird as ever. Within a couple of seconds of when they put the contrast in, you get a metallic taste on the back of your tongue, and some of your extremities get a warm flush. OK, my ball sack got a warm flush. Anyway, nothing more medical until 5/16 when I meet with a doctor to discuss the TAVR. Well, actually, I belatedly remembered that Dr. Dibiase ordered a couple of routine blood tests. So I scheduled those tonight, for Wednesday morning.

I put in a little more work on the T-bird engine, and printed a couple of new pictures for my hallway display. Here’s one I printed today. It’s one of my favorites, a lucky shot from a boat on the Grand Canal in Venice.

This was taken 20+ years ago. You can’t tell in this reduced version, but at full res you can see she is talking on a flip phone; iPhones were 7 years ahead. It always tickles me, this gal charging down the canal in her motorboat, cutting between the water taxis and gondolas, one hand on the tiller and the other holding the phone. Just another day in Venice.

Sunday 05/01/2022

Normal Sunday morning, watering plants, doing puzzle. At 11 I went off to the CHM and led a tour, about 15 people, managed to keep them interested to the end. Started putting the engine of the T-bird together.

Saturday 04/30/2022

The main thing today was to attend the Shipyard Artists open studio day at Hunter’s Point. I enjoyed this a lot. Here are some pictures I took, just a very few of the interesting things I saw. The lady that sculpted in chicken wire like this,

Also had a couple of life-size dogs and some more political pieces. I liked these pieces which were just explosions of colored wires and plastic bits coming out of picture frames.

This artist starts by putting a yard of chiffon over a stretched canvas, and shapes it and glues it, then paints over it. I said “Oooh it makes me want to touch.” She said, “Yeah, everybody says that.

This artist paints photo-realistic pictures of industrial buildings and abandoned cars, but I was more interested in his absolute wreck of a workbench.

This guy folds pages of printed matter into strips and rolls the strips into huge, tight coils.

That was about it. There was a lecture in the evening. David M. ran the AV, and had some trouble with the audio from a video.

Friday 04/29/2022

Took the walk. Stopped by Ace hardware to buy this and that. Experimented with trying to use silver leaf as chrome. Some time ago I bought a pack of silver leaf to use for pretend chrome on models. It’s this insanely thin metal foil. If there’s a draft, or you breathe on it, it flutters and crumples. You make a pattern with glue (called “size”) on an object. You press the foil on it and it sticks to the glue, then you can use a brush to just brush it away from wherever there wasn’t glue, leaving a metal pattern. So I am trying to figure out how to apply size to just the raised parts, of tiny raised details on a car model. In theory it should be possible to make just the raised bits, like the little hash marks on the T-bird (see a couple days back) covered in shiny foil. Not having much success on scrap parts. Don’t have the right size stuff, haven’t figured out a good technique for transferring size to just the raised bits.

Come 4pm it was time for the A/V committee to convene, which we did. All upcoming events assigned to stalwart volunteers. Outstanding problems discussed. And now I am done with obligations until a docent tour on Sunday. Whee.

Thursday 04/28/2022

Tidied the apartment for the cleaning lady, then left for Yosemite, the first time I’ve been to the big CHM warehouse in months. Helped Sherman and Toni to do what the curator Aurora calls, Museum Tetris: moving boxes and artifacts around to different shelves to make more room for other boxes or artifacts.

Left early to be back to CH at 2pm for the important meeting of me and Jerry, with Vanessa the director of IT, and Alonzo, a representative of the A/V vendor that has worked on the A/V systems previously. The purpose was to go over our tentative shopping list for an auditorium upgrade, to hopefully be paid for by the Heritage Circle.

We learned some things, the most shocking of which was from Gerald, the IT staffer, who only that day had been up in the ceiling by our projector and discovered that it was driven by a VGA connection! So it may be a 1080p resolution as I’d thought, but not the best image as VGA is an analog signal.

Vanessa also had us look at a special hardware setup in one of the conference rooms, a hardware extension for Zoom that enhances Zoom Rooms, their video-conferencing system. It had some slick features, but I couldn’t, and still don’t, see the relevancy to the kind of events my committee is concerned with: lectures, concerts, movies and memorials.

Wednesday 04/27/2022

Started with a walk, which felt fine. Put the last coat of pink on the T-bird. I know it’s the last because the spray can ran dry. Tamiya says their cans are good for two normal models, I guess they don’t spray multiple coats? Realizing it was going dry, I held the nozzle to the mouth of a small bottle and ran it out of gas. That got me maybe 1cc of liquid paint in the bottle to use for touch-ups.

Then it was time to go the FOPAL volunteer appreciation lunch. This was pretty boring although nicely organized. At the Mitchell Park Library public room, the same place where the CH Strategic Planning Retreat of a month ago was held. Nice lunch, but not very interesting talks by earnest officials of the library and city government.

Back to CH for a 2pm meeting with Gerald of IT and David G, to investigate problems with Macs and the auditorium equipment. This was where newer Macs like mine could see the projector and use it but after three seconds the screen would go black, or flicker. I demonstrated this for Gerald who got a good look at the problem.

Then off to a meeting with Pam, chair of the events committee, who wanted assurance that showing a movie in the auditorium was an A/V event. And to give advice on the Heritage Circle grant process.

Back to my room and find an email from Gerald, would I download DisplayLink from Synaptics Software and try it. So I did, and back to the auditorium et voila! the problem was fixed and my mac had no more problems running the projector. Nice work, Gerald.

At 5pm Harriet picked me up and we went off to a Softball game at Stanford. Sat with her and Lilly, both SWBB fans, watching Stanford beat UOP. Got very cold in the evening breeze.

One of the old books I put on EBay has sold, but apparently I didn’t mark it US shipping only as the buyer (for $75) is in Norway. Now I have to figure out how to ship it there. Normally we use USPS Media Mail but I don’t know if that works outside the USA. Oh, worra worra.

Tuesday 04/26/2022

I was busy busy all day, checking things off my list, adding them and checking those off. Very satisfying day of accomplishment and relief at clearing off a lot of little things that had been pending for a while.

Like oiling the coffee table. You remember my mid-century modern wooden coffee table. Here, let me drop the computer and shoot a picture of it.

First off, there were several items on it that had been there for weeks and needed to be properly discarded, or read, or stowed elsewhere, and I did that. Then it was looking very dry and bleached out, so I spent half an hour rubbing it with beeswax polishing stuff. Looks good again, also neat.

At hourly intervals through the day I was spraying the T-bird model with its pink color. Here it is after 5 light coats. Kind of scuffed because it has now been lightly sanded with 1000-grit. Tomorrow it gets a final couple of coats, then it hardens for a few days. Then it gets chrome and decals, then clear-coat.

Is that pink, or what? Looking ahead there are huge challenges. You see that line of little hash marks behind the front wheel? Supposed to be chrome. The kit contains water slide decals for this but I doubt it will look right, to have a decal with little gray slash marks covering that area. But that is jeweler-level work for metal foil. Or the liquid-chrome pen I have, no way are my hands steady enough to paint the tops of those little slash marks.

Emails about meetings, and meetings that had to be re-scheduled. And things that had to be printed in multiple copies in prep. for other meetings. Anyway, there we are.