Monday 04/25/2022

Went for the standard walk. Like last week, I was “feelin’ it” by the end: feeling like it would be nice to sit on a bench in the last quarter mile.

Got out the 56 T-bird model. Cut all the pieces that need to be body color, off their sprues. Spent an hour going over and sanding off mold marks and making sure everything fits. I’m going to spray the body with the dusky rose I bought, but the dash and top will be white. Off white actually, I’ll use the same eggshell white I put on the VW model. Should be nice. Anyway next job is to wash those parts and clean them with alcohol and then spray them. Maybe tomorrow.

Went down to FOPAL for 2+ hours of sorting and pricing. While I was there, I got a call from the PAMF cardiology department. I’ll see their TAVR expert on May 16th. Sometime before, yet to be scheduled, will be yet another CT with contrast. I pointed out that I had just had an MRI with contrast, and in February a CT with contrast, but the appointment person insisted the doctor would want another covering the whole abdomen and pelvis. That would be the entire road-map for inserting the TAVR, I guess.

After supper there was a concert, a young man with a guitar doing classical stuff. He played well but I didn’t care for the selections so I left early.

Sunday 04/24/2022

Decided to see some softball today. I’d had the Stanford softball schedule open in a browser tab for a couple of weeks. So I bought tickets for a couple of the few games that remain in their season. Today’s game was at 12; and I wanted to be back for a talk by Lennie at 2pm, so I figured to leave the game early, but still there wasn’t time to walk so I drove. Softball is played in a cute little stadium, like a toy version of Sunken Diamond, which it is right next to. The outfield fences are 210 feet away, where at the baseball yard they are 350-400 feet. The Stanford pitcher got off to a rocky start when the first two Arizona batters homered. But that was the end of the ASU scoring, and Stanford finally won, 4-2. I was not there to see that, having left half way through.

For Lenny’s talk I brought along the T-Loop tester, which arrived yesterday. The T-Loop or Induction loop, is the standard interface for hearing aids in the Auditorium. If your hearing aid is new enough or whatever, I really don’t know, it will pick up the room audio coming out of the T-Loop as some kind of signal. But until now the only way we AV techs could know if that was working, was to ask a hearing aid wearer to tell us.

Bert is sure that once upon a time we had multiple T-loop receivers to hand out to people, and then for a while had one set for test purposes, but all that disappeared during the upgrade and pandemic. So I just said, fuck that, and ordered myself one. It’s just a small plastic box with an on/off/volume knob, and a headphone jack, and a lanyard to hang it around your neck, and a cheap pair of headphones.

So I was interested to hear what I’d get and indeed, the loop seems to be working fine. All sound through microphones or elsewise in the audio system, was clearly reproduced in the headphones. So now we can at least test the loop.

I didn’t feel very strong and was thinking maybe I was having an impact from the booster shot? But that was Friday and I felt ok on Saturday. Anyway, I took like 3 naps today in between other activities. But now it’s evening and I feel fine. We’ll see how tomorrow goes.

Saturday 04/23/2022

Didn’t do too much. In the morning I drove across the bay to what is as far as I can tell, the only functioning hobby store in the Bay Area, in San Leandro. I wanted to find a car model kit that would justify using the “dusty rose” (kinda pink but cooler) spray paint that I bought to do the 1/16 T-Bird model. Then I found out that as a model kit, that stunk, so I gave it away, so had a can of dusty rose spray and no suitable model. So maybe another T-Bird, or even better, a ’69 Cadillac. Well, I did NOT find one of those but did find a 1/24 scale (the usual size) 59 t-bird which will look fine in dusty rose. Also on impulse bought a 1953 Studebaker kit. Gosh that was a lovely design.

So more modeling in the future.

Printed another picture for the picture rail out front. And that was about it for the day. Was invited to supper with Craig and Diane and Trish.

Friday 04/22/2022

Went for the walk in the morning, and it was ok. My ad-hoc half-keto diet plan is working; my weight today is down 5 pounds from the peak of 2 weeks back. It’ll bounce around but I should be able to go back to normal eating (somewhat modified from before, just one fewer snack a day should eliminate that steady creep-creep rise) in a week or so.

At 10:30, an hour ahead of schedule, they called the sixth floor for the scheduled 2nd Booster shot. I wonder if I’ll feel any effects?

At 4 I went up to 11 to help Kass, who was doing A/V for the 4:30pm TGIF party. No severe problems that we couldn’t work around, but it took some fiddling. That whole system is cobbled together and very complicated.

The TGIF party was the first in over 2 years. They used to be a monthly event, arranged by a different floor each time. This was the 9th floor and they did a nice job.

At 8pm I am attending a performance of Steel Magnolias at the Bus Barn. I bought two season tickets, so at the party I circulated around and invited various people to join me. Unfortunately lots of people already had plans for the evening but finally Mary Ann, the only other Washington State product around, said she’d be glad to join me.

…and oops. They had moved the dates of this show due to Covid, and either didn’t tell me or (very likely) I failed to update my calendar. Anyway, no play tonight. I and Mary Ann had a nice drive over to Los Altos and return, period.

Thursday 04/21/2022

Met with Dr. DiBiase the cardiologist. The MRI of two weeks back has not yet been interpreted. Hmph. Based on my report of moderately more fatigue after benchmark walks, however, and the echo of a month ago which showed increased regurgitation, she said “It’s probably time to take some action.” That would probably be a TAVR but she defers that to the “interventional cardiologist”.

She acknowledged that I had good results with the aortic dissection at Stanford from Dr. Watkins, but she strongly recommended against going back there now. She said there was a nurse’s strike impending, and generally “things aren’t happy over there.” She noted that she had visited their echo lab recently and they were backed up with over 50 echos, in-house ones, waiting to be interpreted.

PAMF has their own interventional cardiology group based out of Sequoia hospital, and I agreed to be referred to them. She told me the name of a doctor but I forget it and she didn’t write it into her after-visit notes. Anyway, I wait to be contacted by them.

Later I went out to buy coffee and some groceries while Wanda tidied my room. Then I completely spaced out and forgot to attend a Strategic Planning meeting at 4pm. Very embarrassed.

Wednesday 04/20/2022

Because two weeks ago I moved my laundry reservation (on a magnetic white board in the laundry room) to Tuesday, this week I had to take Wednesday 8am. So first thing up I had to get the laundry started. Then while it ran, I finished my draft of a Heritage Circle grant, complete with shopping list and a diagram of what to install where in the auditorium. I sent it off to Jerry, whose plan it started as, and to Vanessa, who had added to it, for comment.

After lunch I had the FOPAL monthly zoom. Then there was a gap in my schedule so I took the walk I would normally have taken in the morning.

At 4pm I had to meet with John and Frances in the auditorium to advise on them showing a DVD this coming Saturday. Turned out using the Blu-Ray that is built into the equipment rack backstage couldn’t seem to do close captions, so they changed to using a MacBook with a DVD drive.

I had been invited to dine with Cindy and Caroline. Afterward, at 7:30, was to be a concert with a local soprano (at dinner, Caroline talked about her and her family, who go to Caroline’s church). I took a look at the program and passed. Too classic.

Tuesday 04/19/2022

Nothing much to do in the morning so I was browsing the internet when I stumbled on an essay that resonated with me. It was about “apathy of impotence”, a great phrase that nicely sums up how I feel about the world today. So I wrote a comment, and the comment kind of took on dimension so I pumped it up a little and by 10am I had something to submit to the writers group. I’ll append it below.

After lunch I took a tech squad call: Roku remote not functioning, and we found out it had one good battery and one completely dead. Probably the customer had mixed up the batteries while changing them? Put back one old one along with one new? Anyway, easy fix.

Later in the day I spent a couple of hours converting the official Heritage Circle grant application. It is distributed as a paper form to be filled out, and I don’t want to be trying to edit and re-edit paper forms. So I figured out how to scan it and put its image as the background of a Pages document, so I could “fill it out” by typing into text boxes positioned over the image. Tomorrow I will put some text in those text boxes.

Here’s what I read to the writers group:

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I thought I had nothing to say this week. Then I read an online essay (link below) that I think the author, a professor of Philosophy at Cal State Fresno, intends to be inspiring. In this well-written essay Prof. Fiala decries the “apathy of impotence,” a condition that

grows from the feeling that there is nothing we can do to change a world afflicted by systematic and structural problems.

He concludes that

The vortex of despair is overcome by going out and getting to work. We find hope when we join together with others who are actively working to make change.

I’ve certainly felt the apathy of impotence. From under that personal cloud of doom I look out at my activist neighbors, writing letters and attending rallies — exactly the kinds of action Prof. Fiala advocates — with bemusement. So I wrote the following as a comment on his piece.

Oh yes. “We can make a difference,” the organizers cry. The apathy begins when you simply stop believing them. The practical evidence on the ground that “We can’t” is quite strong. Why? Because none of the available targets for social action — political parties or candidates, particular corporations, etc. — are fundamentally at fault. Each identifiable social villain is but another head on a vast Hydra whose amorphous, ubiquitous body arises from the fetid slime of those basic flaws of human nature: fear, and greed, and stupidity. From the incomprehensibly rich conferring at Davos, to the minimum-wage clerk in Tampa drawing a sense of personal significance from the latest QAnon conspiracy, all are utterly ruled by fear of losing what they have, by greedy compulsion to have more, and by a sullen unwillingness to agree to any change whatever in the routine of their lives.

This Hydra, this looming monster with an uncountable number of devouring heads, will not be affected by social action against any one of its blind noggins; it will roll on, obliviously drowning our social world, until it slams hard into the real limits of the physical world. The society that remains after that shock will be very different, and probably much smaller, than ours.

(*) https://onlysky.media/afiala/apathy-of-impotence/

Monday 04/18/2022

Took a standard walk, which felt ok, better than the prior two times.

At 10:30 it was time for the Events Committee meeting, to review the calendar for May. Lots of events coming.

After a quick bite I went to FOPAL and spent 3 hours working through 4 boxes of contributions. Don’t know why it took longer than usual. Well, the computer I use was acting up and I had to reboot it. I cannot believe how long Windows 10 (or maybe it’s 11?) takes to boot. Compared to MacOS, that is.

At 4pm it was time for Rhonda’s open meeting, at which she was to review the separate Resident and Staff satisfaction surveys taken some time ago. Taken early in 2021 actually, so not exactly current news. Whatever, I completely forgot this event was happening and missed it. Nothing earth-shaking anyway.

Had dinner with Patty Craig and DIane. Craig assured me that Rhonda’s meeting was wasted time, owing to how Covid changed everything then and since.

Sunday 04/17/2022

Usual Sunday morning. Took a 1-mile walk. There was a special lunch today, Easter Sunday, but I missed out on it in a fit of pique. I needed to eat early because I had to leave at 1pm, so I went to the dining room at 11:30. Only a few tables active. I sat alone at one of the 8-person “open” tables and waited for someone to take my order. And waited… after ten minutes I decided that I didn’t care that much about the special lunch and went and had a light lunch in my room.

Anyway, out at 1pm to the museum where I led a tour. About 25 people and I kept most of them to the end.

As usual on holidays, supper was a brown bag special. I picked up my bag on the way back in, and at 6pm some of us 6th floor people met in our dining room for a picnic. That was nice.

Saturday 04/16/2022

In the morning I drove over to Safeway and bought some items to support the diet I’m on. I haven’t mentioned dieting. Well, not a big serious thing, but I had put on 5 points since last fall and I want them off. So I’m doing low-carb (aka sloppy keto). Breakfast and lunch are low-carb snacks in my room. When I go to the dining room I have just the protein and salad, like tonight there was chicken, rice, and cooked spinach, and ordered just the chicken and spinach.

At 11 I talked to Patty about the A/V Heritage Circle grant proposal. Good news, the deadline is not 4/30 but 5/24, so much more available time. She knew as did I that the IT manager Vanessa was duty weekend manager, and she shamed me into actually going to the front desk to make an appointment. Vanessa herself was at the desk doing something and we agreed to meet at 2pm.

I spent some time preparing more EBay listings for FOPAL. Here’s one of the three I posted today: https://www.ebay.com/itm/284770277532

Some of my technically challenged neighbors had asked me to turn on the 11th floor TV for the Warrior’s game at 5pm, which I did. Then went down for dinner (aforementioned chicken and spinach) and back to blow my carb quota on crackers and cheese which the Warriors fans had laid out.