Monday 02/07/2022

Opened the day with a normal walk, which went fine. On the return let I stopped at Ace Hardware. My bedside lamp uses two little halogen bulbs and one had burned out last night. This morning I took it out and used the internet (of course) to work what kind it was (T4 shape, G9 base, 120V 35W). I could have ordered a couple from bulbs.com, but I thought I would give the local store a shot, and they came through; they had almost the same bulb, 40W instead of 35 which is fine.

Next up was a Book Talk by a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford, Nils Karlson. As AV committee chair it was my job to set this up, which I had done by arranging with Veronica to open a meeting on the house Zoom account, and arranging with David G. to be the host, which he does very ably for other big meetings. Delegation is my skill. So I had to attend, although the subject didn’t interest me much. Karlson’s book is about how two different modern democracies, Sweden and Australia, had both implemented serious economic reforms in the 90s and 00s. It had nothing to offer current politics as far as I could tell. I asked how his analysis would work for Brexit and he said he is working on a book on Brexit now.

As soon as that was over I headed down to FOPAL to process 6 boxes of books. On return I could relax for an hour and then it was time for the second meeting of the day. This was the first of two meetings where the staff responds to resident complaints. This one was about the recently announced increase in the garage rates from 65/mo to 90/mo which had produced a lot of complaints, I think more because it was announced rather suddenly without any kind of survey or preparation. It turns out that parking is a major issue in several ways. The City has greatly reduced the number of employee street parking permits that businesses can get. Quite a few employees cannot use public transport (I know one commutes from Gilroy) although we reimburse public transit fare use. So quite frankly the raise is hoped to motivate a few people to give up their underutilized cars, allowing more employees to park inside.

Monthly parking in a covered secure location runs a lot higher than $90/mo and I feel quite fortunate to have the space I do and will happily pay the increase.

Food today was three Keto Chow shakes. My weight has been steadily creeping up over the past two months and I am going back on the keto diet for a week or two to knock it down again.

Sunday 02/06/2022

Today for the first time in… maybe forever? I didn’t leave the building all day, on foot or by car. In fact, I only left my apartment twice, to pick up meal trays.

I did some paperwork, doing the January entry for the Nest Egg spreadsheet (down 3% from the prior month, thank you stock market). Did quite a bit of work on the VW model; only a couple more hours of work to finish that.

At 3pm it was SWBB at USC. I was able to watch only the first quarter when it was time to switch over to Sunday @ Home, an occasional series where a selected resident lectures on their specialty. This time it was Gloria Hom, giving the details on Chinese New Year. This was the talk I had helped her prep for a couple of days ago. She managed her slides with only minor problems.

Then back to the basketball. Stanford led by 20 at the half and ended up winning by 30. Back home now for a makeup game with OSU next Wednesday.

I had to work the 6-7 shift on tray distribution because only one person had signed up. Then back to my room to eat and watch some Olympics.

Saturday 02/05/2022

Started the day by taking a modest walk and of course stopping at the farmers market. Brought home a giant pastry and a bottle of organic apple juice. I put those aside, except for a couple of bites, for later. I had signed up to do trays in the 6-7pm slot, with my own tray scheduled for 6:45. So I would have a long gap and used the pastry and juice for a gap-stop or early Tea.

I did some paperwork but did not, as I had planned, take a first look at the tax accountant’s online workbook. Reason, Schwab won’t have all my various statements ready before the end of the month. It’s a good excuse.

I did quite a bit of work on the VW model. After lunch I did some gardening. I chopped back the big dragon-wing begonias as I do each spring. And a month ago, Jean gave me a begonia in a pot off her back porch. This thing has been in the same pot for 40 years, she said; do what you want with it. It didn’t look very well, kind of stunted and brown-edged. Well, today I popped it out of its pot — it did not have a solid big root-ball, to my surprise — and stuck it into a much larger pot. Either it will die, or it will burst into vigorous new life. Or maybe it will just sit there, you never know with plants.

At 6 I went down and joined Lily handing out trays. When mine came out of the kitchen at 6:30, she shooed me away saying she had it. So I went up and watched some olympics, although I don’t feel much involved in them.

Friday 02/04/2022

First thing, I went to the gym for the first time in a couple of weeks. Paced myself carefully; it went ok.

At 9am I was to meet with Gloria. She is giving a talk on Sunday, on zoom, planning to share a powerpoint presentation. I did not want to see her fumbling around like I have seen so many people do, and wanted to walk her through the process of sharing her presentation. Sure enough, she only knew how to make the powerpoint do a slide show, as a full-screen show. Which would have left her floundering at the point the host said, share your screen, because she’d have started the slide show and it would fill the screen, hiding the zoom window with the “share” button!

So we worked out how to make a powerpoint slide show play inside a window, and then the tricky bit where you click Share and it pops up a window with miniatures of all your windows and you have to pick which one to share. She’d never seen that and it would have thrown her. But now she knows.

I was to have taken a tech squad call at 10, but that person had left me a message saying it was all ok now, don’t bother. Good. That meant I was now free to take the Smalltalk book down to FOPAL, to a part I’d never been in, the “annex” which is a workroom off the Children’s section, which is in a different building. There I met with Lisa whose volunteer work is selling on eBay and mailing sold items. She walked me through the process of mailing the book to its new owner.

Then it had to be dropped off at a post office; she recommended I just leave it at the UPS office in Midtown, very convenient to my route home. So I also stopped there for a smoothie and a cookie. Haven’t been in that cafe for a year or so.

There was a lot of email back and forth to deal with, about an event happening Monday. And I did a bit of work on the VW model. There’s a lot to do, but it’s coming together. Here’s the interior.

I am particularly pleased by the red release buttons on the seat-belt latches, which are about 1/8 inch by 1/32nd inch. The thing is, when it is complete you would have to peer in through a side window the size of your thumbnail to see this interior at all.

At 4pm Rhonda held a Covid-status zoom meeting. They are beginning to see the light; down to only 3 staff out for quarantine. As a result they will reopen the dining room, but only for breakfast and lunch. They still don’t have enough people to handle dinner as well; that will continue to be order online and carry out. Which means I get to make another week’s sign-up sheet for tray dispensing volunteers. I did that after supper.

Thursday 02/03/2022

Went for a walk in the morning. Then did little stuff: paid a bill, set up meetings with two different people for tomorrow.

After lunch I drove to the Shustek center in Milpitas for an afternoon of artifact work. This used to be a full day, well, starting at 10am, and lunch with other volunteers. But Omicron; no more lunches together. Anyway, spent three hours working with Sherman, photographing artifacts.

In the evening it was SWBB in Los Angeles, playing UCLA on ESPN. Stanford won easily, leading by 20 at the half and 30 at the end, despite the absence of two starters due to Covid protocols.

Wednesday 02/02/2022

…or 2/2/22 if you leave out the zeros. As somebody pointed out on the house bulletin board list, we won’t have another such day until 3/3/33, I should live so long.

This was the morning of giving a docent tour for people from the Danish Embassy. Scheduled for 8am and we have to be done by 9am. This meant I needed to be out the door by 7:15 or so, to be sure of being early. Well in fact it turns out that it takes 15 minutes to walk from my apartment, to the garage, and drive to CHM, arriving at 7:30.

There I learned some things nobody had bothered to tell us, “us” being me and Chuck, the other docent. On account of Covid, we can’t have more than 10 in a tour group, and there were 20 Embassy people, so, two docents. Chuck had generously volunteered to start his tour in the middle so I could start at my usual start.

I had thought the Danes were arriving, doing a one-hour tour (which is ridiculously short) and going away, hence the 9am cut-off. Not at all how it was. The Danes had rented a conference room for three days, and were doing some kind of off-site training. The 9am cut-off was because a film crew was filming in our exhibit space and they wanted to set up all their equipment and start work at 9am. So the tour groups had to be out to avoid tripping over cables and stuff.

Anyway, the Danish group were prompt; they were every one of them tall, handsome nordic types, mostly men, a couple of women, all 30-somethings. We got going just a bit after 8am and I finished up my tour at 8:55, which is a major win for me. My editing and rehearsals these past few days paid off. Alas, so many interesting tid-bits I had to cut out.

Which brought me home again by 10am with an open day. I had a standing request from neighbor Dr. Margaret to help her with some Mac issues, so after lunch I called her up and she was free so we did that. She has interesting if trivial problems. Like, her Contacts app had somehow doubled up all(?) or most of her contacts. I know zilch about that app, never use it. She pointed out that it had a “find duplicates” function! Which offers a “Merge?” option, which applied multiple times, got rid of all the dups. On her iPhone, the Messages app was stuck in horizontal display, not changing to vertical when you rotate the phone. Remembering the problem with Jean’s phone yesterday, I had her reboot it. Haha, fixed! This is the kind of thing that has people saying I am a tech genius: (a) look up the problem in google, (b) reboot it.

Tuesday 02/01/2022

Went to bed without blogging. Now I don’t remember. Well a bit. I went for a standard walk in the morning, and instead of listening to a podcast, I talked through my docent spiel. Don’t remember what else. This is why I do the blog, because otherwise…

Oh, yeah. Took a tech squad call. Jean (another Jean) had an issue with the Mac Mail app. I think I resolved it by changing the Mail Settings to empty her trash folder more often. She also had a problem with her iPhone, the Mail app on the phone would crash (just disappear from the screen) every time you started it. I did a quick google and the first hit had the eminently practical suggestion, reboot the phone. Which I did, and voila! the Mail app now came up and stayed up. She said, amazing! I said, all I did was google the issue and do what the first hit said. “You know my methods, Watson!” but I don’t think she got the reference.

Monday 01/31/2022

First thing, I rehearsed the docent talk, it ran for just 50 minutes, yay!

Then I went down to FOPAL to do my usual Monday work processing and pricing books. I also bought a few groceries for my stock of snacks.

I knew that only one person had signed up for each of the two lunch shifts. I got back just in time for the second shift, 12:15 and sure enough, only one volunteer, so I filled in for a while until the second person arrived. That was Joanne who offers to fill in whenever needed, and who I had messaged early in the morning.

The rest of the day was quiet.

Sunday 02/31/2022

In the morning, finished editing the docent talk and timing it. If I deliver it as written, it should take under 50 minutes. Of course if I digress a lot, or get a lot of questions…

Met briefly with Marcia to talk about reviving the volunteer newspaper delivery team. Then it was off to the SWBB game vs. Arizona. This was the first rematch since the same two teams played for the national championship at the end of the Final Four last spring, a game Stanford won by 1 point. This time they won by 5 or 6, although the game was close most of the way.

Back home I watched most of the 49ers game against LA, losing in the final minutes.

Saturday 01/29/2022

Sent out the next week’s volunteer sign-up sheet. Went for a moderate walk. Then spent probably 3 hours, before and after lunch, revising and practicing my docent talk. It looks like I can keep my main points and still be well under an hour.