Saturday 01/08/2022

Things I did today.

I worked the breakfast meal. Previously we had not planned on having volunteers help dispense trays and breakfast but I wanted to see if it was useful, so at 7:30 I went down and did it for an hour. It is useful. So I will add it that meal to the sign-up sheet that I need to make for next week.

Took a tech squad call to Jeanne’s apartment: her TV had gone black. I’ve never seen this. A Sharp flat-panel, the audio still works, you can hear the Comcast program, but the screen is black. If you press the Menu button on the side, no change, the panel is just black. Advised a new TV.

Took another private call to someone who shall be nameless who called me directly. I got to start refusing these. In this case, the Comcast box was clearly at fault. It kept putting up the XFinity logo and then would go dead. Advised going to Comcast and exchanging it, which unfortunately is not a practical option for this person owing to limited mobility. I did NOT volunteer to do it for her.

Had a quiet hour after lunch. Then went for a walk with Patty, mainly to pump her for suggestions on how to fund my proposal to the RA. She had a suggestion that I had not thought of, which I will go into another time.

Built the sign-up sheet for next week. https://www.slottr.com/CHTD0110

Had a quiet evening at home.

Friday 01/07/2022

Thought I would just log what I did today.

• 8am messaged Chris, facilities mgr, asking for a short meeting
• 7:30 handle email from someone who needs to take their name off the sign-up list.
• 8:10 Carol, pres. of the RA, sends email “big trouble at breakfast” the line got real long and people couldn’t find their trays.
• 8:20 I go down and check things out. Nobody in line now. But the kitchen staff are not writing the room numbers on the tray tags. This forces elderly people to peer closely at each tag which is machine-printed in pale gray dot matrix.
• I find the dining supervisor and politely stress how very very helpful it was yesterday when kitchen wrote room #s with sharpie on tags. She understands and will comply.
• 8:30 Chris replies, 2-2:30.
• 8:30 I email Marcia, is 2pm ok?
• 8:31 I go for my walk.
• 9:30 I stop at Ace Hardware and buy a card with 3 sharpies
• 9:45 Marcia says 2pm is ok, but she has another meeting at 2:30
• 9:46 I reply ok meet in the basement at 2
• 9:50 I put in my orders for lunch and dinner
• 10:00 I run downstairs and tape the card of sharpies to the podium where the carts are lined up. Now volunteers can write room numbers on tickets if need be.
• 10:10 I write a diplomatic response to Sue who is bothered by how trays come out in (she thinks) random order (they don’t — quite) and people aren’t social distancing while waiting.
• 10:34 Jerry writes he has the auditorium camera working and will be in the auditorium to demonstrate at 11am. Jerry only sent it to the AV team.
• 10:38 I forward that note to the house IT tech Paul in case he can make it.
• 10:40 print XFinity bill (yeah I know wasted paper)
• 10:41 Chris says meet in lobby, i pass that on to Marcia
• 10:48 pay Xfinity bill and file it
• 10:55 head to auditorium
• Jerry demonstrates & explains what he’s learned about the camera. Fortunately Paul got my email and arrives in time to hear. Discussion about what we need to do zoom simulcasts
• 11:30 I move to the dining room and oversee the volunteers distributing trays. The process seems to work well now, the kitchen staff are writing the room numbers on the tickets as we requested and that smooths it all out.
• 12:30 my lunch comes out of the kitchen and I take it upstairs to eat.
• I set an alarm for 1:50, then squeeze in some internet and a nap
• Wake up ahead of alarm. Go downstairs. Marcia joins me, we work out a couple of things.
• Chris the Facilities manager (a very nice guy) joins us and we learn a number of things:
  • facilities has 5 people sheltering at home hence their problems
  • they will start coming back next week hopefully
  • meantime they do have coverage between 6 and 11pm when the night security guard comes in
  • so no real need for volunteers escorting EMTs
  • Lockouts are not a problem since the renovation was completed, it is no longer physically possible for people to lock themselves out of their doors
• So basically, the volunteer tasks we thought we had for him, aren’t needed. Yay!
• As we were dispersing Marcia spotted LaToya, dining supervisor and we got some info from her to squelch various rumors we had been hearing.
• Back to my room; message light blinking, Mary Ann needs help with online ordering, I call her back and direct her to help
• 2:35 Called Bert and suggested the Tech Squad that he chairs, should help people learn to do online ordering. He said, normally we fix things, we don’t do training, but since this is very focused and it’s a critical time, ok, and he will say so on tonight’s general meeting.
• 2:45 called Diane Allen to pursue my other project, funding for the RA. She was very helpful, from her memory as one-time Archivist,
  • The Gift Shop has always been its own thing, formed early on by some residents who thought we should have one, and got permission from the Board (not from the Resident Association, the real Board that governs Channing House)
  • Historically it has always generated income which it has given out on request to various projects, for instance it bought our ping-pong tables (I’ve never seen them) and gives money to the RA on request as I’ve observed.
  • But no formal arrangement or relation exists between the RA and GS.
  • GS has its own Treasurer, a more demanding job than RA Treasurer because they have to calculate and pay sales tax!
  • Mary Beth, present GS manager, has said to Diane that she’d like to have the issue of funds disbursement off her desk and, Diane thinks, has talked to Carol our RA President.
• Diane and I agreed it made great sense for the GS to be part of the RA, and the GS manager to be an elective office and a member of the Exec Committee. But how to make that happen?
• Now I need to talk to Carol and to Mary Beth, but this is very hopeful.
• 3:05 Humming bird feeders are empty. Refill
• 3:10 I have almost an hour free before the 4pm general meeting chaired by Rhonda to read my email and then some other internet things
• 3:15 Bert has put out notice of tech help for meal ordering on CHBB already
• reduce inbox to only 4 items
• Reading minutes of the floor reps meeting yesterday, find we are in good shape from a marketing perspective,
  • five move-ins scheduled in the next two weeks (if not delayed by Covid considerations) she expects that seven more contracts will be signed by the end of February.
• Two of those move-ins are on my 6th floor, one across the hall.

Rhonda’s announcements. No new positives to announce. Tested all staff yesterday, responses will come back over the next 2 days. Lee Center residents and all staff will be tested again next week. Voluntary testing will be offered to all Tower residents next week. (I need to sign up. If you test positive you isolate in your room. Staffing: ‘every hour we learn of staff that cannot report to work” because of exposure from family or other causes. Expect to see staff reallocated.

Questions: can we have the grab’n’go back? Closed for infection control. Also takes staff time to prepare sandwiches etc to put in it.

Rhonda: staff shortages mean that the remainder are exhausted — of all the weeks of the pandemic I think this has been one of the hardest.

Much more chit-chat and questions, although everybody remained positive and civil.

• 5pm, went down to make sure this evening’s tray dispensing volunteers were comfortable. Stayed with them, admiring the competence and good humor of my neighbors, until my tray came out.
• 6:30 sat down at my little table to eat
• 7:00 sat down to veg out for a bit and then watch SWBB — playing at home but no audience allowed, so on TV.
• Oregon played hard but Stanford pulled out to 14 ahead, then they played even the rest of the way, winning by 10.
• 9:00 going to bed to read for a while.

Thursday 01/06/2022

I did my resistance exercises first thing. Then I sat down and created a signup sheet for the new volunteer job, Dispensing Trays. That’s what it amounts to. The kitchen staff wheel out carts loaded with trays. Each tray has a room number visible on a ticket. People order their meals by phone or online, and they specify what time they expect to pick up, say 11:45am for lunch, or 12:30 or whatever.

The trays come of the kitchen in very approximate order of their requested pickup time. Not organized by floor or name. People trickle in to the foyer of the dining room and the volunteers ask their room number, then go look for that tray on the carts. It may be there, it may not. In the latter case, you make small talk until it shows.

So I set up a sign-up sheet for one-hour slots (11-12, 12-1, 5-6, 6-7) and put it out on the CHBB list. People signed up. But I still feel the need to show up at least some of the time every meal to make sure things are running smoothly. Today and tomorrow there is at least one, often two, staff servers. The big test will be Saturday and Sunday, when there will be just one and that one may be doing desk work in the back. Issues arise that need professional help, people say, “I didn’t order this” or “Where’s my salad” or “could you please get me a vanilla ice cream also?” The volunteers can’t handle such requests. We’ll see.

While Wanda was cleaning my unit I napped in the lounge. Then back down to monitor things in the dinner hours.

Wednesday 01/05/2022

Spent the first part of the morning preparing to manage resident volunteers again. Late in the day came word that we now have 6 staff members quarantining at home. I reactivated my membership in Slottr.com, the sign-up sheet site we used in 2020. At 10, met with Marcia, and then at 10:30 the two of us with Rhonda, who brought in Gloria, the dining services manager, so we could find out what she needs.

It seems like what she needs mostly is for people to use the online ordering app to place their meal orders, or failing that, to phone their orders in. Following that meeting Marcia sent me her notes and I worked them up into a nice FAQ sheet, and started a separate sheet outlining “how to get fed online”.

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Then it was 2pm and time for the Resident Association exec committee meet, one agenda item of which was a plan of mine. But that kind of died for a strange reason: my plan requires the RA to assume a cost obligation of $1200-$2000 per year depending on the options. However, the RA has no predictable income source. They don’t charge dues, and very likely any suggestion of dues would generate a backlash. They don’t get money from the administration.

The financial powerhouse is the Gift Shop. When a resident dies or moves permanently to the Lee center, their relatives have to clean out their apartment, and often they don’t want some (or any) of granny’s stuff. So they donate clothes and furniture and what-not to the Gift Shop. Gift Shop volunteers send what they can’t sell to Goodwill, but they sell the rest, often to staff members. So the Gift Shop has a bank account with what one assumes is a healthy balance.

By some historical accident, the Gift Shop is its own little organization, with no obligations to the RA. It makes generous gifts, money to the in-house Library for example. But they are under no requirement to fund the RA.

So although everybody liked, or at least didn’t disagree with, my proposal, nobody wanted to see the RA take on a financial commitment without an income. So it’s back to me to find funding.

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After the meeting I completed my two-page terse & informative summary of how to order food online and sent it out. And quickly had to send it out again because I had screwed up the URL of the site. Well actually not me, I had copied it from an email from another resident who got it wrong, but it’s still my bad for not testing it.

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At 5 I joined Marcia in the dining room to scope out what is likely to be the main volunteer job. Last year, we delivered meals direct to rooms. Now people order (online or by phone) and pick up their trays in the dining room. So there are 3 or 4 carts with trays of food and a ticket with the name of a person or couple on each tray. People come in, and we find their tray and hand it to them. It’s a demanding job, you have to recognize the person and find their tray among 20 or 40 other trays. This went smoothly enough tonight because there were three servers there and those guys knew most residents by sight. I know most by sight but not their names, in many cases. Marcia knew all the names at once of course.

Point being, on the weekend there will be no servers, due to staff shortages, and it will all be volunteers. Tomorrow I work on organizing that.

Tuesday 01/04/2022

Rhonda sent an email to me and Marcia saying that there may be need/use for resident volunteers. Remember back in mid-2020 when we had so many staff out for quarantine we organized resident volunteers to deliver meals and do other tasks? That all ended in early 2021, and since then there has been a steady march back toward normal operations — until this week.

Today about 10am came an email saying the dining room would be closed for supper owing to shortage of staff. We could order food to go and pick it up at the dining room door. Later in the day came the announcement that the dining room was closed, all meals to be ordered to go, for at least a month.

We had the writers group meeting at 11am. During it, I confess I was checking my email while someone else read their piece, came an email from Stanford: while “winter sports” games will be played, only friends and families of the student-athletes will be allowed to attend. So there goes my plan to attend the Stanford-Oregon WBB game Friday night.

I went down to FOPAL and completed cleaning up the computer donations, that took from 12:30 to 3pm.

Rhonda held a general meeting by Zoom at 5 and I missed it! Read a book right through it. But she announced we finally, for the first time since 2020, have a covid case among residents, someone in the Lee center. So we are shut down: no gatherings of any kind, all meetings via Zoom or canceled, the planned bus trip to the Monterey Bay Aquarium canceled, dining room closed. Things are changing fast, please be patient with staff and be kind to each other.

Oh, and Gretta at CHM emailed to say that the normal all-day Thursday volunteer days would resume, but not all-day any more. We used to work from 10 to 11:30, then go out for lunch, and work again from 1 to 4. Now it will be just the afternoon session, to cut down on exposures. I replied I would skip this week at least as having a lot to do here.

Tomorrow morning Marcia and I will meet to figure out what resident volunteers might do. Not much, really, because the big job we had before, wheeling the carts loaded with meal trays, isn’t happening now. The ordering for takeout process has been in operation for months, quite a few people prefer to do that, and the kitchen staff is used to it. I’ve done it a couple of times just for fun. For people who can’t use the web, there’s an extension to call to give a verbal order, but the web interface is quite convenient. You specify what you want off the menu, and when you want to pick it up, and later you go get the tray. Afterward you bus your compost to the big compost bin in the basement.

So I don’t expect we will be organizing room delivery, at least not on a big scale. There are a few people who get food delivered to them, I hear the cart rolling by at breakfast time. So maybe. TBD.

Tomorrow is all meetings, I have to see Marcia at 10, then the RA exec committee — now via Zoom, the last few months it has been face to face — at 3, and a strategic planning committee at 4.

Monday 01/03/2022

The big event for today was a “book talk” that was originally to be a zoom simulcast, with the speaker in the auditorium but also on Zoom. However with new restrictions setting a max of 20 people in the auditorium, the event organizer George opted to go pure zoom, which frankly was a relief. That came off very smoothly.

Before the event I finished polishing my proposal for the RA exec committee and sent it off to all committee members.

Which took us to lunch time. This is the first week of a new recipe regime in our kitchen and the chef is trying, I will admit. Despite a critical lack of staff, owing to now three staff members testing positive and quarantining at home. Today was Mexican day with a choice of a tostada and relleno at lunch (two entrees, which is another improvement).

Next down to FOPAL where I didn’t expect to find much, holiday week and all, but in fact found something like 14 boxes of books. I processed about half, and will have to go back tomorrow. But: a big strike! A donor had tossed in a copy of the Bell System Technical Journal Vol. 57 No. 6 (July-August 1978). This was the issue of that journal that announced the availability of the UNIX system and described it in detail. It includes papers by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson, a paper describing the shell by Bourne (the Bourne shell?) and so on. All the now-famous programmers who created UNIX. I found a single copy on Amazon priced at $2,999. (OK, settle down, it is available from other used book sellers for as low as $60.) That one went in the “high value” box for sure.

In the afternoon arrived an email about a new county health order; visitors must now show proof of a negative covid test, just like for boarding an airplane. A separate email told about the third person testing positive — fully vaxxed and boosted, and having symptoms, just like the prior two. Rhonda is having a special meeting tomorrow. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to hear we are closing the dining room and eating in our rooms again. I hear the Sequoias (senior residence where lots of my neighbors have friends) has closed their dining room.

Regarding restrictions and Omicron, I asked the usual people if they want to ride to the SWBB game Friday night, and two of them expressed doubt about going into a crowd. “May give this one a miss” said one and the other thought likely Stanford would close Maples to audiences entirely.

In the evening I had supper with 6th floor neighbors Margaret and Leon Beeler and Cindy.

Sunday 01/02/2022

Boy I can hardly wait for February 20. Well, after watering the plants and doing the crossword, making it a proper Sunday morning I went for a bit of a walk. First I ordered my lunch for takeout, which we can do. At 11:30 I picked up my lunch and took it to the 11th floor where I put the PAC-12 Network on the big TV.

The Stanford Women had had a quiet weekend. They were to play at UW in Seattle on Friday but the Huskies had to cancel the game because they had too many positive COVID tests to field a minimal team. So now Stanford was in Pullman to play WSU. We soon learned that the Cardinal, too, had five players who weren’t available and didn’t make the trip, among them all of the “bigs”. Nobody on the team over 6-1 could play.

Didn’t matter. After a slow start, giving WSU hope that after 69 consecutive losses to Stanford, they finally might get a win. Nope. Stanford pulled ahead by 10 in the second quarter, and in the third exploded out to a 30-point lead for their 70th consecutive win.

Last week Channing House had announced that, owing to staffing shortages, they would no longer provide hot suppers on Saturday and Sunday. Instead, we could order sack suppers and pick them up at lunch those days. This had been the standard for holidays and holiday eves, so that employees could get off early, but now it would be standard weekend fare for the foreseeable future.

Faced with three sack suppers in a row (Friday being a holiday eve), I had proposed to my sixth floor neighbors that we order in pizza Sunday night. Seven had responded. I placed the order for five pizzas and two calzones right after the game, for delivery at 5:30, and it came right on time. Jerry and Betty had invited me to eat with them and Patty in their apartment, so I did and that was nice.

Everybody paid me in cash so now I don’t have to visit an ATM for another six months.

Saturday 01/01/2022

I fiddled around until about 9:30 when I stupidly decided, oh, I think I will go walk in… where… not the baylands, it will be crowded by now… oh, nobody goes to Rancho San Antonio park. So I drive down there and of course, all their car parks are full and there are cars circling the lots. What a dope I am. Of course everybody in the world has started out for a family walk on new year’s saturday morning.

I headed back. Had lunch with Carol Lois and Randy (I think I’ll start mentioning my “social” meals, which I haven’t done before). After, did a bit on assembling the VW. Consulted for a short time with Jerry about his and Bert’s proposal for video equipment.

That’s about it. Mad a sandwich in my room for supper.

Friday 12/31/2021

Went for a walk. Put in good time finishing one of the two proposal documents. Lolled about reading the internet.

At lunch when I should have picked up my sack supper for tonight, I didn’t because I had never turned in my menu selection. Not a mistake; I had deliberately not, figuring, I’ll feed myself, thanks.

About 5:30 I went out in the car to a drive-in restaurant and ordered a large shake and an order of fries. That was supper, eaten in the car. I am not complaining! Nor trying to appear pathetic. It was what I expected and wanted.

Tomorrow starts another year. 2021 was not horrible for me; no need to kick it out and slam the door behind it, like 2020. But no need to weep at its passing, either. Weep at Betty White’s passing, maybe. Not the year.

Thursday 12/30/2021

Started the day with resistance exercise in the gym. Spent much of the day studiously ignoring the two different proposals I started yesterday. However, I had lunch with Lennie to talk about the subscription proposal, especially the Vimeo one. And at 2 I met with Bert and got more understanding of what we should hope for in replacing the mics on the 11th floor.

I forgot to mention that yesterday evening came an email saying that, due to the current spike in covid in the area, we are tightening up. First off, the New Year’s Eve party has been canceled. Also capacity limits are back on the common spaces, max 20 people in the auditorium. Due to that, two events planned for the following week are being postponed.

Then, today came news of a staff member who has tested positive. Fully vaccinated and boosted, has symptoms, however probably no resident exposure.

And an hour later came another surprise: an email stating that owing to staffing shortages, we will no longer have dinner service in the dining room on Saturday or Sunday. Instead they will do what until now, they have only done on holidays and holiday eves: pass out pre-made sack suppers at lunch time, for consumption in one’s room. This will be the routine for weekend suppers for the time being.

Finally, as I was writing this, came an email from Janette at FOPAL saying that the January sale has been canceled owing to the surge.