Wednesday 12/08/2021

First activity of the day was to go to PAMF Los Altos for a scheduled physical. The Sutter Health/PAMF website had directed me that it was time to schedule an annual wellness exam per Medicare rules. But Doctor Marx walked in saying, I just saw you in June, so this can’t be an annual wellness exam, but let’s look you over anyway.

Nothing new. Well, I’m to resume taking aspirin. I had stopped taking aspirin when I read that the official guidance was, it didn’t have the benefits they used to think. Turns out, yes in the general case the chance of it causing internal bleeding outweighs the benefits. But in my specific case, with the aortic dissection and the artificial valve etc etc, the benefits of preventing clots greatly outweigh the risks, especially since I had been taking it for years and always passed my occult-blood stool tests.

My blood pressure as measured by the nurse was 104/45. At home an hour earlier, 135/45. Is my BP monitor busted? I am going to test it yet again.

On return, at 11:15, I met with Kass to look at the Lecternette again. Nothing special to do. At 2pm it was the monthly resident association executive committee meeting. The hot news here was, on advice of legal counsel, Channing House has removed their former upper age limit of 83. Will this mess with the business model? Will accepting older people raise costs? Rhonda doesn’t think so. They have had to contact a number of people who applied over the past year and been turned away for being too old. There are currently half a dozen units available for sale, although I note that my 6th floor is full.

In between meetings I got through a job I was worried about on the model VW. I cut teeny skinny little strips about a millimeter wide — less than a 16th of an inch, more than a 32nd, so probably right around a millimeter which is 1/25 of an inch — from adhesive-backed metal foil, and applied them to simulate skinny little chrome strips.

They are actually a bit wide for scale but they look OK. Next job is to spray the body hood and engine cover with gloss clear. Well, maybe not.

See those black lines around the fender and the tail lamp asembly? Black vinyl gasket stuff. Around the front fenders, too. If you owned, or even rode in, a Bug back in the day you remember those beads of black stuff.

I have a very fine draftsman’s marker pen. Should I try to draw in those black lines, before I put on the clear coat?

Tuesday 12/07/2021

Did some of my resistance exercises at 7:45. I say some because for the first time, there was another guy there also using the machines. Clearly a resident, but not somebody I know. Anyway, there are 8 machines, and you set the resistance by holding down a button to increase air pressure. Then, nominally, when you finish, you reduce the air pressure below 20psi. I have a list in my phone of what pressure I set each machine to. So my usual thing is, I do all the machines left to right, setting each to my pressure and also adjusting the seat or whatever. I can leave them at my pressure, because there’s nobody around but me. Then I go back down the line for a second set, and sometimes a third, shorter set.

Well today I’m halfway down the line and notice there’s this other dude starting from the far machines. So should I go back and reduce the pressure on the 4 machines I’ve done? I don’t, and he without so much as a nod, skips around me and adjusts machine #1 to himself. I am bemused. He must think I’m a careless idiot, leaving the machines on higher pressure. I don’t like him. So I leave. Next time, well first off, I’ll get to the gym at 7:30; but if there is anyone else, I will just work each machine completely, as many sets as I want, before moving on to the next.

So then I headed out, down to FOPAL, where I tidied up my section. Went through my box of overflow, titles that I had multiples of, and put as many on the shelf as I could. Then did my pre-sale count. All done in 90 minutes, and back to CH in time for the writers meeting at 11.

After lunch and a nap, I put what I believe is the final color coat on the VW. That dries for a while, and on maybe tomorrow afternoon I will have my first go at setting teeny tiny slivers of metal foil onto the teeny tiny trim strips.

Monday 12/02/2021

Went down at 9:45 to start preparing the auditorium for the 11am Book Talk, which was to be three Stanford profs who wrote a book about how to fix the internet. And found the chairs all disarranged, actually set up for a staff meeting of last week. Got the front desk guy to call housekeeping and about 10:30 George came in and started moving stuff around. Meanwhile I set the AV stuff up. The profs, with two grad students, arrived at 10:45 and we had them going in good style. The event came off well, no thanks to anybody but me.

I grabbed a sandwich from the grab-n-go refrigerator and went to FOPAL. This is pre-sale week. I processed four boxes of books, but I will still have to go back tomorrow to tidy up the shelves and do a pre-sale count.

Rescheduled the play that conflicts with an upcoming event, from a Sunday matinee to a thursday night, and notified Jean. Ate supper in my room and went to bed early, only to have to get up again to do the goddam blog.

Sunday 12/05/2021

Prompted by mention of a “king tide” I decided to go walk in the Baylands. In fact the tide wasn’t especially high so I either misunderstood or had the time wrong.

Exiting the trail, starting to cross the street to my car, I failed to see a cement curb, tripped, and fell. No serious damage, although my right elbow is sore.

At three I met with Stew and Lennie to work out how to simulcast a talk in the auditorium on Sunday the 19th, on Zoom as well. We worked out a kludge that should do.

Unfortunately this event conflicts with a matinee at the Bus Barn theater. I will have to try to move that tomorrow.

Saturday 12/04/2021

Did some stuff in the morning. Worked on the VW model a bit.

Got involved in AV problems by email.

Took a tech call to help Joe with his iPhone. Joe is very verbal, and feels strongly that computers should conform to his understanding of things, not the other way around. This makes it hard to explain things. But we managed without either of us losing our temper.

Friday 12/03/2021

December 2, 2018 was day one of my life as a widower. I re-read the blog posts for the first couple of months. (Click “It started here” and then follow the tiny pale grey link at the end of each post.)

Then I finally got around to finishing the book Dennis loaned me, Irv Yalom’s A Matter of Life and Death. In it, he and his wife wrote alternate chapters during her final months dying of cancer. I think my blog posts for days 0.1 – 0.40 or so, hold up rather well in comparison to Yalom’s closing chapters about the weeks after his wife died. Despite not being a psychotherapist with years of experience, I was equally frank, and I think I analyzed my emotions well, and drew interesting conclusions.

Now here I am, three years on. It doesn’t feel like three years gone. I’m sure it would feel like a much longer time had we not had the stupid pandemic. I would have made at least one, probably two or three, overseas trips, for example. But all the pandemic days (500-plus of them now!) are pretty much alike, no events to make milestones.

As I noted in the special post preceding this one, I have numeric evidence that I’m probably losing my verbal edge. Crossword puzzles test a very narrow range of skills, though; mostly remembering vocabulary, and understanding allusions and references. I don’t have a lot of evidence that I’m mentally failing in any other areas. (But would I notice?)

Anyway, today I worked a little on the VW model, and spent a couple of hours with two other Davids — David M and David G — trying to diagnose a problem with a “Lecternette”, a small portable sound system. I actually got my soldering iron out and used it! That was to put a new phone plug on a microphone cable that had failed.

Trying to get the soldering iron in my toolbox in my storage cage in the basement, I had to make some room. I threw out the large cardboard box my iMac had come in. I’ve always kept the boxes computers and such come in, with their customized foam inserts and all. And they sit in the storage location and eventually get thrown away. The box for the previous computer sat in the back of the garage at 2340 until the roof rats had made nests out of the cardboard before I threw it out. So, anyway, out went a very large (like 40″ wide, 30″ tall, 10″ deep) box. My storage cage is better now.

For half the year I’ve been anticipating writing this note. Here’s the story.

Every day, Monday through Saturday, I do the LA Times crossword puzzle, which is carried in my daily paper, the San Jose Merc. Back in 2012 I started recording my solving times in a spreadsheet. Each morning I use the stopwatch feature of my watch to time my solving of the puzzle, and record it. Obviously I have the spreadsheet keep the average time for each day.

I start a new “sheet” in the spreadsheet file each year, and about 2014 I began including in the current year’s sheet, the difference between this year’s average and last year’s. Early in 2021 I noticed what looked like a trend, which has remained consistent for the whole year.

Third row shows the average of the times for this year. You can see how the LA Times puzzle makers very nicely grade the difficulty of each day’s puzzle, so that Mondays take less than half the time to do, as compared to Friday, and Saturday is the hardest of all. The Sunday column is for the NYT big puzzle.

Top row, as it says, is last year’s average, minus this year’s average. It’s red if the result is negative, meaning this year’s time is longer. Notice they are all red. My average solving time for 2021 is, as you can see in the middle row, from 8% to 19% slower than it was last year, across the board.

Does this mean I’ve gotten 8-15% slower in my verbal thinking this year? It might mean that. It might mean the puzzle has gotten harder, which I very much doubt, because how and why would they do that? For more info I pulled in more data. I graphed my solving times for all the years I had.

Here the vertical axis is minutes to solve, and the horizontal numbers are the annual averages. This graph omits the Sunday times, so it doesn’t have to be tall enough to show 35-40 minute values. What does it show?

It seems to show that I had trouble with Friday and Saturday back in ’14 and ’15. That aside, just looking at 2018-21, there seems to be a fairly clear trend, a shallow rise.

Will the numbers for 2022 continue the trend? Am I getting verbally slower? And if so, will the change continue a slow climb, or will it accelerate?

Thursday 12/02/2021

Palindrome day! Also my birthday. I got an email from Laurel, a phone call from Dennis, later a phone call from nephew-in-law Marc, and a text from Darlene.

I did my resistance exercises at 7:30, and by 9:45 was across the Bay at the Shustek center. Steve and I catalogued several things, most notably a prototype or test model, of the flight computer for the Cassini mission. I remember following the Cassini mission from launch in 1997 through its termination in 2017. I didn’t take a picture of this object; it was just a circuit board about 7 by 10 inches, mounted in a big metal frame with a bunch of test circuits around it.

On these CHM volunteer days I work alternately with two brilliant women, Gretta and Aurora. Both are smart, creative managers. Gretta, who got married last year, is now pregnant, expecting around April, at which time she will take 12 weeks off, and the job of cataloguing incoming donations, which she manages, will be put on hold for that time. Or so she says; I bet they can’t let a backlog build up that large. But we’ll see. Today I was a bit shocked when for the first time, I went out to what’s referred to as the loading dock, but is just a big enclosed space, and saw there is already a quite large untidy pile of unprocessed boxes of stuff. Mainly documents, which I don’t work on. I heard they were about to receive over 100 banker’s boxes of documents, the archives of CompuServe (remember CompuServe?). Anyway. Not my problem.

Oh, and there is what is so far only a rumor, that the museum proper will start to reopen in January, probably weekends only.

Wednesday 12/01/2021

Oooh look at that date. Tomorrow, day 365, is going to be a palindrome, 12022021. Cool.

Went for the standard walk. Then did my laundry. At 3pm I met with Ian, of the AV team, and Mary who is the choir director, to talk about the order of events at the upcoming holiday celebration, including the choir and various solo singers and instrumentalists. This takes some planning.

Later I worked on the VW model, practicing laying metal foil. The most difficult issue on this model is the chrome strips on the side.

This is a standard 1/25-scale model so the entire body is about 7 inches in total. Barely bigger than one of my fists. The chrome strip is molded into the model as a raised bead about a millimeter wide. The question is, how to make that shine like chrome? The kit includes skinny decal strips but they aren’t really shiny, just kind of metallic gray. I could try to paint along the bead with a chrome paint pen that I have, but I had a really bad experience trying to paint the similar raised bead of black on the VW Golf I did earlier this year. I am positive I could never get a uniform width.

The alternative is to lay down narrow strips of Bare-Metal Foil product. I have used it before but wanted to be sure it would work on such a narrow bead and that I could apply it, so I applied some to a similar size bead I found on the floor pan part.

Tuesday 11/30/2021

Did my resistance workout first thing. At 11, attended the writers meeting, although I had not written anything. Sprayed a 2nd coat of primer on the VW. Now it has to sit and harden for day at least, before I can sand out a few imperfections.

Here are a few pictures I’ve taken with my phone yesterday and today.