11/09/2021

Went for the benchmark walk this morning. It was ok.

The writers meeting at 11 was interesting. I hadn’t written anything (I’d written lots this week, but not for them) but several good pieces were read. One by Connie was particularly nice.

At 1pm I joined Bert and Rich in the auditorium to watch Florrie rehearse the vocal concert she will present soon (tomorrow? if so, I’ll miss it). I got some more info and then went and finished, almost, the List of auditorium issues.

Monday 11/08/2021

Don’t blame me; it was the internet. I’m posting this on Tuesday morning because last night there was a Comcast outage through the evening.

Because of the 9am Residents Association meeting I didn’t do any exercise. I know, lame. The only memorable news at the meeting was that the bridge is open again. This is a big deal around these parts.

Channing House has two buildings, the 12-story Tower where 200+ people live independently, also the site of most common rooms like dining, auditorium, and others. Adjacent, but separated by a courtyard about 50 or 60 feet wide, is the Russell Lee Health Center, a three-story brick building that houses mainly a floor of AL and one of SN. The buildings are connected at the 2nd-floor level by a wide Bridge floor that also contains several offices, meeting rooms, a large Activity room, the beauty salon.

Pre-pandemic, the Bridge was a main travel way. To get between buildings you would go up or down to 2, walk across the bridge, then go up or down to your destination. Then came the pandemic, and as part of infection control, transit across the bridge was closed. “Single point of entry” was the rule from the Health Dept for each building.

The door at the Tower end was physically sealed. The Activity room was converted to an isolated Covid Ward, reached only from the Lee building side. For a while the only way to get between buildings was to cross the courtyard and enter by an outside door. Then one elevator was unsealed so staff and people accompanied by staff, could go through the basement and take an elevator that led from just outside the underground garage, to the Lee Center. Recently that elevator was allowed to everyone, which is why a couple of months back, I was able to reach the reopened Beauty Salon for a haircut.

Well, the announcement today was, the Bridge is open again! The 2nd floor Tower door is unsealed. The beds etc. are being cleared out of the Activity Room, which to me means, soon I have to go check out what’s left of its A/V equipment. Wednesday, I can cross the Bridge for my next haircut.

After that, I went on down to FOPAL for the final time before the upcoming sale weekend. Tidied my shelves; took a pre-sale count. On the way home, picked up some essential groceries, namely, coffee and peanut butter.

Neighbor Margaret asked for help; she wants to be sure any pictures she takes with her iPhone and/or iPad, show up automatically on her Macbook. This involves stuff I’ve not dealt with before, and the Photos app which I don’t know well (and what I know, I dislike). We didn’t make much headway.

Sunday 11/07/2021

I was determined to make some progress on a couple of stale projects, and did a bit. I went over my records of my Part D insurer and made sure that everything I want to keep was filed in the right folder. I created my account with the new Part D plan. I paid a couple of other bills, too.

I’ve had this set of IBM 7040 manuals (circa 1962) that I meant to try to sell on eBay. They’ve been stacked on my coffee table for weeks. So today I took some pictures of sample pages, which took a while, and filled out the lengthy eBay listing form. Kinda got stopped at the end, though.

eBay dis-aquired PayPal years ago, but now is enforcing a new system under which the seller (me) no longer has any control over how a purchase is made. eBay takes the money using any method, PayPal, credit card, whatever, and reimburses the seller supposedly by direct deposit to the seller’s bank. Which means giving eBay the ability to transfer money into my SFCU account, for instance. But would that imply eBay has the ability to debit my account, too? I need to talk to somebody, perhaps Frank at FOPAL before I go ahead with this.

I worked a little bit on the list of Auditorium issues. I discovered I had some video I shot, from when the vendor was here showing us the system back in the summer. It had some interesting tid-bits so I went downstairs to re-check the details of what the guy told us. And emailed Bert with a question.

This was “fall back” day. It’s only 7:30 but I feel like it’s much later.

Saturday 11/06/2021

Went for medium walk, mainly to pick up some kind of snack food to share at the house concert tonight (“bring something to drink and something to share” said the invitation).

At 11:15 met with Jerry and Patty and drove to Maples pavilion for the first official game of the year for the somen’s basketball team. The visitor was Clarke U., a Catholic school from Dubuque. They played hard but were completely outclassed. The final score was 105-35. Everybody played and most people scored.

At 7pm I met with Sandy who I had persuaded some time back to sign up for the Dirty Cello concert. They put on a great show. Back at 10:30, the latest I’ve been up in some time.

Friday 11/05/2021

Since I went for a walk yesterday, I decided to do the gym today. This was not a success. I couldn’t finish the second round. I can’t explain why. Just my body very clearly tells me, “nope” at certain points. I don’t know what’s going on.

At 11am I had a date to help Edie with her mail. I resolved a couple of her issues easily.

After lunch I went down to the auditorium to play around and verify a couple of the items on my issues list. On the way I got a text from Apple saying my order had been delivered. Oh, that’s my new MacBook Pro! Later in the day I set it up and I am writing this on it now.

In the auditorium I found answers to 2 of my issues and deleted them from the list. Bert joined me and again persuaded me to add some more of his issues. So that means another editing session. Which I will not have time for tomorrow.

After supper I checked in with Ian who was to do AV for a concert. He was doing fine and didn’t need me at all. The concert was by a 17yo pianist, an Evergreen High student who played 8 pieces, by Bach, Liszt, Handle, Chopin. Generally the kid was most impressive, handling big showy piano things with a lot of style.

Thursday 11/04/2021

This was the first Thursday I’ve not needed to go across the Bay for the CHM. The volunteer days for November were chopped up due to various issues, and I opted to just skip the month and resume in December. So: an open-ish day.

I took care of some business before lunch. Wrote the annual Appreciation check. Filled in the Nest Egg spreadsheet with the numbers from the October statements from Schwab. It continues to maintain.

After lunch I tackled the Auditorium problem list. I added back several issues of Bert’s that I had initially rejected. The hard part of that was finding words to present each item as useful, justified, and a positive change. Bert’s problem was that his list of items was all phrased in terms of how wrong, sloppy, and obviously negligent these mistakes were. And by implication, what a bad job Certain People did in letting them pass.

My list covers the same things indicating the practical reasons that fixing them will make our work easier, and how cheap it will be to fix. Removing all implications and attitudes.

Finished that editing in the lounge while Wanda cleaned my room. Strange thing, Wanda complains to me that around my desk and around my table, my carpet is “sticky” and it’s hard to vacuum. I come back to the room, get down on my hands and knees, and feel the carpet. I don’t feel stickiness. Don’t understand. I guess I should ask for my carpet to be cleaned, which is something I can have done by Housekeeping.

For supper I treated myself by driving over to Midtown, to the little Vietnamese hole in the wall, Indochine, and having a dish of red curry duck. It is a wonderful concoction of tomatoes, pineapple, peppers and chopped up duck meat in a smooth orange-y sauce. Brought home enough for lunch tomorrow, too.

Wednesday 11/03/2021

In the night I did something stupid. I was half-asleep and thinking about a video Scott had sent on how to do the Epley manouver, a way to stabilize the inner ear in BPPV. And in bed (like I say, at least half-asleep) I visualized these moves, which just involve rolling over in a certain way, and did them. Except I didn’t do them right, and I actually started a siege of vertigo going, which kept me half-awake all night. Whenever I would try to roll over onto my right side, my favorite sleeping position, I’d hit a wave of vertigo.

When I got up I felt generally sick, and got vertigo when I tilted my head forward or backward. It made for a pretty miserable morning. I napped a lot.

I was active enough to do my laundry between 10 and 1. Then at 2pm I had the RA Exec committee meeting, which was interesting, but — do I want to talk about it? Yeah, there’s nothing secret here. A certain couple had compiled a long list of things they thought Channing House was doing wrong, things which would put CH in at least technical violation of some State laws, and had presented this very lengthy report to various people (not me) and to the CEO and the Board chair. The CEO had written a report refuting all the points and assuring the Board we were in full compliance with the law. Rhonda wanted to go over this report to make sure we understood it, which we did.

The couple involved, we are told, have terminated their contract and will be moving out. Best to them.

Along about noon I got a dispatch from the tech squad. The person requesting help, Nancy, was in fact one of the people in this meeting. I went up to her place afterward and fixed most of her problems. One, “printer doesn’t work” was quite easy: the USB cable had come loose.

At 4 there was a zoom presentation kicking off the annual Appreciation Fund drive. Tipping is forbidden at CH, but in lieu of tipping, each year they have a fund drive. You put your check in the collection box downstairs. This is all added up and just before Christmas each staff member gets a nice check. The recommended minimum is $700, which works out to $2/day, which is pretty stingy appreciation for restaurant service 3 meals a day and your room cleaned weekly, plus all the other stuff the staff does.

Anyway, by suppertime I was feeling very good, vertigo and nausea all gone. Let’s hope it stays that way.

Tuesday 11/02/2021

First thing I went down to the gym and did two rounds of the machines. That only takes 20 minutes, and I’m thinking I probably should reduce the numbers a little more and do three rounds.

After my shower I hustled back down to the lobby to cancel my name from the bus ride to San Jose to see “Van Gogh the Immersive Experience”. Chuck the organizer was a bit grumpy about the late cancellation, but then we discovered that when I signed up for the ride last week, I was actually signing up on page 2, the wait list, because page 1 was full. So I was cancelling off the wait list, and no harm done.

In the next hour I wrote something for the writers group. It had been three weeks since I wrote anything for them so I felt compelled. Now I’m off the hook for a week or so.

After lunch I went down to FOPAL and finished up the remaining 4 boxes of computer books. I found several “high-value”, one of which, a boring little 200page textbook on “Theory of Domains”, is going for $100 and up.

Monday 11/01/2021

Did not go for a walk because I wanted to be early in setting up for the book talk. In theory the A/V guy is only responsible for sound and projection but in practice they often have to set up other stuff. In this case, I walked into the auditorium and found the stage filled with three rows of chairs, blocking me from setting up the podium and screen.

The chairs were for the choir practice this afternoon. I stacked them into a single row at the back of the stage; lowered the screen; positioned the podium, plugged it in to the floor and taped down its power wire, ran another extension cord backstage so the laptop could be plugged in. I was turning on the sound system when I heard a quiet “oh, noooo” from the back of the room — Mary, the choir director. I soothed her, promising to put her chairs back. She should have known there was another event.

Anyway, Mr. Trapnell and his wife soon arrived and set up. He is the son of a famous Naval Aviator, test pilot and later Admiral Frederick Trapnell, and had written a book about his famous father. He had lots of keen pictures of people flying early warplanes.

After lunch I went down to FOPAL and processed 5 boxes of books, leaving another three because we’ve been asked to not hang about during the 3-5pm hours when donations are accepted. I’ll go down again tomorrow I think.

Sunday 10/31/2021

Today was the first day of the Stanford Women’s Basketball Season. Not a game, but an open practice. Years past, they have invited season ticket holders in to watch a practice, with the coaches running drills, followed by Tara introducing the team. This year they called it a “Red v. White Scrimmage” and played it as a full 40-minute game.

The team this year is large, 17 players on the roster. That’s because the NCAA, owing to the broken pandemic season last year, gave all seniors an extra year of elegibility. Two seniors, Anna and Alyssa, elected to get a free Master’s degree and play another year. (Kiana Williams opted to graduate and play in the pro league WNBA — however she was apparently dropped by the first team to draft her, and I can’t find anything on her current status.) A third graduate, Jordan Hamilton, transferred in from Northwestern. Why did Stanford accept a transferee when they were already two over the normal roster? I don’t know, but Hamilton is short (my height, 5-8) and a guard, so maybe they needed an experienced point guard?

Anyway, that gave Tara and Kate Paye each eight players. Players had reversible jerseys, red on one side, white on the other. Actually the two coaches traded players several times. Anyway it was a fun game, everybody got to show off their moves, and try to impress with their skills. Competition for playing time must be fierce with this many players and only 200 player minutes available in a 40-minute game.

I rode over in Jerry’s car, with Betty and Patty. I had a strange bout of vertigo earlier. While sitting quietly at the table doing the crossword, suddenly I got a wave of vertigo. No apparent cause, it wasn’t “postural” as usual (caused by a head tilt or movement), just surprise, you’re dizzy. I was still feeling an echo of that at 10:15 when it was time to leave so I was pleased not to drive, although I’m sure I could have.

That was about it for the day. I had lunch with Ted, Nancy, and Patty, then a nap, and read. I didn’t like the look of the dinner menu so ordered in a calzone from NY Pizza. Whoopee.