Today I had a lengthy meeting with Bert about the auditorium “punch list”, the list of imperfections in the upgraded auditorium. He is banned from taking it to staff any more. As chair of the AV committee I am going to present it under the idea that these problems need to be fixed because they impede our work.
To that end I am rewriting his original list, which contained a lot of grumpy comments and implied criticism. I also wanted to drop several items. Today he persuaded me to put several of them back in. Sigh. Which means lots more editing and writing. When? Sunday, maybe, or Wednesday.
In the afternoon I went out for an hour long spin in my motor-car. Such is our exciting life.
Well, kind of jam-packed. I ate breakfast in the dining room for the first time in months, then headed out on a walk. “The creek” — there are several creeks that run from the hills down to the Bay, but the one of significance in my neighborhood is San Francisquito, which runs down over the Stanford campus, then defines the border of Palo Alto and Menlo Park; I cross it twice on my walk, both times on bike/ped bridges — the creek had been running a healthy stream, probably two feet deep, where it comes under the railroad, after last weekend’s rain, but now it is down to maybe 6 inches of clear flow. Well, it had been dry for months and months.
At 11:30 I went down for an early lunch. At 1pm the speaker for the coming Monday’s Book Talk was to come and try out the stage in the auditorium, and make sure his laptop presentation would work on our projector. So I needed to start up the sound system. He, a Mr. Trapnell and his wife Nomi, were early, bless ’em, and not only that but their laptop was all happy with our system and he had a USB clicker for advancing his slides like a pro. You’d expect no less of a Navy test pilot, which he was. I don’t think he’s the famous test pilot Trapnell, since that one died in 1975, but we’ll see.
I think they may end up as CH residents. Nomi was very interested in the place, asked a number of questions.
With them gone, I had brief break to read the material for my next meeting, with Lennie and Mary, about Mary’s latest revision of the Event Planning Form. Mary is not easy to work with, and Lennie got quite testy with her. But no blood was shed, and we got some changes agreed on and meet again soon.
That brought us to 3pm for the Halloween Party in the lobby, featuring the staff parading in costumes. A lot of the staff, especially the Lee Center nurses, enjoy doing this each year. Here’s a pic of the back part of the lobby, one of a number that somebody took and posted on the in-house forum.
Which brought us to 4:30 and the final Oktoberfest beer and snack time of the year. I drank a large beer and had the snack, and wasn’t hungry for supper so didn’t go. Of course I’m regretting that now, but eh.
Thursday mornings are busy. I have to leave at 9:15 for my CHM gig in the East Bay, today at the Yosemite ave warehouse in Milpitas. Before that I have to tidy my apartment in anticipation of Wanda cleaning the place at 2pm. That mainly involves getting rid of a week’s worth of recyclables, and generally picking up and putting away.
And do some exercise. I went down to the gym and did the strength machines again. Again, about half way through the second round, my body said, enough. Not short of breath. Heart not racing, because with the beta blockers I’m on, I don’t think it could race anyway. But just, “enough”. Next Tuesday, or maybe sooner, I am going to change it up; lower the resistance until I can do 2 or 3 rounds. That should be more effective for building muscle anyway.
The machines are all the same make, fairly new, and use air pressure, rather than weight plates, to set the resistance. There are +/- buttons you press to raise or lower the pressure and thus the resistance. Initially I set the pressure to what would allow me to do 20 reps on each machine, which ranged from 200psi on a leg press, to 35psi or less on other things. OK, I am going to fine-tune it down to what lets me complete 2 rounds of the 7 machines.
So off to Yosemite. Here among other things, we were trying to break in a small fleet of brand new laptops, Microsoft Surface model. They are very pretty, nice design. Unfortunately they also run Windows (Ten? I think) plus they have remote management of their software from the CHM IT team. Getting through multiple layers of safety and work group software to log in was trying. But some useful work was accomplished. And hanging out with fellow nerds.
First up, I went for my 2.5 mile benchmark walk. Striding along, feeling fine. No sign of breath shortness or weakness. So the valve isn’t breaking down, or at least not much. I will try the gym equipment again tomorrow. It might be some side effect of the drugs I’m taking, who knows.
In the afternoon I completed my carefully phrased, positive not negative, cooperative not contentious, list of problems with the auditorium sound system. Not quite sure what next; I could pass it by my A/V committee? Or go direct to staff with it.
Did a resistance workout in the gym early. A strange thing: on the second round I wasn’t able to complete the reps on several exercises. Muscles felt fatigued. I did not feel short of breath or dizzy or any other symptom; I just didn’t have the strength to finish, unless I stopped for a rest. This is the same resistance and reps as I did the first two times.
This is concerning, because I’ve been told an early sign of my good old pig valve breaking down, would be sudden fatigue. I felt completely normal the rest of the day, but that didn’t involve any exercise, either. I will pay close attention to my walk tomorrow.
After that I passed the time to the writers group at 11, working on the list of A/V concerns. Or actually one item in the list. The contractors who did the upgrade provided a battery charger for the microphone battery packs. We had spec’d and expected, charging docks which hold the whole microphone. Bert is very hot about this. I finally found the Shure charging docks on the (very badly organized and confusing) Shure.com website. But they only charge two mics; we would need four of them to keep our 8 mics happy, about $700 give or take.
When I tried to write a smooth and convincing explanation of what a big difference this makes, I ended up convincing myself that it doesn’t matter after all. The extra work for the AV team is that, before an event, you have to take battery packs out of the charger and put them in the mics. After the event, you put the packs back in the charger. Total about 2 extra minutes, compared to lifting the mics out of the dock and putting them back in the dock.
So I plan to not present this as an issue in my list. Bert will not be happy about that. But it felt like I had accomplished something doing that research and reaching a decision.
Other emails were going back and forth. I swear I am doing a lot of commenting. It is hard to write an email that is short, readable, and won’t piss anyone off.
Started out with the usual walk, which was just fine. The vertigo I mentioned yesterday is going away I think. It still bothers me if I do particular things, like bending down and then standing up, or looking up and then down. When I first got up, there were a couple of steps where — how can I describe this? — my foot didn’t come down where I expected, and I kind of lurched left or right. This kind of thing is serious, because as I’ve mentioned, falls are how people get seriously hurt around here. But that went away entirely by the time I started my walk, and hasn’t come back.
In my spare time I’m working on an A/V document. There are a number of shortcomings in the “upgraded” auditorium system. My colleague Bert made such a nuisance of himself about these issues that he was asked to step back from the whole situation. But there are things that need to be resolved, so I am taking it up. I am trying to create a complete problem list, so phrased as to not raise any hackles. This is quite time-consuming. I spent some time in the morning on that.
After lunch I went to FOPAL where there were seven boxes of books, a large number of them from one person, an engineer presumably now deceased, or maybe just retired. Anyway a surprising number of them proved to be “high value” (over $25 used, at Amazon), and easily 40 of the rest were worth shelving at $3 to $10. That took me past 4pm.
I had been invited to dinner by Susan and Harry, Caroline and Ann also. Very pleasant dinner and talk.
I’ve been flirting with vertigo for the past week or so. Moments when my internal balance goes wacko: I lean back and look up, then look forward; or turn over too fast in bad; or bend over. Today it was a little worse, making me a little nauseous just getting up from a chair. So I took it very easy.
Taking it easy was made easier by the weather, the first heavy rain in, probably, more than a year. The TV weather persons were practically having orgasms at being able to talk about “possible flooding” from this “atmospheric river”. It’s been a long time since they’ve had anything to talk about other than low humidity.
So I had a couple of naps, did a couple of crosswords, read a little. About 4:30 I got an invite to drinks and dinner, and had a pleasant evening of chat. I didn’t have the drinks part. The vertigo makes me miss a step sometimes and I don’t want to fall, so no need to add alcohol to that hazard.
With nothing scheduled, I went out to buy a few things. (The title above is because I couldn’t think of a word for the opposite of therapy. Retail not-therapy.)
I wanted 5 pounds of sugar for the birds, and I got that. I also wanted a quart of heavy cream, because I want to try mixing my Keto Chow breakfasts with that instead of oil. I got that at the third store. Also I would like some quadrille pads, otherwise known as graph paper pads, just because. I didn’t get those.
I bumbled around to a big Safeway, to a Walmart, to Office Depot, and to a Costco. All were very busy. If there are supply chain issues, they were not apparent today. Full shelves, lots of people filling up huge cartloads of stuff. had a Costco membership and let it expire. According to their website if you don’t have a membership you don’t get sale prices and you pay 5% extra. Cool with me, if they have heavy cream, which Safeway nor Walmart did. Very busy and very large store. Very harried clerk, and a sign saying “If your membership isn’t current, the cost of renewal will be added to this purchase” which is not what the website said, but anyway I hadn’t brought my expired membership card. I was just explaining that to the harried clerk when the guy behind said, “It’s alright, he’s with me” and held out his card to scan. What a prince of a fellow.
I was very disappointed with Office Depot who didn’t have the pads I expected. Oh well.
Today was the day scheduled for a tour of Chinatown. One of our newer residents, Gloria, used to lead tours of Chinatown on a regular basis. (I first mentioned Gloria on Day 2.158 when I was invited to a dinner party that included her.) She had offered to lead one for CH residents and this was it.
There were 23 people signed up, fortunate since the larger CH bus holds 24. It’s a Ford, or anyway a bus built by somebody on a Ford chassis. And functional but not deluxe at all.
Gloria is well-informed and well-organized. She talked a lot about the unique culture of Chinatown, which derived most of its early inhabitants from one very small region of China. That group spoke a regional variation of Cantonese, which is still spoken there today, despite that since the Communist revolution, Mandarin has been the only language taught in any schools in China, with Cantonese now restricted mostly to ShangHai. She went over the early influence of the Family associations. I had not known that China has only 400-some unique surnames and you are not supposed to marry someone with the same surname as you. Etc.
We visited several places, including, uniquely, a museum of the history of Chinese show-business, created by a friend of Gloria’s who was herself a showgirl in the 40s.
The group crosses from the Hilton to Portsmouth Square to start the tour.Gloria explains some Chinatown history.Fortune cookies were a Japanese invention, but when the Japanese were driven out or interned in WWII, the Chinese took over the manufacture of them. This shop still folds 10,000 a day, they claimed.From the show-girl museum.
Hit the gym at 7:30am to do my round of the resistance machines. At 9:15 I headed out under partial clouds (it rained last night) for the East Bay, Fremont, the Shustek center. Where I spent the day cataloging. Cataloging what? Well mostly a donation that consisted of a variety of ergonomic mice. Lots of companies tried to make mice that would avoid carpal tunnel, or something. Plastic blobs shaped by holding a big lump of clay and gently squeezing it, and taking a mold from that.
For the afternoon we were joined by relatively new volunteers, a couple, Paul and Katherine. I had met them first a couple weeks ago but didn’t really inquire into their history. Today one of the museum curators stopped by to answer a question, and he an Paul started an animated conversation in which I learned that Paul was the Paul Laughton who wrote Apple DOS, the original OS for the Apple II. (No, Steve Wosniak designed the hardware. Steve Jobs managed the development and marketing.)
And that his wife Katherine worked at Atari and wrote their editor/assembler.
I felt almost as impressed and star-struck as when I talk to my CH neighbors, John and Francis, who worked on the Apollo Guidance Computer under Margaret Hamilton.
Codgerville 