Wednesday 01/19/2022

Took a call for the tech squad, mostly reassured Grace about her iPhone. It isn’t behaving oddly after all. Then went out on my standard walk.

Worked on printing or re-printing some prints. I received the professional print, where I printed a picture on my Epson and also sent the same JPG to mpix.com. Their print was not better than mine in most respects: color saturation, sharpness, etc. However they had warmed it up quite a bit, when comparing their print to mine side by side, the whites in my print had a distinct blue or cyan cast. My bad; I should have seen that. I reprinted mine correcting for this, making sure that white highlights were white, not 7000Kelvin blue. Then comparing the prints, I don’t see any advantage in paying mpix.

On the other hand, their print is certainly as good as mine, and cost a reasonable $10 + shipping for a 10×15-inch print. Would I put $10 in labor in materials into any print? Probably; good photo print paper is expensive, also ink.

At 1pm it was time for the FOPAL volunteers monthly zoom meeting. No special news there. The meeting ended on a note of classic Zoom comedy. There’s a lot of unintentional comedy in zoom meetings. For example it always amazes me how few people pay any attention to how they actually look in their little thumbnail windows. They show as dark silhouettes with a bright window behind, or you see only their foreheads. Today there was a couple eating lunch, their kitchen table nicely framed. And there was one attendee who had dark and frizzy hair, and was sitting so that a ceiling fan was right behind her head. The out of focus spinning blades made it look as if she had a tornado on her head, or a swarm of bees.

Anyway, after all the business was done and the host was checking, “any more questions, well it’s been nice…” at this point some doddering fool accidentally (I think) shared his screen. That’s a two-step process, you click share screen (and the host should have set the switch so attendees could not do that, so her bad) and then you have to click on the window you want to share. So now we are all looking at a PowerPoint (I think) screen where this person is editing a presentation on something unrelated to FOPAL. You could see his mouse moving around. He was probably paying no attention to the meeting, completely unaware that all the others were now watching him edit his presentation. Everybody is yelling, “Ed, stop sharing your screen” to no effect. At which point I clicked Leave Meeting.

I noted that my calendar said I had a haircut appointment for 3pm, but I checked with the front desk, and of course the beauty parlor is closed during pandemic precautions.

At 2:30 I got a phone call from “unknown number” which I expected was someone warning me about my extended warrantee expiring (I always press 1 and when they come on, tell them they are lying pond scum and should die in a fire) but no, it was Apple calling to say that my MacBook was back! When I dropped it off Saturday I was told to expect 7-10 days so this was a pleasant surprise, so I went and got it.

When I got home I found that Apple had wiped the hard drive and reinstalled the OS. Now, they did ask me twice, is your data backed up? And I was sure it was backing up, so fine. Now I have a brand new MacBook, I have to choose my language and time zone, and then tell it where to recover saved file from and… it doesn’t recognize the backup drive.

The backup drive is attached to the desktop machine. Long story short, for some reason the backups for the MacBook are kept in a “sparsebundle” file, and the Migration app didn’t know what to do with that. I go to the internet and quickly find directions on how to proceed. I have to physically attach the drive to the MacBook, reboot it, do NOT go into the Migration assistant but continue to the default new system. Then mount the sparsebundle as a drive, and NOW start the Migration assistant and it will recognize it as a backup.

That all worked, restoring all my settings and data files. Now it’s 4pm. However, I had never backed up the /Applications folder. After all, the apps are all the same… no they are not. Turns out there are several apps important to my use of things, which are not in the base OS and now I need to download them individually. My two web browsers, Firefox and Brave. My Sudoku game. My Solitaire game. My RSS reader. So that was a busy hour up to 5pm, downloading and installing important things. Oh, I just thought of another one, Graphic Converter, the simple graphic tool I used for photos I put in the blog.

But everything is pretty much back to normal now, and it is so nice to be off that Chromebook.

Tuesday 01/18/2022

Slept unusually late (6:40 my gosh) so felt a little rushed. Still, ordered breakfast for 8:30, then was at the gym about 7:50, did 2 and a half rounds of exercises, and picked up the breakfast tray at 8:30.

Today is the writers group at 10:45 with a cue of “describe your covid amusements”. Between 9 and 10:15 I wrote a tasty little essay on the challenges of building model car kits, so I had something amusing to read. Got a few laughs.

At 12:30 drove to FOPAL (I had not ordered a lunch as the menu didn’t look good). Found 8 boxes of books waiting for me. Took 2:15 to process and shelve. Bought a protein bar at the store and some drinks, and came on home.

At 6 I picked up my supper tray and just as I was about to sit down, my eye was caught by an orange glow on the eastern horizon. The full moon (well, it was full yesterday), apparently called the Wolf Moon because it is the first of the year, was just rising in some clouds and behind a tree. Oooh I said, picture. Got the camera, put it on the tripod, made a bunch of pixels. Putting two different exposures together gets this.

This is what I hastily wrote, titled “the box in the closet”. This was the first time I’d thought of Richard McMullin in several decades.

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The box sits in my closet, glowering at me. Challenging me. Daring me.

Truth told, to the best of my memory I did not build model cars in my youth. That was the hobby of my best friend Richard, and I remember sitting in his bedroom — discussing our schoolmates, our parents, and the world in general with world-weary cynicism out of our shared basis of near-complete ignorance — while Richard assembled small parts. So I knew how the kits went together but didn’t attempt it myself, then. Partly because I knew from Richard’s littered desk how many tools and bottles of paint you needed, and I didn’t want to spend the money; also probably because I could compare my pudgy, clumsy fingers to Richard’s small, dexterous hands, and could tell how things would go.

But, sixty years on, with Covid isolation I found myself craving something tangible to do. Programming, which is a lot like sculpting clay except the clay is invisible and never hardens, was a possibility, and I started learning a programming language new to me, but I couldn’t come up with a project I wanted to build. Somehow I remembered model cars.

For those who’ve not done one, these models are amazingly detailed. Often they have more than 100 parts. The parts are injection-molded in plastic, a process that preserves the finest detail of the original master mold, so a plastic dashboard the length of your finger will bear clearly-visible embossed knobs and grills and instruments with tiny tiny pointers. Of course that dashboard is molded in off-white plastic; it is up to the model maker to paint it in realistic colors, carefully studying reference photos from the web to know whether this flea-sized feature should be chrome or body-color or what, and then putting the color on with a very small brush.

Since mid-2020 I’ve finished four models, and truly the worst problems I’ve had have been with the exterior finish. Real cars have glass-smooth paint jobs with no color variation. No blotches, no thin spots, no runs. You can’t get that with a brush, or at least, I can’t, and I tried, a lot.

So I bought an air-brush tool and began spraying the bodies. The air brush brought its own problems, like “fish eyes”. A fish eye is a spot in a sprayed coat of paint where the wet paint, for absolutely no reason, draws back in horror from something microscopic and leaves an unpainted crater in the wet film. If not the gaps of fish eye,s there’s the appearance of tiny motes of dust stuck in the wet paint, which on a 1/25 scale model, are the size of gravel.

When dust or a fish eye appears while you are spraying, you are, um, stymied. You have to let the paint harden, then sand the area to make it all level and smooth (otherwise the defect would show through subsequent coats) and spray again. More than once I have held a body shell over the sink and with alcohol wipes scrubbed off multiple coats of paint back to the original plastic and started over.

Which brings me to the box in the closet. It’s a 1/16th scale, 1957 Ford Thunderbird. Most kits are designed at 1/24th scale, so one inch of model covers 2 feet of the real car. I’ve built one other 1/16th scale car, and it came out OK, but my gosh it was a lot of work. The T-Bird wants to be built, and it knows it could be magnificent when complete, and I am afraid to start it.

Monday 01/17/2020

Busy day, sort of. In the morning, waiting to start a 10:30 meeting, I completed the engine of the 65 VW. Complete with a little weathering, some paint to make the bottom look oily.

It’s coming up to tax time and Schwab says the 1099 forms are ready, and I just got the one for social security yesterday, so I scanned that one and downloaded all the Schwab ones into a shiny new “2021 taxes” folder.

Stew wrote asking for advice on a TV for the 4th floor lounge and I spent some time writing good advice on that. Then I attended the committee meeting, during which I discovered that the audio input on this Chromebook is terrible and nobody could understand me. Future zooms, I will have to take at my desktop iMac until M1M1 is back.

After lunch and a nap I joined Patty for a walk in the baylands. Later, I and Leon went to Eva’s place and we successfully got her Macbook to mirror its screen on her TV. However it turned out that she wanted that so as to show the movies she has lined up in her Netflix DVD queue which doesn’t work, most of those movies are not available for streaming. And when we tried to stream a movie that was available, the Netflix player in the Safari Browser wouldn’t work while the Mac was sharing with the TV. Total fiasco. Despite a technical marvel, you just click-click two little widgets and boom, your screen is on the TV, no cable needed. Amazing, except it didn’t do what she actually wanted.

Sunday 01/16/2022

Watered the plants and did the NYT puzzle, and then set out on a longish walk. I walked to California Avenue, gave myself a food reward, and walked back, total a hair under 4 miles.

This brought me to a bit after 11am so I sat down to watch the Stanford Women playing Utah. I expected this to be an easy one. Utah has always lost to Stanford since Utah joined the PAC-12, and owing to various covid issues, had not played a recent game. Nope. Inspired perhaps by neighbor Colorado, they slowed the Cardinal. After Stanford led by 8 and looked like having an easy time, they lost their defensive focus and let Utah go on a long run and get their own 8 point lead at the half. The game was close the rest of the way with over 10 lead changes. Stanford pulled out a 6-point lead with a couple of minutes to go, Utah missed several 3-point tries, and we won, coming from behind two games in a row.

After that I pulled out all my photoshop skills to get that picture of Aoraki (Mt. Cook) looking how I wanted it, and printed it out. Then I put some time into the VW model. The engine is nearly complete.

I didn’t want the evening menu so decided to drive out and eat. Plan A was Mike’s Cafe in midtown, but they turned out to be closed temporarily for covid testing. I ended up at Wahlburger’s downtown.

Saturday 01/15/2022

Not much happening today. At 11 I bumped into Marcia who told me there had been some kind of bad words either between some volunteers or between volunteers and kitchen staff. She suggested I start composing an email urging everyone to be patient and kind. Hmmm.

At 1 I took M1m1 off to Apple for my appointment. A lovely cheerful “Genius” girl checked her out and said she would have to go to their repair center, 7 to 10 days. Sigh. I had already taken out the HP Chromebook I used on my “recent” (i.e. 2019-20) travels and made sure it was up to date and working, so I can still do email and blog and watch videos from my easy chair, as I am doing.

On return I went into the kitchen and talked to one of the supervisors and she didn’t know about any bad feelings or words. That’s good. I called Marcia and she will check further from her source but it may just be an interpersonal thing between 2 people.

My three colors of metallic paint came and I did a bit more work on the VW model. That was about it. Well, and getting used to the Chromebook again. I had forgotten it has a touch screen. You can tap to do a mouse click, and touch and drag to scroll. This goes a long way toward making up for the touch-pad which is really unpleasant to use.

Friday 01/14/2022

Went for the standard walk in the AM. Was OK.

Worked on the next picture to print, one we took in New Zealand. This one.

Turns out this is a very difficult picture to work on. I have tried several different things to bring up the contrast and make the center section pop out more.

I had turned the problem of Eva’s new TV over to Leon, my neighbor down the hall who is a budding techie. He and I went down to her place about 3 and tried several things with only partial success. Critical is getting it to be accepted by the local network and that we failed to do. It’s a good TV for having cost only $260, although its angle of view is very narrow, if you aren’t right on axis with it, it loses contrast fast.

I made the sign-up sheet for next week’s dining tray volunteers. I will publish it tomorrow.

Harriet, Stanford fan, wrote to ask if I wanted to go to Haas Pavilion when the Cardinal plays over there. I had to say no. That would be a perfect place to catch some virus and bring it home. I’m surprised Cal is still allowing fans at games, frankly.

This was the day of Rhonda’s covid status meeting. The two positive residents in the Lee center have cleared up, tested negative; and today no more staff people caught it. But there’s an issue: several people had bought tickets to the SF Ballet season that starts next month, on the assumption that Channing House would run a bus to the performances. All non-essential transportation has been canceled due to staff shortages; plus attending a 2-hour concert seems like a good way to catch covid. Ballet fans are pretty pissed.

Thursday 01/13/2022

Did my resistance exercises first thing, yay me. About 9, went out in the car to safeway to replenish two kinds of supplies: sugar for the hummingbirds, and mini-cans (8oz? tins) of soda for me.

I do not understand marketing. Safeway has literally 20 solid feet of 5-level shelving devoted to Coke, and every bit of it is stacked with 12-packs of the 12oz tins. A few kinds of plastic bottles at the end. They have mini-cans of 7Up, of Pepsi, of several other things. Why not a couple of feet of one shelf for mini-cans of Coke?

On return I put up my picture rails. I’ve had them for a couple of weeks. I put in a request to Facilities two weeks ago. Then the covid staff shortages hit. Clearly Facilities wasn’t going to get to it soon, and I have the tools and know-how, so I did it. This is what you see approaching my end of the hall now.

I am going to print more pics from my extensive catalog of fine photographs. The big one top center, you can’t really see in the above shot but it’s a picture of a picnic spread from our 2010 Normandy trip. It has a lot of colors and some deep shadow detail. This print was made on my Epson, but I sent the same JPG to mpix.com and I’m eager to see what they make of it. That print should arrive this weekend.

In the afternoon I had agreed to go with Eva to shop for a TV. She had an old, 32-inch TV standing on a small table 38 inches across. She wasn’t interested in anything larger. I managed to convince her that a 40-inch would fit on her table. Actually a 43-inch would also but she drew the line at 40. She ended up choosing a 40-inch Vizio which I thought would be easy to install, and it kind of was? But it is “smart” — so smart it’s actually hard to use because it keeps making assumptions about what you want and trying to be helpful. Instead of just “show me my Comcast box on HDMI1 and STFU.”

In the evening instead of turning on my TV, I fell into a YouTube rabbit hole of boogie woogie pianists playing on public pianos in railway stations. Yes, it’s a thing, play that one and then pick from the suggestions below, rinse and repeat.

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Wednesday 01/12/2022

At 7:30 checked with the volunteer dispensing trays to make sure she was ok (she was) then went for the standard walk for the first time in days and days. Felt ok. Stopped at CVS but it was only 8:30 so the pharmacy wasn’t open.

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Then did something that’s been on the back burner for months: printing pictures. Two years back I bought a new printer, and I’ve only used it for mundane stuff. But there’s the project of putting up picture shelves outside my door, and populating them with my own photography. Yesterday I saw a recommendation for an online printing service, and I wondered whether they could do as well as my printer can. So I picked a shot from the queue of pictures waiting to be printed. I tweaked the image to my satisfaction and printed it. I was really pleased with the 11×14 print that rolled out of the Epson. Then I sent off the JPG to mpix.com, and was impressed that they had replied, your order has shipped, about 6 hours later.

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At noon, started the laundry. Met 6th floor neighbor Eva in the laundry room. She wants to buy a new TV and asked if I would go with her. Doesn’t work today but probably tomorrow. So I may be going to Best Buy again.

While the laundry ran I walked back to CVS to pick up two prescriptions that they have been texting me about every day for a week.

Worked on the VW model again but got frustrated with my aluminum paint which didn’t want to cover engine parts even with a second coat. Went online and ordered different.

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Supper tonight was not good. They proudly introduced a complete new menu last week, ironically just as the dining room was shut down. Lots of ethnic days, which have been from not-bad to really good, and today was Japanese day. Unfortunately the bowl of noodles was inedible for me, bland soup, block of noodles glued into a mass, sliced pork that was full of gristle.

I thought, dang, tomorrow I’m going to go out and have good noodles and I looked up Gombei in Menlo Park, where I’ve been eating Japanese noodle soups for decades. Oh so sad, they closed their doors just last November! There is probably someplace as good in the area but I don’t know of it.

Tuesday 01/11/2022

Once again I felt it incumbent on me to stop by the breakfast service and make sure my lone volunteer was OK. The lone volunteer this day was Carol, President of the RA, who I like & respect a lot. She was doing fine. But another day without exercise. (They haven’t closed the gym, and I really should be taking advantage.)

Next activity was 11am, a zoom meeting of CHM volunteers, mainly to be introduced to the new system of signing up for volunteer shifts, replacing the old system that was called Volgistics. The new system seems adequate, although it has a few glitches.

From lunch on I had no commitments, a big change. Amazing how fast my life can swing from “I’m too busy how can I keep up with all this” to “What am I going to do with myself”. I actually spent some time with the VW model for the first time in many days.

For some time I have been mildly bugged by a flaw in the screen of M1m1, my new and expensive Macbook Pro with the M1 chip. There’s a one-pixel-wide vertical red line, like a fine red silk thread, running vertically about 40% of the way from the left edge. I’ve been reluctant to take it in because I use it constantly. Now I got out the old Chromebook that I took when traveling (both to Greece and to London… oh my that’s 2.5 years ago…) and made sure it worked and let me read email, browse the web, and blog. That took an hour because its software was out of date.

Then off to the Apple Store with M1m1 under my arm. And right back again, because a repair problem has to go through the genius bar, and the earliest appointment I could get was next Saturday.

Monday 01/10/2022

First event of the day was to go down at 7:30 and see the breakfast shift off. It was a bit confusing mainly because of one confused resident who hoped for breakfast but hadn’t placed an order. Kitchen staff dealt with his issue but it took a few minutes. However Lennie, the volunteer, was concerned and later wrote us an email proposing ways to help such residents.

Next up was the monthly Resident Association meeting. I gave a one-sentence Treasurer’s report, then later on the agenda I promoted the tray distribution activity, then Marcia addressed other volunteer concerns.

After the meeting I had time to pass before my scheduled lunch pick-up, so I took a modest walk to Gamble Gardens. Then picked up my lunch and took it to my room to eat. After, off to FOPAL where I found three boxes of computer books, but one was someone’s curated collection of books and conference proceedings from the early 1980s, all on the FORTH language. This is prime stuff for the computer historian or vintage computer fan. Not likely to sell from my usual shelves, but perfect for the Vintage Computer Fest next August.

Despite Rhonda having suggested that if we could avoid going to stores, we should, I went into the grocery store on my way home for drinks and items I keep in my room. Maybe I shouldn’t be so casual.

On my floor two of my neighbors have been sick, but not due to covid. Craig Allen got really sick from RSV. He and DIane had to quarantine a week while waiting for test results. PCR tests are taking 3, 4, or 5 days to come back. Now neighbor Doctor Margaret is in bed with upper respiratory virus, PCR test pending.

On return from FOPAL I found an email storm brewing. A bunch of people were concerned about people not being able to use the online meal ordering system, and had various ideas about how this could be remedied. Marcia and I went down to the kitchens and found today’s supervisor, Nareshni, and went over the issue with her. There are in fact just over 20 residents (of 180) who are using the telephone to place their meal orders, and a very few, maybe 3, who don’t/won’t/can’t do that and get paper printouts of the menus and circle what they want and hand them in. Kitchen staff know them all by name and deal with them routinely.

While we were in the kitchen learning this, the resident members of the Food and Dining committee had published a working plan to provide “buddies” for anyone who has trouble ordering food. So ok, maybe not needed but effective, so nothing for us to do.

At 4:45 we met on Zoom for the monthly 6th floor meeting. This is where I learned that Dr. Margaret was feeling unwell. She joined from her bed and looked very miserable. Nothing new here.

An hour before the meeting came an email: the mass testing of residents, planned for tomorrow, that we had all been urged to sign up for? Canceled due to a great shortage of staff!

During the meeting came another email detailing new Covid impacts: today 6 new employees tested positive. Two cases were cleared, net +4, there are now 11 staff on home isolation. The email said that “In the last few days, an increasing number of staff have been exposed to their children who have contracted Covid, or been exposed to Covid, after returning to school.”

This belatedly explained why the mass testing of residents had to be canceled. It also explains the next email which was from housekeeping: starting this week, we get rooms cleaned only every 2nd week.

The feeling of sliding back two years to early 2020 is really depressing, and is affecting everyone around me. We had this beaten, we were opening up, restrictions lifted — and then boom, everything shut down again.