Sunday 07/11/2021

After my usual Sunday morning activities I decided to walk to the California Ave. Market. I did that a week ago and was disappointed to find no market. Well, duh, that was the Fourth of July. They took a holiday! So it should be back, and it was. I had a tasty breakfast of pastry and a bottle of apple-pomegranate juice and walked home. A total of just over 4 miles for the day.

I spent a lot of time working on Software Tools in Python. Coding is such fun. I also spent some time with the Chrysler model. I said it was insanely detailed? Here’s how detailed it is. This picture shows a cylinder head and its matching rocker cover. The cover is going to be glued on to the cylinder head, right?

However, they molded the rocker arms into the cylinder head. They will be permanently covered when the cover is glued on. Boggle.

If they’re insane, I am too. I actually spent some time thinking how I could paint that cylinder head, with dark brown gloss to make it look oily, and then maybe rub the rocker arms and shafts to make them a lighter color so they would stand out. Right. Just before gluing the rocker cover on to hide it forever.

There is a problem, though. The back side of each cylinder head has a couple of hefty molded projections. They do not match any hole in the cylinder block, and are not shown in the assembly drawings. So maybe I’m supposed to cut them off. But they’re bigger than the usual flashing.

It almost looks as if the cylinders should have been open, and those pegs would slide into the #1 and #4 cylinders. But they won’t. Strange.

Saturday 07/10/2021

Went for a short walk, then spent most of the day in my room, alternating among my various hobby projects. I actually opened up the boxes of two car models. One, the 1957 Cadillac coupe deVille, was quite disappointing. No engine; not many chrome parts (and that car has a lot of chrome parts), the tires are not rubber but cast plastic.

The other, a 1956 Chrysler 300b, turned out to be insanely detailed, there must be 50 little pieces to the engine alone. A very good kit indeed. So I started on that one. It will take a lot of work and time but should be rewarding.

Friday 07/09/2021

Went for the walk; it was good.

Today I had set myself the task of completing the upload of Pelajis, in 600-1000 word chunks, complete to the Kindle Vella system. Which I did; and marked the first 20 episodes as “published”. Vella is designed as a platform for publishing serials. It isn’t clear to me if there is a benefit in holding back the remaining episodes, releasing them at intervals as if they were being created fresh, or if I should just dump the whole thing out there. Sooner or later all the episodes will have been published, either way.

Vella is supposed to go live next week. At that time the story will have a public URL and readers searching Amazon will be able to find it. Readers will be able to “favorite” stories they enjoy, and the most-favorited ones will be featured in the “Vella store”, or so Amazon tells us.

Anyway by early afternoon I had finished the clerical clicky-clicky tasks to create all the episodes and publish the first 20.

At lunch I sat with Pru and Bob. I like talking to both of them. For supper, though, I decided to walk to Whole Foods and buy a smoothie. That was a modest supper Marian and I used to get once in a while. I walked but Whole Foods didn’t respond; their smoothie counter was clearly not in operation. Walked on to the Creamery instead.

I am thinking that tomorrow I may break out a new car model…

Thursday 07/08/2021

I was the morning cardio class, the only person with leader AJ on the 11th floor. However there was also one person on Zoom.

This was the first time I executed the schedule I had figured out for Thursdays. Cardio from 8:30 to 9. Then down to my apartment to shower and dress, and down to the car and drive to CHM in the East Bay, either Shustek in Fremont or Yosemite in Milpitas, arriving before 10am. It makes me nervous to schedule things that tight, but of course it worked just fine, arriving in Milpitas with 15 minutes to spare.

Today we did various work related to cataloging and storing items. Too complicated to explain and too boring. On return around 3pm, I took the car for a wash. I used to take it to Lozano’s in Mountain View, but now I go to Ducky’s car wash here in Palo Alto. As much as washing the outside, I wanted to get the inside vacuumed out. Somehow it had picked up a lot of crumbs and trash, I can’t imagine how.

Wednesday 07/08/2021

Yup. Completely missed a day. Went to bed last night without a thought of doing a blog post.

What did I do on Tuesday? I know that I did the aerobics class, and attended the writers group, and went and spent a couple of hours at FOPAL digging through boxes of donated computer books looking for things that might interest the Vintage Computer Fest.

Today, Wednesday, I went for the standard walk. Then I spent some time reviewing the material for the meeting of the Strategic Planning Committee (SPC hereafter). At this point it is all about revising our Mission Statement, which is nearly as boring as it sounds. And list of values.

I also spent a couple of hours continuing to upload segments of Pelajis into Kindle Vella. At the end of the day I had uploaded 42 segments, and had reached the part of the book where I had not given it a close editing on this third, fourth, or maybe it’s the fifth pass. I plan to finish this task and have the whole thing ready to go before the end of this weekend.

Then it was time for the RA Executive Committee meeting. The only point of discussion was the hot news of the day, which had been announced by email a couple of hours prior. A staff member in the Lee Center called in sick, and as normal, Angela went to them at once and gave them a quick Covid test — and they were positive. This staff person has received both vaccine shots so it’s a “break through” case. Anyway they would have had no contact with us IL residents. The AL wing is on modified lock-down pending tests.

Which led up to 4pm and the SPC meeting which was nearly as boring as expected.

Monday 07/05/2021

You know, I think I have been inconsistent with the dates at the head of these entries. Sometimes I use the U.S. convention of mm/dd/yyyy but I notice that at least yesterday I reversed the day and month. No, yesterday was not April 7th.

Today I spent some time preparing the Kindle Vella entry for Pelajis.

In particular they want a piece of art to show at the head of the story. The artwork is to be a square so big, no bigger, and designed so the important bits are in the middle because they will crop it to a circle. After much thinking and looking at, oh, at least 1000 images in google image search, I finally decided to go with a moment early in the story where the kids are looking out of a shuttle window down at Pelajis from space. With that concept in mind it only took an hour or so to cobble up this, from various sources.

At first the Vella web page refused to upload this image. “Something is wrong!” it would say excitedly, “check that your image is the right type and not too large.” Well it was, and it wasn’t; but what was wrong was that it was not exactly square. It was 1266 pixels wide by 1267 pixels high. When I cropped that one row of pixels off the top all was well.

Later I created the first five “episodes” by copying and pasting. It turns out there’s a minimum of 600 words per episode. My first break was a little short. So I had to steal a bit from the next scene, and then from the next, and finally when I got to Episode 5 I was almost 200 words short and at a very definite chapter break. I did not want to pull the top of the next chapter into Ep. 5, so I had to compose 200 words of new story, padding out a scene that I had summarized in a paragraph in the original.

Then I went down to FOPAL and processed a bunch of books, and spent not quite an hour inventorying the books I had thought would be suitable for the Vintage Computer Fest (henceforth VCF). Disappointed to find I’ve got only about 3 boxes, which is not enough to make a good display on an 8-foot table. More on this tomorrow.

04/07/2021

Being Sunday, I watered the plants and did the NYT crossword. Then I walked the 1.5 miles to California Ave, meaning to reward myself with something from the Midwife and the Baker stand at the farmers market, but unfortunately, they have apparently killed that market in favor of filling up the roadway with more restaurant seating. So I took a Lyft back.

Spent a few hours working on hobby projects. At 4:30, I went down to Dennis’s place in SJ and had a good supper and pleasant chatting. Left there in time to get back to CH by 7:20, and set up the A/V for the evening’s party. Which was quite nice. Well organized and fun. At 9pm we adjourned to look at at the fireworks to be seen around the horizon, in about a normal quantity for a 4th.

Saturday 07/03/2021

In contrast to yesterday I took it easy today. I felt a little under the weather in the morning but that went away later. I went out in the car to run a couple of errands, then relaxed until 2pm when I met with David Golden and Mary on the 11th floor to organize Mary’s setup for the 4th of July party, scheduled for 8pm tomorrow night. Got the video and audio all set.

Over other times of the day I did a bunch of editing on Pelajis and started to set up the actual book on Kindle Vella.

Friday 07/02/2021

I took a walk this morning, but before I did I wrote a to-do list to get everything I needed to do down on paper, and there was a lot of it. Just all sorts of responsibilities swirled up on me yesterday.

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For the CH Treasury, I needed to print an invoice documenting the case of masks I bought, and cut a check to myself, and record that in the journal. I did those things right after the walk.

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I needed to contact Mary who is running the 4th of July event and set a time to practice putting her powerpoint slides on the big TV, and where she wants the lectern, etc. I sent an email to her before I left and she had replied by mid-morning and we settled on Saturday at 2.

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I needed to communicate with the long-dormant A/V committee now that events are starting to happen, to see if they still want to be on the committee. Sent that email before the walk; got a few replies later.

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I needed to follow up on the idea of selling old computer books from FOPAL, at the Vintage Computer Fest, which will be held at the Computer History Museum August 7-8. The organizer had not responded to my inquiry. So I re-sent it this morning, and he did respond later in the day. He offered to let FOPAL be a vendor, for free. So then I had to write several FOPAL people to find out if we should go ahead. I’m not sure if that is going to work out. One issue is, who is going to organize the crew of 4 or 5 people we will need to cover all of two long days. Another is, will we actually sell any books? We’ve never done this.

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Mary Beth called about 12, asking if our Slottr membership still worked, because she would like to do a sign-up sheet for the Food & Dining Services committee. So we met in the lobby at 2pm and I showed her how that worked and we built her little sheet. As the manager of the gift shop she has a real budget (the gift shop generates the only real income the resident association has) and will probably get her own slottr account.

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In the midst of all this, I was trading messages via Sutter Health with Dr. Marx. She has referred me to a urologist to talk about the kidney cysts (I want to know if they could be contributing to loss of appetite or too higher blood pressure). And also, the full report on the CT scan reports a node on an adrenal gland, “probably adrenoma”. Anything ends in -oma is a concern, although Dr. Marx says these particular findings very rarely mean anything. However it would be up to an endocrinologist to decide, so she referred me to one of those.

So I made the phone calls to set those two appointments.

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Then I put in an hour editing Pelajis. Having in mind that pretty shortly I am going to put it up on the new Kindle Vella service, and I need to get that done.

Retirement. It’s a thing, I hear.

Thursday 07/01/2021

First thing was to walk up to PAMF for the CT scan. I was scheduled for 8:30; I got there at 8:15 and was done and out by 8:35. Two hours before my next appointment. I had coffee at Peet’s and then walked home, thinking about what to do next. I had just time to get in the car, drive to Safeway and buy a couple of things I want, and make my 10:30.

Which I did. Dr. Dibiase upped the quantity of metoprolol to see if I can lower the BP some. As to the anti-clot Plavix, which annoys me by making any wound or shaving nick bleed, and make bruises come up on my arms from a hard look, she said very sincerely, “You have a lot of hardware in your system. So I’d say please, keep it up for at least a full year.” That would be this fall, November-ish.

By this time the analysis of my CT was online and we had a look. It appears the problem is the kidney cysts that were noted on the prior CT, back in February (Day 2.079). At that time they were dismissed as not a problem. However I notice that at that time, the urologist Dr. Chung, had specifically asked if I had “unusual feelings of fullness”.

On the report for today’s CT, it was noted that the kidney cyst is pushing things forward, which is what Dr. Marx presumably felt. I haven’t heard from her about this. When I do I will ask if, possibly, the kidney is compressing my stomach, leading to a reduction in appetite, leading to my recent loss of weight.

The question is, what can be done about the cyst(s)? I will investigate further.

From there I drove to Shustek. I was too late to meet with the gang at lunch, so I just waited until they came back to work about 12:30. Dave Bennet and Steve Madsen were already working on cataloging, so working alone, I cataloged a BRAINIAC, a simple digital-logic kit that was sold in the late 1950s to the mid 1960s. It had many parts packed in paper envelopes which were degrading and brittle. So I repacked everything in archival plastic bags. It took 2 hours in all.

At supper time I went down and bumped into Marcia and Kent and Martha and oh darn forgot her name, who invited me to join them. Pleasant conversation for an hour.