Wednesday 06/30/2021

First up was to drive to Los Altos to see Dr. Marx for a checkup. I was a little disappointed because since I had seen her last November, she couldn’t do a “medicare wellness exam” but rather did an abbreviated checkup. However, when palpating my abdomen she noticed something she didn’t like but couldn’t identify.

Well, I am scheduled for a CT for a surgery follow-up on the 1st of August. No, she said, combining that you are still a little bit anemic (although in normal range) and you passed a fecal blood test earlier this year; and given you have lost a couple more pounds of weight (164 down to 161); I am inclined to be a bit more aggressive about this. I’m ordering a CT scan of you for sooner, if you don’t mind the extra radiation.

I called to make that appointment right after, and got a slot for tomorrow morning, 2 hours before my scheduled meet with Dibiase.

On the way home I stopped at a CVS to get an eyeglass repair kit, and when I got in, I replaced the missing screw from my frame. And did my laundry.

A few weeks ago I accepted Ian’s request that I take over the chair of the A/V committee, which has been dormant for a year and a half and looked like going on being dormant for months, until we get the auditorium back. Wrong! Got a request from Mary who is on the Events committee and is planning a 4th of July party. Wants audio and a big screen to show a powerpoint, on the 11th floor for Sunday night.

Previously the A/V committee insisted on an ERF, Event Request Form, at least 30 days in advance. Anyway I spent the afternoon, with Bert’s help, making all the audio work on the 11th floor. There’s a portable podium with wireless mics, and it ties in to the speakers on the walls. Took a while to find all the things with dead batteries and verify everything works.

As to a big screen for a powerpoint? There’s a big TV, about 6 foot diagonal, but Mary wants something bigger. Sorry, there is no such thing. She’s thinking of the auditorium where we have a big projector on the ceiling and a 20-foot diagonal drop down movie screen. But nothing like that on 11.

Tuesday 06/29/2021

Did the aerobics in person on the 11th floor. Now that Veronica is on pregnancy leave, our leader is AJ who is younger, male, and definitely pushes us (me and Eva in person, Michelle on zoom) harder. Definite sweat.

Soon it was time for the writers group. I read my little thing about 5th among the group. Went ok.

I left the writers at 12 exactly and went to FOPAL, arriving 12:30. There were 6 boxes of computer books. Eventually I sent 5 boxes to the bargain room. Of the rest, about 8 turned out to be “high value” and went to that department for sale online. Shelved the rest.

I really want to sell books at Vintage Computer Fest West in August, but so far have had no reply from the organizers. So I have a stack of 4 boxes of “VCF candidate” books — manuals for old computers, etc — that are in the way.

At 6pm I met with Mary and Andrew who had invited me to join them for dinner, and they had also asked Gloria, who I have had dinner with before recently. Nice pleasant chat.

About 8pm I was just sitting down in my easy chair when the right lens fell out of my glasses. The little screw had come out of the corner of the frame. I searched on the floor and in the chair for a while, no luck. Plan B, I know I have a glasses repair kit… or do I? Apparently not. Plan C, get a paper clip and needle nose pliers and hack up a piece of wire to hold the frame together.

Tomorrow is a busy day: Doctor appointment for annual physical in the morning, then laundry. I have to squeeze in a trip to CVS to buy a repair kit.

Monday 06/28/2021

Today I was determined to get a few things done, and did. Went for the standard walk first. Then paid a couple of bills.

Then settled down to take all the comments I had received from three other writers in our critiquing group, and integrate them into Pelajis. Useful, nothing large except for Susan’s major comment that it takes too long to get going, there’s nothing happening, where’s the adventure?

This is not the first time this has been said. Well, I’m sorry, but there are things happening. With every scene, the characters, and the reader, are learning about this unfamiliar world and how it works. And to me as the writer, this learning, this discovering the details of this new place and how to navigate within it, is interesting. Exciting, even. I like to think there is a class of readers, little nerds like me at age 10, for whom it will be exciting too. Or maybe every child’s mind has been so conditioned by the bright fireworks of saturday morning cartoons that those little nerds are all gone.

After that I was determined to write something for the writers group this Tuesday, and got that done before and after lunch.

Finally I scanned the cover of Software Tools in Pascal and started converting it for I am not sure what purpose. No covers were harmed in the making of this image.

Sunday 06/27/2021

OK, I missed a day. This day I went for a Sunday drive, by myself, up the back roads and highway 1 and back down 280. Eh, exciting.

Saturday 06/26/2021

Went out in the morning and over-bought at the farmers market: dried apricots, cherries, two kinds of pastries. By the time I’d eaten one and half the other pastry, I didn’t need lunch, so skipped it.

Wrote a program: a Python program to read a Python program with interspersed text, and write a new file that is in Markdown text with interspersed code blocks. Nice that I can still write code that works. This worked after I fixed a couple of typos.

Mid-afternoon I told myself to get the bleep out of the house, and went for a walk. Went down for supper at 5:30.

Continued reading War for the Oaks, one of maybe six partly-read books on my Kindle. It’s a fantasy that involves a musician getting mixed up with the Faerie kingdoms that are warring over control of … Minneapolis. Not the greatest; it has a lot of dialog that goes nowhere, just bickering. But I am just interested enough to keep reading.

Friday 06/25/2021

Off at the crack of dawn — well, 7:15 — for the PAMF lab in Sunnyvale to give blood for labs. Returned to Lytton avenue in Palo Alto for a nice breakfast of coffee and pastry at Mme. Collette’s. Chosen partly because it is nearly adjacent to my bank, where I went at 9:15, brushing off pastry crumbs.

Stanford Federal Credit Union has multiple agents waiting for you to walk in the door. I ended up with Nick, who listened to my tale of trying to get VIA benefits to do EFT. He looked at the record of my account and didn’t see any problem, and talked to his manager and got the same advice.

Then he placed a call to VIA customer service and talked that person through the thing. The VIA customer service can’t take direct deposit info over the phone. One must go online and log in, or have them send a form. We got her to escalate one level to someone in “payments” but it was the same story there. They have no ability to look at any log of attempted transfers. They don’t even have as much info as I do; they don’t see the “Reason R15: account holder deceased” message. And they have no answer other than to try again to enter your direct deposit info.

Nick spent nearly 40 minutes sitting on the phone with me, he talked to the people as did I, but got essentially nowhere. So I have officially given up. I will ignore all requests from them in the future to do EFT and simply keep cashing their occasional checks.

In the evening I had a ticket for a play at The Pear theater. Turns out, so did several other people here. So I got a ride with Patty, Carol and Mildred. The play was a muddle of a fantasy by Christopher Chen titled Late Wedding. Which had nothing to do with the play, there were no weddings. Supposedly based on, or at least inspired by, the fantasies of Italo Calvino, it was in my humble opinion a very lazy mish-mash of ideas thrown together with a lot of meta-stuff about the nature of plays and being a playwrite.

If it had had an intermission (and if I’d been driving) I would have left at intermission. But it didn’t, and I wasn’t. So I sat through the whole thing. Big humph.

But, on the good side, it was the first time out to a live play in 16 months or so.

Thursday 06/24/2021

Went up to 11 for aerobics but I was the only attendee physically or on zoom by 8:35, so I told AJ to forget it.

Off to Yosemite for the first time since pre-pandemic. That’s the big warehouse in Milpitas where CHM keeps all the stuff that isn’t on display. Just for nostalgia I took a picture of the first ever core memory, from the Whirlwind circa 1955.

That’s the stack of core planes, and a few of the many vacuum tubes that made it work. On display at the museum is one looking very similar to this as part of the SAGE project of a few years later. The stack implements, I believe, 32x32x16 bits, or 1K of 16-bit words.

Four volunteers did a little practical work, a lot of chatting, then off for lunch and then came on home; Aurora the curator had a meeting and couldn’t stay the afternoon to boss us.

In the CH dining room, today the servers started using hand-held PDA things to take orders. The system seems to work however the people I was sitting with, and who ordered a few minutes after I did, waited a long time to see their food. So that problem isn’t solved.

Wednesday 06/23/2021

Woke up feeling positively good, and with a temp of 97.2. Yay. (Felt healthy all day, but by evening was up to 99.0. Still, good.) Went for the standard walk and felt good.

Tidied my desk of a couple of things. Did I say that I had a call yesterday from VIA benefits, wanting to have me fill out yet another form for direct deposit, because clearly the last one had the wrong numbers. The person was unable to acknowledge that reason R15 “account holder deceased” — which they couldn’t see on their computer — had to mean that (a) the account number was correct, or else it would have said something like “unknown account”, and the routing number had to be correct or they wouldn’t have reached my bank at all. Nope, has to be my error, can I send you another form? We discussed how to escalate this. She said it could only be escalated if I first “talked to my bank”. About what? Just to make sure everything is right. Then I can call back and the customer service person can escalate.

Yeah, I bet they will jump to do that. OK, though, I have some info printed out; I will take it to the bank and see if they have any logs that show when and with what parameters, VIA attempted the transfer. If they do, I may call VIA back.

Then I did the necessary reading of other people’s writing for the critiquing group that meets Friday.

At noon I was invited to lunch with George and Mickie. That was ok. I went for a second walk, then had a nap.

At 4pm Stanford baseball attempted to stay in the College World Series, and failed. They lost the game in the bottom of the ninth, in a very unusual way: their best pitcher let the go-ahead run for Vanderbilt get to third, and threw a wild pitch allowing it to score. Game over on a wild pitch.

Tuesday 06/22/2021

Did the aerobics class at 8:30. Attended the writers group at 10:45. When they were wrapping up at noon, I headed downstairs, grabbed a snack from the to-go refrigerator, and headed out to FOPAL. We have been asked to not do any work from 3-5 because that is when they are now accepting donations, so I needed to get my computer section organized before 3. Which I did, barely, leaving at 2:45.

That’s about it. Tomorrow catch up with other obligations.

Monday 06/21/2021

Went for the standard walk and felt fine. At 11am I got a call from neighbor Jean, on the 11th floor, wondering if I was going to put the Stanford game on the big TV. I’m the only person in the whole place who knows how to get ESPNU via the ROKU. Yes, I’ll be right up.

Stanford rediscovered their offense and defeated Arizona by a bunch, 14-5? Something like that. I watched most of it in my room. On Wednesday they play Vanderbilt, a must-win game against a powerful team.

At 3pm the RA Exec Committee met to discuss the directions we want to give to the group that want to study medical resources at CH. Well, mainly the group wants to lobby for an in-house nurse-practitioner but we are going to make them actually produce a report.

That was about it. Tomorrow is a full day.