Saturday 04/24/2021

Today was the real start of the crossword puzzle tournament. Between 8am and 1pm we — about 1,000 people who had signed up — did six crosswords, ranging from hard to very hard. The scoring is based on time and accuracy. There is a maximum time for each puzzle, between 20 and 30 minutes typically. For every minute left on the clock when you click “submit” you get points. But you lose points for every incomplete or misspelled word.

After all 6 puzzles, my total score had me firmly in 723rd place, out of 998. So, I’m a leader in the last quadrant.

Other than the tournament, I went to two meals in the new dining room. It is kind of annoying but interesting to watch the ex-sodexo people trying to learn to be real waiters. Some of them don’t seem to be catching on. Like, at supper, a lady at my table had finished her soup. She moved the bowl aside, and said to a server who was standing beside our table, “I’m finished with this.” The server smiled, looked confused, and walked away. The bowl was still there several minutes later when I excused myself and left.

I mean, this is Waiter 101 stuff. A diner says, “I’m finished,” you automatically say, “Oh, let me take that away for you” and move it.

In model news, I now have the stuff to make decals. I had a last-minute thought about the tartan pattern. My image had black with orange lines, but the decal will be going on a black plastic seat, so shouldn’t I remove the black and just print the orange lines on clear? So with some screwing around I managed that,

I printed that on the decal paper, sprayed it with sealant. After it dried I cut one out and made it wet and slid it onto the rear seat.

Well, that sucks. The orange hardly shows at all. Also, the decal is just a little bit too stiff to settle into the grooves of the seat. This is all very disappointing.

Friday 04/23/2021

Went for the usual walk, this time ending up in our dining room for coffee. Later I sprayed the Golf body with primer. The plastic sheets to finish the spray booth will arrive tomorrow but for primer, I don’t care so much about dust.

Arriving today were another pair of jeans, this time Levi’s 501, the original fit. I didn’t like how they looked, so that’s another pair to take back to the Levi’s store. The issue here is that with my post-operation body I really need a 35-inch waist. Not all Levi’s lines offer 35 waists, and even when they do, they are not usually stocked in stores. So I order online and then find out they look like crap on my bod. I have a pair of jeans from Bonobos that look good on me, the only thing wrong is they are a little bit hard to take off. But you know? That’s not such a problem.

I had lunch in the dining room, new-england style clam chowder (as is Friday tradition) and a slice of pizza that was really, really good. For supper I tried the take-out option. I ordered their burger, to go. I only had to wait a few minutes and they brought out a take-out box with my burger and fries. It was a decent burger and good fries.

The reason I took take-out is that I haver registered for the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. I’ve wanted to do this for many years, but it was only held in Stamford, CT at a time that usually conflicted with the end of basketball season. This year it’s virtual. Today was the intro, from 5-8pm. It was a lot of history and chit-chat but I didn’t want to miss it; so, take-out.

Thursday 04/22/2021

After aerobics, I opted not to eat breakfast in the dining room, and also flouted their request to call to let them know I wasn’t coming. I don’t think they notice or care if someone doesn’t show. Instead I went out for a moderate walk, mainly to go to CVS to pick up some Famotidine (generic Prilosec).

Parenthesis: Years ago I was prescribed Ranitidine, basically the same thing, and it was wonderfully effective. I was getting heartburn almost every night and diagnosed with GERD. One pill with my evening pills and the heartburn vanished. Forget my evening pills, and invariably I will wake up around midnight with heartburn. Then, a couple of years ago, Ranitidine was withdrawn because of some unlikely problem and I was switched to Famotidine. Fine, but at the time I had three bottles of Ranitidine. So I kept using them. Until they finally ran out this week, and I had none when I reloaded my pill cases. So last night I wake up with heartburn, and today make an urgent run — well, walk — to CVS.

My route took me past the front of the Apple store, and there was Baranduin Briggs in an Apple shirt. She is a big SWBB fan. We worked with her for several years because she is a superb photographer. Her action shots of basketball players were featured on our fan website. Anyway, today she spotted me and told me about how she had gone to San Antonio to see the recent final four games. The NCAA would only allow a pocket camera in the arena, but she still managed to get some pictures.

Including this one, of the final shot in the championship game. Stanford is up by 1, Ari McDonald of Arizona has launched a final shot, the buzzer has sounded, the ball is in the air:

If the ball had gone in, Arizona would have been national champs. It bounced off the back iron, and Stanford was national champion!

I had lunch and dinner in the dining room. The food continues good. Tonight was a choice between mussels and chicken. I took the chicken. It was good. My table-mates took the mussels and were rapturous. “Best food I’ve ever had here,” said one.

But in mid-afternoon Rhonda dropped a bombshell: in an email she announced that Josh Aranda, who was hired in February as Director of Dining Services, was no longer an employee of Channing House, as of two days ago. Whoa! The guy who supervised the transition from Sodexo to our own setup, is out? And not with “best wishes for future success” or anything nice. Just “no longer an employee”. What happened? We’ll never know, of course. But wow.

I spent 90 minutes at FOPAL pricing and shelving a couple boxes of books. Found one that should bring $95 on Amazon.

I took a nap about 5, and woke up with… a nosebleed. Absolutely no cause, just a little dribble of blood. (yes, I checked my BP, 135) But that’s a problem because of the Plavix. I clearly remember a few months ago when a nosebleed wouldn’t stop, and I finally went to Urgent Care, where a ham-handed ignoramus of a doctor shoved an extremely uncomfortable wad the size of a tampon up my nostril, which I finally took out myself in the middle of the night. Yeah, I remember that.

Following that experience I acquired some liquid styptic stuff, which I have used several times for small scratches. But this was what I got it for. Fold up a postage-stamp size piece of toilet paper, saturate it with styptic juice, slide it up my nose. It worked! I could even breath around it. I refreshed it after supper. It should be good for the night and I expect things will be ok in the morning.

04/21/2021

Today was the day when the new food service system began. I went down at 7:30 for the grand opening. The dining room had been somewhat remodeled. Mainly the large cafeteria serving area in the center was gone, replaced by a lounging area with chairs, couches and low tables, plus a cart with coffee urns and pastries.

The areas that formerly had tables had been rearranged, mostly to use smaller tables. Formerly there were some 6-tops and I don’t think any of those remain. It was all hands on deck for staff; administrative people were acting as hosts and directing us to tables, while people I recognize from the facilities staff are working as servers along with the former sodexo people.

My breakfast was the featured french toast with berry compote. For lunch I had clam linguine, which is a dish that I used to make back in the day. In fact, I made it better. I filed a feedback form saying it was too dry, needed more sauce. For supper I had braised short ribs, which were pretty good and plated very prettily on a bed of broccolini.

I must note that about 8pm I had a bit of diarrhea. I hope that wasn’t directly caused by the food…

Also during this excitement I did my laundry and worked on the model car. About four I drove out to Stanford shopping center to return a pair of jeans. I had ordered them online and when they came, I immediately disliked them. Turns out you can return at a Levi’s store, and there’s one in the shopping center very hand. So now I have a $45 credit in my paypal account.

Tuesday 04/20/2021

Just after aerobics and showering and dressing it was time for the monthly concert and lecture by Stephanie and Paolo. They ran a little long and I had to bail from that to see the Apple Event. (Actually neither of those were zoom, the pianists on YT and Apple streaming from Apple.com.) Anyway Apple had a lot of new things I don’t really care about. Except for the redesigned iMac which is beautiful, but I can’t really justify replacing my 5-year-old one. That nearly ran over and I bailed to join the writers group at 11, which ran to 12:30.

Right after lunch I went to FOPAL and found only one box of computer books. Apparently the sorting process has been held up for lack of volunteers. However one book among the donations is on Amazon, used, at several hundred dollars. I’ve no idea why; it was just a technical manual for an obsolete system. But that’s a fun discovery. I usually find half a dozen “high value” books, meaning over $25, each time, but this was a record.

Back home I futzed around, among other things watching videos on how to use Affinity Photo filters. From that I was able to achieve my goal of getting the VW Golf GTI upholstery pattern cleaned up and scaled down. Check this:

This is a proof sheet, where I printed out three versions of the pattern. First one is too big; second one needs more color and contrast. The one on the right is what I wanted. I can’t make a decal yet because my can of clear sealant is in transit. The ink jet decal paper process is, you print your art on it, then you seal it with sealant spray. Then you can cut the art out, dip it in water, and slide art off the backing onto the object. In this case, imagine the tartan strip, wet and flexible, slid onto the little seat next to it, and carefully pressed into the creases. If I can do it without totally breaking it into bits, it will look great.

Monday 04/19/2021

Today was scheduled for me, Phil and Patty to drive to HMB for a walk and lunch, leaving at 10am. At 9am I remembered that returning from my scenic drive yesterday, I had noted the car was low on gas, and did nothing about it. So now I went out to gas the car, and was back in plenty of time.

Patty nor Phil is an energetic walker so we didn’t get anywhere near as far on this walk along the cliff top as I did with Dennis a few weeks ago.

For lunch Patty wanted Diana’s Fish Trap in Princeton by the Sea. I’d never been there. Been to Princeton to eat a couple of times, but not that restaurant. Which it turned out was serving and even had indoor tables. I had good fish and chips, but the serving was so large I brought half of it home and had it for supper, and didn’t finish that.

At 4pm there was a Zoom meeting of volunteers at FOPAL. They are planning resume their regular book sale weekends in August, probably.

Afternoon and evening I struggled with Affinity Photo. Some time back Adobe switched to a subscription model so you only rent their software, you don’t own it. At which point I gave up using Photoshop, which I had used for many years. Affinity Photo, I think I’ve mentioned before, has all the features of Photoshop and more besides, and they sell it for a quite reasonable one-time price.

Except whenever I try to do something with it moderately complicated, which I know I could do zip-zip with PS, I keep running into user interface issues with AP. Yelling things at the screen like, “Why won’t you do this?” and “Why did you do that?”.

What I wanted to do today was to make a pattern for the seat cover for the Golf. Pictures of restored ’78 Golf GTIs online show it came with a tartan insert in the seats, like this.

The model only gives me boring black plastic seats. No problemo. I have water-slide decal paper for my inkjet printer. All I have to do is take the image above, isolate the best part of that tartan pattern on the passenger seat, rotate and distort it so it is nice and square, duplicate it a few times to make a strip about 4 times as long as it is wide, scale it to print at 1/2″ by 2″, print it on decal paper, cut it out, and slide the decal onto the seat. Which I could have done in P.S. in an hour? About. A.P. is fighting me all the way.

Sunday 04/18/2021

I read the paper had my coffee watered the plants did the crossword and it was just after 8am. OK, now what? I decided to take a scenic drive. I drove East over 237 and continued on Calaveras road, which winds into the hills and past a reservoir.

Back home by lunch time. Added a bit to the current model.

In the afternoon it was the SWBB annual honors dinner, only it was a Zoom webinar. Which was fine. Years past, and probably this time next year, this event is a real dress-up dinner at the Stanford Faculty Club. Barring funerals, my only excuse to wear a tie. But fun because you get to ogle the players wearing their best prom or party dresses. (And let me tell you, a 6-3 athlete in 3-inch heels and a red cocktail dress… is an eyeful.)

But this was just a webinar although they had arranged for a lot of team alumnae from years past. I remembered seeing most of them play, back into the late 90s. Tara said they were lining up a tough schedule for next year, with a visit to South Carolina (who they just beat in the national semifinal; “they’ll be circling that on their calendar I bet,” Tara said), Tennessee, Gonzaga, and starting with a tournament in Hawaii.

We’ve been to games in all those places except S.Carolina. Been to two of the season-opening tournaments in Hawaii, but I’d go again. Been to games at Tennessee at least twice, I think three times. We attended one game at Gonzaga itself, and we have been to Spokane at least three times for NCAA Regionals as well. So, if travel is not impossible next fall, I’ll attend some or all of those.

The upcoming team is going to be a powerhouse. Their leader, Kiana, has opted to play professionally; she’ll be with the Seattle Storm. (I wonder, is the Key Arena back in operation yet from its remodel?)

However, due to Covid, the NCAA has said that players do not have to count this year against their elegibility. So our two other seniors have the option of staying for a fifth year. And why wouldn’t they? Get a good start on your Masters degree, basically for free? Plus there are four quite promising freshmen joining the team. So this team could Go. All. The. Way. Again. It might be fun to say I saw every game of a championship season…

Saturday 04/17/2021

Walked to Midtown for coffee and lengthy chat with Harriet. We agree that Stanford should have won the Final Four in a more definitive style. And that travel, even with vaccination, is still a problem.

On the walk home I saw a nice dogwood. Just an interesting composition of shapes.

The rest of the day I worked on the Golf model and killed time other ways.

Friday 04/16/2021

OK, the blood pressure thing isn’t so bad. I’ve done a little reading. The average I run is around 135, which is “pre-elevated” on a clinical scale. Not very concerning. The surgeon who did my aorta wants it lower, not for general health but to reduce the probability of aneurysms in the aorta wall.

What did we used to call the blisters that sometimes form on the sidewall of a tire? Those are aneurysms. Blowouts: not a good thing. (On the other hand: quick cure for high blood pressure. Takes it down to zero in a minute.)

That one instance of 175 or 185 last night, that is not good. So far it was a one-off, but if it repeats I will have to involve the medical team.

In the meantime there are some other things I can do before having the doctor tinker with the meds (of which I am already taking two). Electrolyte balance: shortage of potassium a/o magnesium can raise BP. That’s easy to address. I’ll pick up some supplements tomorrow and give that a two-week trial. The keto diet didn’t do it; maybe electrolytes will. And there’s one other OTC thing.

By the way, except for some uncommon and easily diagnosed conditions involving the kidneys, there is no known “cause” of high BP. It’s a symptom of something but nobody knows what. It’s associated with an elevated risk of stroke and heart attack, but nobody knows why.

I shortened my walk this morning by cutting off a mile loop of it. And then at the coffee and pastries on the 11th floor, they had apple fritters. OMG I love those. I talked to Peter and his wife. Turns out they own a condo with a lake view at Tahoe, and are headed for there for the month of May.

Fiddled with the Golf kit a bit. Not a complicated kit; it will go fast. However not the best quality either. Assembling the engine, it seemed like very piece needs a little bit of sanding, to fit right.

At Rhonda’s open meeting the discussion was all about the new Dining Service, which starts this coming Wednesday. We are basically going to have a restaurant of our own, open 12 hours a day. They distributed the all-the-time menu and the first week’s meal-time menu, and they look good. Except that the all-day menu didn’t have as many choices as I might wish especially around breakfast. Assuming one didn’t want the daily breakfast special, could one just get an omelet? (In the old cafeteria system, there was an omelet bar.)

Probably, the answer was. The rule is, if you don’t see it, ask. If they have the ingredients and can prepare it in reasonable time, they’ll make whatever you want. Same answer for any kind of customization. Don’t like kale? Just ask them to hold the kale. Whatever.

If they can make it work, it’s going to be pretty sweet.

Thursday 04/16/2021

Oh dear, I finally did it — went to bed without doing a blog entry.

A day lost forever to posterior.

Friends of the library in the afternoon.

Also, this was the day when at 9:45pm I took my BP and it was 177/50. What. The. Fuck? I said, and to confirm it wasn’t the device, I went downstairs to the nurse station and had the young man who was just closing up do it. 185/50, he got. So, good news, my BP monitor is fine. Bad news, I’m gonna have a stroke and die.

This was outrageously out of line with the numbers I have been getting (preceding were, and I copy/paste, 133 124 151 120 132 147 129 128

So I went to bed worrying and forgot the blog. Today back to normal including just now a low of 113.