Friday 03/26/2021

First thing I went for my usual MWF walk, except this time, for the first time since October, I wore my sneakers. Not shorts, but the running shoes, and for two quarter-mile stretches of the walk, I jogged. And I felt fine. Better than I did on Monday or Wednesday as a matter of fact.

This might indicate my metabolism has shifted gears fully into ketosis. It definitely indicates that I’m adapting to a diet of Keto Chow shakes, with sides of protein-rich stuff like sausage, boiled eggs, roasted cashews, safeway chicken and canned tuna. Also peanut butter. Although when I googled “peanut butter keto diet” I was advised that most commercial PBs have a couple grams of added sugars (OMG carbs!) per serving. PB is compatible with a keto diet when it is only PB, and the “calories from carbohydrates” on the label are mostly “dietary fiber” and no “added sugars”.

Unfortunately my blood pressure, the factor this diet shift might, hopefully, address, hasn’t changed, at least not significantly. But I turned in next week’s menu with “no thanks” all over it, so I’m committed for another week at least.

I was back just in time to join Dr. Margaret on the 11th floor coffee serving. She is preparing to give a zoom talk on the pelvis (she gave another talk a few weeks back) and was having trouble working out how to collect clip art from the network and assemble it into a document. So we spent an hour doing that.

After lunch and a nap I decided to stroll the half-mile to Whole Foods and buy a jar of natural PB-that-consists-only-of-peanuts. That brought my mileage for the day to 4.2. And now I know why Skippy and Jif add those grams of sugar to their products. Because they taste a whole lot better that way.

At the weekly 4pm meeting, all the news was basically good: reduced restrictions on visitors, promises that in a few days the pool will open, and so on.

Thursday 03/25/2021

Today I had planned with sister-in-law Jean to go for a drive hoping to see wildflowers. It is California spring, the hills are green, flowers should be out.

Jean suggested I bring somebody from CH so I invited neighbor Patty, figuring she would get along with Jean. She and I drove to Mountain View and picked up Jean, and off we went down 101 past Gilroy to San Juan Bautista. We walked around the mission exterior. The church and mission garden were closed.

We walked around SJ Bautista’s tiny down-town. A couple of its restaurants were actually doing ok, selling sandwiches to go.

From there we debated whether to go west toward the coast, or east toward Hollister and drive some of state route 25. The latter was the choice so we did that, going south on 25 almost to the entrance to Pinnacles National Monument. Stopped at a county historical park to eat our sandwiches, and the drove home, arriving back at CH at nearly 3pm.

I did not set a trip odometer but it was probably close to 200 miles for the day, certainly the longest I’ve driven in two years. And it generally felt fine. I can still drive; my passengers agreed I was driving safely.

Only thing was, while there was lots of green grass on the hills, the only flowers were mustard plants, which grow as a weed in cultivated fields. A couple of patches of California Poppies, probably planted by the highway department. But there was nice mountain scenery.

Wednesday 03/24/2021

Went for the walk and did not feel any need to curtail it, as I had on Monday. This day was also notable because for the first time since October, I went out at 8:30am without a jacket, and didn’t feel chilly.

On return I had two tech emails waiting. Helene is having a problem with her Alexa Clock, and Maggie wants some help managing clip art. Maggie I put off until Friday. I went up to Helene’s place — we can enter other people’s apartments now — and fiddled with her Alexa alarm clock. It’s a pretty thing, a truncated sphere about the size of a softball. She showed how she ought to be able to tell it, “Echo,” (she chose to call it Echo not Alexa) “Set an alarm for 6:30 am.” It mulls for a second and then says “I’m having trouble connecting, but I’ll keep trying.” Why?

I didn’t even know how to get to settings, but Helene remembered something about “swipe down” and in fact that did reveal some icons, one being a gear, the universal symbol for settings these days. I looked at all the settings under it and the one for Network showed it was “connected” to the proper wi-fi with “excellent” signal strength. So what’s the problem? I told it again to set an alarm for 6:30 and it did that with no fuss. Apparently my magic fingers had fixed it, or soothed it, or something. Case closed.

That was about it for practical activity. Well, I did my bi-weekly laundry. And since I plan to be out all day tomorow, I did a bit of tidying in advance of Wanda’s visit tomorrow afternoon.

Discovered yet another, this is the third, series on Amazon Prime about living in a narrowboat on the English canal system. So that’s nice.

Tuesday 03/23/2021

First thing this morning, almost immediately after the aerobics class, was a monthly lecture and concert by Stephanie Trick. Neat music.

At 11 it was time for the writers group. This was an easy one, the cue being, write about 3/16/2020, the day we started officially sheltering in place. I just read from my blog entry for that day. I left a bit early because I needed to meet with Marcia. There were some questions about future volunteer activities and we needed to work out how to say politely to all concerned, we didn’t want to do that any more. That took a while.

Then I went to FOPAL where it almost always takes me 90 minutes to “do” the computer section, surveying all the books that have come in from last time, pricing and shelving the keepers.

At 6pm it was time for Stanford to take on Oklahoma State in the second round of the NCAAs. OK State although an #8 seed, was a challenge, and the first quarter ended in a tie. Then Stanford broke it open to a 20-point lead, and ended the game up 12. So on to the “Sweet 16” round, which will be on Saturday I think.

Monday 03/22/2021

I cut the morning walk short, 2 miles instead of 3, because I felt a little less than 100%. Felt fine later in the day. Finished fiddling with the RA Treasury spreadsheet, and set up its folder of documents and backed that up to the new thumb drive.

Fiddling with this I completely forgot that there was a Zoom meeting of FOPAL volunteers at 10am. So another meeting blown off. I felt like a right stoop.

In the afternoon I drove to the big Safeway in Menlo Park and bought a few things to supplement the protein of the Keto Chow shakes, including a whole roasted chicken. A piece of that added satiety to my evening shake.

Sunday 03/21/2021

I was just taking a first sip from my morning cup when my phone rang, which it hardly ever does. It was Dennis, proposing a walk on the coast at Half Moon Bay. OK, why not. So he came by at 8 and we did that, walking along the cliff top.

This was the first day of eating only keto food, mainly three shakes. There are several things at play here. One is the freedom from the fixed meal schedule. No longer do I have to be sure to be home around 12:45 or 5:45 when the cart comes around. That’s nice. When I’m hungry, I eat, otherwise not. The shakes, although tasty enough and with a variety of flavors to choose from, do not behave the same as meals. This was already true, from my experience with them as my regular breakfast. I forget to drink the shake; then later feel hungry and go back for a few more swallows; and forget it again. I also had snacks of cheese and salami. Keto is fun. All the protein and fat you want. My complete lack of any means of cooking (and I’m not complaining about that) means I have to stock only pre-cooked stuff, but I had the brilliant idea that tomorrow or Tuesday I will buy a whole cooked chicken at Safeway, and have that to nosh on.

Stanford kicked off the NCAA tournament in good style, pretty much overwhelming the 16-seed Utah Valley U. Who? It is a large University in Orem. Stanford ran out a 16-1 opening and ended up 40. Next game on Tuesday.

Saturday 03/20/2021

Had a bit of a walk with a stop for a hazelnut chocolate swirl at the farmers market. The last one for a while, as such a big gob of carbs does not work with a keto diet. Nor a little gob, for that matter. Later in the morning I mixed up 6 shakes, two day’s meals. And moved all the non-keto food items I have into the small closet by the kitchen counter.

I spent an hour going through a mess of receipts and the RA checkbook. The spreadsheet that I inherited turned out when I really looked at it, to be over-complicated, and only one sheet out of four had been maintained. So I made up my own RA Cash Journal Numbers file with sheets for 2020 and 2021. Then I sorted out all the documents for years before 2020, and 2020, and 2021. Got the 2020 sheet complete and organized and my goodness it almost matches the balance from the 12/31/2020 bank statement. Close enough. Tomorrow or Monday I’ll do the 2021 sheet.

I think I mentioned that the motivation to do this came in the middle of the night, several nights ago. Then I worked out how to do it and rather than just forget it, I got up in the dark and found a pad and pen and wrote down notes on what I thought should be done. Then I could go back to sleep.

Part of the midnight mulling was, how to hand stuff on to the next Treasurer, more suitably and more neatly than stuff was handed to me. I worked out that I wanted to have all relevant docs in a folder, and copy that to a thumb drive periodically. So I have ordered a nice new SanDisk 32GB USB drive (all of $5). Also in the night I realized, what if the next treasurer has a new mac with USB-C ports? So I also ordered USB-3 to USB-C adapters, two of which cost more than 32GB of storage. O.M.G. I am picturing screwing a disk pack the size of a wedding cake into a 2314 drive.

32 GIGAbytes is the smallest cheapest USB drive you can get. Sigh.

Anyway, Scott got me curious about how hard it would be to match the Ford “Dark Rose” color of a 1957 T-bird in available model paints. Turns out, not that hard. I believe this one, with some added white to lighten it, would do. It only took an hour of clicking and browsing to find that. Does this commit me to work on the 57 T-bird kit next? No, it does not. I will have four kits to choose among and haven’t made up my mind yet. Also I have some ideas about how to improve my miniature spray booth first.

So on my morning walk my eye was caught by some just about to open magnolia buds. Just begging to be photographed.

Friday 03/19/2021

Went for the usual walk in the morning. Later sat down to do something I thought up in the middle of the night two days ago. Thinking about being treasurer of the Residents Association and realizing I wasn’t keeping good records, more like a manila folder of unsorted documents. I should set up some kind of spreadsheet as a cash journal, and also regularly save it to an external thumb drive that could be handed on to the next treasurer.

Sat down to implement this, and realized it was a bigger job than I’d thought. Then also realized I had been given a spreadsheet by the prior treasurer. I’d given it a cursor look a year ago and then forgot about it. Looking at it now I see that it is pretty much the cash journal I’d been imagining. But I need to bring it up to date from my shamefully scattered records. Fortunately there is maybe two dozen transactions over the past year.

After fiddling with that for a while I set it aside in piles on my desk, where the MG model was spread out last week. It will probably be as long a job as the MG was. Well, hopefully not. Especially hopefully not as tonight I ordered two more 1/16-scale models: a 57 T-bird, and a 78 VW Golf. (What? Why a Golf? Because a 77 Golf was what Marian and I drove while we lived in England.) So I have all told four model kits stacked up in my closet: those big ones, and in the standard 1/25-scale, a 55 Chrysler and a 56 Dodge. No good reason for those.

Dinner was pizza shared among four of us. Gwen ordered from The Midwife And The Baker, an artisanal bakery whose stuff I have bought from the California Ave. farmers market. They do pizzas in their bread ovens on Fridays only. I and Patty drove down to pick up the pizzas up. Phil made up the foursome. Phil’s wife Ruth was just persuaded to move to Assisted Living, a bit stressful for both her and him.

The pizza was good, but in fact in future I’d prefer ordering from the New York Pizza house a few blocks away.

Thursday 03/18/2021

Did the aerobics and then set myself to tidy the apartment. I had a week’s worth of recycling and trash collected in my little recycling-and-trash corner, which I toted down the hall to where the recycle bins were already pretty full. And as usual picked up a few out-of-place things, and closed all the closet doors and so forth, in general cleaning the house before the housecleaner comes, as one does.

I also came to a decision. My blood pressure has been sitting 10-15 points higher than it should be, and higher than it was a month ago. And I’ve been using a Keto (low carb) shake for my breakfasts for a while, and like it and its range of flavors. I know the Keto fanatics make all kinds of claims about reversing Type II diabetes and so on. So I wondered, suppose I went 100% for a couple of weeks, long enough to get into ketosis for a week, and see if the BP turns down in that time.

The complication here is that we turn in a marked-up menu with our food choices for the week, Sunday through Saturday, and my menu for next week is due today. So I have to decide, am I going to do this? If so, I have to mark the menu “no meals this week” right now. OK, going to do it. Marked up the menu “no thanks” for the next week. So that’ll be a new adventure, starting Sunday.

Next I went down to FOPAL and did an hour tidying the computer section. On return I had lunch, a short nap, and then it was time for Wanda to come in and clean, so I went to the 11th floor for an hour.

While there I figured out a constructive approach to a wee controversy that is brewing around here. Every floor has a spare room in the central core that can be used for some common purpose. It’s about 12 x 20, not huge, can be locked. On the 5th floor it’s a workshop for handcrafts, with a nice bench and lots of cabinets with donated tools and parts. On the 8th (I think) it’s a sewing room.

And on the 10th, it is a computer room, with two Macs, two PCs, 2 or 3 printers, all for the use of people who don’t have adequate computer resource in their own rooms. The computer room is managed and maintained by Bert, and last week Bert started an email chain saying, the room was getting less and less use because people moving in are more computer savvy and have their own systems. He’d like to either shut it down, or scale it down and move it to a corner of some other room, like the Library or the 5th floor shop.

Lots of comments on this thread, many opposed to any change, but in general the whole issue is headed for the Residents Association who are ultimately the managers for all these common spaces — not the paid staff, who don’t have anything to do with them. I have not contributed anything to this email thread. Keeping a low posture so far.

So I was thinking about this and anticipating a long and circular and repetitive and boring discussion in the next RA executive committee meeting. How can we make this more interesting. And the idea of co-working spaces crossed my mind. Suppose instead of computer room which we really don’t much need, we had a real co-working space with copier, and a table to spread things out on, and stuff like a three-hole punch and a scanner &etc. Here I was thinking of the marketing stuff I’ve been reading, and how this could be a lovely very modern and trendy marketing asset to help sell Channing House to retiring Boomers.

So I put that out as my contribution to Bert’s long email thread. Probably the most constructive thing I’ve done all week.

Wednesday 03/17/2021

Nothing much of a day, really. Took the usual walk in the morning; it felt fine. Elsewhile I spent some time taking good photos of the MG model. Using the Nikon so I could control the aperture, set it to f/16 and get enough depth of field that both ends of the little car would be in focus at the same time. Which meant that the shutter speed was like a second and a half, so the camera had to be on the tripod to avoid motion blur.

Then take the Nikon raw file into Aperture (what I’m using instead of Photoshop because I will not pay Adobe a continuous subscription fee) and tweak it all nice. Might as well put a couple of those shots in here, nobody else will ever see them.

Sometimes while making this thing I would think “how fun it would be to own one of these”. Actually in my childhood, a friend of the family owned the next car in the series, the MG TF, actually prettier with the headlights faired into the fenders and slightly longer. I can remember being allowed to sit in it, but I don’t think I was ever given a ride.

Anyway, then I would think, uh-huh, noisy, hard-riding, no climate control except the wind through the gaps around the windows when the top is up… Nope. OK I just checked, clean restored MG TFs are selling between $25K and $35K.

That was about it in terms of doing anything productive. Read a little, napped a little…