Saturday 8/29/2020

About 9am I sat down at my desktop machine (because I like to do my serious work on the big screen) and set to work combining all the Safety Sitters documents into a single proposal to be reviewed by Rhonda and her Infection Control Czar, Angela. This comprised an overview proposal written by Marcia, and my instruction sheet for the sitters, and some collateral, like the sign to be placed on each table giving the rules (masks, no food or drink, only two people, don’t move the furniture). I used Open Office for a couple of reasons. It was all highly formatted and I have been having trouble getting Pages to do what I want, it just seems to… well never mind. And Open Office can save directly in .docx format for the PC-impaired reader.

Late in the day I got approvals on that from Marcia and Kim so I formally sent it on to Rhonda. Except of course I forgot to attach the actual document, so had to send it again. Grrrrrr.

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So that was all done by 10:30 and my brain felt distinctly tired. So much thinking! Then I followed up on another issue, radio operations. We have an emergency radio on every floor, and at least some people on every floor are supposed to be trained in how to operate it. It ain’t rocket science for sure. You just pick the little doobie out of its charger, turn it on, set it to channel 3 (which it already is) (unless somebody turned it to channel 2 to eavesdrop on the housekeepers?), and that’s it. Push the talk button, say “This is the sixth floor checking in,” release the talk button, and wait for a response.

So I went to every floor to see if the radios were there. On most of the floors there is also a printed list of residents in each apartment, with those needing assistance in red. Not all floors. I have no idea who prepares these, need to find out. On some floors there was a printed “radio procedures” manual with illustrations. Not all floors, and not the same version on every floor. And on one floor (8) I couldn’t find the radio.

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Somewhere in here I got an email from Declan, the first young person (of four or so) that I had invited to be a beta reader of the novel, saying he’d just finished a big move and was getting back into the book and liked it. So later I sent him an updated PDF, as I had added some material since April when he got it. I mean, it’s meaningless, it has been weeks since I heard from any agent so probably all my queries are dead. But whatever.

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After lunch I tackled another volunteer issue. I’ve been using bit.ly to make readable URLs for the sign-up sheets for meal delivery and package reception. After all bit.ly/CHMD03 is a lot easier to read than http://www.slottr.com/sheets/18254036, right? Except there’s a new sheet each week for each task. So I was creating a new bit.ly link for each week (e.g. bit.ly/CHMD04). But why? Yesterday in the middle of a meeting I realized, hey, why don’t I have just two links per task, e.g. bit.ly/MDTHISWEEK and bit.ly/MDNEXTWEEK, and each week I’ll retarget them to the current and next sheets.

Nope. Bitly does not permit changing the destination address of a shortened URL. So not I spent I dunno felt like four hours but probably only 1, looking at all the URL shortening services (and there are many) finding one that is free, and allows editing the destination address. Turns out, none, but one, rlink.shop, has a fairly inexpensive “Pro” level that does. So signed up for that and created my links.

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Then I realized that “this week” for package reception was about to run out. Next week’s sheet was already partly signed up, that’s good, but I need to create the one for the week after. So I did that.

You know, I don’t think I worked much harder (or indeed, much more productively) at my last real job, at Silicon Graphics in the 90s. Taking the rest of the day off, now.

Watched Midway. Mildly entertaining. Thought the CGI battles were overdone. Don’t believe the planes, the flack, were that dense. But what do I know?

Friday 8/28/2020

Air quality being “Moderate” I went for a run. After that and my usual hour of futzing around reading the blogs I subscribe to, I re-edited my “what to do in an emergency” document, and then wrote my “How to be a Safety Sitter” document. Sent PDFs of both to Marcia.

Spent more time trying to configure Vendetta to work with my perfectly standard game controller. Ah, config.ini files. Such fun. Amazingly, this old (since 2002?) popular (many thousands of players, hundreds online simultaneously) game has no official doc on how to configure it, and the user generated stuff in the game wiki is old and not very helpful.

Later we met with Kim H.R. and then settled on what we are doing. We have two things going. One is the summary of emergency response, my terse summary to inform residents of what to do in case of fire or power outage. I sent that to Kim so she can try to reduce it to two pages that could be printed double-sided for distribution. She claims to be very experienced at such things.

Second is our proposal to open the 11th floor to people for meetings. In theory at least, people are not supposed to be meeting there now; only going up to exercise alone by walking around the outside perimeter, or to practice on the piano that is there. I went through the 11th floor penthouse to check on a couple of points in my instructions, and noticed three ladies having a nice conversation. They were masked and distanced, but sitting in the TV lounge area.

The reason that meetings are currently restricted to the ground floor lobby and outside meeting area is, that those areas are regularly cleaned and disinfected by staff. That’s what our “safety sitter” proposal would provide for the 11th floor. Except, not in the lounge area, which is all fabric covered seating and can’t be disinfected, and not with groups larger than two. Anyway, tomorrow I pull the sitter package together. In Rhonda’s Friday Zoom she stressed the need not to let our guard down, and how there had been reports of maskless meetings etc. “Which is especially ironic after all the grief we’ve been getting over trusting residents to do the right thing.” Oh, burn.

Spent more time trying to configure Vendetta for my gamepad, with no success. Finished the day with another episode of Travels by Narrowboat, but this one turned out not to be relaxing at all, as it involved his account of a very unfortunate incident that nearly ended his boat travel.

Somehow this got saved as a “page” instead of a “post”.

Thursday 8/27/2020

In the emails this morning: a note from Kim H.R. saying, terribly sorry, I wasn’t aware, and only just learned, that Helen (another resident) was in the process of planning for an 11th floor disinfection procedure to present to the Infection Control committee. So please put your plans for volunteer safety sitters on hold.

If I were still in the corporate world, and was a manager (which I never was, and always swore never to be) who was just putting the final touches on collateral material for the rollout of a new project, and got an email from my boss saying, you know that stuff you’ve been working on so hard? Well funny thing, it turns out that this other department is preparing a very similar project for presentation to the Board next week, so just put all that on the shelf… if that had happened to me in my wage-earning days, I’d have been rather seriously pissed. Editing my resumé pissed. Now, in this environment — I’m relieved. I don’t have to do any more on this project and the several things I meant to do before noon today? I don’t have to do them, and that’s good.

So I changed the bed and cleaned the apartment.

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Well, of course all that changed. Turns out Helen is swamped with other things and is happy to let us proceed with our plan. However, said plan will have to be approved by the Infection committee, so we will not be announcing this week.

Marcia and I met and split up the work to be done on two projects. One, preparing updated emergency instructions, to be shared withe Floor Reps at their next meeting, a week from today. Two, preparing various signs or instruction sheets for our 11th floor Safety Sitters program.

I spent a couple hours making a really terse, readable document of “what to do in case of (a) a power outage and (b) a fire.” Tomorrow I will deal with my part of the other project.

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During the day my order of a USB-C cable arrived from Amazon. I wanted that because I have a Gamepad controller which I want to use with Vendetta Online. The game doesn’t recognize the controller when connected via BlueTooth so I want to try it when connected by USB. In the evening I spent a couple of hours trying to get the game to work with the gamepad. It kinda does, but isn’t configured right.

I neglected to mention that yesterday I also spent more than an hour on a long-deferred clean up of some image files. My main photo store is on my iMac, where pics are keyworded and filed in a whole organization of folders. For months when I had a picture on my laptop, that I thought I wanted to keep permanently, I would move it to a folder in Dropbox, for filing “later”. So this was “later”, I went through those pics and decided where to store them in the folder tree on the iMac, which inevitably meant that I had to rearrange some of those folders, etc. Blah. But done now.

Wednesday 8/26/2020

The weather app said air quality: Good, so I started the day with a run, the first in more than a week. And that showed. My body said, whoa, let’s walk a bit, for a while during the first leg. But then I warmed up and finished the last 2/3 of the route at my normal pace.

Back home I settled down to settling my mind about all the different volunteer activities we are coordinating, and which of them needs active coordinatin’ by me, right now. Quite a lengthy list. Sent that off to Marcia to get her comments.

Then sat down to do what seemed like top priority, writing the job description/invitation for the newest volunteer program we hope to have ready for Rhonda to announce on Friday. I will include it here:

I sent that to Marcia and then sat down to make the sign-up sheet for it. That brought me to noon when I had signed up for a free seminar on writing books for the Middle School genre. This was interesting, although the speaker didn’t say anything that told me why my novel doesn’t sell.

At 1:30 I met on the 11th floor with Marcia and we set up three nice seating areas where a 2 or 3 people could have a conversation and decided how to proceed with the announcement.

At 3pm I attended a Zoom meeting, the CH speaker series, with a Palo Alto city council person. Not uninteresting.

From there I just kind of kicked back for the rest of the day — until at 4pm when I got a call that somebody couldn’t make the dinner meal delivery they’d signed up for. So I went and spent 5:15 to 6:30 helping deliver meals.

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Something completely different. I’ve mentioned being fond of web comics before. Today I saw one that, I think, demonstrates how the modern “comic” artists are using the freedom of web-based publication, to create a new kind of literature. That was Stone Fruit Season: A Comic. What is it? An “illustrated essay” maybe? The text is a personal statement about recovering from depression, with digressions about the history of peaches, but all the emotional power is delivered by the evocative drawings which are essential, integral parts of the piece. Even the closing words are in hand drawn script and would not work simply set in type.

I was Veronica’s only attendee at the 7:30 aerobics, so like personal training. The air quality is best described as “mucky” so no outside activity today. But plenty of meetings. Marcia and I met with Kim HR and learned several things. One, is that the staff has recognized a large (“like night and day”) improvement in resident morale since the volunteer programs have started. That’s important, more important than the dozen or so hours a week we are saving staff time.

Dining services would like to have the food delivery task back; but we are keeping it. We concede to them the bi-weekly “farmers’ market cart” room to room delivery of fruit and snacks. We stressed to Kim how much the restriction on using the main elevators impacts everybody, food delivery, people with walkers, etc. And a few hours later she emailed that the restriction was off. The fires are being contained and the risk of outages is reduced enough to allow use of elevators again.

We have two things to plan: a meeting with floor reps to emphasize disaster preparedness, and a scheme where volunteers would managed disinfecting the penthouse so people could use it for meetings. I prepared sign-up sheets for the next week of meal delivery and package reception. Marcia drafted, and I edited, an email to the CHBB with volunteer status news.

Spent a lot of time browsing hobby supply sites. I am almost ready to pull the trigger on buying a good quality airbrush, but I also watched a bunch of youtube videos on how to simulate rust and weather damage on models. With an eye to possibly working over the toy tractor for more realism. Not sure if that project is on or not.

Here’s a funny thing. Part of finishing the Ford model was applying several teeny-tiny decals to represent the enamel badges on the hood, trunk, and rear posts. So I applied the little badge to the center of the trunk lid, and then I cut out and got ready to apply the tiny little script Fordomatic to the right side of the trunk lid, and suddenly noticed that the center badge decal was gone. Just gone. I looked all over for it and of course couldn’t find it. So I secured the Fordomatic and then on the decal sheet found a very similar badge decal and applied that to the center of the trunk lid.

About 10pm as I was shutting off the TV and getting ready to go to bed, something about my finger caught my eye. What the…

There, stuck to my left pinkie nail was the missing badge decal. So that’s where it went…

Monday 8/24/2020

So early in the morning I woke up obsessing about our somewhat frail volunteers fighting through those fire doors, so went down at breakfast and again at dinner to caution people. No problem, don’t worry, everybody said, even the 5-foot tall 80 year old. So I’m a fuss-budget. I’d have been a crap manager.

In the day I remembered that I have VueScan, a lovely piece of software that I’d often used for scanning photos, but which has the almost undocumented feature of doing automatic OCR to produce text and a searchable PDF from a scanned document. I put it to work scanning my father’s autobiography. I had two copies, and one copy’s binding had completely crumbled so it was no problem lifting the pages out one by one. And in fact I had the PDF of a 200-page book finished in under two hours.

After which, in the evening, it was not hard to finally resolve an annoying mystery that has been bugging me and my nephew and niece for a week: why I have two old scanned slide images of my father’s John Deere tractor, except when you look close, they are two different tractors. Turns out he sold the first tractor, the one we all remember, after we had all left home. Then he decided he still needed a tractor and bought for cheap another one from a retired neighbor. That info was in his biography and, thanks to modern technology, took only a little more time to resolve on the computer, than it would have taken to read the damn book.

Sunday 8/23/2020

Went down to the lobby at 10:30 to meet with co-coord. Marcia to discuss various volunteer projects, but the latest news was that the Sodexo staff in the kitchen want to take back the meal delivery job. They had already insisted on delivering some of the carts at breakfast.

We can’t get any management input on this until Tuesday when Kim-HR and Rhonda come back from their days off. So decided that I would hang around and tell the lunch volunteers to give way to kitchen staff if staff want to do it.

Then we waited for what we thought was an 11am meeting with Chris B to organize “maintenance walkers”, volunteers who will walk the building once a week and report maintenance problems using an app the Facilities crew use. Except Chris B didn’t show, and when paged, said it was on his calendar for the 30th. Oh well.

I presumed that also applied to the 3pm meeting with him to organize the trash pickup crew. Turned out, it didn’t. At 5pm I learned he held the meeting and I wasn’t there. Hmmph.

At 11:30 Marcia returned from a phone call with the news that she had talked to the Sodexo manager Matt, and the volunteers are definitely laid off, for sure. She volunteered to email all the volunteers scheduled for lunch and dinner and tomorrow’s meals. I went back to my room and worked on the model and finished it! See below.

At 2:30 I got a call from Angela, another top staff person. She wanted to talk about how they could no longer prop open the fire doors for meal deliverers (see yesterday’s post). No problem, said I, we volunteers are off the job anyway. You can work it out with Sodexo if they need any help.

At 3:30 Angela called again to say, well I have looked into this, and we agree the volunteers should continue to delivery meals! Ohhhhkayyyy, so Marcia just emailed everyone that we are off, now we can email them again. Called Marcia; she can do the email; and we agreed that we needed to double up the delivery people at least for the more frail deliverers, so they would have someone to hold the fire door back for them. She would send the email and call two extra people for dinner, but is running a Zoom conference the rest of the day. No problem, I’ll go down and make sure the dinner deliveries go ok.

So back down to the lobby at 5. All three volunteers, plus the two that Marcia had called, showed up and all were confident they could get through the fire doors without help. Which they all did. So the extra two went away again, and after everyone had completed delivering at least one cart, I went back to my room for my own supper. Whew.

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In other news, I am hanging two humming bird feeders and have enough customers that they empty both in a 12-hour day. It’s like a swarm of hummingbirds. If they were bugs, they’d be yucky.

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So, the model. Here are some pictures, artfully posed so you can’t see the missing door handle and not sharp enough you can see all the many flaws in the paint job, of which I am acutely aware.

These are not great pictures even though taken with the Nikon instead of the phone. I have forgotten how to use the Nikon right. Need to do them over with a tripod and stopped down to get some depth of field. Whatever.

Saturday 8/22/2020

The air is heavy with smoke from the fires to the West and South. Because of uncertainty about power (although there have been no interruptions), we are supposed to use the freight elevator. However this is a problem for a couple of reasons. First, on each floor the freight elevator opens into a large vestibule at the South end of the building. Between that vestibule and the hallway that runs the length of the floor, is a heavy door. It’s probably a 2-hour fire rating, anyway a heavy door 36 inches wide. Under it is a, um, what do you call the plate you put under a door to bridge the transition from one floor surface to the next? A transom? Whatever, it’s an aluminum plate that amounts to a 1/4-inch speed bump for a cart or a wheelchair. Never mind that a wheelchair user could not possibly operate that door. It isn’t easy for a mobile person to open the door, hold it against its automatic closer, and roll a tall cart with 25 dinner trays over the transom plate. Which is what we have to do, because meal deliveries are to use the freight elevator.

So I went down to the lobby at 7 to meet with Marcia and discuss the fallout from Rhonda’s meeting yesterday. Are we going to turn the meal delivery back to the dining staff now they are released from quarantine? That would be kind of a shame, since we have 30 or so volunteers signed up to delivery meals over the next two weeks, and they all find it very satisfying to do. What did she mean by some other things she said, like, volunteers doing something about the excess of signage in the elevators (and why would that matter just now, when we aren’t supposed to use the elevators)? Kim of HR came by just then and we engaged her on this. Nothing conclusive from this except that she would talk to the kitchen management and come back to us.

Well, on signage, somehow I got tasked with replacing the signs advising people to wear masks and go only one to an elevator. I went back to my room and came up with some, I thought, rather cool signs, which I circulated and got approval on and eventually hung about near the freight elevator on each floor, later. Plus I printed up a fresh batch of the tally sheet we use to record packages in the volunteer package receipt task, and put them on the clipboard I provided for that. And that was the morning.

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Later I had another volunteer task to do. Tom the Resident Association head had gotten the Gift Shop to generate a check to pump up the R.A. treasury. I had to deposit this to our Wells Fargo account. Among the things I inherited with the Treasurer job was a folder labeled “Wells Fargo”, attached to which by a bear clip is an ATM card with the PIN conveniently recorded on a post-it. So I took that and the check and went off to Wells Fargo and deposited the check.

From there it was a block to the Farmers’ Market. I walked around, picked up some seedless grapes, and had me a good old sniffle-fest. Visiting the Farmers’ Market was a consistent part of our week for, oh, probably 20 years, maybe 30. By the mid-1980s we had established the pattern that, walking back from our Sunday coffee’n’paper, we would hash out what dinner entrees we would cook in that week. “You do that stir-fry, I’ll do mac and cheese…” At home we would write up the menu for the week, and make out a grocery list, and head out to shop. For a long time the first stop was the California Avenue Farmers’ Market. In the last five years or so, Marian decided it was more convenient to go to DiMartini’s farm stand in Los Altos.

So walking through the Farmers’ Market is a continual reminder of the things we used to look for, anticipate, and enjoy buying. Today, just into the market, there was a booth with stacks of nice looking sweet corn in the husk. How Marian would have jumped on that, “Oh, let’s have that two nights.” Flavor King Pluots. Nectarines. So I’m walking through the market sniffling inside my mask and not wiping my eyes because we don’t touch our face.

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For the afternoon I worked on the Ford model. I made up a two-page “punch list” of tasks to finish it and killed a lot of them. If it wasn’t that I have two meetings tomorrow I’d be sure of finishing it then.

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Nobody had signed up for the 5pm package processing task, so I did it. On the weekend we don’t have our doorman, Paul, who marks apartment numbers on the packages. So I had the fun of slinging a big sharpie. And calling about 8 people to say they had packages.

While downstairs Marcia came by to supervise the evening meal deliveries, and said that she had heard from Kim of HR that she, Kim, needed to discuss the volunteer meal delivery with Rhonda, but it should continue for the next week, anyway.

Friday 8/21/2020

This morning I scraped out the very last grains of my coffee. Peets’ has completely screwed up my subscription. Supposedly they send me a pound of Gaia Organic Blend every three weeks, with the last shipment to have been on 8/14. That order stayed in “processing” status for 3 days until I called. The lady said they had had a computer problem, very sorry, she would start a new order with a 20% discount. They refunded the cost of the lost order; and yesterday they charged my card for a new order, but it also has not shipped, and now I’m out.

Since the blood center yesterday said “no strenuous activity for 24 hours” I decided to have a walk instead of a run, and in fact, to walk to Peets’ at Town and Country and get me some coffee. Which I did, a half pound of Gaia Organic ground the way I like it. (They don’t offer my preferred grind on their subscription scheme.) I was in the store for a very brief time; everyone was in masks and distancing like mad. Cleaned my hands with alcohol on exit.

I made some progress on the Ford model and should finish it this weekend. Fussy stuff, attaching tiny bits of chrome and clear to finish the exterior, and attaching wheels.

Mid-day, Prudence, the CH Newsletter editor, asked for a story on the volunteer thing. So I wrote a 300 word piece for her.

At Rhonda’s open meeting, there was as usual good news and bad. Good: the second round of testing of dining and office staff had all come back negative, and restrictions were lifted. The dining staff is now able to put away wearing face shields over their masks, and allowed to come out of the kitchen. Which means, they will be able to resume delivering meal carts! Not sure if that is good or bad news. We have volunteers booked to do that through next week. Also unclear at this point whether the other volunteer tasks are to continue. Marcia and I will confer tomorrow and then try to get some clarity from H.R. person Kim.

In other news, owing to forest fires not that far away, just the other side of the Coast Range — Big Basin Redwoods park was destroyed yesterday, the oldest California park; I’ve been there several times; it’s a 30-minute drive, about — anyway, while it is highly unlikely that Palo Alto would ever be under evacuation order, the management have been updating their crisis plans again. If anyone feels nervous and wants to go and spend time with friends or relatives in another area, they may, and they won’t be required to do a 14-day isolation on return, assuming no symptoms. There was some amusing discussion of how to choose a refuge. Rhonda said, approximately, “If you have a choice between a healthy friend with a small house with no AC, or an aunt with a big house but she is coughing and has a fever, well, I know which I’d pick.”

Rhonda said their first response to evacuation would be to shelter in place; our building is made of concrete and steel and not in the middle of a forest. If they do have to evacuate, they have plans to bring in buses and plans for places to go. And everybody is to find that “go bag” we were all gifted last year and make sure it contains what you would need for a stay away.

2020 just keeps getting better and better, you know?

Thursday 8/20/2020

Thursday washday. Well, not wash, but the day a bag of linens and towels shows up outside my door. Make up the bed, clean the bathroom and kitchen, sweep, swiff, vacuum. All done by 10.

Spent a bit of time on the Ford model, and almost threw it in the bin. Yesterday I had attached the incredibly small and delicate outside mirrors. Today, trying to insert the interior/chassis unit into the body, I managed to break both, and knock a tiny chrome bit off the counter. I went looking for it but was muttering how if I didn’t find it, I would write off the whole project. I’ve learned a lot from this model, mostly by very painful trial and error. Anyway at the last minute I found it, and so continued.

After lunch I went and got the car and headed out to the Stanford Blood Center donation site a mile away in Menlo Park. Many many times before I had done whole-blood donations, but this time I had booked an appointment to do plasma apheresis. Why ever for? Oh, just for a change. Of plasma.

Fifteen years ago some researchers made some headlines by showing that if they transfused the blood of young mice into old mice, it reversed some of the effects of aging. Nothing much followed on those headlines until recently, when the same researchers, who’d been plugging away all these years, issued new research showing that the rejuvenating effects did not come from an infusion of young plasma, but simply from replacing the plasma, period. So I’m thinking, hey, I know of a free procedure in which they take away a couple pints of your plasma, and you get to replace it. Why not donate plasma, thereby doing a good deed for someone, and find out if replacing one’s plasma a fraction every four weeks, has any effect like replacing half of it in an old mouse.

Maybe I’ll turn into a mouse?