Sunday 8/9/2020

Today I attended the lunch meal delivery to introduce a new set of volunteers to it. Then at 3pm I came down to see the setup for the Market Cart service. This was a little thing the kitchen staff set up back in April as a way of cheering people up during the lockdown. Every Sunday and Wednesday at 3pm some kitchen staff would load up a carts with fresh fruit and various snacks, and visit each apartment letting people take what they liked.

With the kitchen staff shorthanded and being isolated in the kitchen, not allowed to contact residents, the market carts were going to be terminated. Enter my co-coordinator Marcia, who recruited some residents to do the door-to-door schlepping. Today was the first day for this.

Here you see Head Chef Robin explaining to six volunteers (Marcia on the right) what they’ve put on the carts, and how to distribute stuff. Shortly the vols headed out and reported they had a good time doing this job, meeting neighbors and dispensing goodies.

With this and the meal delivery service we are already a roaring success. The sign-up sheet for meal delivery for this week is already fully subscribed, 3 names in each of the meals. I publicized the link to the following week’s meal delivery sign-ups today and it is already half-filled. People are really liking taking some personal involvement.

About 4:30 however, one who was signed up for dinner emailed he had to pull out. So I said I’d fill in, and went down at 5:15 and ran a couple of cart loads with two other volunteers.

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Was that all I did? No, I also spent an hour preparing that following week’s signup sheet and posting it. And a little while on the model car, and oh, yeah, at 9am I went for a 3 mile walk, over to California avenue and through the Farmers Market there, and back. Halfway back I sat in a park and at the almond croissant I had bought, and chatted with Dennis on the phone.

In part we talked about the John Deere tractor on the old ranch. Laurel has found a model of such a tractor and intends to send it to me, for me to detail and paint to match her memory of that tractor. Dennis and I reminisced about the chore we most hated, helping my father saw up firewood with a buzz saw driven by a belt from the old tractor, and stack it in the woodshed.

In between Channing House emails I looked up the two pictures I have of the old tractor and sent them to Dennis and Laurel. Laurel quickly spotted that the tractors in the two pictures are not exactly the same. One has an exhaust stack, the other doesn’t, and there are other differences. Well, crap! Did my father have two decrepit, rusty 1930-era John Deeres in that 1950-60 period? I’m pretty sure I would remember, as machinery was a major fascination of my youth. There’s nobody left alive who would remember.

Saturday 8/8/2020

Went down to join a crew of three newbies for meal deliver at breakfast. Did that again at lunch and again at dinner. I and my co-coordinator Marcia are very pleased: the sign up sheet for meal delivery this week is nearly full.

In between these three 90-minute sessions I did a little work on the model, detailing the interior bits.

After the final delivery of dinner, at 6:20, Patty joined me and we walked a few blocks to the Peninsula Creamery. She had ordered ahead and we picked up sacks of deliciousness and walked o a nearby park to eat, sitting at opposite ends of a bench to take our masks off. Chocolate shake and grilled cheese sandwich, num num.

I am really enjoying Travels in a Narrowboat on Amazon Prime. Can’t recommend it highly enough if you are looking for an antidote to pandemic news. It’ll chill you right down.

I have on my DVR the following movies: A Star is Born (2017), Jojo Rabbit, LaLa Land, Midway, Crash. All well reviewed. I can’t seem to find time to watch a whole movie. Which one should I watch? Which should I delete?

Friday 8/7/2020

Went for a run first thing; normal. Then exchanged a lot of emails with would-be volunteers. Fitted in an hour of work on the model; then it was time to do meal-delivery for lunch. At lunch it was Marcia (the other V.C.) and Susan. Introduced Susan to the job, accompanying her for half of a floor and left her. From then on we three worked alone. By the time you get back to the lobby with an empty cart, the other persons have already left with carts.

This showed me that it really needs three people per meal to keep up. My sign-up sheet had been set up to take two names per meal. After lunch I modified it to take three names per meal. An encouraging number of people have already signed up. In the evening I publicized the sign up sheet on the CHBB list.

At 5 I again went down and worked meal delivery for supper as well. Here Marcia and I were joined by Frances and John. These are among my favorite neighbors because some decades ago, they worked on the Apollo Guidance Computer under Margaret Hamilton. Which they think is no big deal, so I try not to fawn on them too much. I’m sure there are other things they would like to be known for. Anyway I expect to have to show up for every meal for a couple of days now, if only to orientate new volunteers.

During Rhonda’s 4pm Zoom (which peaked at 150 people) there wasn’t a lot of news. However she made a point about management of the pandemic,

That is an important point that I want to highlight. We have done hundreds of tests now on all employees and most residents. And, none of those test results (from surveillance or response-driving testing) have come back positive.

And, yet, we have COVID-positive cases. What is happening is that our stringent screening and isolation requirements are detecting probable COVID cases BEFORE they are sent to be tested. This is a reflection of the diligent efforts of Izzy Leon, our Director of Nursing, and Angela Lamothe, our Safety Officer.

So all the temperature-taking and symptom reporting is working.

Thursday 8/6/2020

Long, intense day! 7:15 I met with Marcia, the other lucky volunteer to be volunteer coordinator, and Kim HR (actually Kim Kurtis, not to be confused with the other Kim K., Kim Krebs), and we did meal delivery.

It’s really simple. You wait patiently and after about ten minutes one of the kitchen staff wheel out a tall aluminum cart with many shelves. On the shelves are 20+ trays, each tagged with a room number, all for a particular floor. You wheel the cart to the elevator, up to the floor, and distribute the trays to the rooms. People were surprised to see me instead of a staff person, and several were interested in volunteering. Bring the empty cart back to the lobby and wait another ten minutes until the next cart comes out.

After all the carts were out, Marcia, Kim HR and I went to her office and talked at length about employing resident volunteers. Kim and other staff had put together a list of possible jobs. Marcia and I went off to our separate rooms to make some of this happen. The whole day was taken up with emailing and phoning back and forth trying to figure out how to do this.

The first two jobs we are trying to implement are the meal delivery, and package reception. The meal delivery needs two volunteers, three meals, seven days. How to keep track of who wants to do what. Everybody has a different plan, some don’t want to work breakfasts, some can only do Tuesdays, etc. After we had floundered with spreadsheets a bit, I said bleep it, I’m making a Slottr sign-up sheet like I was doing for FOPAL. That appears it is going to work. It really wasn’t hard setting up a sheet with 21 slots for a week’s meals, room for 2 names in each slot. Then I sent a job description and invite to the main CHBB list, and immediately volunteers starting replying. I directed them to the signup sheet and by this time, quite a few slots are filled.

The package reception job is different. Many residents are ordering stuff primarily but not wholly from Amazon, so something between 30 and 50 (at a guess) packages get dumped outside our front door each day, a bunchfrom UPS and Fedex in the morning, and a bunch more from USPS in the afternoon. Front desk staff has been bringing them in, marking the destination room number on each in big marker digits, and arranging them on a long table. Then they log receipt of the package and call the recipient’s room to say, you’ve got a package.

This is a huge PITA for the front desk person. So we’re going to take it over with resident volunteers. I put a description of this job on CHBB about 10 and have 13 names tonight. I will convene a zoom meeting of those names on Tuesday, I figure, and kind of encourage them to organize themselves.

There are another half-dozen jobs we haven’t advertised yet — the day was intense enough thank you very much. Monday is the monthly residents association meeting, 100+ people will zoom in, and I will describe all the jobs available. I expect lots more sign ups that afternoon. Marcia is preparing a document describing all the jobs to distribute to everyone’s mailboxes.

Oh yeah, I cleaned my apartment in the afternoon as well. Going to bed now.

Wednesday 8/5/2020

Went for a run in the morning; felt normal. I had two meetings scheduled for the afternoon. In the time before I painted the hood of the model. I did it manually, with my widest softest brush, and invented a new technique that I think will be useful in future, to get a smooth coat with a brush. Tomorrow I will apply gloss clear to the hood and then can set the body aside and work on the interior for a while.

The first meeting was the Residents’ Association executive committee. Rhonda attended, to bring us not-good news. Another staff member has tested positive. This person had been sheltering at home since 7/31 because of symptoms; however there were other staff members and some residents in close contact with them before. So another handful of staff are sent home to quarantine (and presumably 1 or more residents are in isolation).

There were already 20 staff in home quarantine. They will get their second tests tomorrow, and if they come back negative, those staff will be back on the job next week, but in the meantime, staff is short. As a result, some changes. One, all housekeeping that was DIY, is back to DIY. So tomorrow I get to clean my unit again. All interaction with staff is to be by phone or zoom unless absolutely necessary. Maintenance work orders are deferred unless critical.

Further news. I discussed the matter of the T-Mobile cell phone antenna on the roof on day 1.220. It’s back, but in a different form. Some people who feel strongly about it have contacted KPIX (CBS 5) and that station is planning a story on the antenna. Rhonda declined to be interviewed and gave them the official statement by our board, reporting the 3rd-party engineer’s report. KPIX may or may not go with the story.

From that meeting I and Marcia were scheduled to talk to Kim from HR (not Kim from Marketing) about resident volunteers. Last Friday, Rhonda asked for people to volunteer to be Resident Volunteer Coordinators. I hesitantly did so, as did Marcia. So this was a meeting to tell us what we could and should do to establish that brand-new role. Unfortunately due to the above-mentioned staff upset, Kim didn’t start the zoom meeting. She called us later, and said one of the first things they may use volunteers for is food delivery, wheeling the carts of trays from room to room to deliver meals. She suggested that we begin by actually doing that job. So at 7:20 tomorrow morning, I will get trained on delivering a cart load of food.

Tuesday 8/4/2020

After the aerobics class and before the CH Writer’s meeting, I fielded a tech call. Craig asked me to check on Terry, who (Craig claimed) had an old Mac that, according to Paul Ma, the CH staff tech person, needed an external, USB, wifi adapter. Hmph, seems odd. Well, I called Terry who said, no, it’s an old HP laptop of some sort. So I bounced that one back to Craig.

The Schwab statements were ready so I updated the Nest Egg spreadsheet. The Nest Egg was down about 13% on the year a couple of months back. It has recovered to be 8% down on the year now.

The writers’ group had a cue, or topic, of “that memorable hotel room” which produced a lot of interesting travel reminiscences. I had no contribution to make. Not as a writer. After the meeting I helped Margaret figure out why she couldn’t hear a Zoom meeting in her new bluetooth headset. Turns out, Zoom audio has an option, “use default sound (built in speaker)” which if selected, makes it ignore your system setting for sound output. So I had a tech success after all.

For the car model, I took a step back. Early on, I had set out to spray gray primer on the body. I did spray the hood and got a good coat, but when I went to spray the body, something, I don’t remember what, messed up, and I gave up on the primer. So the hood had gray primer and the body was still white plastic. Predictable what happened. Four coats of the light blue on hood and body, and four coats of the clear. And finally I set the hood in place on the body and… oops. Because of the medium-gray base coat, the hood is perceptibly darker and grayer blue, than the body. Set them a foot apart and you can’t tell. Set the hood on the body and it instantly stands out as not-quite-the-same-color.

So all I did on the model today, was to sand off the paint on the hood, taking it back to white plastic. (Now obviously there was another option, to strip the paint off the body and prime it, but that was out.) Tomorrow I’ll figure out how to paint the hood. Maybe with a brush.

That was all in the morning. After lunch I went for a 2.5 mile walk, up to the campus and back. I should say, the gouty toe has faded almost back to a normal color, and although it can still emit a sharp pain if bent the wrong way, it didn’t bother me running yesterday or walking today.

During the writers’ group, amid all the travel reminiscences, Margaret noted there was a series on Prime about traveling the canals of England. Tonight I found it, Travels in a Narrowboat, and am watching it. It is about the lowest-key show you can imagine. Canals are very quiet, the boat moves about 4mph top speed, and the whole show is just … so … soothing …

Monday 8/3/2020

This will be short, because there isn’t much to tell (quarantime is starting to fold in on itself). Went for a run, which felt fine. I think that spell of weakness a week ago may have been because I had no food before starting out: a “bonk” as we used to say in cycling. I had part of my breakfast shake before leaving today and all was well.

At 11 my neighbor Peter gave a book talk on his autobiography, Painted Pebbles. He read a few dramatic passages remembering the days of Nazi occupation of Hungary, and of the Hungarian Revolution.

The rest of the day was alternate reading and working on the model, mainly trying to finish painting the body. Many frustrations and do-overs. It is really difficult to get a clean, blemish-free coat of paint. To do it right I need a bigger shop with a proper ventilated spray booth to control dust, and a better quality air-brush/spray gun.

That’s about it. Tomorrow I will have to do something different.

Sunday 8/2/2020

For breakfast I had the leftover pulled pork from last night, reheated. Very nice. Then at dinner-time, came a nice dish of… pulled pork! with sweet potatoes and a salad. Well, I like pulled pork. The CH kitchens didn’t provide BBQ sauce, but a little drizzle of sriracha fixed that.

Over the day I spent, must have been three hours fighting that nasty little airbrush. I took it all apart and found it had old paint from the first time I tried to use it. The product came with zero instructions on how to disassemble or properly clean it. In the course of cleaning it, however, I almost ruined it. The base/handle incorporates a battery, and a motor that pumps air out the top. Turns out, the air inlet is the USB charging port on the side. So I was holding it over the sink, using the air pressure to blow out the spray pipe while running water into the feed cup. Water ran down the side, and got sucked in through the charging port. Soon it stopped working because the handle was full of water. Then I spent a lot of time trying to get it to dry itself out, which it finally did.

Despite this and other problems, I did manage to apply decent coats of two different colors to the car body.

What’s left is to get a coat of clear acrylic on it. I applied this to the Chevy model with a brush and it came out ok. But I could try to use the Abominable Airbrush one more time before I junk it.

Saturday 8/1/2020

Took it easy as is my wont on Saturdays. Felt fine, except for the gouty toe, which made walking a bit difficult. In the middle of the day it was quite swollen. I took a picture but it isn’t that different from yesterday’s picture, except the toe is more of a cherry red.

Supper today was BBQ from Armadillo Willy’s, via DoorDash. This was a plan suggested by Patty, who shared in the meal–to the extent that sharing is allowed. Which means, she and I waited together for the driver, split up the meal into separate bags, and went off to dine alone. Anyway it was very good and a nice change.

I finished the chassis and undercarriage of the Ford model, and finally got to everything set to begin painting color on the body. I have been looking forward to this, but unfortunately I looks like I made a stupid mistake. I tried to go cheap on buying an airbrush. I bought a small one, quite a clever design that incorporates its own air compressor into its handle, and all for a third what an airbrush plus external compressor costs. I should have known, you can’t go cheap on tools. Trying to save money on a tool is usually a sure way to waste money; I know that.

The little brush doesn’t deliver enough paint nor spray a wide enough pattern. It takes for bleepin’ ever to build up an opaque coat of color and the narrow pattern makes it very difficult to get a uniform coat. I painted the hood, a separate part, and stopped.

So I spent a lot of the evening reading “10 best airbrushes for model makers” type websites, of which there are several, and looking at youtube videos on using an airbrush. Actually from some of the videos I learned a couple things and I am going to disassemble my cheap brush. It may be better than I think, although I doubt it.

Friday 7/31/2020

I went for a run this morning and it felt completely normal throughout. However as I walked the last block to CH I noticed a general mild feeling of weakness. No nausea or giddyness, just general feebleness. I went upstairs and checked my vitals and was relieved to find temp 98.1, BP slightly high at 140/114, pulse slightly low at 62. I’m always on the lookout for signs my artificial aortic valve is breaking down, but that BP and pulse is the exact opposite of what you’d expect if the valve were failing; it would cause a high pulse and low BP. So I had what I meant to be a bit of a nap, but turned into an hour slumber, and then felt normal again.

Except for a toe. One toe had felt sore last night and this morning and, hello, it was showing gout. Is this not a classical presentation of gout? Rubor, dolor, little bit of calor. I’ve had a few episodes of gout before. Welp, guess I have another. By evening it was cooling off a bit. All the news that fits…

Did not do much except read, and a bit on the model. Rhonda’s 4pm Covid conference had some interesting news items. One, owing to the severe staff crunch, with 26 employees quarantined at home pending tests, with the head chef doing prep work, the food services manager running the dishwashers, and the housekeeping staff delivering meals, they are reassessing some things. They have stopped trying to spray-sterilize the many incoming packages, partly because of staff time, partly because the spray disinfectant, the same as they use on the elevators, hand-rails, etc., is in short supply, and partly because current advice is that the chance of virus transmission by packages is low.

And they are planning to re-open the garages for full access! Another week of limited return times, and then we’ll be able to bring our cars back in any time.

Another interesting, and reassuring, item was about our policies with respect to those staff members who can’t work. I’ll quote Rhonda’s remarks as received in email later,

Within hours of receiving a positive test result, Kim Kurtis (our Human Resources Director) and Paola Robles (our Human Resources Assistant) goes to every department for impromptu staff meetings. They… answer questions from staff and address their fears. They offer support services which have included hotel stays for those who do not want to risk exposure to their families, to Instacart deliveries for an employee who was too ill to shop for their family. … And, they check in on employees while they are out to see if there are any additional ways we can support them.
 
You may also like to know that Channing House has always had a generous policy for Paid Time Off (PTO). We always required that anyone with a fever, or various other symptoms, stay home. Our generous PTO policy supports that expectation. Our COVID PTO policy enhances that with the ability to use more PTO than an employee has earned. Which means that the employee continues to be paid while they cannot come to work when it’s related to COVID.

It is really nice to know we take care of our staff in this way.