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.

Thursday 7/30/2020

Did the morning aerobics. Soon after, found the weekly sack of fresh linens outside my door. Last Thursday was when Marta cleaned the place professionally. This week I’m on my own. In hopes of another professional cleaning next Thursday, I only swept the kitchen/living room floor, and changed the bed. Given the situation with Housekeeping staff having to deliver food, probably next Thursday I will have to get out my little vacuum and spray bottle of cleaner and do it right.

Off and on through the day I worked on the model, where I achieved a bit of a coup. The model has a detailed front end including steering knuckles/kingpins, and a detailed little tie-rod between them. The kingpins are set up so they could pivot, giving steerable front wheels. However, the connection between the tie-rod and the steering knuckles was designed to be cemented solid. A pin on the knuckle went into a hole in the end of the tie-rod, and if you didn’t cement it, the tie-rod would just fall off. So close to articulated steering, but not there. Assembled to instructions, the wheels would be fixed.

So I cut off the pins that came up from the steering knuckles. I took a tiny little drill bit and drilled a hole through the end of each steering knuckle, where the pin used to be. And I made little bitty rings of brass wire to link the tie-rod ends to the knuckles. Viola, articulated front steering. I’m rather pleased with this so I am including two pictures.

Not much else to say about this day. Well, one thing. I have Marian’s retirement clock on my desk. It’s a nice, heavy, gold thing that sat on our mantel for years. It’s very accurate, and runs for about a year on a single “N” cell. This morning during aerobics I noticed it had stopped. Time for a new battery. How to get one? I didn’t want to start yet another Amazon order for one stinking $3 pack of 2 batteries. I could fill out a form for “essentials”, and the staff will shop it next Tuesday, but I don’t want to give the staff any more to do in this crunch time.

Bleep it, I said, I’m going to walk to CVS and buy it. I put on my hat and got about halfway over to the CVS on University when my conscience got to me. Yes the risk is minimal but is it really essential to take it? Once again, do I want to risk being the one who brings the virus into Channing House?

Nope. So I turned around and walked back. And in about 2 minutes I had found TheBatterySupplier.com, a wonderful website that sells batteries of all kinds and doesn’t charge shipping. In five minutes I had placed an order for a 2-pack of N cells. It may take a week to get them, but whatever. I have five other clocks in the apartment (microwave, dvr, house phone, iPhone, wristwatch).

Wednesday 7/29/2020

Yeah, another day of gripping excitement. Well, a gentle pinch of excitement. Went for a run, and shortly after returning I got the car out of the garage and went for a drive just for fun. I thought about going down to the Baylands for a walk but instead went up 84 to Skyline and back down Page Mill.

Very few cars on the road, but quite a few cyclists. I remember the pleasures of cycling Skyline and Page Mill. Put the car safely away at 1:30. Maybe Saturday I’ll go to the Baylands.

---

Worked an hour on the car model. Although this model has better plastic details than the prior one, its instruction sheet is not as good. I’ve found a couple of mistakes in it, and today I had to spend ten minutes trying to make sense of a graphic where the drawing doesn’t match the plastic parts at all.

---

On my balcony, the dragon-wing begonias are begoing bonkers.

---

At 5:30 comes an email: a special Zoom meeting is called for 6:45 tonight “for an important COVID update”. Uh-oh. Will it be the first infection among us Independent Livers?

Turns out an employee in food services tested positive, and had been in close contact with others, so 20 food service employees are on furlough pending tests. In the meantime, the remaining food staff are confined to the kitchen where they prepare food and load carts wearing PPE including face shields. And delivery to the rooms is being done by whatever staff are available, primarily housekeeping and office staff. So in-room housekeeping services are again on hold.

Rhonda emphasized we are all to practice safety more than ever, and emphasized specifically that we are not to eat with persons from another household. I had a tentative date to go out for pizza on Saturday with another resident. While the meeting was in progress I sent an email canceling that.

---

Still reading Journal of the Plague Year and it is interesting how they tried to contain it with some measures that are familiar to us now. Defoe quotes at length from the orders of the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of the City of London. Among the rules,

…all plays, bear-baitings, games, singing of ballads, or such-like causes of assemblies of people be utterly prohibited … all public feasting,… and dinners at taverns, ale-houses, and other places of common entertainment…

Just the same, like parts of the USA, they couldn’t bring themselves to close the bars, only ruling

no company or person be suffered to remain or come into any tavern, ale-house, or coffee-house to drink after nine of the clock in the evening…

One striking measure of control was locking people into their houses. There was a system of watchmen and inspectors, who could go into any house to examine a sick person, and if the inspector decided this was a case of the plague they would lock up the house with everyone who lived there inside it, and set a 24-hour watch outside to make sure nobody left the place. You got out of such confinement only by dying, or by having an inspector come in and verify there was no remaining sickness. Defoe admits

many people perished in these miserable confinements which, ’tis reasonable to believe, would not have been distempered if they had had liberty, though the plague was in the house.

and says that

it would fill a little volume to set down the arts used by the people of such houses to shut the eyes of the watchmen who were employed, to deceive them, and to escape or break out from them.

Yeah, you think? We are more sensible, we confine the healthy people. Plus, we have internet. In 1650, if you are quarantined, the only “media” is your window to the street.

Tuesday 7/28/2020

This is the first day of the pandemic where I’ve been seriously bored and antsy to be out and doing, with nothing to do. I wrote to Frank at FOPAL hoping he’d come up with something I could work on out in the courtyard. Maybe tomorrow.

I read my essay on “Every day (I update this blog)” to the CH Writers and people seemed to like it. Maybe a few new followers, but probably not. People around here don’t follow blogs they way I do, as far as I can tell. In the essay I referred to Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (which anyone can download here). Some parallels emerge at once, and some differences.

One difference was how slowly Defoe’s plague moved, owing I suppose to how limited was the ability to travel in 1664. In autumn they get rumors it is in Holland, then in the spring shows up in the parish of St. Giles, and takes months to work its way across London. People didn’t move that far from their neighborhoods, I guess. Or maybe it had to do with the mode of transmission: the Great Plague of London was the bubonic form, transmitted by fleas, not through the air in droplets. That means that to spread the disease requires an infected person to carry their fleas to a new location, or to infect the fleas in another location, which is not as convenient as just sneezing or singing near another person. Of course, once the fleas of a household were infected, all the people who slept or spent time in that house would be infected.

One striking parallel was the immediate rise of quack remedies and their opportunistic purveyors:

it is incredible and scarce to be imagined, how the posts of houses and corners of streets were plastered over with doctors’ bills and papers of ignorant fellows, quacking and tampering in physic, and inviting the people to come to them for remedies, which was generally set off with such flourishes as these, viz.: ‘Infallible preventive pills against the plague.’ … ‘Anti-pestilential pills.’ ‘Incomparable drink against the plague, never found out before.’ ‘An universal remedy for the plague.’ ‘The only true plague water.’ ‘The royal antidote against all kinds of infection’

We’d like to think we’re smarter now than 450 years ago, wouldn’t we? Chloroquine, anyone? Bleach?

There were “astrologers” and others publishing all sorts of prophecies of doom.

Some endeavours were used to suppress the printing of such books as terrified the people, and to frighten the dispersers of them, some of whom were taken up; but nothing was done in it, as I am informed, the Government being unwilling to exasperate the people,

Facebook/Twitter?

---

I omitted to mention that yesterday and the day before I received rejections from agents, and another today. Still about half of the 30 submissions still open. I was impressed at first that agents were replying fairly promptly, within a week or two; but now it has been more like six weeks. Of course a few of them just say, if you don’t hear back in twelve weeks, it means no.

A couple of the rejections read as if the agent had actually read the sample prose; others are less specific and might just mean they didn’t go past the submission letter itself. I haven’t much hope of an acceptance, but it would be really nice to have at least one agent ask to read the entire MS.

---

I was reminded of Pelajis the other day when I read Fried Rice Comic. I keep up a bit with the world of web comics, which is a new creative/publishing genre, barely twenty years old. (So far as I know, the longest continuous running web comic is Schlock Mercenary which started in 2000. There are a few others nearly as old, and many nearing the ten-year mark.) I follow several of web comics with enjoyment. There’s a huge range of artistic and narrative styles, all very different from the old syndicated newspaper comics.

Anyway, the annual Eisner Awards are the Oscars or Emmys of the world of comics and comic books, and since 2017 they have included an award for Best Web Comic, and this year that award went to Fried Rice Comic. If you haven’t read any web comics, read a few pages of that. Lovely, delicate watercolor illustrations, pleasant characters… and nothing happens!! Fifty damn pages (and it only updates once a week, so that’s a year’s worth) and nothing has happened except they go to church and later have a quiet little party.

So my test readers told me that in Pelajis not enough happens. Lemme tell ya, there’s more action on one damn chapter of Pelajis than in a whole year of the Eisner-winning Best Goddam Web Comic of 2020. Also, more jokes. Go figure.

Monday 7/27/2020

After my run I alternated between reading and working on the model car: paint a bit, read a while to let the paint dry or the cement set, and repeat. Eventually I finished the engine.

Late in the day a combination of a note from Scott, and a blog I had read earlier, combined to lead me to write a little screed to the CHOpinion mailing list, on the facts around the Federal response to the Portland protests. I also completed my essay about blogging every day and sent that to the writer’s list. So I did quite a bit of writing, although not in this blog.

Here are some views of the V8 engine. For starters, here’s the real thing.

Here’s the model a little closer up.

Sunday 7/25/2020

Nice ordinary Sunday morning. Watering the plants, I thought about going to the nursery. I want to add a couple of plants, and repot another, and need potting soil and stuff. Common sense says do it Monday so I can put the car away the same day. But it was 9am on a lovely Sunday morning, so heck, I decided to go.

I haven’t mentioned the rigamarole of getting the car out. In order to completely isolate the COVID area from the rest of the facility, they had to close off the basement passage that I used to take to reach the car in the Lee Center garage. There’s also a ground-level door to a stairway to the garage, but for security, that door has to be kept locked. So to get the car, I go first to the front desk and ask for a Lee garage key. The receptionist notes my room number in a log and hands me a yardstick with a single key in a ring at the end. I take this and follow blue tape arrows through the dining room (chairs and tables all piled up for storage because we don’t eat there any more), across the back patio, and use the key to unlock the stairway door. Inside that door I hang the yardstick and key on a hook on the wall (somebody from Facilities comes around periodically and moves the keys back to the desk) and go down the stairs to the garage.

When I put the car away in the garage on Monday, I will exit that garage through a different door, one that opens to the street, so I can come around and reenter the building through our “single point of entry” and wash my hands and have my temperature checked.

Well, off to the nursery. It was busy, though not crowded, and almost everybody had masks on. I frowned at one guy who didn’t, but later he had one on. Earlier he had chin-strapped it to talk on the phone. Why do people think they can’t talk on the phone through a mask?

I bought a bag of soil, a couple of plants, a couple of pots and trotted on home where I gardened for an hour. I had to get rid of a healthy plant, a Heuchera. It was growing well but it was infested with tiny little white flies. It had annoyed me anyway, so I didn’t mourn when it went to the trash. I now have three fuchsias of different varieties in largish pots and look forward to seeing how they do. According to the little info card on one of them, it grows to 10 feet. I figure I will just keep cutting it back, holding it to about 3 foot max. Maybe that will kill it, but I bet it will be just fine.

The cue for the upcoming CH Writers’ meet is “every day” — whatever that phrase means to you. Hah! What does “every day” mean to me, aside from natural body functions (which was the first thing to pop into my mind, gotta be real), is this blog. I have written a nice little essay about why I started it, and why I decided to do a personal journal as a public blog. Why not a private journal, a text file that only I would ever see? (Like a normal person.)

For entertainment I watched Josie and the Pussycats oh yes I did. One of the bloggers that I follow had recommended it and it was on my TV box free, so sure. It was worth every penny, silly but fun.

Saturday 7/25/2020

You know it’s a boring day if you have to put “walk” to fill out the title. Pleasant Saturday morning. Headed out for a walk about 9am. Went over to Midtown and had a cappucino and almond croissant, num num. To make up on calories, I skipped all carbs at lunch and ate only the salmon entree. (Salmon steak for lunch; I was thinking pretty well of the CH kitchen.)

Today was the tip-off of the WNBA season, which is being conducted entirely in a “Wubble” (Women’s bubble) with all teams sequestered in a single campus, three games a day. I had recorded the first game, which was the one in which Oregon alum Sabrina Ionescu, the all-everything college player of the year, made her professional debut. So nice that she’s graduated and I don’t have to root against her any more. She did well, but frankly the game wasn’t that interesting. I probably won’t watch many more of them.

I worked on the model for a couple of hours. I am at a very slow part where I have many tiny parts to assemble to the engine block. I cut them off the sprue and began. Each part needs to be carefully cleaned of flashing and then painted one of gloss black, flat black, aluminum or rust. Most need two coats of paint, with half an hour to dry between coats. And then fitted to the block. Always dry-fit first before applying cement, because things never fit quite right and need to be sanded or shaped somehow to fit snug.

Note the oil filter at the bottom?

I had a wee problem with that. When I went to find that on the sprue and clip it out, it wasn’t there. Apparently I cut it out earlier and lost it? Anyway it was nowhere to be found. Maybe it got vacuumed up by Marta Thursday. Anyway, I found a piece of sprue that was about the right diameter, and I sculpted an approximation of the original shape. Painted and with the decal it looks ok. (The decal is exactly right, it says “strato star” above a “V8” and I have a pic of a restored original car that has an oil filter just like it) .

Supper time and CH kitchen lost all cred; the entree was a grilled tuna steak that was dry and had a really foul odor. I dumped it and had a PBJ instead. (Finishing off a jar of rhubarb jam from niece Laurel.)

Friday 7/24/2020

Went for a run, starting early so as to be back before the promised 8:30am power shutoff. In fact the shutoff didn’t happen until 9:20, and was over and power restored by 9:40. So that was easier than planned. They did establish that the freight elevator worked off the emergency power supply. That’s important because the freight elevator opens to the outside; it can be entered from the back parking lot. So it could be used by emergency responders.

Also the test established that, on the upgraded floors like mine, the wi-fi also works off the emergency power system, and kept on right through the outage.

---

Speaking of upgraded floors, there was news on the upgrade project in Rhonda’s weekly call. Currently the 5th floor is being worked on, with move-ins to be done by 10/31. That will leave two undone floors, 3 and 4. By the original floor-by-floor schedule they wouldn’t have been completed before end 2021. But staff have brainstormed a plan by which those two floors can be done in tandem, completing in July next year. This means finding 30-some temporary units but this can be done, by offering inducements to some people who have bought in, but not moved in. This so-called “loan back” program means they are loaning back the unit they would have occupied in exchange for some kind of financial break.

Hopefully mid-year next year will bring lots to celebrate, starting with a return to normal operations.

---

Right after Rhonda’s meeting I met with Michele in the lobby and we had a long conversation with a very patient and helpful Apple support agent. With his guidance I was able to find the massive file, a 192 gigabyte “log” file kept by the Mail app. It was a hidden file, not revealed in a normal Finder display. Moved it out of the Mail folder to the desktop, started up Mail, all looked normal so it didn’t miss that file. Deleted the file and presto, we had 192GB free space. I personally don’t use Apple’s Mail app, and I’m glad. But it is essential to many of my neighbors with Macs.

---

Another snippet from Rhonda’s meeting:

We are currently required to complete 4 daily and weekly reports to 3 different reporting agencies. We are required to report PPE inventory, number of COVID-tests administered and the related results, number of COVID positive residents and/or staff, and number of persons of interest or PUIs (PUIs are people who may have symptoms or may have had exposure to COVID). Of course, each agency asks for the same information in a different format or for a different time period.

Also, a staff member who had not been at work in the past 3 weeks, apparently self-quarantined for symptoms? has tested positive. So several more staff who had contact with that person are also now self-quarantining, putting a strain on the staff to cover for all the absences.

---

I started assembling the engine of the model. The detailing is very nice. On the cylinder heads for the flathead V8, the individual spark plugs are present. By leaving those bits unpainted, I get white spark plugs. I have to think if I can get little spark plug leads to them.

Thursday 7/23/2020

After the aerobics class I was doing my usual morning internetting when the phone rang. It was Michele, who lives on the 9th floor and who I have helped with Mac problems before. Her Mac was giving an odd error message about its disk being nearly full, please do something. Michele is pretty much the opposite of technical, so was flummoxed. We agreed to meet in the lobby at 10 to look at the problem.

Which was a real problem. Over the course of half an hour playing with her pretty little rose-gold Macbook Air, I learned quite a bit. For instance, although I had often selected About This Mac from the Apple menu, I had never noticed that the little window it opens had anything other than info on the model and the level of the OS. It has tabs! And one of them is Storage! And it presents a nice bar graph to summarize how storage is used. Here’s the graph from Michele’s machine.

Almost all of the 250GB drive is in use. The little colored slivers on the left represent System, Photos, Mail (the largest blue one) and so on. But 209GB is in use for “Other”. There in the lobby, and later alone, I researched the heck out of this. There are a lot of web pages out there telling you how to manage storage, but none of them matched up with Michele’s situation.

I learned how to get the Finder to show me a list of all files in the Mac, sorted by size. None of those files were larger than the 2GB in the mail folder. A couple of websites pointed to Time Machine as a possibility. Apparently it sometimes keeps local “snapshots” of backups. So I got Michele to meet me again in the lobby and I checked her machine and no, Time Machine wasn’t even running, there were no snapshots. You use a command in the terminal window to verify that. I felt very sophisticated opening the terminal window and running the tmutil command, heh heh. So now I will meet Michele tomorrow at 5:30 and she will call Apple support and I will translate geek for her.

It was second-Thursday, and Marta came by at 2 and made my unit spic’n’span. So that was pretty much the day.

Tomorrow, Friday, there is to be a scheduled power shutdown, apparently having to do with an elevator test. So power will be off from 8:30 am until maybe 11am. I imagine they will come back sooner than that. Anyway, if I go for a run I will probably have to climb six flights of stairs when I come back. Well, so?

Wednesday 7/22/2020

Went for a run first thing; it felt kind of effortful. Some days…

First excitement of the day was that InstaCart shopped my grocery order at 10am. This was stuff for me and stuff for the Allens. Nobody else on the 6th floor wanted to buy stuff. I think people are going out to stores on their own. Anyway, the shopper arrived at 11:40. I took it all upstairs, separated out the Allen’s in a bag, and dropped it off with them.

The modeling tools I had ordered finally arrived. This would be Amazon’s replacement for the order that got lost. The same tools that I ordered again from the manufacturer yesterday. Those will arrive next week. Who knows, the original Amazon order might emerge from limbo someday, too. Then I’ll have three scribers. Anyway.

So I broke open the 1953 Ford model kit and took a look. I am quite pleased. It is more detailed and intricate than the 1952 Chevy kit in several ways. One way, is that the chrome spears on the side are provided as separate, chrome pieces. On the Chevy the comparable side-spears were just molded into the body and you had to paint them silver.

Another feature is a sheet of very nice decals, including tiny details like the little fender and trunk badges and the script “Fleetline” and so on.

After supper I sat down and finished the Coke machine, a little white paint, silver paint, black paint, and decals.

All the screening Covid tests (53 residents, 49 staff) are back, negative.