Tuesday 7/21/2020

Today was the first day it was practical to re-execute my trip over the hill to Half Moon Bay to look for plants and pots. Doing so meant blowing off the CH Writers’ group, but I had nothing prepared and wasn’t that interested in the subject anyway. So off I went.

I found one acceptable large pot. And I found two plants. One is a nice Daphne. We had a daphne in the back yard on Tasso Street, so I know it can be healthy and bloom in shady conditions, so it should be fine on my east-facing balcony. The other is a thyme-leafed Fuchsia, so called because its leaves are very small. Although I’ve seen thyme plants and their leaves are smaller still. Anyway, happily blooming away with lots of little red flowers.

So back home for an intense hour of gardening. I killed one of the chinese whatsis plants, I don’t know what they are, anyway they haven’t done well, just hanging on. The shock of being out of doors after years in our living room was too much. I kept the larger one, but the runty one I put out of its misery so I could re-use its pot.

I filled up four small plastic bags with used soil and broken plant bits. Well, I can’t put a new plant in the soil used by a plant that wasn’t healthy, can I? But gardening on a balcony is different from gardening in a… garden. Can’t just scatter the dirt. Gotta sweep it up and bag it up. And I took the pot into the shower and scrubbed it. Anyway, that’s all done.

I put the daphne back against the inner wall. It won’t get direct sunlight at all. Or maybe ten minutes just after dawn. So it should be comfortable.

I ordered a pair of Levi’s on 7/11. The order stayed in “processing” state until 7/18, when it went to “shipped” and finally showed up this evening. My efforts to control my weight have been effective; over the last month I’ve come down from 174+/-2 to 172+/-2 pounds. And my I had to keep hitching up my 36-waist jeans so this was a 35-waist. And it fits fine. So yay me.

Monday 7/20/2020

Went for a run which felt fine. Back in plenty of time for the 9-10am window when the 6th floor was to be called for COVID testing. In fact they worked from the other end of the floor so I was the last in about 10am. The test kit this time was different, the nurse said. “It’s uncomfortable.” Instead of long Q-tip things, there were long plastic rods. She had to probe both sides and it wasn’t that big a deal, although it is always astonishing how far back my nasal passages go.

There is a mystery with two Amazon orders. On separate days I put in two orders, which then were combined and re-split. The first order was for three wee little bottles of model paint plus two model-making tools. The next day I put in an order for 4 different New York Times crossword puzzle books.

When I began getting follow-up emails, it seemed Amazon had decided to ship two bottles of paint and two crossword books in one package, which finally did arrive three days after it was ordered.

The other package, two books, two tools, and a single paint bottle, didn’t ship for three days, and then its tracking info seemed to stall out in USPS Milpitas. Today I checked the status and Amazon’s order status page says “This order may have been lost”. Da fuq? And I was offered a button to click for “request a replacement”. Which I clicked but now it isn’t clear if that actually “took”? So I ordered the two tools from a completely different source (we’re talking 2x$9, they’re just like little steel dental picks). I want them because they are meant for use in the initial prep of a plastic model, prior to painting, and I want to use them in starting the 53 Ford model.

I spent three hours documenting and revising my playing cards software module. Fascinating how programming work can eat up time.

Oh, Men in Black yesterday? Was off Comedy Central, not HBO, so had lots of commercials. I stuck with it for an hour, admiring the special effects and Tommy Lee Jones wonderful screen presence, then went to bed.

Sunday 7/19/2020

Read the paper, had my brekkie, watered the plants, did the crossword, talked to Dennis. Told him I was heading out for a walk, but then realized, if I go now for any decent length of walk, I won’t be back when the lunch cart comes around.

So spent the time to lunch completing the coding of that old project. What I had done was to try to create an abstract “deck of cards” that could be shuffled, dealt into “hands”, put back in the deck etc. Written as a Python module that could be used by any kind of card game. Then as proof of concept, I started coding a simple Klondike solitaire using my deck. That’s what I got working yesterday and today. It has a very lame user interface, just ascii characters to show the tableau and the foundations etc. But after picking off 3 or 4 bugs, it plays the game. So that was fun. Not sure what to do with it next, if anything.

After lunch I went for that walk of a bit over 2 miles. Then it was time to watch The Limelighters’ production of Pirates of Penzance now streaming free for a week. After supper I started watching Men In Black recorded off the HBO. Will I stick with it to the end?

Saturday 7/18/2020

So today I did my laundry. I hadn’t gotten my preferred 6-10am laundry slot (there’s a magnetic board we put markers on to claim time slots, and a neighbor grabbed the best slots a week ago) so had to do it 10-12. I started the first load then grabbed a shopping bag and a hat and headed out for the five-minute walk to the farmer’s market. I only bought a pound of ripe apricots.

With the laundry done and put away, it was almost time for the garage to be opened for returning cars. Mine spent the prior night on the street, because of driving down to FOPAL yesterday. Now I put it away. Next on the program was a nap, and I tried to take one on my balcony. However, being on the sixth floor, I can hear sounds from blocks away, and somebody was remodeling a house in the next block. Later I spent a couple of hours working on an old software project, one I’d set aside back in 2017.

One more shipment came in, an order of a few colors of model paint colors from eBay, but not the order from Amazon. I’m waiting on that, which should have come yesterday, to start work on the next car model.

Friday 7/17/2020

Went for a run first thing; it felt good. Watered the plants. Refilled the hummingbird feeder. Little buzzers are emptying it in 6 days, average. That’s what, 50 hummingbird weights in sugar water, say 10 hummingbird weights consumed per day. By one, or perhaps two, birds. Slurp slurp.

First order of business, however, was catching up with the FOPAL decision to not have an August sale after all. It occurred to me, hey, those signup sheets are still open. I went through all 6 of them and changed them to stop accepting results, supposedly at 9am. By 9:30, 3 of them had “closed” status but 3 didn’t. Little bug in Slottr, there.

Also in Nancy’s “sorry, changing to september” letter that I forwarded to all signed-up people last night, she indicated that the signups would be preserved. Um, easier said than done. I looked but couldn’t find any way to reschedule a “slot” to a different date. One can only delete a slot (losing any signups) and enter a new one. There’s a work-around, to export all the existing signups to a spreadsheet and manually reenter them. So I wrote to Slottr support asking for guidance on that.

Then bugged Frank to tell me when he’d be at FOPAL so I could go down and finish working those boxes of Computer books.

Then wrote a note to the CH bulletin board advising Mac users about the latest update. MacOS keeps suggesting politely but insistently that we should upgrade to Catalina. I don’t want our in-house Mac users (of whom there are many) to attempt that, because if there is any problem, which is possible with an OS version change, they’d be on their own. However, MacOS also offers other updates the same way. So I sent a graphic:

Don’t click on the one thing, do click on the other to install a Security update and a new version of Safari. Should be clear enough, right?

Updated the status of all my pending online orders. Somehow I have ten things on the way to me, mostly from Amazon but also eBay and Peet’s coffee. Shopaholic much? It looks like three will arrive today, maybe four. (In the end three things arrived: one small order, a larger order, and half of each of two orders that Amazon had split and recombined, who knows why.)

And that got me to 11am and feeling like I’d had a full day.

After lunch I got the car out and drove to FOPAL where I processed the last four boxes of computer books. Back home, I listened to Rhonda’s Friday meeting. There was little news this time. All covid tests are coming back negative. The program for allowing family visits is working well. There have been quite a few calls from people interested in moving in, which is not what Kim in marketing had expected. The 5th floor upgrade is moving along, with planned move-in for October. Generally a feeling that we are getting on top of this pandemic thing and starting to cruise.

One of the orders that arrived today was my final order of model cars, an order I placed nearly 2 weeks ago.

So now I have 4 models to choose among. There are great reference pictures online for both Chryslers. They are very collectible. Examples: 1955 300, 1956 300B. One thing I learned from these pictures: the original Hemi engines were not painted red! They were painted gold.

Both cars were successful as stock racers. The 1955 in particular was the star of the Mexican Road Race, which brings up the idea of dressing the model in racing colors:

That would be a lot of work, and I’m not sure my skills are up to it.

Thursday 7/16/2020

Victoria was late starting her Zoom session for aerobics. She comes up from Hollister–which is a hell of a commute–and today for the first time in Shelter Days, there was heavy traffic.

This was a pretty blank day. Took two naps, that’s how boring it was. I was curious whether, with the new, every-other-week cleaning schedule, I would still get the usual weekly delivery of fresh towels and sheets. And I did, so whee, excitement, I got to change the bed.

I spent some time casually looking into something that caught my attention recently: Prius camping. There is a little subculture of people who live in their Priuses, and a slightly larger subculture of people who use the Prius for camping. I’ve figured all along that when we all get busted out of house arrest, it would be time for a road trip. I’d thought of that in terms of staying in motels. As I noted last year, camping was one of the things I figured never to do again. But camping in the Prius…hmmm.

One more car model came in the mail, the 1/16 scale MG-TC.

The box is much larger than the box for the 1/25 scale Ford. I’m not going to do this one next; I expect it to be of very high quality and detail (if those spoke wheels in the picture are really that good, wow) and I want to do it justice, so I’ll do at least one other, first.

Then about 8pm came news from FOPAL: they have decided that they can’t run a sale August 8-9 after all; the recent increase in ‘rona cases makes it irresponsible. So now we get to test the feature of Slottr, that lets you send an email to everyone who has signed up. Tomorrow.

Wednesday 7/15/2020

After my run and checking email I got in the car (parked on the street) and headed over the hill to the coast. I had just stopped at the first of three nurseries outside of Half Moon Bay when my phone rang: it was Nancy, of FOPAL. Today was the day the sign-up sheets should be open for signing up, and it seemed they weren’t, or at least one wasn’t.

I couldn’t do anything from there, so I started back, taking another call from her as I drove, tsk tsk. By the time I was back to the apartment, Nancy and Frank had worked out the issue, whatever it was, I really don’t know. Anyway by 11 all the sign up sheets were functioning, much to my relief. I had picked this sign-up sheet website to use and it was very distressing that it failed as soon as it was being used. Thus I didn’t get to look for plants or pots. Maybe Saturday?

Nothing much the rest of the day, except for putting the car in the garage at 2pm. With the mail one of the models I ordered came in, the 53 Ford Victoria. It includes a period Coke machine model.

According to the side of the box, it has even more detail than the 52 Chevy (peeking out above).

Observe that engine, a flat-head V-8? I know it very, very well. There was a period when mine had a head-gasket leak. With John Snow’s help I changed the head gasket, which promptly failed. We took the head off and I had it milled (I forget what I used for transportation with the car down) and John reinstalled it. I bought a torque wrench to make sure we did it right. But it failed again. I remember that John got angry at this, elbowed me away, and changed the gasket for a third time in a couple of hours, working in a complete rage. I think that third time was what worked.

I eventually more or less abandoned that car in Seattle, selling it to Tom Attwood for $100 (or maybe less?) before moving back to San Francisco. Will this be the model I do next? Must wait until three more kits come in.

Tuesday 7/14/2020

Did the aerobics class, then frittered time to the CH Writers’ meeting at 11. The cue this time was “your relation to France”. I didn’t realize when Connie assigned that last week, that today was Bastille Day. Anyway I had nothing. I thought about me and France. I might have made something of why in 1957 I opted to learn French as a second language in high school, instead of the presumably easier Spanish. (Or for that matter, how little old edge-of-suburbia Bethel HS in Spanaway WA even offered both French and Spanish. Go BHS!) Except I don’t remember why I made that choice. Or how I have a bunch of nice French in-laws who I don’t socialize with. So, nothin’.

Before and after the meeting I was negotiating with Frank at FOPAL to implement my actual physical presence. I got the car out and went down there at 2pm and spent a couple of hours going through some of the backlog of computer books. Found something like 15 “high-value” ones, books that bring more than $25, used, on Amazon. And two boxes of ones worth selling here, and assigned prices to them. I did all this sitting at a table in the shade in an open courtyard. It felt really good to be out of the house, doing something useful.

On return of course I had to park the car on the street. I can’t bring it in until tomorrow at 1:30. I have a plan for tomorrow morning, as well. Harriet texted me that she had seen fuchsias for sale in the nurseries over the hill at Half Moon Bay. So I’ll probably drive over there in the morning.

In the evening I tried to watch School of Rock and couldn’t hack it past 20 minutes. Sorry, Jack Black.

Monday 7/13/2020

Went for a run early; I was back and showered and dressed by 8am.

The Residents Association meeting went off smoothly. Only about 80 people on at peak. As treasurer I gave my report in one sentence, “There have been no transactions since the last meeting so the balance is still the same as then, $974.” A bit to my surprise the question of the cell tower on the roof was not brought up in the open discussion period. Good.

Didn’t do much else of note. Looked at some old software projects, wondering if I want to do some more hacking on them. I’m participating in a beta test of a picture storage manager. It crashed on me so I reported that, and filed a couple of feature requests. The developer is really friendly and accessible and the app is pretty, but it lacks some function I would need.

A friend asked how I liked Chariots of Fire, which aired on PBS this week. She didn’t think it deserved all the Oscar nominations it got back in 1981. I had it on the DVR so I started it. Got 45 minutes in and gave up. Very pretty PBS-style costume drama. Downton Abbey with foot races. Booooring. Other movies on my DVR: Men in Black, School of Rock. Both of which I saw in theaters when they were new. Actually we saw the Broadway production of School of Rock when we were in NYC in 2017. So some low-brow fun waiting for later in the week.

Sunday 7/12/2020

Totally blew this one off, I did. If Scott hadn’t reminded me, I’d have had my first break in continuity.

Was a Sunday. There was a walk. Something else happened… oh, right, I got a decent picture of the comet. Call that an accomplishment.

In the full-rez there’s fair detail. Here let me zoom in.

It’s starting to be visible after sunset as well, and I expect to see pictures from my neighbors on the west side of the building.