Saturday, 12/21/2019

The winter solstice, huzzah. One memory I retain from childhood was that my mother always noted the solstices. “December 21st, the days will start getting longer,” she’d say, with the clear suggestion of warmth, light, spring, to come. Of course, it’s a more meaningful turnover at the latitude of Tacoma, where winter days are significantly (and depressingly) shorter than here at the latitude of SF.

Post-breakfast the next scheduled thing was lunch with Scott at 1pm. What to do in the meantime? Well, I’d recently had an email from the Stanford Blood Center, my O+ type was in short supply. So I drove around to the donation center and donated. It’s actually close enough, only a couple of blocks off the route of my usual run, that I could walk there. But then I’d have to walk back while short a pint of red cells. I don’t think so.

I was pleased by my vitals: BP 105/63, pulse 60, hemoglobin 15.3, temp 97.79.

From there I came around to the T-Mobile store on University. Here’s an oddity: when I checked before departure, using Google maps on the laptop, it assured me there was a T-Mobile store there. But when I looked on the phone using Apple maps as I walked up University, Apple Maps didn’t know about it. Fortunately Google was right this time.

My desire was to switch the account so that the phone I always carry, ending in 1986, would be the primary, and the -3645 number, which I loaned to Jean, the secondary. When I first created the account (about ten years ago?), -3645 was my only cell phone, and -1986 was the land-line to our house. Two years ago I killed the land-line and moved the number to a cell, which was added as the second line on the account.

Problem is, when I try to log in to my T-Mobile account, it wants to send a TFA text to -3645, which is useless because that phone is at Jean’s house. The chap at the store said he could fix that, went away to the back, came back to verify which number should be which, went away, came back and said it was alright, I’d just have to “enter my PIN” when I logged in next, by which I assumed he meant the code sent by text.

So I just tried it; it says “there’s no primary account holder, enter the PIN you got at the store.” Fortunately it also was willing to take the last four digits of my SSN. And it still shows -3645 as primary and -1986 as “other line”. And it still doesn’t send a text to -1986. I assume a text showed up on -3645 causing Jean to wonder, if she even notices. (Later I got a text with a number I assume was the PIN. Later still, I tried logging in again; there’s no change. Looks like I’m stuck with -3645 as the main.)

Lunch with Scott was fun as always, and we tried Georgian food. I had a monster cheese boat, which the waiter should have advised was really meant as a shared dish.

Dinner was the Webster Street Grille reservation organized by Patty, featuring me, David and Helen Golden, and David and Mary Sue (I think?) Thornton. Three Davids. Lots of pleasant conversation, except that I was depressed to find that almost everyone at the table believed that Saunders and Warren are unelectable and only Biden could beat Trump. Post-traumatic stress of the Boris Johnson win in the UK.

Wednesday, 12/17/2019

Out the door for a run at 7:30 to find, whoopsie!, it is raining. I knew showers were in the forecast but could I be bothered to go lean over the balcony railing, or to look for green pixels on the weather radar? Oh no… but what the heck, it’s just sprinkling, carry on. So I did, and while my jacket got damp, it wasn’t bad at all.

I hung around the room doing I do not recall what until lunch time. Today was the day the CH publication, Scribble & Sketch, was to come out and go on sale at 12:30. So my plan in the morning was to have lunch, buy a copy, check how prominently they displayed the poem I had contributed, and then go on to FOPAL. But coming out of lunch I completely forgot about buying an S&S, just headed down to the garage and out.

In the evening I learned that they had completely sold out their (obviously inadequate) “print” (local copy shop) run and were taking orders for later. Anyway I got four useful hours in at FOPAL.

When I returned to CH I discovered that there was a local power outage and the building was dark! Well, not entirely; they have a generator which, among other things, keeps the automatic garage doors working, and lights on in the garage, the basement hallways, the lobby and dining room, stairwells. It also runs the freight elevators but not the regular elevators. So I walked up from the basement to the 4th floor, which like all floors above the first, was dark.

Apparently the power problem started at 4:28, which was just about the moment I left the FOPAL parking lot. Now, residents gathered in their floor lounges by flashlight to listen to announcements on the house emergency radios. Every floor had somebody manning the hand-held walkie-talkie for the floor, and everybody observed orderly radio procedure. The front desk made brief announcements, including that supper would go ahead as scheduled.

In the lobby I talked to the head chef and he explained that they had partial power in the kitchen, and their ranges and ovens were gas, so they could finish preparing the main entrees. However the heating on the serving line is induction plates which were not on the emergency power system, so they’d had to dig out the catering trays with the bottled gas flames. Also the dish washers are not on the emergency power, so they’d had to switch over to all paper.

When I got into the dining room I found that they had, indeed, in the hour between the outage and serving time, re-laid all the tables with plastic utensils, paper napkins, and little plastic bottles of water. The serving lines were filling paper plates from catering trays, and everybody got fed.

About 6:10 the three people who were riding with me to the game finished eating and we all trooped down to the garage and drove to Maples in my car. Probably another 10 from CH also went. (Why don’t we have the CH bus available for these games, there’s enough people to fill it? was a topic at dinner.)

Anyway, Stanford romped over Tennessee, leading by 10 at the half and winning by more than 20. Wally had attended the pre-game chalk talk and said the coach’s emphasis for the game was “box out” and rebound. Tennessee has no players under 6 feet, and more than one 6’5″, so it was important to work extra hard for rebounds. Stanford apparently took this advice to heart, as they ended up with 10 more rebounds, quite an achievement against average-taller players.

Another, but milder, episode of vertigo in the night. No problem in the morning, but it looks as if I just have to stop sleeping on my left side entirely.

Friday, 12/13/2019

Went for a run first thing, and without any breakfast. Whether for that reason or some other, I didn’t feel very good, and although I completed the usual distance, by the time I was back in the room I felt tired and worn-down. Was I sickening for something? By 11am when I left for the museum I felt better, and by afternoon felt normal.

At the museum, I had only four people for the tour. At least two, I felt were putting up with me out of politeness, but the other two were interested. Oh well.

With a few hours to kill before leaving for the women’s volleyball regional, I worked at getting my year-end wrap-up essay incorporated into the blog. This was not easy. I wrote it as a Pages document. From Pages I can export to PDF or some other formats, but not to HTML. The WordPress blog will let me create a “Page” as distinct from a “post” but the only way it will incorporate a PDF document is as a link. I want it to be a Page, which is a section of my “site” — but on the other hand why? Because from the normal site URL, all you see are the blog posts. The “pages” only appear if I put a link to them in the banner line.

Well. The essay “My First Year as a Bachelor” is, well, that’s the link. It mostly consists of quotes from this blog, but there’s some added value in the editorial comments around the quotes.

Off to the volleyball.

During the night I turned over in bed to my left, and immediately had a moment of vertigo. When I got up to pee, I had to reach for the walls for stability. I spent the rest of the night sleeping on my back with my head propped up, and in the morning was pretty much ok again.

Thursday, 12/12/2019

Spent the day at the Yosemite warehouse, including a couple hours scraping degraded foam out of the inside of a Cray 1.

The Cray was recently ousted from the museum’s lobby and sent to Yosemite for long term storage. It has six, pie-slice-shaped, power supply boxes that surrounded its base. These had been detached for shipment. Aurora wanted them opened and vacuumed out; she could see dust and crud inside.

The machine has been badly treated over the years. I believe it was actually used as Los Alamos, but it has been an inoperative exhibit for a long time, and not handled nicely. The covers of the power supplies, for example, are held on with eight flat-head philips screws, and none of the six boxes had more than three screws remaining, others being broken off or just lost. Anyway, I opened the first and groaned. The top and front panel were lined with that abominable black foam that we’ve had to scrape out of so many old machines. It gets soft, then brittle, and rains down into the machine as a toxic, acidic black snow. The stuff in the Cray had just reached the squishy state and had started to drop crumbs down; that’s what the boss saw, black crumbs of foam. I wore gloves and a breathing mask for this. Alan, who did more of it after lunch, disdained the mask. OK, your lungs.

We also played “museum tetris” moving the 1401 “study collection” (two 1403 printers and a 1402 reader/punch all partly cannibalized for parts, plus many cartons of SMS cards and cables, all from the 1401 restoration project) into a more compact arrangement to help make room for the Cray.

Back home, I had to prepare for my second A/V committee assignment of the month. This was a concert by the Silicon Valley Boy Choir. I fussed with the position of the Steinway on the stage, and the lighting. Then I contacted Florrie, who was in charge of the event, and she had me change some things. Then we waited for the performers to arrive. They were supposed to come at 6:30 and of course didn’t actually arrive until 6:50. Then they wanted the piano moved and could the mic be on a stand instead of hand-held? Well, no, mainly because I didn’t know where the mic stand was and it was time to start. Had they come on time there would have been time to find the mic stand (I know where it is now, I looked after the concert). Feh. Talent. What’r’ya gonna do.