Day 333, meeting, tour, supper

Thursday, 10/31/2019

Did some exercises before breakfast. I really haven’t got a satisfactory solution for the exercise situation. I feel I need more guidance and motivation for that, since I don’t go to the Y any more. However, the C.H. “strength and balance” classes are at 11:45 on MWF and that schedule just does not suit me. I want my physical exercise done in the morning, not impinging on my midday like that. Wouldn’t have to be 6:30am, but at least 9am.

Went to the quarterly meeting of FOPAL section managers and sorters. Had a talk about emergency response from the guy who manages the Cubberly complex where FOPAL is. Basically, after an earthquake, move out to one of the athletic fields, don’t cluster in the parking lot getting in the way of emergency vehicles. In other news, Janet is organizing additional shifts of volunteer sorters to try to make headway against the backlog. And our favorite website for pricing info, bookscoutPro, appears to be down permanently. It’s much more tedious to use BookFinder, etc.

After that I went to the museum to lead a tour for a group of 19 Google software developers. They seemed to enjoy it.

Back home, got a call from Mary Beth, would I join her and her husband Bruce and new resident Ann for dinner. Sure!

Day 332, fopal, something

Wednesday, 10/30/2019

Damn. Let too much time pass. Don’t remember what I did this day. Well, a bit. I spent half an hour on the novel in the morning, adding some text that did not satisfy me at all. I went down to FOPAL around noon, priced a couple dozen computer books, then did sorting until after 4pm.

Oh, yeah. While sorting I got kind of hungry, and decided that for supper I’d go to the Peninsula Creamery and have grilled cheese sandwich and one of their magnificent chocolate/chocolate shakes. Which I did, walking up from CH and back in the dark.

Day 331, teeth, book, A/V, SWBB

Tuesday, 10/29/2019

First thing this morning was to walk to the dentist’s office for dental hygiene. Times past, I would allow 30 minutes for this walk, starting at Tasso street. Now it’s four blocks. Good news, my gums have not receded any further, and Dr. Kono couldn’t find anything to complain about, no decay or anything.

The A/V committee meeting is scheduled for this afternoon, and I’ll likely be assigned an event. It has been weeks since Ian walked me through the various features of running all the stuff in the auditorium, the lights, the screen, the projector, the mics. Lots of details, seen once. I’d been telling myself often, I should go down and poke around again. So today I did that. I went into the auditorium and turned stuff on, dropped the screen, played with the lights (of which there are quite a few, house lights, stage spots), turned on a mic and talked through it, hooked up my laptop and played a youtube video.

After lunch I added some more words to the book. When time came around for the A/V meeting I walked down to the third floor lounge. I got assigned just one show, a talk on Monday morning at 10. Only issue is the presenter, on the ERF (event request form) has stated he needs to show PowerPoint off his Windows laptop. I need a few more details, like, does the laptop have an HDMI port or what?

I had seen a message on the house email list, Lenny (woman who moved in just after me) wanted a ride to tonights SWBB game. I offered. So I got a quick dinner at 5:45 and met Lenny in the basement at 6:15. This was the first time I’d gone from CH to Maples, and I made a botch of it, ending up taking the wrong way, and then turning too soon and having to loop around for a second pass at the Maples parking lot.

The game was fine: the Cardinal beat Beijing Normal 100 to 58. Three of the freshmen played and all looked strong and capable. A returning junior, Alyssa Jerome, looked vastly improved, and the usual good players all looked good.

I am glad I can still enjoy SWBB on my own. Several times during the game I pictured Marian there with me, how much she’d have enjoyed it, and my eyes prickled and my throat closed up. But that didn’t dominate the experience, and there were a lot of moments when I was honestly and enthusiastically cheering for good play and high skills by Stanford.

Day 330, Shingrex, FOPAL, book, fugue

Monday, 10/28/2019

I opened the day and week with a run. Every run is different. This was one of those where I felt good, not just normal but positively good, jogging along. A mental tail-wind as opposed to the mental head-wind that one sometimes has to battle. At the point where I stop jogging and start walking, I did a rough time/distance calculation; I jog at about 4.5 miles per hour, the same as feels comfortable on a treadmill.

Next stop was the Los Altos office of PAMF, to get my second Shingrex shot (say that three times fast). The prior one, see Day 268, had given me a day of low-grade fever. The nurse this time said, oh yes, this one might do the same.

Moved on to FOPAL for the usual Monday morning cleanup of the computer section. Found only one “high-value” book this time, a textbook that retails from $27-$75. Then I did sorting for another two hours, leaving when the 2pm volunteer crew arrived.

Back home, I took a nap and then flogged myself over to the keyboard and added 1000 words to the novel.

I felt fine up to the time I went to bed at 10:30. But around midnight I wasn’t sleeping and I felt cold, cold enough to shiver. I got up in the dark and found a wool throw, one that we bought at a Scottish woolen mill in, probably, 1978. It’s light but very warm and snuggly(*). I knew just where it was, so I found it in the dark and brought it back to bed and wrapped myself in it, under the usual sheet and blanket. In that brief excursion out of bed, I started literally shaking with cold.

I was quite aware this was not a real sensation of cold, but a chill. I figured I probably had a fever as well, although I didn’t feel any malaise. I expected that shortly it would turn and I would find myself sweating. That didn’t happen. Eventually I drifted off. Somewhere around 2am I woke again and pushed the wool throw aside, then slept until 6:30. At which point I felt just fine.

I blame the whole episode on the shingrex shot; nothing else changed in my routine. Anyway as of the next morning, I feel fine.

(*) Sad story about the twin of this throw. We had bought two, and gave one to my mother. She moved in to a care facility, where she often sat with the throw over her lap. There her laundry was done by the staff, who weren’t the brightest candles in the sconce. Some staff person decided to launder the throw along with everything else, and must have tossed it into a load washed with very hot water. The one-time fluffy, 4×6 foot woolen throw came back from laundry the same color as before, but now about 18×20 inches, with a texture like a hot-pad.

Day 329, Printer, TSA, Repair Cafe, smoke

Sunday, 10/27/2019

Went out for coffee and to read the paper at Verve. Talked to Dennis on the phone while waiting for my cappuccino. Back at CH, I had an hour to kill and put it to good use. First I tested the new printer by printing an 8×10 of one of my Greek pictures on good quality paper. Screen on the right, paper on the left. It did pretty darn well.

It could be a little more contrasty and more blue, but for a first try with default settings, not bad at all. Certainly every bit of detail was there.

I had time remaining so I did what I’ve meant to do for some time, went to the TSA site and applied for Global Entry. This is a superset of TSA Precheck which supposedly makes it faster to return to the US from abroad.

Now it was 10am (gosh but I am productive in the mornings), so I took one of the house shopping carts from the garage and used it to roll my toolbox three blocks up Homer street to the Museum of the American Heritage, for the quarterly Repair Cafe. I was teamed with apprentice fixer Daniel and we had a pretty successful day. We repaired an old calculator quite easily, and a wooden floor vent with somewhat more effort. Then we got a stand mixer that turned into the Job from Hell. Spent at least an hour figuring out how to get it apart. Quickly identified the broken part, a worm gear, and showed the client how to order a new one on Amazon. Then spent half an hour trying to reassemble the goddam thing before, with the client’s encouragement, giving up on the whole job.

Finally we had another easy one, an electric jigsaw where the user had cut into the cord. The break was only a foot from the handle, so we opened it up, discarded the short piece of cord, stripped and reattached the good part of the cord inside the device. Fixed!

We were working outdoors under canvas marquees and several times the gusty wind in the courtyard threatened to blow our marquee away like a kite. “Grab a pole!” was the shout and people would rush to hold them down. It was all fun and games until you realized, every such gust up in Sonoma county was spreading the Kincade fire…

Due to the wind shift, the smoke from that fire finally came down to us, and by late afternoon the sky was yellow and the air smelled like an old cigar. At sunset I saw the color and took some shots with the Nikon from my west-facing balcony.

smoky_sunset

Day 328, laundry, docent, new printer

Saturday, 10/26/2019

The laundry room on each floor has a sign-up calendar, and I’d reserved the first slot on Saturday. Since I had to be out by 9, I got up at 6:30 and immediately started my two loads. I had it all wrapped up after breakfast, around 9am, including ironing my red CHM Docent shirt.

For some reason my newspaper wasn’t delivered this morning. I noted non-delivery at the Mercury website, and a copy was left at the front desk for me in the middle of the day sometime.

After lunch I went to the Museum and led the 2pm tour. About ten people, several of whom hung on my every word.

When I got back I had a voice mail from the front desk, you have a newspaper waiting, and a large box, it looks like a printer. And it was, my new Epson. Setting it up was interesting. It came with ten bottles of ink, two each of Black, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Photo Black, the same colors as the cartridges used in my old printer, but now in plastic bottles holding, oh, about six ounces probably.

The setup process involves charging the five ink tanks by carefully tipping each color bottle into its tank, waiting about 30 seconds while it goes glug glug glug, well, more of an alto tone, glig glig glig, and the color creeps up the side of the translucent tank. Then the printer takes seven minutes to initialize itself, and prints an ink jet alignment page. The pattern was perfect the first time. Nice. After it has done all that, you again uncap each bottle and pour the last ounce into the tank to take up the space used by the charging and testing. The second set of five bottles get stored for, well, in my case probably a year or so? Until I deplete the reservoirs.

Now I have to get find a new home for my old printer, which works fine. I will advertise it on the CH bulletin board mailing list, but not today I think. There are a lot of messages on the CHBB list about emergency preparedness and what to do if the power goes off, so I think I’ll wait until Monday.

After that excitement I flogged myself to the keyboard and wrote a key scene in the novel, an conversation full of important information for the characters and for the reader to know. This is the delicate problem of exposition: you want the readers to understand some important facts, preferably not by just telling them, but having it arise in conversation between characters. But if these are important facts about this world, won’t the characters already know them? In which case, why would they talk about them? (Also known as the “As you know, Bob…” ploy, from the clumsy way that old SF pulp fiction would do it: “As you know, Bob, the Jovian Mind Eaters can only be blocked by an adamantium shield…”) Properly, you establish that one character isn’t in the picture, and you have the others fill him in. That’s what I did, hopefully in believable dialogue that sounds like actual people (or in my case, actual children) talking to each other. That done, I can resume moving the narrative along.

The other night I mentioned receiving a hand-written letter. It was slightly upsetting and I am still thinking about how I want to respond. Maybe next week my thoughts will resolve.

Day 327, SWBB event

Friday, 10/25/2019

Began the day with a run. Futzed around the rest of the morning doing I don’t remember what. Feeling guilty about not working on my book, for one thing.

Let me catch up on one thing. Two days ago, when I was printing 34 pages of the SWBB season tickets, I thought about how that would be affecting the ink cartridges in the printer. The Epson Expression 630 has been a stalwart companion for a couple of years now. It works just fine as a copier, a scanner, a document printer, and, thanks to having five colors, a decent photo printer. Two drawbacks. One, it uses fairly expensive ink cartridges, and it is hard keeping them in stock because they always run out on different schedules, magenta this week, cyan next month, etc. Two, it won’t print paper larger than 8.5×11. I think in future I would like to be able to print photos larger.

Both problems are answered by the Epson Expression ET7750. It uses large ink bottles and “comes with 2 years of ink”. And it prints on paper up to 11 inches wide. I have had that on my list of things to buy because I feel wealthy. A few weeks back I bought the better sound bar from that list. On Thursday I pulled the trigger on the printer, and it should arrive Saturday. Then I’ll have to get rid of the 630, which has plenty of life left in it, now that I’ve cleaned the excess ink out of it (Day 283). Probably somebody around here will want it. The only thing left on the “because I can afford it” list is a new TV and I really have a hard time justifying that for any reason other than that.

At 1:15 I started for Maples Pavilion and the Stanford Women’s Basketball season kickoff event. The day had turned warm (the car said the exterior temp was 91º, in October? really?) and there was no parking to be found anywhere near Maples. Walking to the garage I had the passing thought, maybe take Lyft? and now regretted not having followed through on it. Eventually parked near The Bing, a nice quarter-mile walk to Maples.

The event was first, to watch a practice, and after, to have refreshments in the lobby and hear Tara answer questions. The practice was a first chance to see the new freshmen, who look very good, ready to go. And to refresh my memory of the older players. Kiana Williams looked especially sharp. This team has the potential to reach the finals, I think.

Another perennial question is, is Tara Vanderveer still game-ready? She is 66, and there are always rumors she’ll retire soon. She did not look at all like retiring, or even show her age much. I think she’s good for several more years.

Day 326, Yosemite, not choir, another play, some mail

Thursday, 10/24/2019

Today I had in my calendar to attend a meeting of FOPAL volunteers at the Mitchell Park Library center. Except when I got there, no meeting. Got into Gmail on the phone, retrieved the e-vite, and of course: it’s the 31st, not the 24th. Bad enough when I forget to look at the calendar; now I’m putting the wrong dates in the calendar.

Anyway, on to the Yosemite warehouse for a partial day of working with artifacts. Then back to CH, arriving around 4:45. This is a problem for the following reason. When I attended the first Chorus rehearsal the other day, Mary the leader handed out a rehearsal schedule, with rehearsals at 4pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays for the next two months. Thursday is the only day of the week when CHM volunteers gather in the east bay to do collections work. I would have to leave every session an hour early, to get back to CH for a 4pm rehearsal.

I’m debating this, but I think on the whole I would rather be futzing around with old computers than singing in the back row of the chorus. Certainly my contribution to the former is a lot more substantial than the latter.

Waiting for me was the online links to all the tickets for the Stanford Women’s Basketball season. The Stanford ticket office does this in a rather lame way, sending you a list of 34 separate links, 17 to PDFs of individual print-at-home tickets, and 17 to PDFs of print-at-home parking passes (I paid the extra to park in the lot next to Maples Pavilion). I sat in my office printing 34 individual sheets of paper and organizing them into a packet, and sniffling quietly because this was a job Marian had always happily dived into, delighted to be setting up for a new basketball season.

By the time that was done it was supper time and I just didn’t feel like going to the dining room, so I had a PBJ and grapes in my room.

At 7pm was a theatrical presentation. Diane Tasca is large in local theatrical circles, formerly artistic director at the Pear Theater and often seen on stage at local shows. Today she and a partner presented a two-person play, “Love Letters”, in which the actors read out the letters written between a boy and a girl over their lives from grade school up. While the actors were doing a good job, the portraits the letters paint of the people, especially the girl, made me dislike them — the characters, not the actors. So I left at intermission.

Waiting in my mailbox were two interesting letters. One is from a bankruptcy court, setting out the details of the settlements from the bankruptcy of the San Jose Repertory theater company several years ago. The letter was addressed to Marian at the Tasso address, I presume because our season tickets to SJ Rep were in her name. The letter contains eight double-sided pages listing at least 150 names with amounts of $200-$500 owed. However, I’ve been over the list twice now and can’t find Marian’s or my name in it. So why did we get a copy?

The other interesting letter was hand-written, but I think I’ll write about it another time.

Day 325, FOPAL, theft, theater

Wednesday, 10/23/2019

Went for a run, sans sweatshirt as the weather has warmed up again. After that I wrote another long detailed note to the CHBB for MacOS users. Yesterday’s email had made the point about “your old 32-bit apps won’t run under the next release,” but that just raised the question, “which of my apps are 32-bit ones?”

Turns out it is quite simple to find out, but not obvious. So I wrote up how to do that: how to get your mac to list the 32-bit apps, so you could go down the list and decide which ones you actually use, so you can start trying to get upgraded 64-bit versions of them.

The big issue here is Adobe software. When Adobe went to the ~~highway robbery~~ excuse me, subscription model, a lot of people didn’t bother to subscribe. They just kept using the last version of Photoshop, InDesign, LightRoom that they had actually purchased on CD, which is the “CS5” edition. They work perfectly well. Unfortunately they are all 32-bit apps and will quit working when you next upgrade your OS. So you have the choice of paying Adobe an annual subscription, after which you can download the latest versions (and learn their modified UIs); or you can look for alternative products and learn a whole new app. I didn’t cover all that in the email; just how to find out what your 32-bit apps are.

About 10 I went to FOPAL. Well, first to the grocery store next door, where I bought about $15 worth, including some grapes and the sugar-free drinks I like to stock. I put them in the fancy canvas shopping bag that I had brought back as a souvenir from Mykonos, on the front seat of the car. And left the windows open.

I worked the computer section and then sorted until about 12, when I went back out to the car to have some lunch and chill out for a while. And guess what? My bag of groceries was gone. Some creep had reached in and taken my bag. I hope they were disappointed with what they got. I hope they choke on a grape. I really miss that bag, it was well-made and had a trendy hotel name on it.

After a while I went back in and did sorting during the 2-4pm open hours. Then back to CH to relax for an hour before dinner. I finished eating at 6:15 and left for the theater. I had tickets to TheaterWorks’ Mark Twain’s River of Song at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts. It’s basically a concert of early American music, around the theme of a trip down the Mississipi, conducted by Mark Twain remembering his riverboat days.

This was not very good, and I left at intermission. There were several problems. The first was that the performers really weren’t very good, either as singers or musicians; just average living room performers, mostly. They played banjo, guitar and fiddle, but at no point did anybody try to solo on an instrument; the kind of musicianship you get in any bluegrass group was absent. With one exception their voices were average to weak; the exception being Valisia LeKae, who has an excellent alto voice and can really act.

Second problem was the staging. This was a small show, just six people sitting or standing around, no dancing, little movement. If it were presented in a small theater like the Pear or even Lucy Stern in Palo Alto, it might come across better. But the MVCPA stage is enormous, it’s a huge room, and this little group was kind of huddled in the middle. The big stage emphasized how average (and also static) the performances were.

Day 324, in-house activities

Tuesday, 10/22/2019

Lots of in-Channing-House activities today. I started with a 9am meeting with Patty. She is a former board member and the person who thought up the Heritage Circle, a separate fund, managed by the CH board, that acts as a granting agency to fund projects suggested by residents. The Heritage Circle has funded things like upgrades to the library, a program of day-trips to various attractions, and such. They solicit funds from members.

I started thinking about the Heritage Circle because it is also time to donate to the Appreciation Fund. That’s another thing entirely. There is absolutely no personal tipping allowed from residents to staff. However, residents subscribe to the Appreciation Fund annually, the value of which is equally divided across all staff, so like a year-end bonus. I made out a check to that for $500, because I’ve only been here half a year. For a full year, I expect to give $1000, which at ~$3/day seems little enough for the cheerful service I get in the dining room, from the front desk, and from the facilities guys.

But that brought the Heritage Fund to mind, so I asked Patty about that, thinking she would just tell me how to make out a check, but instead she wanted to meet and explain about the fund, how it is run, what it does. Which she did. So I wrote a check and now am a member of the Heritage Circle.

At 11am, tickets for Eric Johnson at SFJazz went on sale, and I bought one. Then I did some actual writing, yay. First was to write a detailed email to the bulletin board, telling MacOS users how to avoid the automatic upgrade to 10.15 “Catalina”. The internet’s opinion is that it has several annoying bugs and one should wait for the .1 or .2 release; plus also, it is the threatened future release under which all 32-bit apps will no longer run.

Second, I wrote a couple of key scenes for my novel. Back on Sunday, sitting in the classical music concert that I went to as a result of forgetting about the Boogie Woogie one, anyway, sitting there I was pummeling my brain trying to think of the phrase I wanted. And I did. Think up how the people in my future would phrase the idea that all genetically modified organisms must have some crippling flaw so they can’t spread into the environment. Since this is like a fundamental rule of that society (the violation of which is the main plot device), they would not have some labored way of saying it; they’d have a short phrase. And I finally thought it up: “All new things must have a lack.” That’s the snappy sound-bite they teach kids, like “Do unto others…” in our world.

Knowing that, I could write one scene where that gets said, and start another where it will get expounded and expanded on. Painless exposition.

Three PM brought the monthly Tech Squad meeting. My MacOS email was appreciated. Some other issues were discussed.

At 5:30 I met with Mary Ann who had put in a tech squad call about her comcast DVR on Monday, a call which had been assigned to me. We spent an hour, almost, going over all the features of the remote and the various DVR menus, and she gained a lot of confidence in using the device. Hopefully she will remember the simple two-step process that gets you to a reboot of the DVR, in case it gets wedged the way she described on Monday.