Author: Owns 9 Fedoras

Day 323, long busy day

Monday, 10/21/2019

Started the day with a run, wearing a light jacket which I really didn’t need, but at least, I did remember. Then off to FOPAL where I processed four boxes of computer books, and did a little sorting.

From there I drove to the Alpine Inn to meet Scott and Denny for lunch. Google maps had pointed out to me a route I wouldn’t have thought of, but which worked great. FOPAL is just off Charleston road, which turns into Arastradero, which meanders into the hills and ends up exactly at the Alpine Inn. Parts of that I had bicycled many times, but I just didn’t think of it in terms of a car route.

Well, come to find out Alpine Inn isn’t open on Mondays! So we adjourned to a restaurant in Ladera shopping center where we chatted for about 2 hours? A long time. Well, Denny chatted. I had not seen him since, roughly, 1979. He has had an interesting life (in both the real and sarcastic senses of the word), has many stories, which he tells well.

Back at CH I didn’t even have time for a nap before it was time for chorus practice. I am still not persuaded I have anything to offer there, but Mary the leader and organizer is very persuasive, positive and encouraging, really a model of a group leader. I’ll keep attending for now.

Out of that, I had only a few minutes before it was time to grab my hat and head out for the evening. As I planned out in detail the day before: I walked to the Palo Alto train station and caught the southbound 5:56, which makes only one stop before reaching Diridon station in San Jose. Walked out of the station and caught a Lyft across to South 1st, where I had a delicious burger and shake at Johnny Rocket’s.

This was a sniffly emotional nostalgia trip, really. For several years before it died, we had season tickets to San Jose Repertory Theater. Marian and I would drive down, park at a garage on 4th street, walk past the theater to Johnny Rocket’s for indulgent burgers and shakes, then walk back to the Hammer Theater for the play. So I was recapping old haunts.

The event this time was the dance troup Momix, which specializes in using props, costumes, and lighting effects — along with spectacular dance and gymnastic skills — to create rather jaw-dropping routines. This video has samples of some, including several that I saw this night. It was good stuff.

I had worked out that if the show let out by 9:15 I would be able to Lyft back to the train and catch one back to Palo Alto, but if later than that, I’d just Lyft all the way home. It was, and I did.

 

Day 322, senior moments

Sunday, 10/20/2019

Had a pleasant coffee at Verve. Did a bit of reading, and then, on the general principle of GTFO of the house, decided to drive to the City and walk around some bit of Golden Gate Park and maybe take a picture or two. Took the camera and went.

Note that at no point did I consult my Google calendar. I just assumed this Sunday was unscheduled, as usual.

On the way into the city I missed a turn onto Sunset Blvd and in reversing course, noticed a skinny green patch on the GPS map and decided to investigate. It turned out to be Pine Lake Park, a westerly extension of Stern Grove. It’s a deep, steep ravine in the middle of the city, with a little lake at the bottom. I had no idea it was there. Lots of people playing with their dogs.

On to GGP. It was now nearly 1pm, which is of course the absolute worst time to try to visit the park on a Sunday. Every legal parking space on the park roads was taken. I stopped by a lake with a nice reflection of yellow leaves and took pictures of mallards. I found a spot near Stow Lake (which should really be called Stow Giant Bowl of Algae Soup) and walked around a bit. Then headed home via Skyline drive and 280.

Back to C.H. in comfortable time for a 4pm concert of classical piano music. I was waiting for that to start when I happened to open the calendar app to check on tomorrow and realized, with a nasty shock, that 4pm was exactly when the Boogie Woogie Piano fest was starting at SF Jazz. I had a ticket for that! I ought to have left for the City to attend that, around 2pm.

I really feel bad about this, for wasting the ticket money, for missing an event I had really wanted to attend, and in general for being such a lame doofus as not to check my calendar a day ahead.

There’s a lot happening tomorrow, and I spent some time planning the logistics for that.

 

Day 321, real estate, mostly FOPAL

I didn’t mention on Thursday and Friday about real estate worries. Early in the week I got a property tax bill from Santa Clara County for the 2340 Tasso house. Not sure what to do with that. I used the SCC.gov website to inquire: hey guys, I sold this property 27 August and the escrow included a prorated tax payment, what up? They replied that yes, they would send out a new bill to the new owners “in November”. Since the bill is delinquent early in December, I worried on behalf of the new owners, so I wrote to Chuck.

He replied saying I didn’t need to do anything, they’d be fine; but oh by the way, he was getting phone calls from Davey Tree service about an unpaid bill. Eh? I knew I had the invoice for that in my 2340 Sale folder; surely I’d paid it. I look for that amount in the online statements for my two checking accounts. Nope! So I called Davey. Nice phone lady agreed, nope, that had never been paid. Apologized, and mailed a check that day, Friday I think.

Saturday, 10/19/2019

For the first time in maybe years, I slept past 7am. What up, body? Had breakfast in the dining room, and about 9am went to FOPAL, figuring by now there would be some books backed up for the computer section. Indeed there were, six boxes. But also, when I got there, I realized that I had forgotten to do the post-sale inventory. That’s where I go through all the unsold books still on the shelf, and decide for each, whether to leave the price as-is for another month, lower the price, or give up and consign the book to the Bargain Room. I could have done a post-sale count as well, but since my stand-in had not done a pre-sale count, there’d have been no point. Anyway that takes an hour. Then culling the waiting boxes, and pricing and shelving the keepers, takes another two hours, then I did an hour of sorting, before coming home with a glow of accomplishment.

Later in the day I spent an hour implementing an idea I’d had last week. Each time a donor comes in to drop off books, they may or may not request a receipt, and they may or may not ask about sale dates in which case we give them a bookmark with sale dates on it. But they never get anything that would encourage them to volunteer. FOPAL runs on volunteers and always needs more; and that point of contact it seems to me, is the ideal time to try to recruit. So I made up a one-page flier headed “What happens to my books now,” outlining the process, with nice pictures, emphasizing the scope (40,000 books a month! $125,000 a year to the library!) and that it’s all done by volunteers, and you could be one, too!

I thought it was pretty good, so I sent it off to Janette (the one paid staff person who runs the whole zoo). We’ll see if she likes it.

 

Day 320, non-docent, pictures, eyelid news

Friday, 10/18/2019

I started the day with a run, for the third time getting out the front door and saying, “shit, it’s cold out here, why didn’t I wear a sweatshirt?” Whatever. Showered and shaved and put on my red docent shirt because today’s activity was to be a noon tour, a group of junior college students. I’d been thinking about this tour for days, wondering how to slant my pitch to people all of whom were born, probably, in this century. Well, no need to worry; at 9:30am I got an email from the museum, the group had canceled.

I did some reading. For a guy who says he does all his reading on Kindle, I seem to have a bunch of paper volumes around, but all free. The other day Jean handed me a copy of Born to Run by Christopher McDougall, about the Tehumara(?) people of Mexico who supposedly have superhuman running ability. I have two books I snatched from FOPAL while sorting. I’m 2/3 of the way through Just for Fun, Linus Torvald’s biography. And Wednesday I glommed onto a very fresh copy of Randall Munroe’s (creator of XKCD) book, What If? Serious answers to absurd hypothetical questions. Then yesterday, Toni had just received back from Greta, a set of old SF paperbacks by Melisa Michaels she had loaned, and I was intrigued so I borrowed them. All fun books, and I spent a couple of hours reading chapters from each.

Then I sat down for three hours of digital image work. During the Greek trip I had uploaded all my iPhone pictures to Smugmug. Now I downloaded them all to my permanent picture repository on the big Mac. I reviewed them all, and did minor editing: straightening horizons, cropping for better composition, occasionally a little bit of color correction. In the course of this I re-learned, or re-confirmed that the iPhone camera, while remarkably good at its default focal length, absolutely sucks when you zoom in more than a tiny bit. One of my favorite shots, morning sunlight making the Parthenon pillars glow, is just pixelated crap when you make it full screen. I had zoomed in maybe 50% to take it. Well, it was my considered choice not to carry my real camera; so you get what you get. Then I re-uploaded the edited versions to SmugMug.

At supper time I sat at an open table and was joined by four people I have talked to before, all nice, pleasant talk. When I returned to my room I noticed I had a voice mail. I had had a call from a 321- prefix and declined it, assuming it was a robocall. Well, not so. It was my opthalmic surgeon with the report on my eye thing. But she’d left a voice mail with the news that,

  • It was a basal cell carcinoma;
  • These are very common, slow-growing, and usually don’t come back if they are fully removed;
  • The pathologist reported that she had gotten a complete rim of normal tissue, so she believes it was fully removed;
  • I am to see her again in 3 months, 6 months, and 6 months again, just to make sure.

So that’s that, for now. The removal site, by the way, has not caused me any discomfort, just a round scab that is getting smaller, I think, already. Certainly healing nicely.

 

 

 

 

 

Day 318, tech squad, hair, docent, FOPAL

Wednesday, 10/16/2019

First thing was to be an appointment for a haircut at 9am. But at 7am I found an email from last night asking me to look into somebody’s problem with their Comcast TV; they weren’t able to watch the debate because inexplicably their TV had decided it wasn’t authorized for CNN, which is in our building’s contract basic package.

I passed this off to Craig, who said he had seen that problem. Then went and got my hair done, and then down to the museum to lead some Apple employees on a tour. Here I tried something new, that I’d been thinking about doing. I explained I would give them a 45-minute survey of the major technical developments,  along with pointing out the different galleries, and then they would be free to explore on their own, except that if they wanted, I would lead them back to look at some specific objects that I like.

The idea was I could include more stuff than the usual “keep it under an hour” tour allows. I’d do a cut-down version of my usual survey, then stroll back to look at the Xerox Alto, the Apollo Guidance Computer, maybe the SAGE system. Great idea, and I may try it again, but this time it definitely didn’t work. They all opted for independent exploration (or more likely, a quick exit) and nobody followed me as I headed back.

Something ridiculous also happened. I had mixed up a 500-calorie meal replacement shake and put it in an insulated shaker cup, which I’d never used before. The plan was to have it for lunch after the tour. But when I parked at the museum I discovered that I had not properly sealed the new shaker top, and it had emptied itself onto the passenger seat, out of sight because it was covered by my shopping bag of museum stuff. About 12 ounces of high-protein drink, half still on the leather seat, the other half down under it on the carpet.

I went across the street to the 7-11 and bought a roll of paper towels and some wipes, and got a lot of it up. Fortunately it was “pumpkin spice” flavor and now the car has a delicate cinnamon aroma. But I suspect soon I will be paying somebody to steam clean my carpets.

In the afternoon I went to my usual 2-4pm sorting job at FOPAL, which makes three times this week. Not what I want to do on a regular basis.

 

Day 317, what happened?

Tuesday, 10/15/2019

First time I’ve missed a post by this far, writing Tuesday’s entry almost 24 hours after I went to bed Tuesday night. What did I do this day? I spent a couple of hours at FOPAL sorting. I attended a free organ concert at the nearby church. Something else. Not sure what.

Oh, right, I spent half an hour at the keyboard trying very hard to solve a problem with my novel. Writing fiction is hard, have I mentioned? Not going into it now. But the people in the story, and the readers, need to know some important facts. There’s one point in the plot sequence where that info can be expounded. How to set up that scene, and how does this important knowledge get expressed? They’d have some kind of catch-phrase or sound-byte way of saying this important principle, what is it?

In the evening was the presentation of Carousel, the movie version. It had been given a big buildup by the guy who presents this series. I found it stiff and not engaging at all. Sure, “If I Loved You” is a wonderful song, sung as a musical performance. But for two people to be singing it back and forth to each other… nunh unh. Can’t get into it. I left, and I noticed I wasn’t the only one.

 

Day 316, eyelid, FOPAL

Monday, 10/14/2019

Started with a run, and was once more surprised by the chill. Next time I must try to remember to put on a sweatshirt. At 9:30 I headed out for my appointment with an opthalmic surgeon to have the “lesion” (as my appointment referral calls it) on my eyelid biopsied. The surgeon was a charming woman who looked at the 3mm white bump on my eyelid and explained all the different things it might be: a cyst, an unpigmented mole, or a basal cell carcinoma. If it is the latter, I don’t need to worry about metastases, basal cell tumors don’t metastasize, which is a bit of a relief.

She recommended removing it today. She would try to remove a 1mm margin of tissue around it, so if it proves to be malignant, the pathologist may report that it has been completely removed. If it is malignant and not fully surrounded by normal flesh, there will be further work to excise the remainder.

The procedure was about as minor as surgery can be. I laid back in a chair; she anesthetized my eyelid (“little pinch now”), and there was a little pressure as she fiddled around for a couple of minutes, and that was it. I’m left with a little divot in my eyelid.

eye_divot
This was not an easy photo to take! Can you figure out how I got this “selfie”?

She cautioned me that the anesthetic would wear off in an hour and I might have some pain. I didn’t. She said it might bleed, but it didn’t. I have a tube of erythromycin to dab on twice daily. That’s it for care; “eyelids heal really quickly”.

This was my first “procedure” as a bachelor. The familiar details, like waiting in the waiting room, being given a sheaf of paper with post-procedure instructions, and so on, brought back all the many, many exams and procedures that Marian went through last year. It wasn’t comfortable to remember those.

I came back to CH for lunch, then went to FOPAL. To my surprise, there were no boxes of books stacked by the computer section, as there normally are on the Monday after a sale weekend. So instead of culling and pricing, I just sorted for three hours. During that time we took delivery of a donation from a recently-deceased Stanford professor: forty boxes of books. I may go do some more sorting later in the week.

 

 

Day 315, walk, tech call, tv

Sunday, 10/13/2019

Started with the usual crossword puzzle and coffee at Mme. Collette’s. Then, it only being 9am I thought I would go for a walk around the Dish. That early on a Sunday, surely there would be parking up there, right? Nunh-unh, all the local walkers had already filled up the limited parking by the trail entrance. Plan B, I went down to the Baylands and did a walk there. There were lots of water-birds, including three different pods of white pelicans. Lots of ducks. Marian used to like to use her binoculars and pick out the different species of duck; and she doted on the white pelicans. I didn’t have binoculars with me, so I couldn’t tell a shoveler from a mallard. Actually I think I could have recognized the mallards, and there weren’t any.

I went the three miles from Byxbee park around to the foot of San Antonio road, but rather than close the loop with two miles on pavement, I just called a Lyft to get back to the parking lot where I’d left the car. Back at CH I had a snack lunch in my room and a nap; then went out again. First to FOPAL where the sale weekend was winding down.

Then down to sister-in-law Jean’s to help her with a software problem. She uses the Photos app to manage her huge collection of images, and she had somehow lost a bunch of them. I personally detest the Photos app because it takes possession of your images and stores them in its own proprietary “Library” files. Contrast that to comparable image managers like Adobe Bridge or Lightroom, which leave the images safe in the hands of the OS’s file system, each image a file that you can copy, back up, open with another app, etc. Those managers have their own catalogs, but they don’t hide the images in massive opaque globs where the only access to the image is through Photos itself.

But there it was: Jean had a Library of hundreds images taken in her work in the local diocese and sometime in the past month, most of the images in it had disappeared. Photos helpfully displayed the image names still, but only little blank rectangles to show they weren’t there.

Fortunately when I helped her set up her system, back in 2015 after her husband died, I set up a backup drive for use by the Mac’s Time Machine backup system. So now we just started the cool “Time Machine” effect and went back a week and restored that Library, all 27GB of it. One file, 27 gigabytes, contents only accessible through Photos. Unfortunately that version was still missing the images. So we restored a copy from two weeks back. Nope. Each restore cycle taking about 10 minutes for Time Machine to copy the file and then Photos to “recover” its catalog data, whatever that meant. Finally went back a month, and that version, when restored, was 51GB. That’s promising, we said; and when Photos had finished munging it, yes, there were all her pictures up through that backup date. She hadn’t lost a lot of work. So that made me a hero, yay me. I had gone into this assuming it was likely user error (e.g. she meant to delete one picture but accidentally selected a bunch of them), but now I think it equally likely that Photos has a bug where its database gets corrupted. Well.

Back home again, I had a nice supper sitting with Craig, Diane and Patti. Then watched more TV. Before heading off to Greece I had set up the DVR to record three new series that sounded good. One was Carol’s Second Act, Patricia Heaton as an older woman trying to have a second career as an intern. I gave up on this halfway through the second episode. The writing is pretty bad and the jokes are labored.

One was Stumptown, and this I’m kind of enjoying after two episodes. It’s basically a noir detective show, could be from the pen of Raymond Chandler or Mickey Spillane, except that the broke detective with the complicated past, the alcohol problem, and the propensity for getting beaten up, is a handsome woman, and instead of New York or L.A. the setting is Portland, Oregon.

Third is In a Man’s World, where women, with the help of Hollywood makeup artists, go undercover as men, to prove that they were unfairly held back. The first episode was entertaining, although it’s not clear what Emily proves, in the end.

Plus, a new season of Mom has started, and a new season of Bitchin’ Rides, and I have at least three eps of Austin City Limits, and … life is rich, I guess.