Day 285, paperwork, activities

Friday, 9/13/2019

Despite a forecast of high hot heat — and it did top 100 on my balcony later in the day, as reported by my totally accurate indoor/outdoor thermometer — I went for a run. I was out before 7:30 and back before 8:30 and it was very comfortable. Next I went to the Financial Advisors’ office to sign a bunch of papers. When we met on Monday we decided to put 1/3 of the house money with one of their favorite brokers, Kahn Bros., and 1/3 with another, Robotti. This requires opening two new Schwab accounts.

My IRA account has been managed by Kahn Bros. since forever, but you can’t just randomly add money to an IRA. So I have to create a new account to receive the money to be managed by Kahn. We had not had money managed by Robotti before, so that meant setting up yet another new account for them to run. Each of the brokers that my F.A.s use follows the Benjamin Graham “Value Investing” paradigm, but each has different methods and favors different parts of the market.

Anyway the Schwab paperwork to create an account takes at least four signatures and a couple of “initial here” items, and each brokerage has a disclosure agreement that takes a couple more. Then, the package needs to include proof that I’m the trustee of the family trust. The “Statement of Trust” document that the F.A.s had on file was out of date, superceded by the revisions following Marian’s death. So I went home and scanned the relevant pages of the current documents to PDF and emailed them. This was all managed and handled by the supremely competent and cheerful Cindy, who is the soul of that office.

Paperwork done, I put in an hour or so working on the novel. I’m in an easy part, basically doing a careful edit and slight modification of the parts I’ve already written. Removing one particular SF gizmo that I decided I didn’t like, while inserting a couple of clues that will be relevant to the ending I’ve outlined. And generally tidying up. I’m also reading Show Don’t Tell, one of the most practical and useful books on writing fiction I’ve read (and I’ve read a few). That motivates some of the edits I’m making.

About 2pm I started getting phone messages and emails from C.H. staff alerting us that the “chiller” that cools the ground and 3rd to 6th floors had broken down. We were advised to hydrate and if we felt any distress, to go to an upper floor lounge. Then there was a knock on the door, one of the nurses from the nursing wing was checking on each apartment on the floor to make sure we were OK. Actually I was quite comfortable. I had closed the drapes earlier and I don’t think the temperature got above 77 in my unit.

Today was the much-advertised Activity Fair, at which all the volunteer organizations have tables and try to get new members. I was interested in the A/V committee, who mainly provide people to run the sound (and video when necessary) in the auditorium. I’m supposed to get an email scheduling a training session.

I was accosted by the Chorus group who want me to come sing with them. Dubious, but I may try it. And I was hit on by Betty of the Writing group. They do a weekly thing where they send out a “prompt” — a sentence or something — and everyone writes something based on it, and they meet to read their creations. Hmmm. And by the editors of Scribble and Sketch, the in-house magazine, wanting contributions. Hmmm.

Because of the A/C breakdown, the Activity Fair in the Auditorium was managing attendance. They were monitoring the temp and if it got over 85, they’d have to cancel it. Meantime you had to wait at the door for someone to come out before going in, to keep the crowd small.

By 5pm the A/C was back online. At six I went down and didn’t like the look of the menu so I went out in the car to find supper. I was thinking of the restaurants at the Town and Country shopping center, but on the way I noticed Whole Foods, and said bleep that, I’ll just get a smoothie. And did.

Day 284, Yosemite, traffic, tech call

Thursday, 9/12/2019

Did some exercises, had breakfast, and off to Milpitas for a day’s work cataloging. Just toward the end of it I did a stupid thing with the database that will take Aurora, the curator, at least an hour of time to fix. Agghhh.

Left Milpitas at ten to four and thanks to traffic backups on 101 and Middlefield, didn’t shut down at C.H. until 5pm, about twice the normal time.

In the morning I’d had an email from Bert, the tech squad leader, referring me to a problem Bob S. was having with Apple Mail. I googled it; it’s not a common problem, but one that other people have had, so I emailed some suggestions (forgetting his problem was with email). Anyway that hadn’t helped and I futzed around with his computer for a while and declared myself stumped. I recommended the Genius Bar at the Apple store, and fortunately he had taken the Mini there before so he thought that was an OK idea.

Day 283, writing, FOPAL

Wednesday, 9/11/2019

Went for a run. After that I spent an hour on the YA book, and worked out the general outline of an ending. The problem had been, that I’d allowed my party of protagonists to split up and I needed a convincing reason for them to get back together in time to figure out and thwart the disastrous action planned by the villain. And I did, I see how it can all go down now. This was very satisfying. There is a positive endorphin rush that comes from working out a creative problem.

Then I spent another hour on Lisp. Then it was 11:30 and I went to FOPAL for a pleasant afternoon of sorting. I had meant to do four hours, but at 3pm my feet and back were hurting, so I called it a day.

In the evening I cleaned the interior of my printer, which has been smearing ink on printouts. Emboldened by a couple of youtube videos I got in there with tissues and paper towel and alcohol and sopped up the excess ink and cleaned the bottom of the print head.

Day 282, quiet Tuesday

Tuesday, 9/10/2019

For exercise I ran my series of this and that, but I need to either increase reps or add things. Then I had breakfast here, apparently for the first time ever on a Tuesday. I know that because at supper last night, we were talking about the meal service and I mentioned that I never see pancakes or waffles at breakfast. Nobody then at the table had any thoughts other than “they do sometimes — I think?”

But this morning there were waffles on offer. I said “oh boy, waffles” to the guy in front of me in line, and he confidently informed me, there are always waffles on tuesday and pancakes on wednesdays. Well, Wednesday I usually run, and have breakfast in my room for an earlier start. But I guess on Tuesdays I’ve always done that also.

During the morning I spent an hour and a half on Lisp, doing the exercises at the end of a chapter of the book I’m using now. (It is a print book, ANSI Common Lisp by Graham, not the tutorial etext I mentioned earlier. Graham’s is a college-level text and quite challenging.)

I also spent an hour working on the outline of my YA novel. I started this back in 2016 or so, and have over two-thirds of it done. When I re-read what I’ve written, I like it a lot; it’s really good writing, and for tone and character it accomplishes just what I wanted to do. But there are structural/plot issues that I need to correct, and in particular I need to work out a clear outline for the ending.

In the afternoon I thought about actually buying some things. I have a list of things I’d like to splurge money on: a TV, a sound bar, and a printer. I went to the local Best Buy to eyeball some of these things. I was able to see the particular TV model, but mounted about 8 feet up on a wall in a dark room; and actually listened to the sound bar, which sounded good. I almost bought that, but couldn’t quite pull the trigger on it. They didn’t have the printer on view, although I think their website said they did.

At 4:30pm was the monthly fourth-floor residents’ meeting in the lounge. Everybody welcomed me and Patti, their new 6th floor “campers”. After the meeting, the floor rep, Mary Beth, had reserved a big table for 18 in the dining room. Made pleasant conversation with people until almost 7pm.

Day 281, FOPAL, money

Monday, 9/9/2019

Went for a run first. Then to FOPAL where I found eight boxes of books for the computer section. It took just over two hours to do the culling and pricing. The monthly sale is this weekend so it was time to tidy up. I had an email asking section managers to do a pre-sale count. This makes good sense, to be able to report how many books sell from each section, but I’d not done it before.

After grabbing a bit of lunch at the grocery next door, I headed over to the financial advisors’ office. We worked out how much of the house money to keep as liquid reserve, and how to allocate the rest between the different brokers, and began the process of creating accounts and disbursing things.

Back home I spent some time on Lisp. I’ve finally gotten to the syntax for iteration and it is… well, the kindest thing is to say it is extremely general. To put it in my terms, a loop is encoded as

(do ( iterators ) ( test finals ) ( actions ) )

Doesn’t look so bad except that an iterator is a three-element list,

( var initial_value ( increment_expression ) )

and there may be more than one. test is a parenthesized expression which when it yields T (true) ends the loop, and finals is a series of parenthesized expressions to be executed at the end of the loop and determine the value of the loop. actions is the sequence of parenthesized expressions in the body of the loop. So, a simple loop to count 0..9, printing each one and returning NIL, comes to,

 (do ( (i 0 (+ i 1) ) )
     ( (> i 9) NIL)
     (format t "~A~%" i)
)

That’s the right number of parens, I just ran that and it runs.

Day 280, coffee, drawers, show

Sunday, 9/9/2019

Harriet had texted suggesting coffee, and we met at 8:30 at the Midtown coffee shop. Nice lengthy chat.

Back at C.H. I pondered what to do for the next couple of hours, and decided to execute the plan to varnish the bathroom drawers. I took them to the basement workshop, did the sanding, put on a coat of varathane.

Back in my room, I noticed it was past 11:30 and about time for Dennis to arrive for our outing, and exactly at that moment my phone rang. Together we drove up to Foster City for lunch at BJ’s Brew Pub, and from there to the Hillbarn Theater for Anything Goes.

This was an excellent production. I totally fell in love with the lead actress, Caitlin McGinty playing Reno Sweeney. She apparently starred in Beach Blanket Babylon for three years and is now a realtor(!) but she nailed this performance. Oddly I can’t find a personal web presence for her. Neither actresses nor realtors are usually shy about having their own page.

In the evening I watched Guardians of the Galaxy on Comcast on-demand. I keep seeing references to this and thought I should really see it. I remember a year or so ago, I started to watch it on TV and when the blue-skin villain came on ranting about destroying civilizations, I didn’t see it as over-the-top meta-humor (which apparently some do) but as just tone-deaf boring use of a worn-out trope by bad screenwriters; and turned it off ten minutes in.

This time I stuck with it. It has some charm but really it is not good SF. And the special effects space battles are way too long and confusing to watch. Who’s who and which way are they shooting? And they take a cheap way out of one of the only real emotional conflicts, the battle between the green sister and the blue sister. That should have been resolved in some constructive way. (For that matter, why is only one of the daughters of a blue-skin villain blue? The mother of the green-skin one has some ‘splainin’ to do, I think.)

I’d give the flick a C+ at best.

Day 279, docent, quiet

Saturday, 9/7/2019

Right, of course, do the blog post next day and… what did I do yesterday? Well, I did lead a tour, the 12oclock one, and had about 30 people to start, 25 or so stuck around to the end. In the morning I called Dennis and arranged our schedule for tomorrow. Afternoon? Read some from my Bridge Defense book, read some from the Lisp book. I remember that at supper, I was disappointed with the entree. The menu said “scallops in polenta” and I was picturing a couple of seared scallops on a nice bed of polenta, but the reality was more of a stew, small scallops stirred in with mush.

I settled in to the new room, which is perfectly adequate. One minor point of annoyance is the drawers in the bathroom vanity cabinet. They are originals, similar in make to the ones I started varnishing in #621. I’ve given up on that project for #621; I’m determined that in February or so, after I’ve moved back, I’ll have all the closets professionally rebuilt. But for here in #435, maybe I’ll sand and varnish these ugly little drawers. I’ll see the top one daily; it’s where I store my hairbrush and comb etc, and I open it at least once a day. The unfinished interior has been stained, and has the outline, the ghost as it were, of a pair of scissors that were put in wet and stained the wood.

Day 278, move, museum, echo

Friday, 9/6/2019

The day I’ve been anticipating almost since moving in 10 weeks ago has arrived. Angela, at the head of a five-person crew from Gentle Transitions, arrived on the dot of 8am. I showed them about the computer desk and we chatted about a few other things. I grabbed the shopping bag in which I had my day’s necessities, and we went off to a guest room on the first floor, where she took my #621 key (little does she know that I have another one stashed in my desk mwahaha), gave me a brown-bag snack pack, and left me to pass the day.

I putzed around reading until 11ish, then went off to the Stanford campus where two exhibits had just opened. One was works by Jim Campbell at the Anderson gallery. Campbell uses LEDs to make moving images. He hides the LEDs inside plastic beads or behind little metal shades, and animates them with (I presume) a microcomputer to make shifting abstract color blurs or moving images. The one I liked best was this very large one.

It’s large, at least 10 by 10 by 6 feet, with the LEDs in a cloud of little plastic balls, so it strongly suggests looking up through a depth of water, and the swimming forms pass across it at random times and directions.

Next door at the Cantor a chummy volunteer docent at the door talked me into joining the museum. I am now a member and got a thick book about Rodin as a prize. I had come to see an exhibit of the sketch books of Richard Diebenkorn. It turned out to be a very small exhibit, one painting and an interactive video table on which you could page through about 20 pages of sketchbooks. I’m afraid I just don’t get Diebenkorn. “And this is good… why?” was my mental refrain. Oh well.

I had lunch in the nice Cantor cafeteria, benefiting from my 10% member discount, yay. Then back to my ~~purgatorio~~ guest room to kill another hour and a half until it was time to go to PAMF and have a stress echo. I had last done one of these in 2007, it turned out. One walks on a treadmill at increasing speeds and slopes, while wired to the max for ECGs. Then when you reach your personal “Very Hard” effort level, which I did just into the fourth level, you lie down quickly and the echo tech takes pictures of your heart action. The only uncomfortable parts were, (a), patches of my chest hair had to be shaved to get good wire adhesion and (b), you have to “take a deep breath and hold” several times when you are panting from your run. But the two techs, one on the echo and one managing the treadmill, were both charming, and in general I think I aced the test.

Now a couple more hours of waiting and finally, Angela appeared to take me to my new room. The movers had done a really excellent job. They had gotten everything, every little object, and put it right back where it was, or as near as it could be given a slightly different room layout. All my plants were on the balcony, and they’d noticed the little sender for my indoor/outdoor thermometer. My Comcast modem and DVR and TV were all set up and working. They’d booted up my iMac and done a test print on my printer. I had forgotten to put away my coffee cup, and left it on the coffee table when I walked out in the morning. The cup, now washed clean, was in the same place on the coffee table in the new room. To the greatest extent possible they made the transition to a new room as seamless as it could be. Really nice job, folks.

Day 277, Shustek, move prep

Thursday, 9/5/2019

Today I did a set of exercises, then had a hearty breakfast here, and headed out to Shustek for a day of cataloging.

On return I did a few little chores to prep for tomorrow’s move. At 8am tomorrow, Angela The Move Boss comes with the moving crew. Per her email, I get 15 minutes to give the movers any last minute instructions. Then I must Go Away for the day. I will have the use of one of the guest apartments if I want it. (Most evacuees spend the night in a guest apartment, and go to their new quarters next day. Because my possessions are relatively few, Angela plans to do my move in one day.)

In the evening she will meet me at my new digs, #435, and exchange keys with me. I should find everything from #621 properly arranged in the new space.

The only special instructions I want to give the movers is on how to move my L-shaped computer desk. It needs to be split, so the two halves are moved independently. If they try to move it as a unit — well, per the Amazon reviews, it won’t stand up to the torque. Like most furniture these days, it is assembled with bolts threading into metal inserts that are pressed into the vinyl-clad chipboard. The bolts that hold the pie-shaped corner piece will pull out under stress. So the movers have to unfasten eight hex-head bolts to separate the two halves. It shouldn’t be beyond them, but just to make sure, I put bits of green masking tape on the underside and drew arrows pointing to the heads of the 8 bolts. And taped the hex wrench to the top.

With the mail today came my zero-g deck chair, which took only a couple of minutes to set up and should do well.

I ate dinner alone, reading email on my phone. I just felt like that.

Day 276, car, FOPAL, dinner

Wednesday, 9/4/2019

First job this morning was to get the car to Toyota for service by 8. In fact, was a bit early. I wanted a routine minor service, plus balancing the tires in hopes of curing a vibration at freeway speeds, plus an alignment check because for months I’ve been noticing a slight pull to the right.

I dropped off the car; the service writer said “should be ready by lunchtime”. I walked the half-mile back to the shopping center and had a nice nosh at Peet’s coffee. Then walked across the parking lot to FOPAL. Only two boxes of computer books to cull and price, and yet again I found a high-value book, one whose used prices ran from $45 to $85. That’s always fun.

Then I settled in to sort books until Toyota would call me. This is always satisfying work, making order out of chaos. When I came in there were heaps of children’s toys and the sort boxes for the children’s department were overflowing. I tidied those and moved them to the back table for transport to the children’s department which is in another building.

There were piles of boxes of donated books on the front porch (Why do people ignore where it says “donations accepted 2-4pm every day”, and just stack the books by the door? We welcome the donations, but this is really kind of rude.) and a line of them on the table and a row of shopping bags under the table. I was an hour into it and had just gotten those on and under the table cleared when the “pickup” volunteer arrived. He has a literal pickup truck that he uses to go out and collect large donations from people who can’t come in. In this case his truck had 20 boxes of books, which filled up all the empty spaces in the sorting room.

I kept plugging along, got the boxes in off the front porch, sorted them, sorted some more boxes from the Mountain in the Middle, and it was noon. Finally it was 1pm and I called Toyota. “Looks like it’s ready to go” says the perky lady in the service department. Yeah, thanks for calling me like you said you would. Anyway, now I walked back to Peet’s because I had forgotten I needed to buy coffee for myself, and then back to Toyota, and home.

They had found some misalignment of the right rear wheel, which surprised me, but whatever they did had indeed fixed the pull to the right. It now tracks straight without needing light pressure on the wheel. That’s excellent. They found one wheel 20 grams out of balance. Tomorrow I will drive to Shustek and will find out, traffic permitting, if the vibration at 70mph is gone.

I had been invited to supper by Susan and Harry. They also asked Craig and Diane and we had a nice meal, talking until the servers were closing the dining room doors and pointedly cleaning up around us.