Saturday, 1/18/2020

Today’s main activity was to lead the noon tour at the museum. I had about 25 people at the start, 20 at the end.

Back at CH I put in a facilities request for two annoyances in this apartment 435. One, the kitchen sink tap has started dripping just in the past week. Two, the little fluorescent light over the sink flickers several times before it comes on. Needs a new starter module, my diagnosis. Later in the day, a facilities guy came by. His opinion on the faucet: they will completely replace it, but that will be on Monday. Not just a washer? No, we change a washer, it will just start dripping again in a month, he said.

As to the light, he replaced the two little 12-inch fluorescent tubes. It might be brighter but doesn’t start any faster. I don’t think he knew what I meant by a starter. Forget it; it will surely be replaced when the 4th floor is upgraded, a year from now.

After he left, I opened up the light and pulled out the two starter modules. I walked up to the hardware store a few blocks away and bought replacements. Came back and put them in and… it doesn’t light any faster than before. So my diagnosis was wrong. It’s just a crappy design.

On a positive note, I then added 600 words to the novel. I really want to get that finished, maybe this month? Soon, anyway. Reason is, I have thought of another project I could do, but I refuse to start something new with too many other things pending unfinished. So that’ll be motivation.

 

Friday, 1/17/2020

Went for a run on damp streets. Pleasant. Ran a load of laundry, really just to wash one sweater that wants special handling, but I added a couple of other garments so the machine would be balanced.

The little refrigerator in this temporary apartment has been making an odd noise, and in investigating I discovered that the freezer had a half-inch coat of ice. So I defrosted it, and figured out the likely cause, its door doesn’t close properly. Well, it will probably get trashed when this unit is upgraded next year, or the new, 5th-floor camper may deal with it.

I received word that FOPAL was back in operation, so after lunch went to see. A hazmat removal service had taken out all the old carpeting. I had wondered how they would deal with the many heavy book cases. Well, it appears they just cut close around their edges with utility knives and left the carpet under them. Later in the day Janette notified us that the building owner would pay for new carpeting, installed as carpet squares, next week. I did some sorting for a couple of hours until all of the regular Friday 2pm volunteers arrived and it was too crowded.

Not much else of interest this day.

Thursday, 1/16/2020

The first real rain of the year came as intermittent, heavy showers. I drove through one on the way to the Yosemite warehouse where I spent the day helping in a treasure hunt, of a sort.

Sometime back in the 90s, or possibly the 80s, the London Science Museum loaned all or part of an early Ferranti computer to the Computer History Museum, possibly as early as when it was still in Boston. The part or parts of this machine ended up in the Museum’s early storage facility at Moffat field. At some point most of that material was returned to the Science Museum, but one piece, a large plug-board, was not returned. The Science Museum would like it back, or failing that, they think £10,000 compensation sounds fair.

Where is the board? It’s about 18×24 inches by an inch thick, weighs several pounds, and in general is not something you would think is easy to lose, nor something anyone would likely steal. So it was probably still in the collection when the Moffat field material was moved to the then-new Yosemite warehouse around 2009. I helped with some of that work, and I remember that we tried to catalog everything into the newer database, at least minimally. However, it is possible that the board got packed in a box, or in a large plastic tub with other large boards, and shelved, without being identified as what it was.

One nice thing is that given its size, it can’t be in a standard banker’s box. That eliminates several hundred boxes that we don’t have to open. But the ongoing project now is to open and look into every one of the larger, flat boxes that could hold it, and into any plastic tub file it would fit. Today we worked all of aisles 14, 15, and most of 16. I learned that we have a surprising number of plug-boards from the IBM 402 and 407 accounting machines. The Ferranti board would be about the size of a 407 board but looks quite different.

In the evening I watched the Stanford women get whupped at Oregon. They played even the first half, down only a few points, but in the second half Oregon’s Sabrina Ionescu, the consensus college player of the year, went on a tear, and the Ducks opened a 30 point lead by the end. OK. Last year the Ducks beat us by a similar margin in the regular season, but lost to Stanford in the PAC-12 tournament two months later. So you never know.

 

Wednesday, 1/15/2020

“Nickerty shit” is what my old pal and sometime roommate John Snow called those small annoying things that had to be dealt with. Today in the morning I cleared out some nickerty shit: paid a couple of bills, washed up the dirty coffee cups, dumped accumulated recycling. Went to the bank and deposited a check (from that IBM benefits outfit that I have tried three times to convert to direct deposit, but the checks keep coming) and got some cash.

This is interesting: I think it has been three months or more since I used an ATM to get cash. I pay for almost everything day-to-day with Apple Pay on the phone, or with LastPass filling in a credit card number online. My wad of cash just lasts and lasts.

Then took my favorite jacket to Jacquie’s Sew and Sew. Walking fast to the train yesterday afternoon, I went to zip it up and the pull broke off the zipper. Turns out this clever zipper will not unzip without its pull in place. Are they all like that? I don’t think so, but anyway, on the train I pulled the jacket off over my head, and spent ten minutes trying to get the slider to go down. Finally forced it down with brute strength, but I could no longer zip it up again. So off to the seamstress where, a couple years ago, I had a new lining installed in that same jacket. Two weeks and $95 bucks. As long as I get it back before London.

Drove down to look at FOPAL. Normally I would spend Wednesday afternoon there, but yesterday came a strange terse email from Janette our leader: FOPAL is unexpectedly closed for a week to replace carpets. Whu? I emailed Frank, another volunteer there who knows everything, and he knew the story. “Sunday maybe 4:15pm (past the close of the sale) some guy wheeled up the ramp on in his chair wanting to know where is the bag of books he forgot to take earlier? Somehow he got in [to the sale room]. Then it developed: (1) this forgotten bag was from November’s sale, and (2) he was bleeding out his toe. So, big gouts of blood on the carpet… he left via the exit toward the parking lot and I have since been told he wheeled his way to Piazza’s where he put on a different but similar spectacle in search of a sandwich.”

I was there on Monday and didn’t notice any big blood stains, although I do remember people talking around me about bloodstains while I was obliviously sorting. Whatever, on Tuesday “the Hazmat crew” (from what, PA FD?) got involved, and advised that the carpets need to be replaced. Now. So the place is shut down while that happens.

Later this morning Craig sent out his usual email looking for bridge players for Monday and, since I won’t be going to FOPAL then, I signed up.

Afternoon, spent some time studying Affinity Photo (which is an impressive app and a worthy PhotoShop replacement) and doing online volunteer work.

For supper I sat at an empty 4-top and was shortly joined by Cathy and by Kay and Don. The latter two still have their house. They have bought into CH on the third floor, but have elected to not move in until the third floor upgrade finishes (18 months yet). Meantime, they take most of their meals here because, Kay says, “I hate to cook.” Don took a docent tour at CHM a few months ago (not mine) and unfortunately was in one of those 40-person days and didn’t have a good experience.

After supper I sat down with the list of London museum URLs I put together some time back, because it occurred to me that it would be good to know which ones have docent tours and on what days and hours. The big ones are open 7 days and are free. I noted when they have their highlight tours.

I haven’t finished the list, however I have already found two things I want to visit that require advance booking. The Royal Gallery and the Royal Mews I booked for Monday 2/17. Then one of the lesser museums, the Saatchi Gallery, turns out to be hosting Tutankhamun, the biggest collection of relics ever allowed out of Egypt, and that also must be booked for a specific entry time. So I booked that for Tuesday 2/18, and my dance card for the trip is filling up.

Interesting, I think I remember visiting a big Tutankhamun exhibit at the British Museum in 1975…

A year ago I was having unpleasant 3am thoughts about the house, obsessing on all the things that it needed. The previous day I had been debating the cost of a senior residence versus the cost of staying in the house. Now I decided “no amount of piecemeal spending could relieve my 3am worries about the fabric of this place; and frankly I am not up for any amount of remodeling… So, yeah, if a fresh start in a pleasant place where I have zero worries about building maintenance, appliance repair, or landscaping — if that costs $25K extra a year, it’s probably worth it.”

A year later, I confirm. Yup. Totally worth it.

 

 

Tuesday, 1/14/2020

First item today was to start the laundry, two loads. I’ve been tinkering with laundry. By custom I have always done two loads, one of my whites with bleach, one (used to be two when there were two of us) of everything else. But now my white load is very small and the other load is quite large. Today I tried balancing it out by putting the two pairs of jeans from the regular load in with the whites. After all, if the bleach affects the color of the jeans, that’s actually to the good. (In the end it didn’t, as far as I can see.)

Then I made a dumb decision. I should have waited around until 8am and cycled the loads as soon as the first ended. But I was anxious to get started on my run, and did that, which meant my second load didn’t start until 8:40, so it ran over my 7-9 laundry slot, and drew a perfectly justified annoyed call from the next resident in line.

Well, the run was pleasant and went well anyway.

Did a few computer-y things of a marginally constructive nature for the rest of the day, oh, including, finishing up a chapter in the book. Hopefully only two, or at most three, chapters to go!

The big adventure of the day was to attend a concert at SF Jazz. I had plotted out the logistics in detail. It isn’t rocket science: CalTrain, Lyft, reverse. But which train up? And will I be able to catch the 10:30 train back? I had planned to catch the 5:07 but at 4:30 decided to start walking and catch the 4:46, which I did. That worked out well; despite the usual City gridlock I got to Franklin street in plenty of time for a leisurely dinner at the Grove cafe. (I note that a year ago was the first time I used my Clipper card, to go to SFMOMA.)

The concert was by Eric Johnson, an electric guitar “shredder” (as the kids used to say back in the 90s; I wonder what they call them now?), meaning he specializes in very fast improvised sequences, lots of 64th-note cadenzas and runs. Eric had his one big public success in 1990 with the song “Cliffs of Dover” (here’s a live performance). Tonight he played a wide variety of material. He opened the first set with an obscure Beatles song, “Things We Said Today”, and the second set with an even obscurer one, “Mother Nature’s Son”. There were original songs, and one extended number was based on a Coltrane composition. Mostly providing the structure for his extended solos.

I had an excellent seat (I bought the ticket the day it went on sale) and from it I shot a teeny video of EJ doing his thing.

There were other people shooting pictures with their phones, which was mildly annoying. I took pains to not be offensive. One, I took a moment in the settings to lower the brightness, so my phone wouldn’t be a glary little fire in the darkness. Two, I didn’t hold it up in front of me to blind the people behind. Thanks to my good seat, I could hold it at chest level, below my chin. And three, I kept it short. Just enough for a taste to remember.

The sound level was high. The bass guitar, especially, was amped to well-nigh seismic levels. Certain notes resonated with the floor under my feet, giving me a foot massage; while others resonated with the frame of the seat, giving a little magic fingers butt-rub. Fortunately the guitars and keyboards weren’t that high and I didn’t regret not bringing earplugs. (Marian would have hated it. She never liked loud music of any kind.)

Eric wrapped it up with “Cliffs of Dover” just short of 10. Would I make the 10:30 train? I beat most of the crowd out to the street and dialed up a Lyft, which came in 2 minutes, and the driver had no problem getting to CalTrain at 10:20. To my surprise she took the skyway, from 9th to 4th. I’d of never thought of that.

Which got me to Palo Alto station at 11:40 (local train) with a good stiff 15 minute walk home; took my hat off just short of midnight.

 

Monday, 1/13/2020

Wanting to spend a good amount of time at FOPAL on this day after the sale, I didn’t go for a morning run. Went there at 8:30 and stayed until 1:30, by which time my back was sore and I was ready for my standard prescription, “2 Ibuprofen and a nap,” good for any ailment or condition. My section sold 61 books. Got it all nicely tidied up and organized, and then did the same for the sorting room. Very satisfying work.

A year ago I was still running the numbers on living in my house versus moving to a senior community, with ambiguous results. (I linked to the Clash, Should I Stay or Should I Go.) A year later I am very clear that selling up and moving was absolutely the right thing. It is so nice to not worry about taxes, insurance, maintenance; to have no chores except bi-weekly laundry; to have grocery shopping be an entirely optional thing, deciding what snacks I might want in my refrigerator, and no time pressure to get them, etc. etc. And no concern about “what will I do if I get sick, fall and break something, need an operation.” (My friend Nancy who sits next to me at SWBB games had a bout of pneumonia the last couple weeks, and commented on how lonely she got, having to stay at home in bed, unable to get out.)

 

Saturday, 1/11/2020

The A/V committee assigned me to support a lecture tomorrow afternoon. Formerly lectures with accompanying powerpoint slides happened in the Auditorium. However, the Auditorium is currently shut while the whole A/V facility there is upgraded. So this event has to happen on the 11th floor “penthouse”. There is a big TV there, as I’ve mentioned before (day 1.002). However, it is in an alcove with seating for at most 20, realistically 10 or 15. George, the speaker, will probably draw lots more.

Solution, there is a big flat-screen TV on a rolling stand that is used, mostly, for big meetings, where it is set up to mirror the speaker’s slides in the back of the auditorium. But it can be moved to the 11th floor, and I put in a facilities work order for that on Friday. I met with George on the 11th floor at 10am, we went over what he needed, and discussed how to arrange the seating.  Then, on my way out of the building, I stopped at the basement lair of the facilities office to check the TV move order. Good thing. The one dude there for the weekend didn’t know anything about it. So I wrote out another facilities request.

Then to the museum and led a tour of 20 or so people, which went fine. On the way back, I stopped at the FOPAL sale in progress to tidy up my section. People make such a mess of it, reshelving books (or not reshelving). Also checked on some books I have extras of, and yay! a tome on TCP/IP had sold, so I pulled a backup out of my stash and restocked it.

I’m not sure what all happened in the afternoon, nothing exciting. Might update if I recall.

A year ago, I was just starting to evaluate senior residences. I noted prices from $3300 a month to $8800. I ended up a little past the midpoint of that range.

Friday, 1/10/2020

Went for a run this morning, first time since a week ago. Felt a bit feeble for the first couple of blocks but after I warmed up, it was fine.

Back home to do stuff. Exciting stuff. Refilled my pill cases for the week. Refilled the shampoo and conditioner bottles in the shower. Got on the Anthem website and figured out how to pay them the $3 I owe them for my prescriptions.

Did I mention? (no) that my prescription meds arrived yesterday, so that part, the home delivery, is working. Also didn’t mention that yesterday I mailed the checks for the 4th quarter estimated tax. I don’t tell you everything, Dere Diary.

What isn’t working is using Bill Pay at the credit union website to pay the monthly insurance bill. Back in December, they billed me for my first month of coverage (just $20.60), and I thought I had ordered Bill Pay to pay it. But now Bill claims not to know about that; and Anthem shows me as owing them for January and February. It is just barely possible that I failed to click the last “do it” button in the bill pay process. That has happened once before, causing an embarrassing overdue notice from Palo Alto Utilities; and on that account I take pains to not write “Scheduled” on the statement until I have actually clicked “Send Money” on the website. But, maybe. So I very carefully went through the process to send $41.20, double-checked the address, definitely clicked “Send Money” and noted the confirmation code. That should cause a check to reach them on the 15th, and I’ll check online after that.

Lynne (a different Lynne from dinner last night) is preparing the elevator poster for when I give a talk about my book in April. She showed it to me yesterday and I didn’t like the headline. So now I rewrote it and slipped it under her door as promised. Later she showed me the revision and I approved it.

Last Tuesday Susan consulted with me about self-publishing, which she wants to do. I took along a couple of books to show her, the photo books we made for the SWBB team back in 2011-13, to show what the current print-on-demand platforms can do. I left them with her because Harry, her husband, wanted to see them. Well, apparently Wednesday evening they put the two books in #621 cubby in the mail room.  (There is a two sided bookcase with one shallow cubby for each of the 200-odd rooms, mostly used for house announcement letters, or for anything else you want to pass to somebody, “I’ll drop it in your cubby tomorrow”) But they weren’t there last night, nor now. She might have put the books in the wrong cubby, but says they had my name on them. Mystery. Who’d take two nice picture books and keep them? She’s put out a note on the CH email list; maybe they’ll be returned. They were my only copies; however, they are still there at Blurb.com, and can be ordered — at $42 each. Premium paper, full-bleed color printing etc. If they don’t show up, I imagine Susan will order them, or if not, I will. No biggie. Other people have commented darkly about things disappearing from the open cubbies. But when I looked today, I noticed somebody’s cubby had a MacBook Air in it. That’s trusting.

Put in 30 minutes on the novel, added 300 words, but realized that I’d strayed from the structure I laid out in the outline I put together weeks ago. Must think.

At 2pm the staff put on a 50’s-themed party in the lobby, to kick off the upgrade of the fifth floor. Did they do a 60’s party last September when the 6th floor started to move out? I don’t remember. Listening to Little Richard and Elvis and Rock around the clock, I was struck by two things about that music. One, how simple it is, drums, acoustic bass, and one more instrument; and two, how fast the tempos are. Compare Tutti Frutti to something contemporary, like the band Pom Pom Squad that I just heard highly praised. They’re both rock’n’roll, both musically minimal, and both boundary-pushers (and I just bet that Mia Berrin and Richard Pennyman could have totally bonded, talking about eye makeup) but dear goodness the modern band is playing a dirge compared to the early one.

There were snacks at the party, so I skipped supper. Lenny rode with me to the SWBB game against Cal. Stanford took an early lead and romped to a 33-point win, leading by over 40 at times. Cal scored just one basket in the third quarter. The same teams meet again at Cal on Sunday, which must be a glum prospect for the Cal team.

 

 

 

Thursday, 1/9/2020

Once more avoided left-side sleeping, and got up to no-vertigo. That shouldn’t feel like an achievement; it should feel like normal. Hopefully it is.

Today’s event was that, as I noted a few days back, I’d signed up for a bus trip to the Legion of Honor museum to take in their special exhibit of paintings by Tissot — a name that if you search it, will tell you a lot about expensive swiss watches, but not much about the guy who painted lush, detailed pictures of society people in London and Paris in the late 1800s. Fun pictures to look at, pictures that let you invent stories. This one, of three rather dissipated looking people on a motorboat on the Thames…

The interpretive sign made much of the air quality, which was a hot topic in London at the time, and of the implied social criticism of carrying three bottles of champagne for a party of three people. I was impressed (possibly because of recent experience of vertigo!) with how there are no perpendicular lines. Everything is at an angle, everything is swaying and unstable. And yet the people are unconcerned, even bored (lots of Tissot’s people look bored). Was that a social comment about the uncaring upper classes ignoring social unrest? Or just an accurate picture of boats on the water?

That aside, the thing that was impossible to ignore in these very large canvasses was the man’s almost insane attention to detail. He was famous for painting womens’ clothes in photographic (well, photography didn’t exist) detail. Here’s a segment of one painting.

That’s about 1/8 of a big canvas. Imagine painting all those stripes, one at a time, getting the light values and angles right so all the wrinkles and folds are consistent. Then painting the lace edging. Then painting the stitching in the silk stocking. Then the grass…

So there were about 15 of us, of which I was probably the youngest, certainly the most spry. Our bus got there about 10:30, and we were scheduled to depart at 2pm. It took me an hour to see the Tissots, and I was hungry, so I checked out the museum cafe, whose menu didn’t attract nor did a long line for service. Hmmm. I have over 2 hours to kill. Got out the phone (had to walk to the far side of the parking lot to get service), checked the map, yes, there are a couple of casual eateries a mile away on Balboa street. Walk? Nah. I called a Lyft. Had a very tasty panini at the Simple Pleasures Cafe. Very San Francisco place, and don’t ask me to define that, but it was very different in tone and decor from anything in Palo Alto. And a Lyft back. Total, about $25 for travel and lunch, which was not a whole lot more than the museum cafe would have cost.

I went into the museum again, and joined the 12:30 docent tour. This lady, Fern, showed us a couple of paintings in the normal collection that related to Tissot’s work, in being contemporary in time but different in treatment of subjects. She did an excellent job of this. As a docent, I love seeing other docents doing good tours.

Still time to kill. So I walked down the hill playing peek-a-boo with the bridge.

Bus finally left, all home safe. At 5:30 I joined Harry and Susan who had invited me to supper along with Betty and Jerry (another guy about my age and spryness), and Lynne. Pleasant meal, nice people.