Day 136, realtor, sale manager

Wednesday, 4/17/2019

First item was a run. Started early, 8:15, so as to be back in time for the 10:30 arrival of Chuck the realtor, Vassily his contractor, and Amy the stager. Before they arrived I had a talk with Richard the gardener about adding new bark mulch to the landscaping. We’d done that twice in the seven years since the 2012 landscape makeover, and the mulch was again looking thin and gray. He reminded me how I’d set down a big tarp in the driveway so the truck could dump two yards of mulch and he could get it up clean. Oh, yeah, it comes back to me now. And that big tarp is still in the garage.

So I priced bark mini-mulch at local garden centers and we decided to do it a week from Friday.

Then the realty crew arrived, and I introduced Richard to Chuck as a reliable gardener, and then Amy said, about the mulch, hold off on that until you know when the house will be on the market and do it just before so it looks its best.

There were extensive discussions between the three of them about how to re-do the kitchen and the bath. I tried to keep my mouth shut, with mixed success. Vassily wants drawings to work from. I was surprised that Amy said, “I don’t do drawings”, so that is something that somebody (not me!) will have to organize somehow. Anyway it was left that Vassily will get Chuck “some numbers” next week. So at least we’ll have an idea of how much renovations will cost, which Chuck can balance against an expected higher price for the house.

Possibly the most significant conversation happened in the driveway, after Amy and Vassily had left. I pointed out how good the garden was looking, with the iris all in bloom, and if we could just let people see the house it might sell as-is. Chuck said, well we can do that. And we agreed he would put up a local ad, without enough detail that people could find the house on their own but would have to go through him. And he would coordinate with me to let selected people, if any were interested (Hah! thinks I), see the house as-is.

Coincidentally that afternoon I got my monthly email from Zillow.com, giving their “Zestimate” on the house of 2.9 million. I am only hoping for 2.5 clear, or about 2.7 going into escrow. So. I have hopes this will all happen without the need for fussing around with construction mess and delay.

At 1:30 Deborah the estate sale lady arrived with Thor her son, to take some pictures. She shot pics and took measurements of the major furniture items.

Two items I still vacillate about: the bed, and the big room divider that is my media stand. Of the bed, Amy emphasized to me that my queen-size is about 6 inches longer than a “full” which I had planned to buy. In the night, I stretched out and my toes touched the footboard and there was about a hands-width between my head and the headboard. Hmmm. I’m just not sure. The queen width is much more than I need; I still sleep on exactly half of it, from long habit, and the other half is unused. Maybe if it was in the new location, turned a different way, I could get used to sleeping more in the middle. Fret fret fret. If I keep it, I am spared the hassle of trying to buy a bed, mattress and new linens.

After Deborah left I headed out to FOPAL and spent 2 and a half hours finishing the cleanup and reorganization of the Computer section.

Day 135, History SJ, FOPAL

Tuesday, 4/16/2019

First order of business was to transport our San Jose Lasers relics to History San Jose. Long story here. Back on Day 38 I mentioned sorting our memorabilia of the San Jose Lasers, a professional women’s team in the short-lived American Basketball League. The ABL folded in its second year. On day 60 I mentioned being astonished to find that, besides the team shirts and framed pictures, Marian had carefully curated two fat binders of paper items. One was from the first two seasons: ticket stubs, trading cards, press clippings and more. The other was from the last months, when the fans came together on the internet (in 1998!) to organize a final game, called HoopSalute.

I twice used the donation page on the History San Jose website to offer these items and received no reply of any kind. Fortuitously, last Thursday Dan, one of the curators at HSJ, stopped by the Shustek center for an unrelated matter. I accosted him with my tale and he said “email me your list”. Long story short, they did want the items, we set up a time, and today is the day to take the stuff to them. I drove to the HSJ office on Senter Road in the south end of San Jose, and went over everything with them. They were happy to get everything and thanked me. I’m delighted that these things are out of the house and into safe hands.

Back home I killed time laundering the bed linens until the cleaning lady arrived. I told her that I hoped she’d come just twice more. Also I gave her a little gold chain and medallion from Marian’s collection. She’d said last time she wished she had something to remember Marian by, so there.

Then I headed down to FOPAL to do post-sale-day cleanup of the Computer section. I got some advice from a couple of ladies who were doing the same for their sections. You can tell from the way we write prices, how many months, or sales, a book has been on the shelf. If it has been on the shelf unsold for two months, mark it down by half, and if that takes it below $2, send it to the Bargain Room.

I sent four boxes of books to the Bargain Room, and also found myself reorganizing the categories on the shelves. I didn’t finished, but left after 2 and a half hours. I’ll finish tomorrow.

After a short rest at home I went out to an early supper at Hobee’s. I talked to them about brunch for eight or so, around 11:30 Saturday, but they don’t do reservations. “Call a little while ahead and we can probably fit you in.” Well, I really didn’t like the atmosphere that well anyway. So, where? I want someplace close to Bol Park and easy to get to from there, i.e. no left turns across El Camino without a signal, or U-turns. I tried Cibo, a would-be upscale place in a good location, but it felt too upscale. I don’t want to host a fine meal, I just want a casual place for friends to stop by if they feel like it.

I finally settled on the decidedly down-scale Corner Bakery. It’s just a chain but it has plenty of space and parking and is dead easy to get to from the park.

During the evening, Deb the sale lady texted to see if she could come take pictures tomorrow at 1:30. Later, Chuck called to say he and Vasilly and Amy would come around tomorrow at 10:30 if that was OK. Sure.

Day 134, planning the unit

Monday, 4/15/2019

Started with a run, very comfortable. On return, showered and dressed, I spent time on the phone with Via Benefits. For the third month in a row they had ignored my information on direct deposit and had sent me a check. The phone rep said she would send me a paper form that I could return to request direct deposit. Hopefully that will be more effective than repeatedly putting the bank numbers into their web site and clicking “submit”; that hasn’t achieved anything.

Then spent an hour doing stuff–triage of the “shop”, the enclosed room in the garage building. That’s where the brown steel cabinets are that I emptied over the last two weeks. Now I worked on the cabinets up the right side, primarily paint and related chemicals (paint stripper, thinner…) and plant pots. Lots of plant pots. Those I left for the sale manager to price.

I spent some time with decorative pebbles. Back last summer, with Marian in the hospital, I tidied the three big “porch pots” of bedding plants by pulling the dying plants and, rather than replant, I put in rounds of green netting and covered them with the shiny decorative pebbles Marian used to discourage squirrels. In the winter, I moved the pots to the garage.

Now, cleaning out the shop cabinet, I found a half-bag of shiny pebbles and remembered the others, so I gathered all the pebbles together, and then noticed they were dirty and had leaves mixed in, so put them in a plastic tub and washed them.

Well, such fussing brought me to noon and shortly Amy the Decorator appeared right on time. We walked around the house and I pointed out the few bits of furniture I meant to take, or that we could take. She took pictures and noted dimension on her iPad.

Then we went to Channing House for a scheduled meeting with Angela the Upgrade Manager. She and Amy got along great and we all spent nearly two hours in unit 621. Much of the time was spent choosing materials from Angela’s stock of carpet and counter-top samples, paint chips, and photos of cabinetry and sinks.

One problem emerged: Angela just lost her in-house cabinet maker, and is not sure whether the bathroom cabinetry that I want can be done in the next few weeks. Possibly it will have to be delayed until the 6th-floor upgrade late this year. To be determined.

Amy dropped me off at home. After she left, I drove up to Bol Park where the tree planting for Marian is to happen Saturday. On the map it had looked unfamiliar, but in person it was “Doh! of course!”. I had ridden my bike along the edge of this park many many times; it’s the bike-path from Oregon Expressway over to Arastradero.

It was easy to identify the place for the tree planting; I could see the clear signs of Canopy having prepared the ground for one of their community plantings. It’s just in front of the pen where for years a donkey lived that everyone treated as a Palo Alto mascot.

From there I drove less than a mile to Hobee’s, where I am thinking people can have brunch after the planting. Unfortunately they close early on Mondays so I couldn’t get in. I’ll have supper there tomorrow and make a reservation if I can.

Day 133, hat store

Sunday, 4/14/2019

Opened the day with my customary walk to the local coffee shop to read the paper and do the big crossword. Problem: in a month or so, living at C.H., where will I take that pleasure? All right come on, that’s an opportunity not a problem.

On return, I was faced with a day in which I’d told myself I wouldn’t do any chores. But what to do instead?

I remembered that for some time I’ve thought of going to the Berkeley Hat Store, one of the best hat shops in the area, to look for a replacement for my favorite casual fedora which is showing some wear. Well, why not today?

Two minutes (at most) with the internet answered all questions: yes, the store was open today at noon; yes my clipper card works on BART; here’s the address of the BART station in Fremont; the next trains depart at 11:17 and 11:37; it will take a bit over 20 minutes to drive there. I try to get people on my docent tour to grasp how our lives have been changed by networked computers. As fish we have a hard time seeing the water we swim in.

So I drove to Fremont, had an hour’s ride on BART to Berkeley Downtown and a nice 20 minute walk to the store. A helpful clerk wasn’t able to find an exact duplicate of my pet hat, but he found one quite a bit like it that looks ok on me. And cheap, at $32. I had a slice of pizza for lunch, and reversed my journey, stage by stage.

To continue the theme of the computer revolution: I passed time on the ride reading a book on Kindle on my phone. It was the first volume of a science fiction trilogy and I really enjoyed it. That’s a change; the experience of really getting into a story and liking the characters and being interested in the events — has been rare of recent years. I’ve abandoned a lot of books (and even more movies on TV) because I just didn’t care what was going to happen, or actively disliked the people or events. (Case in point, last night I gave up on On the Road about one-fourth through. What a bunch of smug, obsessively self-focused, asocial losers.)

Anyway, having finished the science fiction book, I wanted to get the next two volumes and although I could see them on Kindle, I couldn’t quite figure out how to buy and download them on the phone. I’m sure it was possible, I just couldn’t see how to do it through Kindle’s interface. (Sure, blame the software.) But that would really have closed the loop. Reading a book on your phone would have sounded like science fiction already, fifteen years ago (the iPhone was announced in 2007), but to be able to buy and download another volume on your phone while riding a train… that would have been perfect.

Home for a quiet afternoon and evening reading and watching TV.

Day 132, cleanup, docent, FOPAL sale

Saturday, 4/12/2019

Today I continued to decimate the long merged to-do list I put together a couple days back. One item was just “clean camera”. I had noticed that the Nikon was really grubby and in fact, I’m shamed to admit, it still had traces of an unfortunate event back in spring 2017 when, in Italy, I had a small incident with a cappuccino and some foam got on the camera. So I cleaned it up and put a bit of armor-all on the rubber bits and looks good again. “Photo stuff” was another checklist item, and that was easy to deal with. One old camera was already in the sale box. The Nikon manual, battery charger, and extra battery, and the tripod, were the only remaining items, so I put those in an appropriate “keep” location.

Eventually I went off to the CHM to lead a tour. On the way back I stopped first at Summerwinds Nursery on Middlefield. On this first warm weekend of spring it was bustling with people buying plants and fertilizer etc. Marian would have been there I’m sure, picking out bedding plants for the “porch pots”, three large bowl-shaped pots that stood on our front porch. She would plant them with blooming things every spring. I retired those pots to the garage last fall when the then-current crop of bedding plants were dying down. I thought very briefly of bringing them back and planting them, but… no.

I was only at the nursery to buy plant supports for the two big dragon-wing begonias that live in pots on the porch. I do intend to keep them for my deck at C.H., and for that they have to have saucers, so water doesn’t drip down to the next floor’s deck. I thought they’d be better off with casters as well, so I got little wheeled supports for them that incorporate saucers. That was another to-do item.

From the nursery it was just a few blocks to FOPAL where the monthly sale was going on. I went in to see how the Computer shelf was doing. Quite a few gaps in the shelving showed that some books had been bought. I was disappointed though, because I had set up a short section labeled “classics and nostalgia” and stocked it with blasts from the past, like “Using your TRS-80 in the home” and a book by Larry Yourdon on “Structured COBOL”. Maybe people had gotten a kick out of it, but nobody had bought anything. I also took a look around the Bargain Room, which is quite remarkable, really three large rooms where all books are $1 and the high stacks are just stuffed with thousands of volumes.

At home I sat down to do something about the file of “letters to us” that Marian had carefully collated, and which had sat in the closet unexamined for over thirty years. Going through it I found that almost all the letters were from the period 1975-1979, around the time we were living in London. We wrote regular letters describing our adventures, duplicated them and sent them to half a dozen friends and relations. Said friends and relations often replied, and these replies are the bulk of the file. It’s nice to know that we had people who were complimenting us on our travel narratives.

One particularly good correspondent was Marian’s sister Jean. I set the thick packet of letters from her aside and emailed her to see if she wants them. The rest I put in the recycle.

One last item: two dresser drawers of Christmas wrapping material. Rolls of paper, boxes of tags, a shoebox of ribbon spools. Bagged the complete rolls in a big white garbage bag to be sold (maybe). Plain paper and plain boxes into the recycle. Scraps of foil and shiny stuff into the trash. Two more empty drawers!

And that is bloody well that for the weekend. Sunday is a day of rest from downsizing.

Day 131, more tidy, Chabot

Friday, 4/12/2019

Should have gone for a run but decided instead to do more — I need a word for, sorting through possessions, deciding what to keep, putting those bits in one place, the other bits in the trash or a different place — downsizing. I went through the sewing bits, collected a little kit that would handle buttons and simple repairs; put the rest in a nice basket to go in the sale. Stayed busy until 10am, time to leave for Oakland where I had a date with Darlene and Jessea. They’d invited me to go with them to Chabot space and science center, up top of the ridge above Oakland, for the planetarium show, and then lunch.

Chabot was rather busy with several busloads of kids. We checked out the exhibits, then watched the show, which was not a planetarium display but an iMax-style movie about the search for dark matter. Watching the kids boisterously bouncing around the displays, and watching the filmmakers trying to get across a fairly difficult concept, reminded me of how hard museum people work to produce relevant displays, and how often they fail, in my opinion. The software exhibit at the Computer History Museum is like that. They tried really hard, but it ended up more about the things people do with software, and conveys almost nothing about what it is, or the process, difficulty, fascination of trying to make it.

Nice lunch with two cheerful people. Got to talk about myself and my adventures, which is always enjoyable, so grateful for that.

Back at home I spent a couple of hours getting one our better images to print properly, and made something of a breakthrough controlling the printer. I think following images will be much easier to print with good color.

And only now I realize, I had a baseball game I could have gone to. Oh well.

Day 130, Shustek and taxes and legal

Thursday, 4/11/2019

My tax return is ready at the accountant’s in south San Jose. Their office is open at 8, and I need to be at the Shustek center in Milpitas at 10. OK. At 8:15 I leave for the first stop. I pick up my tax form, which includes addressed envelopes and forms for,

Federal tax return
State tax return
Federal estimated tax returns for four quarterly payments
State estimated tax returns for three (I get to skip September) quarters

The amount I need to pay immediately is rather large. Unfortunately my financial advisors, or rather the brokers they rely on, realized a lot of gains this year. Due to this misfortune of making a lot of money, I need to pay a bunch of tax. I put the papers in the car and proceed to Shustek, arriving just before ten.

The usual gang, Toni, Don, Steve, Dave, and Greta work on cataloging a bunch of stuff and chatting. I leave for home at 4.

At home I sit down for serious check signing. Marian established the tradition of writing tax checks against our unmanaged Schwab account. I log in and check; oops, there isn’t enough cash in it to cover all the taxes. Well, this is the account whose mutual-fund assets I intend to liquidate to pay the C.H. entry fee. So I place an order to sell one of the mutual funds. Good practice for selling the others next week.

Then I write four tax checks (return plus first-quarter estimate, federal and state) and triple check that the right check is with the right form in the correct envelope. Then look for stamps, and oh dear, only one stamp left in the desk. Well, I wanted to get this properly posted anyway. I drive to the California Ave. P.O., buy stamps, re-re-check that every check and form is properly addressed, seal the envelopes, stamp them, and post them.

Back at the house, I work my way through nine (9!) pages of realtor disclosure forms, signing and initialing. So that’s ready for Chuck when he next stops by. Next up, the forms needed by my attorney. Yesterday I got a statement from her listing what documents she needs to properly handle the details of Marian’s death, and oh yes, how much it will cost. So I assemble the documents and write that check.

One of the documents she needs is a copy of a recent property-tax bill. I’ve been fretting about that all day, where would that be? Finally realize it will, or should, be part of the wad of supporting documents in the 2018 tax return folder. Out to the garage where the box of tax forms went yesterday. Yup, there it is!

Then I try to fit the documents into the attorney’s post-paid return envelope and they don’t fit. So I supply my own return envelope and two stamps.

I call Darlene to confirm I’m joining them for lunch tomorrow. Somehow one or the other of us gets the call into FaceTime mode (except I can only see my face) and then neither of us can figure out how to end the call. I think I’m tired. A little TV and bed.

Day 129, cleanup, forms, FOPAL

Wednesday, 4/10/2019

I woke up with a lot of anxiety, based I think in the general level of upheaval going on. Going through all the memorabilia yesterday, and scheduling the estate sale with Deborah, left me feeling that I’ve got a big, vague, mass of things to do in order to get my possessions in order, and the “keeps” separated from the “sells”.

Then there was the realization that Deborah had suggested a sale the weekend of 12 May, while my (still tentative) move-in date for C.H. is 18 May. Where will I be in the meantime?

Then, in the middle of the night, I woke up and fussed for half an hour about how both the entry price and the monthly fee that I’ve been quoted to enter C.H. is around 20% higher than I’d anticipated. I eventually worked out that, even without the sale of the house, I have enough assets to pay that monthly fee for… about 40 years. But still it was a worry.

So I was fussed. I deliberately went to bed early, and got up early, so I could get a jump on … something. I pulled together two or three to-do lists and made a merged one that encompassed all the shit I need to get done. Then I went for a run, which improved my mood.

Back home I tackled the number one item: to set up a clear “sequester area” in the back of the garage where I can store boxes and objects that I am definitely taking to C.H. I moved some things into it; and moved sellable things (garden tools, etc.) out of it. This alone, getting some definite physical sorting done, had a calming effect on my mood. In the rear of the garage is a big shelf where I’ve always stored the original boxes for products we bought. Most are now irrelevant, and I spent an hour breaking them down and putting them in the recycle. Boxes for things I’m keeping, like the scanner and the iMac, I dusted off and set aside.

While doing all this, Richard the gardener was working, and I gave him the update, the news that his services will be needed through May but probably no longer. In the course of this it emerged that he wasn’t aware that Marian had died! I’m embarrassed that I hadn’t thought to tell him. Anyway, we agreed he would be adding a new layer of bark mulch, as he has in years past.

I boxed up the scanner (don’t plan to do any scanning for a while, but I mean to keep it) and put it in the sequester area. Now I really felt like I was getting on top of stuff, so I took a break. Shortly after, Chuck arrived with lots of realtor documents for me to sign. There’s an amazing number of disclosure statements that realtors use for legal CYA. We talked further about possible dates for staging and selling the house. It will probably get pushed into June.

While we were chatting, Deborah called. She was worried about the sale date she’d set. “I’m thinking, I’m going to sell your bed, where are you gonna sleep?” I said I’d been having the same thoughts, and we agreed to push the sale date to a week after 18 May, the 25th. This took another load off my mind!

The most interesting thing Chuck had to say was a very intriguing fact: he has had a casual discussion with a woman who’s getting divorced. She and her soon-to-be-ex live in a 5-bedroom house about seven blocks away from mine, which they’ll sell. The woman wants to find somewhere smaller to live, but would like to stay in Palo Alto. Helloooo! He let her know he might have something that would suit. It would be fabulous to have a private sale, possibly with minimum remodeling. But this is still just a vague chance, not least because the divorce proceeding complicates the financing.

After Chuck left I took a box full of empty three-ring binders (from yesterday’s memorabilia triage) to FOPAL and did two hours of sorting.

Back home I worked a while on a more fun project. I have a stack of nice color prints I’d made over the years from our best photos. On impulse I ordered a pack of simple frames from Amazon and they came today. I had in mind making a matched set of nice pictures to decorate a wall at C.H. I quickly found that I’d have to reprint them to get them to look right in these frames. Or buy different, smaller, frames. Easier to reprint the pictures — or is it? Because as usual, it’s a struggle to get Photoshop and the printer to agree on color values. But a fun challenge. I got one picture printed the right size and good color, in a frame by supper time.

And now, in the evening, I feel remarkably less anxious, more comfortable, than in the morning.

Day 128, unit walk-thru, more history

Tuesday, 4/9/2019

First item today was to meet with Angela Lamothe, the “upgrade manager” at C.H. We viewed my

unit #621

in detail and talked about what they would do standard, and what they would do that would cost me extra (but no numbers yet).

We decided that the kitchenette area will be remodeled with a new microwave, new fridge (both the extra-cost stainless steel instead of the standard white) and changed cabinetry. The existing cabinetry is not exactly crude, but not elegant and the paint is somewhat worn and chipped.

I decided to have the bathroom vanity redone. This isn’t part of the standard move-in upgrade. However I thought the present cabinetry was ugly and outdated, and it will be well worth some money to make it nice.

In both cases there will be several choices to be made of finishes and materials. I said I want to have my decorator along for that conference. Later we settled on Monday afternoon, and I talked to Amy on the phone and that works for her. So next Monday I will finally get a decorator really involved. (By the way, last I heard from Chris’s niece Tyra was a vague, “not sure this will work with my schedule” and no follow-up since, so I’ve basically written her off.)

There will be more work done, specifically new floor covering and paint on all surfaces. I elected to postpone that work until after the major sixth-floor remodel that will happen beginning in August. They would normally re-do the floor covering then because they pull out the floor-mounted heating/cooling units, replacing them with ducts in the ceiling. That leaves holes in the floor covering. I decided that I would have a hard floor (faux wood) in the living half of the unit, and new carpet in the bedroom half. In the meantime I will live with the beige carpet that exists. They will do a thorough clean of it hoping to get out a few of the dents and stains from the prior tenant’s furniture.

Paint is also re-done after the big remodel, so I will also live with the existing beige paint until then. However, I will have Amy select the colors to be used now, along with the flooring choices.

So, home to start doing more

memorabilia triage.

I’m trying to empty the bottom two shelves of the last cabinet. First up was a box of Marian’s memorabilia from her school years. I swear she never looked in this box all the years we were married. (Maybe she went out and looked in it when I wasn’t around? But I doubt it.) There was the Oakland High School annual from her graduation year, and mementos of proms, and a whole pack of report cards from middle school. (Somewhat to my surprise, she didn’t get all-As. There was a fair sprinkling of B and B+ grades as well.) I winnowed out documents showing her high school and college graduations and saved them. There was the 1952 Cal Blue and Gold in which she appears as a postage-stamp sized headshot in the hundreds of graduates in the school of Arts and Letters, but there was only that one tiny picture in a volume an inch and a half thick, so I didn’t keep it.

A box labeled “Work Misc” had assorted memos and–I cannot fathom the reason for this–desk calendar pages. Marian had a calendar with month-pages on her desk where she noted all her meetings and to-dos; and she saved them. Here were the 12 months of each of several years from 1990 through 1996, her final work year. If anyone had ever wanted to know, they could learn when we went to Chris for haircuts or she had meetings or work deadlines. To the recycle.

Also in this box, though, was perhaps the only extant copy of the manual she wrote, Introduction to IBM Direct Access Storage Devices. She wrote it while working for IBM in Honolulu in 1965-8. She was running customer training classes for the new IBM 360 line, and many customer programmers had never been exposed to disk drives, so she wrote this manual explaining their principles and how to write code to use them. It was widely praised, and here were letters to Marian from IBM managers and from customers praising the manual, saying how clear and helpful it had been. I kept the manual and tucked the letters inside it.

Next up, a stack of fat three-ring binders that contain software manuals she contributed to. Hundreds of pages of detailed software reference and usage info for systems that nobody uses or even remembers now, like OSI/CS or the EDX Communication Facility. Oh, and APL for VSPC, a product we both worked on for several years here and in England. All computer industry veterans suffer from this irony, looking back on the hard, diligent work they poured into brilliant projects that after only a decade or two are completely forgotten and irrelevant. All these pages go in the recycle. The three-ring binders I can take to FOPAL where they have a special spot for binders that people can take free.

But there was another binder, with a nice padded cover. Not containing manuals, but containing all the letters she had received from various IBM managers and co-workers on the occasion of her 30th anniversary, in 1991, and on her retirement in 1996. I’m pulling the letters out of the clear plastic sheet protectors. I’ll put them in a single envelope and keep them.

Delving further, I found two boxes containing all our credit card statements from about 1987 to some recent year. In the desk I keep the statements for the past 12 months. Each time I pay a credit card bill, I put it on the top of the stack, and throw away the matching one from the bottom of the stack. I suppose I knew we had these historic records. I think I recall once in the late 90s I got out a year’s worth and did a summary of our annual spending, just to reassure myself. After that, nobody touched them. They would have nicely filled the gap between the end of the hundreds of cancelled checks I threw away last week, and the present day. Keep? Nope nope nope. Out.

Final box on the bottom shelf: old tax records! The bundles of tax-related documents for each year from about 1979 through 2013. In the closet in the house is a small box where we have kept the most recent five years’ returns. I’m writing to my financial advisor now to ask, how much of this is really necessary. I’m guessing, none of it, but we’ll see what he says. Later: the advice is to keep the last 7 years complete, i.e. the return and the fat envelope of 1099s, supporting receipts etc.; but keep just the actual return document for prior years. On examination of the box, it appears that Marian was doing that; the returns up to 2010 had been stripped of the supporting docs.

I managed to get all the tax returns from now back, into the one banker’s box. Next year may overflow. Or next year I will accidentally lose (“oopsie!”) say 1970-1980. While working on that, got an email saying this year’s tax return is ready. I’ll have to go pick it up and pay the preparer tomorrow or Friday. Then came

Deborah

and this day is getting crazy long. Deborah is the woman I tried to contact to run an estate sale, and hadn’t returned my message. Now she did, and came over at 3pm to look the house over. Like every other person who sees the house for the first time, she loved it. She was complimentary on how far I had gotten at de-cluttering and organizing. She looked the goods over, opined that the sale might generate $3000, and we would do a 50-50 split. She’s going to come around Monday afternoon to start pricing. Which means I’ve got to move on with finishing the garage triage and as much as possible, get the things I mean to keep sequestered into one marked-off area.

Day 127, history triage

Monday, 4/9/2019

Began with a run, 37 minutes, felt good. At home, suddenly wondered, all those paper manuscripts from the 80s — don’t I have those on disk? Sure, I must do. They were computer files right from the start, typed into Word Perfect under CP/M and saved on 8-inch floppy disks. At some time in the 90s, I remember getting ready to shut down my CP/M system for the last time, and cobbling up a serial connection from it to my then-new Mac, and moving the files across. I must still have these files.

And of course, I do, or most of them. They are sitting quietly in the Documents folder on the Mac. One story appears to be missing, and one major fragment. I’ll key those in today. Then I can recycle all the paper. I plan to keep paper only of the two stories that sold to a major magazine, along with the copies of the magazine itself.

Next project: dumping the slides. I decided to take some pictures of this process. Concentrating on that helped avoid excess emotion.

pics_dump

The slides more than filled the can and the slides from the last boxes went into bags.

pics_in_can So that’s done. Major check-mark on the to-do list. Major milestone in The Transition.

There remains a large shelf of saved memorabilia that I need to triage but I think I will wait on that until tomorrow. I am really close to being done with clean-outs; close to the point where I could walk through the house filling a few boxes and pointing to a few bits of furniture to be packed, and know that everything else is for the sale.

Today I am going to type in two stories that I want to preserve digitally, and then go have a look at FOPAL, make sure the Computer section is squared away for the sale this weekend.

Later: I did type in one of the stories. Of course as I was entering it, I couldn’t help myself improving it with lots of little tweaks. So I made the copyright line, “Copyright 1986, 2019 David E. Cortesi” which is kind of cool.