Day 116, Yosemite, laundry, music

Thursday, 3/28/2019

Started a load of laundry and then headed out to do museum work at the Yosemite drive warehouse. I spent the day with Steve, cataloging the parts of a donation of a Data General file server from the mid-90s. There was a “deskside” server, a box about a the size of an ottoman and weighing a couple hundred pounds, full of big circuit boards, with its associated terminal and keyboard; and a RAID array of twenty plug-in disk modules, and a heap of spare parts, extra disk modules, extra power supply modules, circuit boards, cables. Over a 6-hour day we cataloged 24 items, with another 15 to go when next the volunteers hit Yosemite, in two weeks.

Back home I ate and continued the laundry process, and then had to go out to a Voices of Music concert. This is a local organization that puts on Baroque and other classical works. The musicians are skilled and I find some the music very enjoyable. Some, kind of boring.

Voices of Music was Marian’s discovery; she found their concerts a couple of years back and signed us up as season subscribers immediately. I considered not going to this, the final concert of their season, mainly because the prospect was causing uncomfortable emotions. I just have to get used to the fact that thinking about anything that she enjoyed is going to cause prickly eyes and constricted throat. That doesn’t seem to be changing with time. If I were an actor and needed to cry on stage, I could do it easily by thinking about her favorite azalea plant. Or in this case, her favorite concert series.

But the music would be good and I have an on-going goal of getting the heck out of the house and to performances. So, go. (And, note to self, sign up for their next season. Their usual venue, the Episcopal church at 550 Waverley, is about four blocks from C.H.)

This was a selection of works by Handel and by Bach, and like most of their concerts in my experience, some pieces were snoozers and some were wows. Most of the wow this time came from the vocal performances of Amanda Forsythe, a soprano.

Here she is with a group very similar to Voices of Music doing a similar Handel number: youtube link. Brava! It felt like a privilege to be in the same room as that voice. The thought occurred to me during some of her twiddly bits, “How come there are no sopranos in jazz?” Because what she’s doing is not that far from scat, except Ella et. al. did their scatting in a much lower register.

So that was good. Back home to fold the laundry and crash.

Day 115, glasses, FOPAL, burger

Wednesday, 3/27/2019

Started with a run, 37 minutes, felt fine. I’m sure I did something for the next two hours, but don’t remember what. At noon I set out to take care of a thing that had been bugging me for three months. For all that time, two pairs of Marian’s glasses have been lying in their cases on a bedroom dresser. I’d see them, think, “trash them”, then “no, donate them”, then “but where?” and then “deal with it later”. Over and over for 100-odd days now.

Well, yesterday I finally got around to an internet search for where to donate used eyeglasses. Everybody knows the Lions Club has that as their special charity, but it turns out they don’t have any local drop-off points. Further searching reveals all LensCrafters stores accept glasses for their OneSight program. And I know where there’s a LensCrafters. So I drove to Menlo Park and dropped off the glasses. Done.

From there I went to FOPAL and did 3+ hours of sorting. That’s damn hard work. I counted; I moved about 35 bankers-boxes of books from sorting to the sales room. I didn’t count the books I handled, but it was a lot. Per the Health app I walked 4.7 miles, 12,000 steps yesterday. A bit less than half of that would have been my run, but a lot was going around and around the sorting and sales rooms with boxes and cart-loads of books.

They really handle an amazing quantity of books. One cheerful donor yesterday brought in 25 boxes, which pretty much wiped out the gains we sorters had made in the hour previous. The donations vary immensely. Some people drop off boxes with mostly recent hard-covers. Or a box will have somebody’s accumulation of years of computer reference books (Windows XP Secrets, How to use MS-DOS, etc.). Yesterday there were a couple of boxes of very old paperbacks, many with cover prices of 50 cents and 75 cents. That keeps the sorting process interesting; you never know what the next box will have.

At 4:30 I left, stopping to buy a few grocery items. I decided to go and eat out for a change. Specifically, I decided, a burger and a beer. I went to Kirk’s Steakburgers in the Town and Country shopping center, but when I walked in, their drinks fridge had no beer. “Yeah, we ran out,” the counter person said. Well, a beer was an integral part of my plan so, feeling distinctly curmudgeonly, I turned around and left. Now what? Ah! I drove back to California Avenue and (with difficulty) found a parking place, and went to The Counter, where in fact I sat at the counter and had a beer and a burger.

When I got home I was quite tired; watched a little TV and went to bed at 9:30, and slept until 6, so that was good.

Day 114, mental exam, slides, art

Stanford gave its fans two agonizing quarters, seeming to be unable to penetrate the BYU zone defense while hitting exactly one of their first 12 three-point shots. Then in the third quarter they found their defense and offense at once, and put on a 17-2 run to take over the game. On to Chicago to play Missouri State and then, hopefully, Notre Dame.

Tuesday, 3/26/2019

First up today was an appointment with Dr. Melissa Frederick, the C.H. medical director. She’s a cheerful, young (by my standards) woman, very pleasant to talk to. This turned out to be mostly a brief test of my mental acuity. For example, in the next one minute, name as many words as you can think of, that start with the letter ‘F’. I thought that was quite a challenge; I could only think of 15. Turns out, eleven was enough. Phew.

Later I got an email saying I had passed. So, ok. Now only waiting for approval of my financial documents.

Back home I waited to see if Tyra, Chris’s designer niece, would call as I’d scheduled at 12. Meanwhile I finished inspecting the Japan slide group, and started scanning them. One more session will finish that job. When Tyra hadn’t called at 2, I figured, ok, so much for that. Then it occurred to me to wonder if I really sent that email. Um… no. Still in “drafts” 😳. So I changed it to say, call me Wednesday between 11-12 and actually clicked Send. Tyra responded shortly after.

Bored, I started walking around the house collecting all the art works I want to take along, and identifying those I could. One is a print we bought in San Juan Island around 2000. We liked it as an excellent rendering of the look of the Puget Sound as we often saw it from the Washington State Ferry boats.The name “Spaulding” is on the bottom margin. A little googling found a married couple of printmakers of that name, on San Juan. I emailed them enclosing a snap like the above, asking to verify it was theirs. (Note from November: they never replied.)

I also cleared out another couple of shelves of storage from the shop.

Day 113, jewelry, FOPAL, basketball

Monday, 3/25/2019

Began the week with a run, 40 minutes of my 4.5mph pace, felt just fine. I had a list of things to get done. One was that Louise was coming with the jewelry she’d taken for appraisal, at 10:30. Two were online, so I did them while waiting. One was to review my museum schedule and sign up for docent tours for the month of April.

The other was to go to Apple’s trade-in page, and arrange to trade in three Macs for apple store credit. The process is simple; you enter the serial number of the device and answer a few questions about its condition. Then their recycling vendor sends you an email to confirm, and later a custom box to return the device. When it is received, you get a gift card in the amount. I’m returning Marian’s old Air, which was made in 2006, I learned after entering the serial number. Got lots of good use out of that one! The other two are my old 2011 MacBook Pro, and Marian’s 2017 iMac which sits on her desk. (It was a recent replacement for a Mac mini that served her a long time; and it was preceded by a Cube — remember the Apple Cube?)

I realized from the email that the return offer is only good for 21 days. I’m not sure I’ll be ready to send off the iMac in 21 days. I use it for all financial stuff, bank statements, reviewing brokerage accounts, credit card bills. Just because the Chrome browser in that system knows all the passwords for those accounts and fills them in. Silly! I have the passwords; there’s no danger of getting locked out. I can do that work equally well from laptop Godot or my big iMac.

Louise texted she’d be an hour late, so I zipped out in the car to take care of two more items. One was to go to the Stanford ticket office and make sure that my WBB season ticket account was alright. Yup, it turns out I had indeed unsubscribed from emails from them (while shutting down all Marian’s email subscriptions). That’s why I never had a chance to buy a good seat for this weekend’s games. Fixed now.

The other job was to return some fluorescent bulbs to the hardware store for recycling. Back home, I had an email from Canopy about the memorial tree planting for Marian, now with a time and other info. So I composed an email to the people who wanted to attend. While I was working on that, Louise showed up. So I answered the door sniffling and had to go blow my nose before talking to her. She’s done a marvelous job documenting Marian’s bling. We talked about how to sell some of it, and she will get back to me with more info.

After she’d gone, I headed out, first to Office Depot because I wanted to see what kind of office furniture they had. For the new place, I want some kind of cabinet to set the printer on, with space for printer stationery and hopefully a file drawer. And I looked at desks, because initially I’d been thinking I’d keep Marian’s desk, but now I’m inclined to want something a little lighter, more open. Office Depot stuff didn’t attract me. Ikea’s desks are better.

From there I stopped at FOPAL to check on the Computer section. There were several boxes waiting, so I culled them and priced the keepers. Two hours logged in the book. I learned something today about the bargain room, where I send the unsaleable Computer books. But time presses, I’ll record it later.

Had a few hours to relax and eat some supper; then it’s out to the Stanford second-round game against BYU. I’ll report on that tomorrow.

Day 112, stuff, and baseball

Sunday, 3/24/2019

Another Sunday morning. Walked to the coffee shop for a cappuccino and to read Sunday paper and do the big crossword puzzle. On return, went to brush my teeth and noticed that the Braun electric toothbrush head was looking distinctly worn. Well, I know where we keep spare ones; and in looking found another trove of

stuff.

There’s a stack of little drawers — part of the custom cabinetry that was made for our 1974 bathroom remodel — between the toilet and the shower. Toothbrush heads are in one of those. So I started opening them, and was immediately reminded that here was another goddam set of drawers that needs to be cleaned out. So I went and got a plastic trash bag and discarded years-old cough and cold meds, bottles and tubes of sunblock and bug spray, stuff Marian used on her nails, etc. Down in the last drawer there were a couple of spare Braun toothbrush heads. I kept those, and some of the fresher cold remedies.

Now I was on a roll. I gathered up a pile that I had been dithering over for days. This was a collection of Stanford Women’s Basketball Media Guides from 1996 through 2015. Marian had gotten a Media Guide (a glossy magazine with player bios, team stats, records, all the deets) each year since we became season ticket holders. I had thought there would be a continuous run, but when I looked through them last week, I was surprised to find the run stopped with the 2015-16 season. Had it been complete with the last two (2016-17 and 17-18), I would have felt really obligated to find a new home for the collection. (Although I have been dithering for days over how to advertise such a set to fans, how to find the one fan who would want it.) Now I know it isn’t complete, so… Right. Today’s a good day for clean-out. I dropped the stack into the blue recycle bin. End of that dither.

There was column in today’s paper about the problems faced by children when a parent dies and leaves them with the dilemma of a house full of stuff to dispose of. I can well believe it! I’ve been tossing stuff for weeks and am strongly aware of several pools of stuff still lurking and looming and daring me to come at them. I can sympathize with any elderly, feeble person who shirks the task of de-cluttering right to the end.

Each piece of stuff has no intrinsic value, is worth zero, zilch, nada, to you or to anyone else — yet each piece has associations that tug on you. Marian referred to those media guides when she updated the alumnae section of the fan website, or checked on prior records when a player seemed to be approaching some kind of team landmark for scoring or blocks or whatever. The pile of media guides was of no use to me, in fact it had negative value because I don’t want to spend the mental energy to figure out where to store them or how to preserve them in the future. Their highest and best use is to be pulped in the recycler and to become new grocery bags. But throwing them out somehow suggests I am denigrating the use Marian made of them, denying her diligence in documenting the team. Which is really stupid; and indeed I can imagine her disdain of any such sentimentality.

Continuing the roll, I cleared a couple shelves of one of the big brown steel cabinets in the shop. Two big roasting pans into the recycle. When was the last time we roasted anything large? A couple of the slides I scanned last week were from a Christmas dinner we hosted in 1992. That may have been when that roaster was last in an oven. But there it was, carefully laid away in the shop for the next time we needed it. Doing these discards and thinking about the care, the practicality, and the ultimate futility of it all, caused enough emotion that I recorded a symptom on the app for the Zio patch I’ve been wearing (and which I can finally take off in two days). Time:10:30 to 11, symptom: skipped/irregular beats, activity: strong emotion/grief.

Well, off to a

baseball game.

This was my first visit to Sunken Diamond in a couple of years, and my first sight of the seat I selected when I bought my season ticket. Sunken Diamond is a very nice place to watch baseball. Here’s the view from my seat.

Also this was the first time I’ve watched a baseball game in several years. I’d forgotten how slow a game it is. Stanford had a two-run lead after seven and I decided to do something else and left early, following the rest of the game on the car radio on KZSU.

What I wanted to do before 5pm was to hand off one of the four (4!)

laptops

that are cluttering the place up. There’s Marian’s old MacBook Air, it’s at least 6 years old, I think older. It was getting flaky, the keyboard and track pad not acting right, so about this time last year I got her a new one. After that I installed Ubuntu Linux on the old one and it actually runs fine that way. My MacBook Pro of 2013 was also showing age so as noted in these pages I replaced it with the slow-arriving Godot, that I’m using now. So, too many laptops. Apple has a buy-back program that I need to start using. (Putting that on my to-do list for tomorrow right now.)

In the meantime, I offered Marian’s newer Air to her sister Jean, but Jean wasn’t interested. So instead I offered it to Diane, a long-time friend of Jean’s who I’ve met a few times. She wanted it, so I took it down to her this afternoon.

Stopped at the Westwinds Nursery on Middlefield on the way home, looking for plant hangers and stuff. I’m thinking ahead about that big deck on my C.H. unit. I plan to take 5 or 6 plants, 4 for the deck and at least one of two similar ones to hang indoors. I don’t really need to get any hardware now; I just had a notion to remind myself what’s available.

In the email, finally a response from Chris’s niece Tyra, the decorator. She’s really busy she says, but is curious to know what I am looking for. I’m thinking she doesn’t listen well, because I was standing there when Chris left her a phone message describing me and what I was looking for. But whatever. I replied with a sentence or two, and left it open that if she was really busy, perhaps it wouldn’t work out.

It’s a bit awkward because I also asked Chuck to tell his designer Amy that I wanted design help. We’ll see who’s more interested.

Day 111, basketball

Saturday, 3/23/2019

In the morning I started reviewing

one more group of slides.

Two days ago I scanned the last ones that I had set aside in the review of all un-scanned groups. Finishing that, and feeling quite emotional about the looming prospect of carrying out the dumping of all slides, I took a last look through the existing folders of scans. There I discovered that one group, group “501 Japan 2002”, 250-odd slides from a memorable ElderHostel tour of Osaka and Tokyo, had only a few scanned images, and they weren’t properly named with the group and picture numbers. Clearly that group had not been as carefully reviewed and scanned as other major trips. I speculate the few images in it were perhaps selected quickly to illustrate a blog post or something. I don’t remember the thought process applied back in 2003 or 4, but the existence of a folder named “gp501 Japan” suggested that the group had been done, and clearly it had not.

So I started to inspect the group 501 slides and got through 30 or so, selecting a few to be scanned. I’ll finish that tomorrow and probably have all the actual scanning done next week.

I took one more whack at trying to get

the sound bar

to accept input from the HDMI and the optical ports on the TV, but nope. The optical just doesn’t work, and I’ve tried two different optical cables. The HDMI works, but only if I feed the DVR cable into the sound bar and thence on to the TV, so the sound bar sits in the middle. That would be fine if the DVR was the only program source, but there is also a DVD/Blu-ray Player; and I anticipate adding a Roku box. So all sources have to feed into the TV so I can select among them with a remote; and TV audio out to the sound bar. What works is to feed the sound bar with the TV’s analog output. Stereo audio on a mini-jack, so primitive. Actually it sounds fine.

Meanwhile I pulled out all five speakers and the heavy receiver, and made a pile of them with the receiver’s remote and manual, in the spare room. Probably will end up in a landfill. Well, no; it’s too bulky; I’ll have to take it to Green Citizen or such for recycling. Which brought me to noon and time for

basketball,

the NCAA first round games at Maples Pavilion. I bought my tickets the only way I could, from Stanford’s website as soon as they were available, and the best I could get was front row of the upper level. At the game I found several friends and fellow season-ticket holders sitting in much better seats in lower levels. I think probably that when I was cleaning up all Marian’s email subscriptions, I un-subscribed to the season ticket holder list, with the result that I didn’t get notified of a better way to buy.

Then Dennis, who was on campus to see a water polo game earlier, texted that he was in the building, and I found him in a very nice seat in the middle where the chairs have padding and back support. How did he get that nice seat? He just walked up to the ticket window before game time and said, gimme what you got. Umph.

BYU beat Auburn fairly easily. Stanford romped over UC Davis, opening the game with a 17-2 run and ending 30 points up. The next game will be Monday evening. I expect Stanford will beat the BYU team I saw today, although not as easily as UC Davis.

Home again, I opened the windows to spring-like air. Now at 7:30 it is beginning to feel chilly.

Day 110, many appointments

Last night’s play, at local playhouse The Pear , was the world premier of

Sojourn

by Evan Kokkila-Shumacher. It was… interesting. The staging was clever and attractive. The acting was competent. But it was a lot longer than it needed to be. I almost left at intermission, but stayed for the second half to see if they could resolve the many issues; in the end I don’t think they did.

The setup is that two astronauts have been launched on a no-return mission, to pass Jupiter, then Saturn, then apparently to just keep going on toward the Oort Cloud. They have aboard fertilized human eggs and incubators and are supposed to keep decanting babies to be raised up as replacement crew members. This whole mission plan seems, in hindsight, screwy, impractical, and pointless, but it is revealed gradually through the first act so the screwiness doesn’t really hit you until you’ve left the theater. On the ship, things have gone profoundly wrong. Back home at NASA, the management wants to cut funding. But all the stage time is taken up by endless, repetitive arguments. The two astronauts argue in circles about the mission plan. Back home the mission director and a nasty manager argue in circles about funding and the value of the mission. It was all quite tedious and I thought, even as it was going on, that the main points of debate could have been conveyed in a third the amount of dialogue. But then you’d have a one-act play, I guess.

Friday, 3/22/2019

Today is full of scheduled to-dos. After a shower, shave, and dressing in my Museum Docent clothes, I sat down to assemble some

financial documentation

that I was supposed to have included in my initial C.H. application! I was politely reminded of the need for this stuff in an email from Kim, just after the email telling me I could have the nice 1BR unit. It took a while to assemble the needed documentation (basically, proving I had as much assets as I claimed).

One item wanted was a copy of “the first few pages” of our 2017 tax return. I thought I knew exactly where to lay hands on that. There is a small banker’s box with a folder for each of the last five year’s tax returns, organized meticulously (of course) by Marian each April. I opened it, there was the folder for 2017, but it only included the supporting documents — not the actual spiral-bound return document from the accountant. The folders for 2016, 15, and 14 had their returns, but not last year’s. Thinking about it… the taxes would have been finished just about when Marian got her pancreatic cancer diagnosis. We got really busy around then, with lots of doctor appointments and procedures. (I commented more than once that, when you get cancer, you have a new job: you are “doing cancer” for the duration. It just occupies your life.) So not too surprising that, either we didn’t keep the spiral bound printout, or more likely, we didn’t ask for one because the return was e-filed.

At 9am I sent an email to Cindy at the financial advisors’, and at 9:40 she had emailed me a PDF of the 2017 return. I’m getting great support from that outfit. Printed out the first 8 pages, added it to the other copied statements showing the value of various accounts. I had promised this for Monday but I think now I will drop it off on my way to the Museum for an

11:30 tour.

Which was a bit of a mess. On the volunteer scheduling site it was given as “11:30” but in fact the group arrived at 10:30. I got there at 11:00 but Mike, the second docent, didn’t show for another 15 minutes. I had the group of 40+ herded into the 1401 lab and vamped about that machine until Mike arrived. Then we split the group up and started our normal tours — he very generously offering to do his in reverse, from the present backward, so we wouldn’t conflict.

Then, five minutes in, a CHM staff person interrupted me to remind the group that their lunch would be ready upstairs at 12:00. Only now it was 11:20 and I was barely started on what is usually a one-hour tour. I edited myself severely and managed to get them off to their lunch about 12:05 but it was not a relaxing experience. For me; they seemed to enjoy themselves well enough. But seriously: this is the second time in a month that the museum staff has screwed up the scheduling of a custom tour.

I stopped on the way home to buy coffee. I use three scoops for my morning cup, and had only enough left in the canister for tomorrow. But I’m getting to be such a

short-timer;

everything I do has a resonance of, will I do this again? Will I finish this pound of Peet’s Gaia Organic in the old house, or will it last until I’ve moved to C.H.? I bought a pound of bacon because I like to fry up a couple strips and an egg for supper. Will I actually finish that pound, or will I have to throw some away because I’ve moved to C.H. where meals are laid on? It’s an uneasy, but exciting way to live.

Next event was the 2pm arrival of Chuck

the realtor

We reviewed the termite report and he confirmed the low price of fumigation and the reliability of the company he’d used. So it really isn’t a big deal or problem for the sale. He still hasn’t gotten input from any developers. We went over my likely time-line: that I could be signing for my C.H. unit as soon as next week or the week after, and when that’s done, I can begin moving things out of the house into C.H. Which means that almost surely by May he can have the house to stage and sell. He was taken aback by the speed of events but accepted it. I also asked if his stager, Amy, whom I met back on Day 94, would be open to my paying for design assistance in fitting out the new place. He said she did do that and he would let her know I was interested.

I also googled the niece of Chris the hairdresser, who she had recommended as a designer two days ago. She has a small website touting herself as a designer. However she had not responded to the voicemail that Chris left for her two days ago. I sent an email to her business address. We’ll see who responds quicker.

Then off to C.H. to meet with

Ilsabet

who is a resident of C.H. and a client of Chuck’s. I’d asked to meet her because she has an “Alcove” (large studio) and at the time I thought that was what I’d be offered. Now I’ve been offered a 1BR I don’t care so much, but I kept the appointment just to begin making acquaintances in that community. She’s a very pleasant lady and we chatted about room decorations and antiques for a few minutes. She had an idea of what I might do with the numerous decorative objects that aren’t valuable enough to sell. She suggested I donate them to the C.H. Gift Shop, which is run by residents to generate money for the library and for newspaper subscriptions for the lobby. They give a receipt for tax purposes, she assured me. I think this sounds like a grand idea.

two scratches

Louise the gemologist was to come by at four, but she emailed earlier saying she wasn’t done with my report, so we postponed to Monday.

I had planned to go to a Stanford Baseball game at 6, but light sprinkles of rain continue, so I passed on that. No fun sitting in the open on a wet plastic seat — assuming they even hold the game. That left a whole afternoon open to install the

sound bar

which I did. I removed the receiver and its subwoofer and five speakers from around the room, and connected the DVR directly to the TV. Connected the sound bar and it works OK, definitely better sound than the TV itself, definitely not as good as the old 5-channel system. However, the sound bar has an output to drive a separate sub-woofer, so I brought back the woofer and hooked it to the sound bar. That helps, adds “meat” to the sound even when the woofer is set low.

Fed myself and watched some TV. Quite a day.

Day 109, Shustek, sound bar, play

Thursday, March 21, 2019

Drove to Shustek center in Milpitas (or I guess it’s officially in Fremont) to work on cataloging. One of the paid staff there was having a birthday so at 10:30 everyone, staff and volunteers, had cake and goodies. I’ve been trying to eat low-carb; boy, blew it today with doughnut and a piece of cake. Did photography with Bud; took 40 pictures in all of 29 objects. Out of work to do, so left early at 3:30.

Took advantage of the extra time to stop at a TV place, Video Only, to continue shopping for a sound bar. (I began that search at Best Buy on day 91.5.) Unlike Best Buy, Video Only has all their sound bars hooked up so you can try them easily, and a helpful, informative, and not-pushy sales dude to assist. I zeroed in on a $99 special, a Yamaha that sounded OK and was on sale. Done. The box is unopened for now. My Google Calendar for today, tomorrow, and Saturday is bizarre. Maybe Monday I’ll have the open time to tear into the wiring of the sound system and try it out.

Noticed the three hummingbird feeders are low, so after I fed myself I brought them in and refilled them. This is not a simple job because the sugar water, as it hangs outside for a week, tends to grow a nasty mold. You have to clean all the parts carefully with hot water and soap.

It takes one cup of sugar, diluted to 4 cups of liquid, to fill the three feeders. Looking at the sugar canister, I judge there is about enough left to refill them twice more. Then that will be it. When the sugar runs out, the feeders, whose plastic parts are rather perished and brittled from years in the sun, will go in the trash. By then there will be plenty of natural blossoms and the little buzzers can make it on their own. Actually, after I’m established at C.H. I might just buy a new feeder for my deck. But that will be later.

Chuck sent along the termite inspector’s report. It isn’t horribly bad, although he did find isolated spots with evidence of both subterranean and dry termites, and recommends doing a fumigation. To my surprise, if I’m reading the report correctly, the estimate for tenting the house is only $1800. That seems terribly low for something that involves a crew of several workmen and a bunch of equipment over two days. Still, the report in all is not the death-blow to an occupier sale I thought it would be.

Shortly now I will head out to see a play. Report on that tomorrow, along with lots of other happenings.

Day 108, a room of one’s own

Wednesday, 3/20/2019

Morning rain precluded a run, so I drove to the Y, did 20 minutes on a treadmill and some exercises. Back home I fixed a problem with

my iPhone!

For weeks it has bugged me that the “lightning” plug doesn’t want to stay in the phone. I use a lightning-to-USB connection to listen to podcasts while driving, and a lightning-to-audio “dongle” to connect my earbuds to listen while exercising. And the damn little spade connector wouldn’t stay in. I supposed that I would have to get it repaired at one of the independent shops, or maybe I would have to trade the phone in at the T-Mobile store, such a pain.

But on a whim I picked up the computer and googled “iPhone lightning won’t stay in” and of course, the internet knows all about this and the second or third link was how to fix it. With a toothpick! It turns out that the little rectangular hole in the bottom edge of the phone likes to pick up pocket lint. And each time you cram the connector in to charge the phone, it just tamps the lint down to the bottom. Gradually you build up a springy little pad of fluff at the bottom of the hole. Two minutes carefully probing with a wooden toothpick popped out little wads of lint. A shot of canned air, and boom! The plug stays in!

So in a good mood I set off for Channing House where — not to bury the lede — I was

offered a unit!

Not just a unit, but a very attractive, corner unit that just glows with sunlight. I walked in and said, “oh, wow.” Here is a pair of snapshots to show the impression on walking in.

Looking left – bedroom and bath over there

Looking right, kitchenette and side window

Well, ok, beige room. But lots of light. The outside deck extends across both rooms, and can be accessed from both. And it is about 6 doors down from Craig, the ex-IBMer who first showed me around C.H. back on Day 50!

When talking about the cost of entering C.H. I had been talking about the fee for a large studio on a lower floor, which is what I had been shown at first, and was all I thought was available. This is a large 1BR on a higher floor, so the entry fee (and the monthly rent) is about 20% higher. I don’t think I’ll put the amount here. But I can afford it, and this is a really nice room, I think. I can make a life here.

There are a couple of drawbacks to it. One minor one is that I’ve put in a couple of hours moving bits of furniture-shaped paper around the floor plan for that large studio. That time, and the uncounted minutes of imagining life in that space, are out the window. All to be done again.

The one real drawback is the rolling renovation at C.H. Right now they are moving people back to the 8th floor and off the 7th. Around the end of August, they will finish with the 7th floor. They will move the 7th floor back and at that point, probably September, they will evacuate the 6th floor, and I’ll be moved to another unit. Sometime around a year from now, they will be moving the 6th floor back and the 5th, out.

Among the changes in the renovation are that they place all the HVAC in the ceilings. Notice the heating unit to the right in the picture? That disappears, as does a similar one in the bedroom. Right now some of the electrical wiring is in visible channels around the top of the walls; that also disappears.

Well, this was a surprise, I expected to be told it could be weeks or months. But it appears that, pending a couple of more bureaucratic steps, I could be signing for this unit in a couple of weeks. Which means that probably early next month I can begin moving stuff I mean to keep out of the house directly to there; and hopefully turn the house over to Chuck and Amy to “stage” and sell in April; hopefully to close in May.

From there I went directly to my haircut appointment with Chris. I told her about all this, and how I really feel I

need a designer

to help me choose which furniture items to bring from home, and what to buy to complete this much larger space and how to arrange it all. Chris said, heck, my niece is a good designer, let me put you in touch with her. So that contact may turn into something.

From there I went to spend 3 hours sorting books at FOPAL; and then home to write emails to the tax person, to the financial advisers, and to the realtor. And then to do this blog. Hmph. Such a day.

Day 107, money money

Tuesday, 3/19/2019

Had the annual talk with the

Financial Advisors.

The firm is Sullivan and Serwitz, and for several years, we’ve met with only Bob Sullivan, but today his partner Marshall Serwitz sat in as well.

Bottom line, I’m financially fine. According to their conservative model, I can spend money at a generous annual rate (almost surely more than I’ll actually spend) and I still won’t be able to keep up with my principal’s growth, even at a conservative projected growth rate. So I will almost unavoidably die richer than I am now. Yay me; or rather, yay us, because it was the money we earned as DINKs, conserved by our naturally modest desires, that was the foundation.

As for what I had seen as a vexed question: In the event that C.H. offers a unit before the house is sold, how to finance the entry fee without incurring big capital gains and/or paying high interest? Not an issue at all! First, thanks to my being a recent widower, all of our investments have a new “basis” — not just the house, which is a huge benefit, but even the mutual funds that we bought into back in the 80s. So I can sell any amount of those shares, should I want to, and pay no capital gains. But, they pointed out, it would be equally simple to get a standard home loan through e.g. Quicken Loans, secured by the house. Almost surely at a lower rate than the 10% annual that C.H. offered.

Or, the advisors’ suggestion was to ignore C.H.’s timing; go ahead and sell the house as quickly as possible so as to have the liquid cash in hand whenever C.H. is ready to offer a unit. Well, that means moving twice, say I, like moving into another ILF with a monthly rate.

Not necessarily, they said. Look, you don’t want to keep much of your furniture anyway, right? True, I agree, about 5 or 6 pieces all told, and a few boxes worth of other stuff. OK, you put those in storage. Storage units are cheap. You pack your clothes and move into a long-stay hotel, or a vacation home rental. It would be cheaper than moving into any ILF.

This turns out to be true. They referred me to “Vacation Rentals by Owner”, VRBO.com (the link is a search for Palo Alto at under $150/night) and there are lots of cottages and apartments I can rent for extended periods around $100/night, which comes to $3000/month, which is substantially less than any local month-to-month ILF; the difference being, no food service. OK, given a kitchen I can feed myself for not much, just as I do now.

So the picture they proposed is that I (1) move out to a rental, (2) take my time saving whatever possessions I want to keep into a storage unit, (3) sell the house, (4) wait comfortably for the unit I want. The local housing market is showing signs of turning down, they said, so the sooner you sell, the better.

I took all this under advisement. A critical time will come tomorrow at 11 when I sit down with Kim Krebs at C.H. and find out what the actual prospects are. If she says, you can have X unit next month, that’s one thing. If she waffles, indicates it may be weeks to months, then I may implement the advisors’ plan.

There were other points. The house and everything else is part of a family trust. With the death of one of the joint trustees, the trust documents need to be revised. They will set up an appointment with the attorney who drew up the trust, probably for May. So there will be that to do. Also I had to sign and notarize several documents related to changing the ownership of the various Schwab accounts to me as sole trustee.

From there I did some

errands:

Got the car washed, first time since it was waxed, poor thing. Bought some groceries (like, $30 worth, see above). Got some cash from the ATM. Then home to

throw out more

… I want to say shit, but that’s not fair. I cleaned up a couple of shelves of things, and most of the things on the shelves went into the black landfill box. There were collected CD-ROMs and manuals for software. Photoshop CS2? Really? (Current version is 7 or so.) Also two or three versions of Windows, which I ran (still can run) in a virtual machine on the Mac. I used to do that when I was maintaining an app that a few other people used, and I had to test new versions on Windows as well as Mac.

Then more serious stuff: a fat binder which has all the historical receipts for house maintenance. This has been often used. When the hot water heater goes out, as it did a month ago, it’s handy to be able to look back and see who installed it. That’s where I could look up how much we paid to fumigate in 2005, but I disdain to do that. Anyway that has some value going forward, if only for the curiosity of a buyer.

Next to it was a fat binder that set me sniffling for the next half hour: Marian’s medical records. She kept every test result, every procedure, going back forever. Organized, with tabs for easy lookup. Anytime a doctor wanted to know, when did you have this or that, she could tell them, oh that was in ’93, or ’07 or whenever. So I looked at it and debated with myself. Under what possible circumstance could I ever imagine me or anyone else wanting to refer to this? None! For any reason? Certainly not for nostalgia’s sake; illnesses and medical procedures are not what I want to remember her by. And yet… it really hurt to put that in the trash. Another shard, falling away.

It’s 5:30; I’m going to feed myself and then watch something stupid on TV. Naked and Afraid should do it.