Day 89, medical exam, FOPAL, “potlatch”

Wednesday, 2/27/2019

Started with a thorough shave, shower, tooth-brush. One wants to be clean for a medical exam. At ten departed for the PAMF Los Altos clinic for a routine physical with our long-time physician, Dr. Marx. She was, as always, attentive and kind. My numbers are all good. She’ll have the form wanted by Channing House ready in a couple of days.

In email, Marian’s relatives Darlene and Jessea and Liz all want to attend this tree planting in April. Hmm. So I passed on the info to a couple more people, and by midday they also replied with “yes, sure.” So that will be a thing.

Went to FOPAL with three more boxes of books. While filling them I eyeball-estimated how many more I’d need to take. Probably about 9 or 10. So, bookcases emptied in March. At FOPAL I worked a full three hours, then bought a few groceries and headed home, on the way stopping at FedEx to pick up Godot, the new laptop. It will take many hours to get it configured how I want it, but I started by introducing it to the wi-fi and starting it on upgrading to the latest OS level. It will probably sit all day tomorrow, then on Friday I will really dig in.

Making lunch in the kitchen I realized that though I had emptied out the canisters of various pastas and flours, I had never tossed the 30-40 jars of spices. Well, actually last night I used some cinnamon, and I still use the pepper grinder regularly. But I should clear out that spice shelf.

Thinking about furnishing a studio at C.H. has made me realize there are quite a few things I will want to hang on to, just to make an empty apartment homely. There’s a chair and a small table in the back yard that will do well on the large deck that is a part of all C.H. units. And a couple of plants that I know are hardy and have been thriving even under my minimal care. And some decorative objects that speak to me, including the Linsky painting.

Then I had a brilliant idea for the rest. I will damn well hold a potlatch! The problem is that so many objects have (apparently) no current market value, despite having been bought for their beauty or charm or skillful execution, and cherished for decades. One way to realize the value is to try to sell it on eBay, but from experience I know that is a frustrating, time-consuming process that is unlikely to generate any real money.

But focus on the end-goal, which is just to pass an object on to someone who will also cherish it! Instead of demanding money as a sign of desire, let’s just put the objects out and let people take their pick, guided by their own tastes. I have to think about the details, when to do it, who to invite, how to show the items, whether to include furniture items in the give-away. But the basic idea will be, invite relatives and good friends to come in, take one object each that they really like. Maybe a terrible idea, but at the moment it feels like genius.

Day 88, ikea and slides

Tuesday, 2/26/2019

Rain threatened so I drove to the Y for a little workout. Yesterday evening and again this morning I played with little scraps of paper representing scale furniture, on the plan of the Channing studio. Amy’s basic idea was to use stand-alone shelving/media units to create a partial wall between one side with the bed, and the other with a comfy space to watch TV. She pointed out that the units can be different facing the bed versus facing the other way, and don’t all have to be the same height.

Further thoughts on that occurred as I pushed bits of paper around.

One, the unit has tons of storage space already: two full closets. I did not pay attention to these when I was there, but I’m pretty sure one or more of my existing dressers (very handsome danish style items) would push into one of the closets and still leave ample hanging space for my needs. I think but am not sure, that the closets have a shelf above the hanging rod, as well. Most closets do. Bottom line, there is no crying need to create a lot of new shelf or drawer capacity.

Two, another almost equally important space is a working/office area. I need to have a desk, at least one drawer for files, somewhere to put the printer, room to roll an office chair around.

With thoughts like these churning in my head — which is dumb, because I don’t know if that unit, or any unit, will be available when I finally complete my application paperwork — I headed off to walk the trail of IKEA in East Palo Alto, and then Scandinavian Design in San Mateo. If you want to have a quiet, meditative look at furniture, you can hardly do better than to arrive at 10am on a Tuesday. I don’t think I saw six other shoppers all morning.

My shopping was inconclusive. I did come to the conclusion that I liked the IKEA foam mattress line in its firmest model. Regardless of the destination unit, I will be buying a “full” size bed (a couple inches narrower than “queen” size), probably from IKEA. So that’s some decisions made. At home, I found those items online and noted their URLs.

I had an email from Catherine at Canopy saying they plan to plant a tree in Marian’s memory on April 20th, would I attend? I forwarded it to Jean, who promptly said she’d go. So I replied yes.

Then I worked on scanning slides. Between that email and scanning pictures of trips we took in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, I found myself getting quite sad. There’s no particular reason, just the multiple reminders of a life that is over piled up on me.

Day 87, blood and real estate

Monday, 2/25/2019

First priority this morning was to get to the PAMF Los Altos lab and get blood drawn so the results would be in for my physical on Wednesday. The car of course is still sitting in the driveway with a flat tire, so I took a Lyft instead. Cheerful young phlebotomist got the needle in with only a tiny sting, and soon I was Lyfted back. For the return trip I opted for the cheaper, shared-ride Lyft. There was another passenger, a young woman in the back seat who chattered at high speed to the driver the whole way. Pleasant, she wasn’t carping or bitching, but goodness, draw a breath, lady.

After some delayed breakfast I headed out to walk to Chuck’s office where I expected to meet him to talk about the sale of the house. I got there and he wasn’t in. After a while his assistant — also his son, Andrew, whom I had not recognized when I came in, to my embarrassment, sheesh I’ve only met him like four times before — called Chuck up and discovered that he had expected to meet at my house, not his office. Mis-communication all around. So he came and got me, only a five-minute drive, and finally we got together.

Then I, Chuck, and Amy, his “stager” (an interior decorator who specializes in getting houses ready to sell) walked around the house and talked about it. Amy was full of ideas about what could or might be done.

We all agreed that everything depended on whether it would marketed to owner-occupiers as a place to live, or to developers as a site to build on. That decision still hasn’t been made. Chuck will talk to a couple of developers he knows and look at more comparables.

Meanwhile I heard all about what Amy would do at a budget of around $30K or $40K to make it more desirable to, probably, a young professional couple with no children (which pretty much describes me and Marian when we bought the place). Gut the kitchen and redo it entirely. Strip out the bathroom tile (which Marian and I had selected with great care and much shopping, in 1975) and redo it. Maybe find a way to sandwich in a bath of some type for the master bedroom.

I tried to hold my tongue on most of this, reminding myself several times that, whatever they did to the house, I wouldn’t be living in it. So the details really didn’t affect me in any way, except by their possible effect on the net sale value.

Amy also spent ten minutes with a copy of the floor plan of the available studio unit at Channing House, giving me several good ideas on that. Soon after they left the mobile tire repairman arrived and fixed the Prius.

Then I sat down with Photoshop and made a better floor plan including a scale-accurate ruler. I printed that out and used the scale ruler to make little scale-size paper cutouts of furniture items so I could push around and arrange different ways. That took me to supper time and there we are.

Day 86, flat tire and a game

Sunday, 2/24/2019

I tried something new for my Sunday morning coffee. Going to a coffee shop on Sunday morning to read the paper was a ritual for Marian and me for decades. I’ve written earlier in this series about the experiences, both positive and negative, around doing it without her.

A constant so far has been that I would do the NYT crossword at home, before going out for coffee and to read the rest of the paper. But that sequence was a consequence of the fact that Marian liked to sleep in, and I didn’t. So I would get up and spend an hour doing the crossword and futzing with the internet; then when she got up we’d go out.

So, um… I’ve no reason to wait now. So today I got up, dressed, and walked to the coffee shop at 7am, where I read the paper and did the puzzle in comfort, with a scone and a cappuccino. Not exactly an earth-shaking revolution, but still, one more break with the past.

At noon I went out to go to the final SWBB game of the year, and found that the car’s left rear tire was flat. I had noticed a low-tire-pressure warning yesterday, but I looked at the tires before I went in to the movie yesterday afternoon, and they looked alright. I’m glad it held up for the return trip from San Jose, 75mph up I-280 last night.

But, what to do now? The plug-in hybrid has no spare (no room because of the large battery in the trunk) and anyway I wanted to get going. So I called a Lyft. At the game I met with Harriet and her visitor, Bridget, who were using my pair of tickets while I sat in her single seat. She agreed to give me a lift home.

The game was against ASU, and the Sun Devils are usually a tougher opponent that the UA Wildcats who came so close to beating us Friday night. But this game went Stanford’s way early. They had a modest lead at the half, and in the third quarter blew it up to 20+ points and cruised to the end.

This was Senior Day, the last home game of the season (ignoring the fact that Stanford is almost certain to host the first two games of the NCAAs) and I had a bit of trouble controlling my emotions. I kept remembering how Marian had hoped to last out this season, and how pleased she’d have been to reach Senior Day and applaud Marta, Shannon and Alanna who she’d watched grow up for four years. So I couldn’t have talked coherently for a while, but fortunately had no reason to talk.

After the game Harriet wanted to show Bridget the outside of the Cantor Museum and the Rodin sculpture garden, so I walked along with them to that. Then she drove me home where I made an appointment for a mobile tire repair outfit to come tomorrow afternoon, then had a pleasant evening watching TV.

Day 85, museum and a movie

Saturday, 2/23/2019

The first scheduled thing for the day was to lead a docent tour at 2pm. So I settled in for a relaxing Saturday morning with the computer. After about two hours I was bored, so finally I left early for the museum — might as well be bored there as at home. Did my tour; went home; changed clothes; and headed out to meet Dennis at the Pruneyard for a movie.

This was my first experience with a theater that not only has the reserved-seat reclining chairs, but the chairs have a tray, and a menu, and you can order a meal. So we ate supper in the theater while the many trailers ran. Not bad food, either. I had a “sesame chicken on rice noodles” thing which had generous amounts of chicken and bell pepper chunks in a fairly tasty sauce.

The movie was Alita: Battle Angel, a sci-fi effects adventure based on a manga series. It was entertaining, although it got kind of draggy toward the end, with a long and complicated third act. The most challenging thing was figuring out how the digital artists at Weta Studios created the central character. According to the Wiki page linked above, famous director James Cameron intended Alita to be 100% CGI. The character interacts fully and continuously with the live-action actors.

mv5bota2ntqzote5nf5bml5banbnxkftztgwotq1mtqzndm40._v1_sx1777_cr001777960_al_ — Eyes like golf balls…

Throughout the film I was looking at the effects as effects, trying to work out how this or that was done. I was assuming that at least Alita’s face and head were that of a live actress, but the eyes… her eyes are at least 30% larger than real human eyes. Did they have to edit every frame to make the eyes bigger? I was trying to imagine a program that could automatically analyze every frame, find the eyes, and stretch them. No, probably the whole face and the rest of her is all computer imagery. And yet the actress Rosa Salazar is credited with playing the part. So presumably she supplied at least the voice, and perhaps some of her body movements were captured as the basis for the images.

Day 84, slides and a game

Friday, 2/22/2019

Started the day with a run but had some foot pain so cut the distance short. Finished reviewing all the slide groups. I have selected perhaps 150 total out of… I am not going to try to estimate accurately, but several thousands. Today I looked at some I am sure have not been seen since they were filed in the box, shortly after they were taken in the 80s or 90s. One group, from the Oughts, is a series that Marian took of me, before and after the operation to replace my aortic valve. I don’t think I had ever seen them.

In the afternoon I spent a couple of hours actually scanning and processing slides. Over several years and hundreds of scans I have polished that work flow down to a smooth pattern. I won’t go into it now. But it appears I can finalize 10 slides an hour, so the whole pile that’s beside my desk now should take about 15-20 hours total. Two weeks max. And then, I expect, I will dump about a bushel basket of slides representing 46 years of photography (the earliest slide in the collection is from 1973) into the garbage.

While I was eating an early supper, Dennis called and suggested we see a movie Saturday evening, so we made that date. Then I was off to a SWBB game against the Arizona Wildcats.

The game was a whole lot closer than any Stanford fan would like. They trailed by four with two minutes to play. With 29 seconds left, Alanna hit a three to give Stanford a 2-point lead. On defense, Stanford committed a foul, but the Arizona player missed both free throws and Stanford controlled the rebound. All Stanford had to do was hang onto the ball and let Arizona foul them, but with 10 seconds to go, they turned it over. Now the Wildcats had the ball. With one second to go, their best player put up a three-point shot. It hit the inside of the rim, rolled around three-quarters of the inner circumference of the basket — and popped out. Buzzer; game over; Stanford wins.

Day 83, yosemite and imposter

Thursday, 2/21/2019

Drove to the “Yosemite” warehouse for a day of storing artifacts. Putting heavy objects (old servers, very heavy metal boxes) onto a pallet, strapping them down. Thought about how hard it is to spell pallet because of the confusion between

pallet, a small wooden platform for piling goods for shipment,
palate, the roof of one’s mouth
pallette, the flat piece of wood on which a painter mixes colors.

Trying to make a note, artifact number so-and-so moved to palla… palle… pala… shit! It’s really hard. One ell or two? Second vowel an a or an e? How many t’s?

In the morning, making plans for the day, I had an episode of something like, but not quite, imposter syndrome. I’ve had spells of this earlier, but this was the first time I thought about the sensation and tried to describe it. Basically I feel like I am faking my life. I see myself from outside, sort of, and feel a sort of contempt for a commendable, but obviously flawed and ineffective, effort to act like a real person.

This is new to widower-hood, I’m sure. When I was part of a couple, there was the constant agreement and validation that what we were doing was right for us, appropriate, sensible. I mentioned on one of the very early days that I missed the frequent little verbal validations we gave each other; but here I am missing something deeper and more subtle. It’s the implicit, unverbalized, confidence that what “we” are doing, the course “we” are charting, while it may be difficult, may not be as we’d ideally like it to be, is still correct, inevitable, impeccable, and would be approved-of by anyone else who really understood our situation.

Now, while there are times I feel quite correct, and even times when I positively enjoy the new possibilities, the loss of old constraints; but there are also times like this morning, where for a while I get a sinking doubt in my rightness, a sensation that I’m clearly faking it and could be called out as a failure and mocked at any moment. Not a sensation based in reality, and it isn’t crippling or even very bothersome. But I thought I should write it up as one more effect of bereavement.

Day 82, FOPAL, haircut, groceries

Wednesday, 2/21/2019

Pretty routine day. Started with a run. Reviewed a couple of big slide groups. Not many left, now.

Drove to our long-time hairdresser, Chris, to trim my increasingly thin hair. Really not a lot left, but what there is, looks better for being cut. Chris said she had been going over her recipe file and had noticed how many of her recipes she had gotten from Marian. Over the years the two of them swapped recipes often.

Down to FOPAL a bit early so started sorting at 1:30 and didn’t leave until 4:30. Bought some groceries and was surprised when the bill came to $70, probably the most I’ve spent on food since December. Well, some stock items like a big brick of cheddar at $15 which will last two or more weeks.

Relaxing in my chair, the doorbell announces a visit from neighbor Pat, just stopping by to see how I am. We chat for a few minutes about this and that.

The evening’s entertainment is watching an episode of “Brokenwood Mysteries“, not on the DVR but streamed on Amazon Prime. I like that series and am pleased to see from that Wikipedia link that it has been renewed for another season. But with me watching streamed stuff, TV is stacking up on the DVR; I noticed this morning it is 55% full. Must watch or delete something. Oh, the burdens of being a responsible consumer of media. (jk)

Day 81, real estate and baseball

Tuesday, 2/19/2019

For no reason I can fathom this has been a hard day emotionally. I started with a brisk walk (brisk because the air was chilly, but the sun was bright which makes all the difference) to the Y and a little workout. Then I reviewed some more slide groups while waiting for Chuck to arrive to talk about selling this house. Maybe something in the slides? No, even before that I was just awash with, I don’t know, call it grief. I’m sure the Norwegians have a very precise term for it. Walking around the outside of the house with Chuck, I was going to point out Marian’s favorite azalea in mad bloom, and I couldn’t get the words out, my throat just locked up. Oh well.

Chuck is an old friend and, as I think I wrote on Day 78? he was also our agent in two prior real estate transactions. Today he looked over the house and the neighborhood, considered the size of the lot, and so on. I have to say, looking over the house with a third-party’s eye, its age really shows. But no matter: ISMISEP, baby. That’s our mantra.

Chuck went away to research comparables and think about whether the house will most likely sell to a developer who’d scrape it (always my and Marian’s assumption), or someone who’d want to remodel it and live in it. What depends on this is whether, or to what degree, the house should be “staged” before being shown. If the owner/occupant option is what to aim for, “staging” might go as far as remodeling the kitchen and bath, expensive stuff. A developer, however, only cares about the size of the lot, the location, and any impediments to construction — take for example, the two protected oak trees that they would have to work around.

Chuck also mentioned he works with a designer who plans his staging. I sat up at that, because a designer is exactly who I’d like to consult with, in planning the layout of a hypothetical unit at Channing House. Later in the day I obtained the floor plan for the one available unit there, the jumbo studio, and emailed to Chuck with the request that his designer give a ballpark idea on whether it could be made a livable unit with spaces for working, reading, watching TV and sleeping. Maybe nothing will come of that, but.

I started scanning some slides and was surprised and disappointed with a couple of the ones I’d selected for their pictorial quality, as I saw it looking into a hand-held slide viewer. When actually scanned and on the big monitor, however, both these turned out to be soft, not properly focused. One is a lovely composition of a water bird (a male Smew, actually) moving through the water. The light was perfect, it made the water look like liquid glass and the bird is posed just right. Except, damn it, the bird’s head and eye are not in focus. The sharp focus was just past the bird, on his tail and the water. Looked fabulous in the hand viewer, but in detail it’s a complete miss. I’m sure when we projected that slide back in ’95 we jointly lamented the bad focus. But still we kept it. Sentiment.

In the afternoon something reminded me of baseball, which reminded me I’d been talking (to myself) about getting a Stanford Baseball season ticket. Well, why not now? And I did. It was only $220 for a 35-game season and what I know is a good seat at Sunken Diamond. I compared their schedule to mine and printed out the tickets for the games I think I’ll be able to attend (about half of them).

Then I sat down to watch Gene Kelly in An American in Paris.

Day 80, slides, tour

Monday, 2/18/2019

I started the day with a run, the first in a week, and felt pretty good for it. This is President’s day, a Monday holiday, and the Museum will be open — normally it is closed Mondays. I had signed up for the 2pm tour, and as of the morning, nobody else had, so I supposed I might have to deal with a big crowd as I did on Saturday. However the desk crew said attendance had been light so far; and just after I got there, Steve showed up as well. I started my tour at 1:59 with the 20-odd people who were ready, and Steve stayed back to pick up stragglers.

I must not have been as interesting as usual (though I didn’t do anything different) because half the 20 had dropped off by the end — although the ten remaining seemed really interested. Then I went back to sit in on the last stop of Steve’s tour. He had a group of a dozen who’d showed up after 2pm. I liked how he finished his tour, more formally and clearly than I do. I think I’ll shadow his tour sometime and see what else he does differently.

Back home I reviewed a couple more groups of slides. I should be able to wrap that review task up this weekend, and then it will be on to scanning and keywording the 150-odd slides I’ll have set aside by then. Keywording is adding keywords to the metadata of each image file so that I can do a search and turn up, for example, all the slides that relate to “Marian” or to “bridge” or “vehicle” or “London”. Or Boolean combinations of those, “Marian AND London” etc. This is an absolutely essential step in managing a collection of digital images. Without it, you just have a mass of hundreds (thousands?) of images and the only way to find anything is to scroll through a sea of thumbnails trying to spot what you want. (Which is exactly what I observed Jean doing yesterday when she was looking for a shot she wanted to show me.)

Anyway, scanning slides involves (1) the actual scan, which deposits the image as a file; (2) looking at it in Photoshop, possibly cropping, straightening, or adjusting color; (3) storing it in its appropriate folder (the folder for its group) with a correct filename (like g201p043 Mt Shasta from I5); (4) going over a group in Adobe Bridge or Lightroom and adding the keywords; (5) uploading the group to our online collection. Then it’s accessible and searchable. Here for example is the result of searching the collection for “Ireland Marian”.

And when that’s all done, hopefully before the end of March, there will be a day when all eleven boxes of slides get dumped into the black garbage can.