Day 59, a button and a money rethink

Monday, 1/28/2019

Started with a run, which was ok. Then ran a string of errands: to DiMartini’s for some fruit; stop at Trader Joe’s; stop at JoAnne’s Crafts; Piazza for a few other groceries. Wait, crafts?

My favorite jacket has a broken button. I’ve been keeping the jacket alive for years; in 2017 the lining started to fall apart and I paid to have it relined, as the shell is fine. I’ve replaced buttons on it before, the buttons on the cuffs tend to snag on things. Just as I decided to do something about this broken one, I realized that our collection of spare buttons went off in the sewing box that, along with the sewing machine, I gave away yesterday. There was probably a match for this button in it, but now it’s gone. Well, it’s not an odd button, I’ll get another. And I did, going into the craft store near Trader Joe’s, 5 minutes looking through the button racks, there was a card with buttons close enough to the originals. I spent longer waiting in line to check out than I did finding the button.

Home, put away groceries, sewed on new button. Fortunately I did not give away all the sewing equipment. There was a separate drawer where the pincushion, scissors, a few spools of thread lived. I actually had the thought yesterday to gather those up and dump them in the sewing kit, but decided no, hang onto basic tools I might use. And the next day I used them.

Money money money

While driving along earlier I’d been mentally reviewing what I wanted to talk about with our financial advisors — excuse me, my financial advisors — when we meet in March as scheduled. The most pressing issue I thought of was to address the change in income. In round numbers, Marian and I had a combined income of about $6000/month. Her social security and IBM pension were both higher than mine. Now that she’s gone, my monthly income is about $2000. But my expenses are only slightly reduced. (Food a bit less, one less person wanting shoes and clothing and books, etc., but those don’t add up to $500 per month. Utilities, insurance, maintenance all continue virtually unchanged.)

I’d got that far in my thinking when I realized that for at least two decades we had been living on that combined income and it had been just right: money out was usually equal to money in. If we took a trip or made some other big purchase we’d move money in from one of the investment accounts. But we never moved money back to an investment account. Net cash flow pretty close to zero.

Now, I realize, my net cash flow is roughly negative $3500/month. I’m not worried by this; I have ample reserves to make up the difference for many years to come. The question for the advisors will be, what accounts to take it from, and at what intervals. However, this realization that we’d been spending just what we made at $6000/month cast a whole new light on the analysis I made on Day 43.

Staying, Going

Back on Day 43 I did a rough calculation of how much it cost me to live right here, and I came to a number of $25,000 per year. But that can’t be right! Because for the past two decades Marian and I have been living right here and spending $72,000 a year, the amount of our combined pensions. We are not known for riotous living, either. No big parties. And the major vacations, and the two cars we bought over that span, were paid for out of investment accounts, not by saving up. So when I figured my cost of living I was low by a factor of almost three. I had to have been! Where did I go wrong?

Well, never mind that; what about the sticker shock I got, when I thought about the monthly costs of ILFs? They looked so expensive in comparison; the least expensive charging double what I thought I could live on.

They don’t look so expensive now, do they? As a couple we were living modestly on $6000/month. As a bachelor, history says I would need only a bit less, say $5000/month.

What does a 1BR unit at Channing House cost? $4650/month.

Hmmmm. Not such a rip-off after all.

Pulling chains

Sent some emails to people to remind them I’m waiting. To my niece to see if she wanted the china set. (She quickly replied with an apology, and no, they can’t use it.) To a friend who had a friend who might be able to appraise Marian’s jewelry. To a friend who has a friend at Webster house.

And a second email to the gallery in Monterey that I contacted on Day 53. You send an email using their web form, and you get a cheerful automated reply, “We’ll get right back to you.” But they don’t. I’m really forming a bad opinion of the art gallery business.

Computer stuff

Spent some time working on the computer. I need to transfer my game to Windows and package it there. I run Windows in a virtual machine in my “big” Mac system. But it’s been months since I fired up the virtual machines, and of course now Windows wants to update itself with months of maintenance. After the usual amount of fiddle-faddle and rebooting I got the job done, a working game on Windows.

Day 58, Repair Café

The play was well done, lots of clever stagecraft, complicated blocking and dance routines, all very skillfully done. The lead part, Shakespeare, was very well played. I like the female lead less well. Whatever.

Sunday, 1/27/2019

For the first time in a long time, I stayed home on a Sunday morning, breakfasting on a meal replacement shake. I don’t mean to establish a new pattern. It was that I needed to leave by 10am to attend the Repair Café. I enjoy these events in part because I like fixing things, and in part because as a “fixer” I am also a “mentor” of some college student “apprentice”. My apprentice this time was a pleasant young woman named Leela who has a Master’s in electrical engineering but felt she lacked hands-on experience. She was eager to get those hands on, so I mostly just stood back and advised. She had never soldered before, and one fix involved soldering some wires that had broken off a battery holder. I showed her one joint before handing it over to her. She was delighted with the way solder melts then instantly freezes when you take the iron away.

During our lunch break, Leela mentioned how her mother was a seamstress, and she’d like to do sewing herself, but didn’t have a sewing machine. I said, you want one? And ended up giving her Marian’s. Nobody else I had asked was interested; I was planning to give it to Goodwill. Leela was very grateful and I’m sure she will put it to good use.

In the evening I caught up on some of the TV that has been stacking up on the DVR. In particular I wanted to watch the US Skating Championship, where the Ladies competition was won by a new phenom, 13-year-old Alyssa Liu. This is a show I would have watched with Marian, and she would have been delighted to see a new skating star emerge.

Day 57, museum, inspection, sale, play

Last night was the second time I’ve gone to a highschool game to see a future Stanford player. The last was on Day 33, to see Hanna Jump play at Pinewood. This trip was to Mitty HS in San Jose to see Haley Jones , considered the #1 recruit in the nation for the class of 2019. She was impressive for sure. Surprisingly for a 6-1 player (tall for high school) she ran the point most of the time, but also penetrated to score under the basket, and had lots of rebounds, too. Coincidentally the little group of 8 or 9 Stanford fans had picked an historic night to watch her. During the third quarter she broke the Mitty High record for career points scored, a 28-year-old record that had been set by — wait for it — Kerry Walsh, better known today as a many-time Olympic Beach Volleyball champion.

On the way back, Harriet and I talked about senior living issues. It developed that she has a friend who recently moved into Webster House, another ILF that I’m interested in. (It’s just on the opposite side of University Avenue from Channing House.) She is going to find out if her friend would be willing to show me around there.

Saturday, 1/26/2019

Went to CHM for the second Saturday in a row, to lead a tour of SCU students. Didn’t bore them too much, I think. Back home and changed to normal clothes; and went off to eyeball three ILFs located North of me, starting with

Voralto Belmont

I think this may have been a mistake by Alan, because the Voralto site says it offers “Concierge-Level Assisted Living & Private-Pay Skilled Nursing” — no mention of independent living. It’s an odd place, built like a castle on top of a steep knoll above Ralston Avenue. Down below, around Ralston and El Camino, there are plenty of restaurants, a Safeway, a Walgreen’s. It’s not a pleasant neighborhood, with six lanes of traffic intersecting four lanes, but there are lots of services. I am amused by the website linked above, which gushes that the Voralto (I keep trying to write Voltron) is

just steps from the Cal Train station, El Camino Real, HWY 101, Downtown Belmont,… within a minute’s walk from the many fine dining restaurants and boutique shops that Belmont Village has to offer…

The first 200 or so of those steps (and the final 200 returning) are on a very steep street with an elevation gain of at least 50 feet. Once on the flat, it is only a couple tenths of a mile to Caltrain, and there are quite a few local restaurants, if you want to call Panda Express “fine dining”.

Anyway, I think the Voltron is off my list because it isn’t really Independent Living. Next up was

Peninsula Regent

in San Mateo. The Peninsula Regent is a buy-in community: you buy a condominium apartment and then pay a monthly fee for food and services. In theory at least, you or your heirs will be able to sell your condo. (The website mentions the staff includes “licensed Realtors to help in purchasing or selling your membership and condominium”)

My first visual impression was of an old, respectable hotel. I mentally guessed it was of the 1950s. (I note the website has pictures only of interiors.) I didn’t take a picture but here’s a screen grab from Google Street View:

pregent

(The scaffolding is no longer there.) The impression is of a stately hotel of the last century. In fact, per the website, it went up in 1986, so not so old. Does that mean it is seismically safe? It offers mainly independent living, but also has 20 assisted living units. It is not clear how that transition is handled, if it can be temporary, etc. No skilled nursing.

Then I explored the neighborhood. It is located just outside San Mateo’s very pleasant downtown, ‘B’ street. What a nice walkable neighborhood! Not quite as nice as University Ave in Palo Alto but quite pleasant. My next stop was almost exactly as far from the town center at 2nd and ‘B’ but on the opposite side,

The Stratford

which is very similar. The Stratford describes itself as “a beautiful, 11-story condominium building… has the distinct look and feel of a 5-star hotel.” That’s the first impression it makes to the eye: a grand hotel of the last century. Like the Regent, their website doesn’t show any exteriors. Here’s a street view grab:

stratford

As a location, this is very good, just a couple blocks from that nice downtown and facing a park. Just like the Regent, it claims to have assisted living but not skilled nursing. In fact this and the Peninsula Regent are kind of twins in location, facilities, and price.

And probably too expensive for me. But I enjoyed looking at them. Then home to do a blog post. Later, I have a ticket for “Shakespeare in Love” at the Peninsula Theater.

Day 56, busy busy

Friday 1/25/2019

Started the day with a short run, only 25 minutes. Then after shower shave dress in my docent outfit (proper slacks and my official red Museum shirt) I sat down to clean up some deferred desk work.

One job was to get the form 1099R for Marian’s 2018 pension into PDF form. All the other 1099’s (of which there are 8 total) arrive as PDFs, or are downloadable from the provider, Schwab or whoever. But this one arrived in the mail as paper, and I need it as a PDF with the others to submit to our tax accountant. Well, not a big deal. That’s why we have an “all in one” printer that copies and scans. But I’ve never actually scanned off this printer. Just on instinct I opened the Mac Preview app, which is Apple’s swiss army knife for documents, looked under the File menu, and there it was: “import from scan” with a submenu listing the attached printer. Two minutes later, badda-boom badda-bing, PDF.

Next job was to call VIA Benefits, the IBM health agency. I want to know that Marian’s account is properly closed. I called them first on Day 13 when they couldn’t talk to me because they needed proof I was Marian’s executor. I’d sent a packet of proof then. So I called again today. The pleasant phone rep “Candy” told me she couldn’t talk to me because blah blah, I said, but I sent blah blah, she says, oh I see on the file a note here, the legal department said the document was “missing page three” so it wasn’t complete.

Rubbish, I did not say to Candy. I just had her verify the address to send, hung up, and prepared a new packet of copies of Marian’s will, death certificate, etc etc, making sure that every page was copied. Had it all addressed and sealed when I realized, her will names “my spouse” as executor. So I opened the package and added a copy of our marriage certificate just to prove that I was the “spouse” in question.

Then it was time to go to the museum to lead a tour, stopping at a post office on the way to mail that packet. It was a light day at the museum and my tour group numbered only four. I asked, they were not in a hurry, so I deliberately took it slow, made a couple of extra stops. Ran over the allotted hour by 20 minutes, but they stuck with me.

Did this post, and now I’m going to run up to Belmont and get a quote on a dash-cam. Later… Yes, I have booked installation of a nice dash cam for February 5th. I mean to get the car waxed soon, too.

I’m going to close out this blog post. Tonight at 6, I and another Stanford WBB fan are going to drive to San Jose, to Mitty HS, to see a highly-touted Stanford recruit play. I’ll tell about that tomorrow.

Day 55, cataloging

Thursday 1/24/2019

Nothing remarkable today. It was the day for spending all day at the Computer Museum work site, the Shustek Center in Fremont. Spent the day working with Steve Madsen cataloging old stuff. Oldest thing, no doubt, was a Hewlett-Packard Audio Oscillator model 200C (the link is to a model 200B; the one we cataloged differed only in being wider with holes to mount in a 19-inch rack). On the bottom of the case somebody had written in marker pen, quote,

RETUBED 11-12-57

Nice, huh? In 1957 somebody renewed the vacuum tubes in that machine!

Certainly the oddest objects were the parts of a prototype game from 1975 called “WillBall”. It was intended to be a game in which two players competed to control the position of a ball using mental powers through biofeedback headbands. The ball was controlled by a magnet under the game table which was moved by a Rube Goldberg lash-up of rubber belts pulled by stepper motors. The whole thing was meant to be driven from a program written in BASIC running in an Apple II. Don’t imagine it worked too well.

Anyway, a nice day working with a friendly crew of folks. This is one of my main sources of socialization. Home to do a little programming and watch some TV.

Day 54, haircut and FOPAL

Wednesday, 1/23/2019

Went for a run in the chilly morning. At 11, departed to get a haircut from Chris, just like on Day 18. There was this difference: as I pulled into the Ladera Shopping Center parking lot, I automatically scanned for open slots near to the top — just as I had twenty or more times over the last two years or so, parking to minimize the distance for Marian to walk. And suddenly realized, wait a minute: I can walk just fine. I don’t need to park close to the entrance. I can sashay across the length of the parking lot with no difficulty. And pulled into the first available spot.

Claiming my new life. I never felt any resentment at Marian’s limited mobility, or the limitations it forced on us both. If I thought about it at all, I admired her matter-of-fact, dignified acceptance. This is how I am now, was her attitude, and this is how we deal with it. Parking close to your destination, avoiding stairs, skipping activities that needed many steps — these was just ways the partnership operated.

But I’m living a new life now, and it has pluses and minuses. One of the advantages is that I no longer need to compromise with limited mobility. (Well, for now. How long will I be freely mobile?) Today I consciously realized that advantage.

I loaded two cartons of books and went to FOPAL where I sorted for 2 and a half hours. Afterward I drove down to say hello to Jean. I took a bag of books. When she was at the house last, she took all of Marian’s Tory Hayden books (Hayden wrote books about saving troubled children). Well, that was a genre that Marian had loved. Cleaning out the next shelf I found another dozen books of a similar kind by other authors. Now I brought that bag of books to her and we chatted a bit.

Day 53, Pasta and Chateau Cup.

Tuesday, 1/22/2019

A chilly morning by California standards, 42º at 8am, and I was pretty cold as I walked to the Y in my shorts and a light jacket. Did my round and walked back, not stopping at the coffee shop (for once).

Passed the time waiting for the cleaning lady to show, shopping for a dash cam for the Prius. This is in line with my decision of way back there, to keep the Prius indefinitely (it has 57K miles now, and I doubt very much I’ll ever see 100K; and many of these “gen 3” Prii go 150-200K before needing a battery). If I’m keeping it, I might as well upgrade it a bit. Hence the dash cam. Yelp seems to agree that the best shop for this is one in Belmont. Maybe Friday I’ll drive up there.

Once Suli arrived and started work, I headed out to do things. First a stop at Fedex on California to fax a signed paper requested by our broker. Then to a car wash to get the Prius cleaned up. And then down to Cupertino to do a drive-by of Chateau Cupertino, the low-price leader among the list Alan compiled for me. At $3500/month they are the least expensive of the month-to-month places. As such they deserve a look-see and maybe a proper tour if I like the outside.

Alas, I didn’t like the outside. They are pretty close to the corner of De Anza and Stevens Creek, in an area filled with fairly new, multi-story condos and offices. The building itself has no charm; while not ugly, it is not a place I’d be pleased to come home to or to bring a guest to. Although their website claims that “Residents enjoy local mall shopping and restaurants of every flavor” in fact it’s more than half a mile to the nearest restaurant (The Counter) or coffee shop (Philz). I drove around a bit but the ambience was not pleasant. It would be no fun to walk these streets, even the smaller ones, never mind 6-lane De Anza or Stevens Creek.

Back home, I refreshed the hummingbird feeders. The plastic flowers on the three feeders are getting tatty, petals falling off etc. If I was staying I’d buy new feeders, but ISMISEP.

Then I tackled the shelf full of canisters of assorted pastas and grains that I mentioned yesterday. The concept that I’ll probably never cook another meal is not one of the things I had realized before Marian’s death. I’d anticipated a lot of things, but that aspect came as a surprise. Yet it follows inexorably from being single. I am feeding myself properly (weight stable at 175, no beri-beri yet) but I spend at most ten minutes preparing food; that’s how long it takes to mix up a tuna salad, or to fry two strips of bacon and scramble an egg in the grease while peeling an orange. Or I go out. And of course in an ILF the food is made for you.

Which leaves me with a full set of cooking utensils and a big accumulation of ingredients. The dry foods shelf had a dozen canisters: barley, couscous, lentils, at least six kinds of pasta, dried potato flakes. Microwave popcorn. I cleaned it all out, dumped the food into green bio-bags and put them in the green bin. Put the canisters into the dishwasher and ran it. They’ll go in the Great Garage Sale that I anticipate will happen sometime later in the spring. There was some emotion at dropping yet another shard of the old life, but there was a kind of triumph in it, too. Cleaning out. Making space. Along the same lines, I think I’ll go pack up two boxes of books to take to FOPAL tomorrow.

Realized that it’s been more than a week since Day 46 when I spoke to the owner of the gallery in Carmel about selling my Linsky painting. And he hasn’t replied. I wonder how he stays in business? Because frankly, he behaves like a jerk. How could I trust somebody to handle the sale of (what I believe should be) a $6000 painting, when that person doesn’t reply to emails or return phone calls? So there is a second gallery mentioned on Linsky’s website. I check their site and see that one of the principals is named Simic. One supposes this is somehow connected to the now-departed Simic Gallery where we bought the painting in the first place. I emailed them.

Day 52, Grief blips

Monday, 1/21/2019

By and large my emotions have been pretty upbeat and calm for a while now. What earlier on I called grief spasms have not been a problem, and I haven’t been troubled by that anxious “day late and a dollar short” feeling for some time. Which is all to the good. But there are little blips of grief that pop up from two sources. One is doing something that we did together, now for the first time alone.

Today I went out for groceries and went to DiMartini’s fruit & veg place in Los Altos, for the first time as a bachelor. For the last several years we always made that the first stop on our habitual Sunday grocery round. Marian loved that they provide samples of all the fruit. She enjoyed tasting all the different varieties of pear, for example, to decide which to buy. I wanted to go to DiMartini’s because I’ve been stocking grapes and oranges to eat with my meal replacement drinks for variety, and I’ve been unhappy with the quality I got at our usual grocery store. But walking around DiMartini’s, sampling fruit, without Marian, was… rough.

The other thing, that pops up quickly and annoyingly often, is my instant, unthinking reaction when I see something that she would have enjoyed. One of the plants alongside the path to the door is going nuts, popping up a mass of new sprouts and already showing buds. (I’m embarrassed to say I don’t even remember its name.) Every time my eye falls on this over-achiever the thought, “Oh, she’ll love that” starts to run through my mind and bangs into a wall of reality. I’m afraid spring is going to bring more of these.

I went for a run this morning, it went well, 45 non-stop minutes of my pathetically slow pace. But it is a jog, not a walk, that I’m doing. Then shower and shave and dress and go for the groceries. While putting away the groceries my eye fell on the bottom shelf of the door of the fridge. This shelf is kind of overhung and shadowed by the larger pockets of the door where we put eggs and milk and salad dressing and such. I had cleaned out those pockets earlier, during the first week as it came home to me that I’d never be cooking a “real” dish again. I kept the capers and the mustard and the mayo, though, because I’ve been making myself tuna salad, but a lot of things like tomato paste and lime juice and so forth went out.

Now I’m looking at the bottom shelf and realizing it is kind of a black hole where little-used bottles went for retirement. I emptied it of six or eight bottles of stuff: maple syrup (been at least 2 years since we made pancakes), molasses (no idea when last used), hoisin sauce (what? must have had a recipe that needed it, but which, and how long ago?), karo syrup… Emptied them all down the sink with hot water and put the containers in the recycle. (There’s a whole closet shelf of canisters with various pastas and such that I need to tackle, but not today.)

Blog post, then out to do a docent tour; the museum is open this MLK holiday and docents were asked to please try to cover. If anything happens I’ll update or add to tomorrow’s entry.

Day 51, coffee hissy fit, ILF drive-by

Sunday, 1/20/2019

Did the NYT big puzzle in record time, 26:19, yay me. I’m using a new approach to crosswords and it is working well.

Headed out at 8am for coffee. Drove to Baron Barista, because it’s close to The Avant on El Camino, which I want to eyeball. Alas, at 8:15 they were very apologetic that their pastry order hadn’t arrived. As an almond croissant was the whole purpose of my visit, I smiled and said “sorry, bye”. Just down the street was a Starbucks. It’s an odd one, squeezed into a building that’s the shape of a skinny wedge of cheese. For some reason they have tinted windows with shades pulled down. It was almost too dark to read the paper. But they displayed almond croissants so I ordered one and a, quote, “Grande Dry Cappuccino”. The dude leans down and gets the pastry from below the counter and it’s wrapped in cellophane. Sigh, ok, I don’t complain. I pay and find a table with a little light and put down my paper and my hat and my jacket. And wait. There’s two guys and neither doing any coffee-related activity. Finally the one guy brings out my coffee, which was nice of him, except when I pick it up, it weighs at least 8 ounces, it’s two-thirds full. I don’t say anything but I am fuming inside. If I wanted a fucking latte I would have ordered a fucking cup of hot milk with a dash of coffee, I think. And then, why am I here? To eat a stale pastry and have a coffee I don’t want? And I put on my coat and pick up my paper and start quietly out, quickly walk back and pick up my hat, and leave and drive to my usual P.A. Cafe in Midtown, thinking on the way what a gem of a place it is. The staff have been there forever; they bake all their pastries on site; they make your drinks as you request them. It gets noisy, true, but that’s because it’s a success and people love it.

After reading the paper I drive by

the Avant

It’s the place that charges $4000 more per month than several other ILFs including Channing House. I am not impressed with the exterior, other than a nice entry, the side exposures look like a motel. I don’t see the extra money on the outside, anyway. I wonder if they charge extra for off-street parking? Well, I’ll never find out, because I am verifying it is much too far from the nearest shopping street. It’s a good half-mile to California Avenue. So it fails at my first requirement. Which is a bit of a relief, frankly. I can finally stop wondering how they justify their rates.

I drive that half-mile to El Camino at Oregon, park, and walk around

Sunrise Palo Alto

an ILF that (I only now notice) also advertises “a special community for the memory impaired”. In fact, looking now at their web page, they really don’t bill themselves for IL, but rather for “personalized living options” and “continuing care”. Which I read as, more for the sick and the feeble, less for the independent.

Sunrise is a month-to-month place which — I only just now realized from Alan’s info sheet — also charges $8200/month for a 1BR unit. Oof! Well, to the eye it’s a decent looking building, fairly new. (Looks a little more like $8k than the Avant.) The ground-floor street corner is a large dining room. There are only a couple of people visible in it. The windows on the next corner reveal what is clearly the staff break room with several nurse-looking types chatting around a table. There appears to be an underground garage. Frankly, Channing House is looking better all the time. Well, time to head off to

Basketball

The Cardinal women dominated WSU behind a career performance from Alanna Smith. Back home I polished up three remaining loose ends in my game. Next time I work on it, it will be package it as a stand-alone app.

Day 50, CHM and Channing House

Saturday, 1/19/2019

I started the day by leading a tour at the Computer History Museum for 15 comp. sci. students from Santa Clara U. When talking to people all of whom were born after Amazon.com was, I keep catching myself. There’s a point where I explain about vacuum tubes and how unreliable they were in the early computers. I say they are like incandescent light bulbs, they have a filament that burns out. Well you know, these students may have seen an incandescent bulb at some point, but a bulbs’ unreliability isn’t part of their daily experience.

So I managed to keep their attention for my 50 minute tour, then handed them off to the live demo of the IBM 1401 that starts at 11am every Saturday. I hung around to watch that; the docents who run it do a great job.

Home again and I put in about two solid hours adding some near-final touches to my program. It’s a game, and what I was doing at this point was adding sounds, bleeps and clicks and bonk noises. That entailed spending a lot of time prowling websites that offer free downloads of royalty-free sound effects, listening to various sounds and trying to pick out the right ones. But it all went together and now my game makes noises. There’s a couple more minor things to do and then I’ll let people play with it. When that’s done, I will turn to the two partially-completed books that have been simmering quietly on the back burner of my mind for months. However today at 4:40 I left for the short drive to

Channing House

and dinner with Craig and his wife Diane. They’ve been living at Channing House (click for official website) for six years, since they sold their home in Professorville. That’s the name for the residential part of Palo Alto on the North side of Embarcadero Road. I’m on the South side of it, and tonight I learned that because of that, my house will sell for more money than theirs. It seems that houses in that older part of town can’t easily be “scraped” and replaced with McMansions, like the place next door to our house was and like this house almost certainly will be shortly after I sell it. Fewer speculators are interested. But that’s by the way.

Financing and Governance

Unlike some other ILFs, Channing House is run by an independent, non-profit corporation. It isn’t part of a chain or owned by a for-profit corporation. A paid CEO runs the in-house staff under direction of a board of trustees. Two residents are nominated to the board, and also the president of the resident’s council — who is currently my hostess of the evening, Diane — sits in on board meetings to present resident concerns.

The organization is funded by people’s buy-ins and monthly rental. They have and are continuing to do extensive and expensive renovations; these are funded in part by contingency funds and in part by long-term bonds. Diane says the board includes a number of financial people who have worked out how to keep it solvent.

One of the renovations done just after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake was a seismic retrofit. In the basement you can see massive flexible joints that were installed in the building’s support structure. It should be able to function after an earthquake.

Layout

The House is eleven stories high. The top floor is a glassed-in penthouse used for social events. The ground floor has a large lobby, dining room, a performance space, and other public spaces. There’s a pool and fitness facility in the basement (Craig led me on a tour of all these areas). The second through tenth floors are divided into 2- and 1-bedroom and studio units, each with a balcony, looking West or East over Palo Alto depending on which side it’s on. Every floor has a pleasant public living room, a laundry, and a dining room with kitchen so you can entertain a group (something I’d never do, but there you are).

Originally, the second floor was a medical facility for rehab and assisted living, but just a few years ago, they built a new, separate, two-story health care center. Current residents can and do move back and forth between the IL part and the assisted-living part as their health varies. Craig had a medical incident recently that needed rehab so he slept in the health care wing for some nights to have access to an on-call nurse, but returned to their apartment during the day.

There was an unintended consequence of splitting out the medical facility to a separate building. The main building, when it housed a medical operation, had been under the jurisdiction of the State of California. When it became 100% residential, it moved into the jurisdiction of the City of Palo Alto, and in particular, the Palo Alto Fire Department. They recently decreed that the building needs to have a sprinkler system for every unit. That meant tearing out the ceiling on every floor.

The board decided that, since ceilings had to be opened up, they might as well replace the HVAC ducting and the electrical, tv and internet wiring at the same time (much of which dated to the original 1961 structure). This renovation is being done floor by floor, from the top down. Currently it’s the 8th floor that is closed off. People on that floor had to move to other units for a few weeks. I had a quick look at the refurbished tenth floor; it doesn’t look a lot different except that lighting in the halls is better.

Food Service

The dining hall serves cafeteria-style. (Note that at the ILF that I visited for New Year’s eve on Day 31, the dinner service was restaurant-style. The staff came to the table to take your order and bring your food to you. I think actually cafeteria style is more to my taste.) The evening’s menu was interesting and seemed well-prepared.

There’s no opt-out of paying for meal service unless you are going to be away for a week or more; then you can apply for a refund for that period. On the other hand, Craig said the actual amount you pay is calculated on the assumption that the average resident eats only 1.8 meals a day.

Social

Both assured me that the other people living at Channing House were interesting, including many retired medical people and Stanford professors. There are active committees to organize musical performances and other entertainments. Craig is on a committee of resident nerds who help others with their computer, internet, and cable TV problems. “We take maybe two calls a day”.

Costs

Channing House is a “buy-in” place, where to enter you pay a sizable fee (on the order of $1M). If you leave during the first 3 years, you can get back a prorated portion of that fee. After that, not. And unlike some buy-in places, you aren’t actually buying anything. When you die, none of the buy-in fee will be available to your estate.

The reason is that your use of the attached assisted living and skilled nursing facility, short- or long-term, is included in the standard rental. There is no extra fee for assisted living care, nor for help with the medications or other nursing visits. (That’s not the case with other ILFs.) Basically, this is where your buy-in has gone; in effect, you’ve paid up front for a long-term care insurance policy.

Summary

As I said to Craig, this evening certainly set a high bar for other ILFs to meet. I already had a requirement that an ILF be easy walking distance to a town center. Channing House certainly meets that requirement, being only a couple blocks off University Ave. Besides that I will now be looking for:

Access to “continuing care” both temporary and permanent, the convenience of it and the cost to use it.
Ownership vesting: whether local corporation, regional or chain corporation, whether for-profit or non-profit.
A seriously good story on seismic safety (can you imagine your ILF being red-tagged?)
Resident participation and influence in governance.
Active resident-run committees for entertainment and other activities (as opposed to everything run by paid staff).
(late edit) Parking! since I mean to keep my car.

Channing house has basement parking but it is charged-for separately. I didn’t ask how much it was; but I don’t like paying for parking, nor do I like the idea of parking on the streets of Palo Alto as some residents do.