Wednesday 04/11/2022

Went for a walk in the morning. At 10:30 I had a date with Grace to talk about phones. She considers me her personal expert on phone stuff. She’s thinking about changing carriers to T-Mobile because of all the dropped calls she has with AT&T. She had one interesting bit of info: she called AT&T customer service and the service person looked up her location and told her, there was an AT&T antenna on Homer st. (next to our building) and one on University ave (4 blocks away), but the one on Homer had been inoperative for a year. Aha! It’s been about a year that she (and others here) have had problems with reception. I seconded her plan to switch, agreeing with her that she had nothing to lose, she wouldn’t be any worse off certainly.

My neighbor Caroline had asked to borrow my X-acto knife to cut a matte for a picture. This turned into a major project, she and I took the large matte and the picture up to the artist workroom on 11 and spent an hour hacking away with two box-cutters to neatly enlarge the opening in the matte.

At 4:45 it was time for the monthly floor meeting and dinner. No real news except that Jerry is handing over floor rep. duties to — Caroline. No issues with that, but he claimed he announced that at the last meeting and I was there and don’t remember it. Whatever. In casual chat with Doctor Margaret I learned that beta-blockers such as Metropolol can have mood-altering side-effects. Hmmm. I haven’t communicated it much here, but I’ve been feeling kind of stressed and low in spirit for some time. Hmmmm.

Tuesday 04/10/2022

First thing, I needed to finish preparing my section of books for the FOPAL sale weekend. That was work I couldn’t finish yesterday owing to have to start a meeting. I went down there at 8:30 and finished in less time than I’d thought, so I didn’t have to miss the writers meeting after all. Although I had nothing to contribute.

At 12:30 I joined Patty for lunch. I wanted to talk to her about the status of the Heritage Circle grant: how the ICS quote was lacking in details and what could be done about that. I am not feeling comfortable about getting that grant through this year. Besides making sure that it represents good equipment that can be used for years without cursing, the grant application itself needs to be “vetted” by another party before submission. Patty thinks the appropriate vetting group is the RA executive committee. But they won’t meet again until June, I said. So you better be talking to Carol (the President) about a special meeting, says Patty. Have I ever mentioned that Patty’s last working job was running the local branch of Habitat for Humanity for several years? An experienced manager and not fond of bullshit.

Then it was time to board the bus for a tour of Hidden Villa. This was organized by Stew, a neighbor who is a docent there. It was nicely done, although certainly I didn’t learn anything as I have seen farms before. Been nuzzled by sheep before, too. Anyway, back on the bus at 3:45 and just barely back to CH in time to start a zoom meeting for Mary. She’s the floor rep for the 9th floor and wanted to hold their monthly floor meeting on zoom. Other people might have had their own zoom account or known someone who did, but she didn’t, and wanted a meeting longer than 40 minutes, so as the A/V committee person I got to do that.

Monday 04/09/2022

Resident association meeting at 9am. Zoom-only instead of in the auditorium because we are having an outbreak. Not a bad one, in fact the afternoon Covid letter said we had one new staff case, had cleared 4 prior cases, net 3 cases. So progress. Nothing special about the RA meeting.

I have a request from Barbara, because all our meetings are supposed to be zoom (see Outbreak), to provide a zoom setting for her committee meeting. So I have to be back here to start a meeting using our channing house pro account, before 2pm. Meantime it is already 10:30 and I need to prepare my FOPAL section for sale weekend. So I buzz off to FOPAL, thinking this will be easy, I was here on Friday and got a head start. Not. There were four boxes of books, and by the time I finished pricing and shelving them, it was after 1pm and I needed to grab some lunch at the store and back to CH to start Barbara’s meeting. So I didn’t get my section ready on Monday as I’m supposed to; I will have to go back tomorrow, which means skipping the writers group again. I am thinking about dropping the writers group anyway.

Started Barbara’s meeting, made her host when she logged in, then had nothing to do except copious email. One of which was from Vanessa, with the quote from ICS about the auditorium upgrade. It was extremely short of details and vague except in everything except the price. I wrote back to her pointing out a couple of really critical details they had omitted. As it stands, I could not recommend that proposal for Heritage Circle funding.

I spent some time dithering over the CHM volunteer sign-up page trying to decide what shifts I wanted to work. They are now opening 5 days a week, which means they need 10 public tour guides a week plus a couple of private tours on average, which is a lot of docents. Finally settled on next Sunday 12pm for docenting, and Thursday at Yosemite as usual. But if the artifact work doesn’t get more interesting…

Sunday 04/08/2022

Left at 10am to buy some groceries and then go to the Computer Museum, arriving about 11:15. I had the 12pm docent tour. About 20 people, and kept most of them to the end.

Back home, today, Mother’s Day, was one where the dining staff takes the afternoon off. One picks up a brown-bag supper after lunch. Times past, the 6th floor has met in our dining room to picnic but I hadn’t seen any email to that effect so about 5 I at my sack supper. Then a little later, I learned that there was a sign on the bulletin board, picnic at 6pm. Who looks at bulletin boards? Anyway, I took a glass of wine and went to the dining room and sat at the table with 8 others while they ate.

One idea broached was, maybe dining services should take one short day a week, or a month, providing a sack supper and going home early. This will be proposed to the Food and Dining Committee. In the meantime, the 6th floor on our own, will order our Sunday night suppers for carry-out (which one can do) and picnic on a regular basis.

There was also a strong suggestion from several that I schedule a private docent tour four our floor soon.

Saturday 04/07/2022

During the day, off and on, I worked on the T-bird model. I almost ruined it. I was about to spray clear coat on it when I noticed I had gotten a little smudge of chrome on the body paint. OK no problem, that’s just why I had saved the last dregs of the dying pearl-pink spray can in a bottle. I’ll just touch it up with a little dab on a tiny brush. Hah. Turns out, the liquid carrier of the pearl pink spray is a ferocious thinner for that paint. As soon as I wiped a tiny drop of the saved paint onto the little spot of chrome paint, it dissolved the chrome paint and made a chrome-pink blotch. As I tried to brush that out, it dissolved the pink under it — which had been dry for a week and had no business going soft so quick — exposing the white of the plastic underneath. After a pause to panic I managed to use a dry brush to bring the color back over the white and now it only looks like a little spot of leprosy in certain angles of light. After that dried I coated the body and hood in several coats of clear and after I polish that, it will be fine. Sure. As long as the driver’s side is turned toward the wall.

At 1pm I walked up Homer avenue through the Children’s Parade finish area, which was also a small show of classic cars. There were three T-birds out of 25 or so cars, but two were ’57s and one a ’55. But I took a couple of pics of the 55 for reference.

From there I walked over to the campus and watched the first half of a softball game. Stanford was getting pasted 5-0 by the Oregon Ducks so I left before the end and walked home.

Friday 04/06/2022

Went for the standard walk, and felt quite tired before the end. Actually did sit down and rest before the end. (See the new cardiologist 5/16.)

Next tasks were two. First I need to mail a book that sold on eBay to its buyer, only its buyer is in Norway. I thought I had specified North America only on the listing, but somehow the purchase went through, for a nice $75. But now I needed to ship. Shipping materials and the computer with Stamps.com are in the Children’s dept. building of FOPAL.

Second, I need to confer with fellow volunteer Frank — uber-volunteer, he does much more than I do — about the status of all the boxes of stuff I’ve set aside to sell at the Vintage Computer Fest. While waiting for him to set a time I put more detail decals on the T-bird.

While these things aren’t as shiny as chrome, they fit well. The grid of chrome slashes, no way could I paint that in. Tragedy has struck: during the night, somehow, the little badge decal on the driver’s side has fallen off. At less than a millimeter square and light enough to float, there is no chance of finding it. All these things have to do is stay stuck until I spray with clear varnish, which is almost the next thing to do. Cling, little decals!

At 12 I went down to FOPAL to find that they had changed the lock code on the Children’s building. So I emailed the boss, Janette, and killed time by processing three boxes of books that had been dropped at my section. That will make it easier to finish up for the sale on Monday.

At 2 I met with Frank and we moved three boxes of VCF books to room G9, a part of the Cubberly complex I’d never seen. (Cubberly is a former junior high school building complex that has been converted into a multi-use community center; FOPAL has several rooms scattered around it.) There are now 8 boxes of books and a total of 5 boxes of old Byte magazines, destined for VCF.

Frank let me in to the Children’s building and into the Annex where the mailing supplies are. You want to hear about horrible software? Stamps.com’s app for PC is horrible. It presented me with an “International” tab. It let me enter the address and choose Norway as the country. It gave me a goddam customs form to fill out. It let me click “Print postage.” Only then did it tell me: “this account is not authorized for international postage.”

So now what? I got a nice mailing envelope from the supplies, said bye to Frank, and drove off to the USPS office off 101. Here I got to fill out a customs form in paper. And find out that the book — a skinny 50pp pamphlet in a flat envelope — was not actually a “large envelope” but rather a “package” so postage would be twice what I had told the buyer and the buyer had paid. So I get to eat the difference. This is why I don’t want to sell overseas, and in fact, since this is the only one of ten listed items to sell at all, I am giving up eBay sales for FOPAL completely.

With all the walking around Cubberly I see I racked up over 4.5 miles for the day, no wonder I felt completely nackered when I got home. Bleagh.

Thursday 04/05/2022

Tidied the place for the cleaning lady as usual. Then drove around the Bay to the Shustek center. Had a few too many volunteers and not enough to do, for once. Steve and Dave B. spent the day cataloging somebody’s collection of very early transistors and diodes. Really. I made up boxes, folding archival banker’s boxes from flats, and not much else. Left early so as to be in time for the Strategic Planning Committee. The Strategic Plan is in pretty good shape and actually reads like a policy now. No credit to me; most of the work has been done by others. This was basically a group editing session. My only contribution was to point out two typos and suggest some wording in another clause.

After dithering about various methods of applying chrome to tiny features of the T-bird I decided to try the decals in the kit, which looked pretty good on close inspection. And yes, they look not bad at all. I put on the decals on one side and left them to dry. I’ll put on the other side tomorrow. I’ll take a picture then.

Wednesday 04/04/2022

First thing was to drive to PAMF Sunnyvale at 8am to have some blood drawn. When I saw DiBiase a week ago, she ordered some standard blood work, and this is me finally getting around to having it done. Results came in later in the day; BUN and creatinine are high, indicating some kidney issue (could it be the effect of processing the CT contrast fluid? but that was about 40 hours previous). Red blood cell, hemoglobin, and hematocrit are all marginally low but that is consistent over the past couple of years.

Home again in good time to do my bi-weekly laundry. While that was running I took a tech squad call. Grace has a consistent problem with dropped calls. She has AT&T and the same iPhone as mine, and often incoming calls go to her message without the phone ringing at all. I demonstrated that, standing there with a phone in each hand, calling from mine and twice it went to message. My advice was there was nothing the tech squad could do, this is between her and AT&T. She doesn’t feel strong enough to walk alone to the AT&T office on University; I studiously avoided volunteering to accompany her. Later in the day I emailed the tech squad list about this. Peter reported he has AT&T and the exact same problem.

Thing is she has wi-fi enabled and wi-fi calling enabled, and it doesn’t help. Ditto Peter. I think wi-fi calling is only of use for outgoing calls. Maybe for SMS. Anyway I noticed when in her apartment, on the West side, my T-Mobile signal strength was way higher than in my East-side apartment. So that’s another variable.

At 2pm I drove to the museum to lead a custom tour, MBA students from McGill? or some such university. Meh.

For my afternoon amusement I read the background material for tomorrow’s Strategic Planning Committee meeting.

Tuesday 04/03/2022

Today I needed to go to FOPAL. I’ve been going on Mondays, but didn’t go yesterday owing to having to get the CT scan. I knew there would be a heap of boxes to process. But I also had a date with sis-in-law Jean for after lunch, so had to go in the morning, meaning I had to miss the writers group.

There were indeed a heap of boxes, 8 in all, and it took 3 hours to go through them and price the keepers. Then I got a small lunch at the grocery next door, and then went on down to Jean’s in Mountain View. She was having some trouble with her Mac and I managed to resolve most of the problems.

In the afternoon came an email from staff: another staff member with a positive test for Covid. Yesterday they had announced another staff and one resident, saying “As of today, we have 5 active Covid cases in staff and 1 active resident case. This is considered a Covid outbreak.” Today, with one more staff member, they say “we recommend that resident meetings be held by Zoom, where possible, to minimize opportunities for exposure.” Which means the resident association meeting next Monday will be zoom-only, after just two in the auditorium. Ho-hum.

Monday 04/02/2022

Went for the standard walk, which felt fine (no unusual fatigue). At 9:30 I went down to the auditorium to set up for an event. This was an easy one, a talk by Professor Patnode, who has lectured here often. He never has computer slides, just wants a whiteboard and a lectern. No zoom complications.

I had messed up my timing; I was scheduled for a CT scan at 2:30 and the instructions were no eating for 3 hours previous. By the time the event was over my lunch window had closed. But they said liquids were OK so I had half a protein shake.

The CT was uneventful. It took a lot less time than the recent MRI. The contrast injection was just as weird as ever. Within a couple of seconds of when they put the contrast in, you get a metallic taste on the back of your tongue, and some of your extremities get a warm flush. OK, my ball sack got a warm flush. Anyway, nothing more medical until 5/16 when I meet with a doctor to discuss the TAVR. Well, actually, I belatedly remembered that Dr. Dibiase ordered a couple of routine blood tests. So I scheduled those tonight, for Wednesday morning.

I put in a little more work on the T-bird engine, and printed a couple of new pictures for my hallway display. Here’s one I printed today. It’s one of my favorites, a lucky shot from a boat on the Grand Canal in Venice.

This was taken 20+ years ago. You can’t tell in this reduced version, but at full res you can see she is talking on a flip phone; iPhones were 7 years ahead. It always tickles me, this gal charging down the canal in her motorboat, cutting between the water taxis and gondolas, one hand on the tiller and the other holding the phone. Just another day in Venice.