Friday 9/4/2020

Went for a run, which was fine.

About 2am I had a brief spell of wakefulness, during which I realized what I need to do for the volunteer coordination was to extract the data from the signup sheets and combine them to get a picture of how much volunteer activity we have.

Background. Volunteers sign up for two activities, meal delivery and package reception, using online signup sheets. I make a new sheet for each activity, each week, so now I have several old signup sheets that have served their purpose. I’d like to delete them, but then I’d lose the history. However, the signup software, slottr.com, allows me to export the content of any sheet to an Excel spreadsheet. And recently I’d coincidentally been reading about using Python to process Excel spreadsheets. Perfect.

So I exported each old sheet to a .xlsx file. Then, for a couple hours before lunch and again after lunch, I coded up a quick Python program to read the spreadsheets, extract the names of the volunteers, and tabulate their names and the number of times they had volunteered, writing another spreadsheet of my own.

About 3:30 I had the numbers: 58 distinct volunteers had signed up for a total of 240 activities (one or another meal or package shift). I sent that off to Marcia and to a couple of staff members and it was time to sit down for CEO Rhonda’s weekly meeting. 120 participants on the Zoom. There were two items of news.

Regarding the KPIX story on our antenna, she refuted the claim that residents never knew about the antenna: there’s documentation that residents and neighboring property owners were informed in 2006 when the contract was signed. (On the other hand, they never specifically informed anybody about it when they were buying in. It just wasn’t mentioned. But on the other, other hand, why would they?) The engineer’s report measured all EMF in the building, which includes wi-fi and other sources such as outside cell antennas. The total was a couple orders of magnitude below the FCC limit. No doubt that settles it and everybody is happy (not).

In nicer news, CH has leased all six units in a new apartment house directly across Webster street. These will be used to house residents from the 3rd floor for the next few months. That’s what will enable us to finish the remodeling of both 4 and 3 simultaneously, instead of one floor at a time as they’ve been doing for the last 3 years.

Thursday 9/3/2020

Did Veronica’s aerobics first thing. The KPIX News at 11 was on the DVR, so I found the lengthy (5+ minute) story on the “controversy” over cell antennae, a 5G one across the street, and the 4G “macro” antenna on our roof. Actually I thought it was a pretty decent piece of journalism, for a local TV station. They had the controversy, which is largely manufactured by the middle-aged son of a couple of CH residents, over the effects — we really don’t know what they are but they could be dire, except we’ve no evidence, but we are worried — of electromagnetic radiation, but they did a pretty fair job of putting into context of both science and the legal situation.

I made a transcription of the piece and had almost finished it when my phone alarm went off. I had set it to 8:50 to remind me of the Floor Reps meeting I and Marcia are speaking to. If I hadn’t set an alarm, I’d probably have been late. I’m getting sneaky about guarding against my bad habits.

The meeting went off well. Marcia, mostly, presented the “what to do in an emergency” sheet. I wrote the original first draft of that, then Kim Kurtis massaged it in PowerPoint to make a colorful, two-sided thing that, probably, will eventually be reproduced and laminated and given to every resident. The point today was to encourage the floor reps (elected captains on each floor) to promote emergency procedure awareness when they hold floor meetings. It was well received and several people praised it afterward.

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We are back to having rooms cleaned by Housekeeping, plus the housekeepers are back to their original assignments, so Wanda is back in place of Marta. I knew that Wanda was coming in at 2pm so after lunch I went and got the car, for the first time in a week? Two? I took it to a car wash. Then down to the Baylands for an hour walk looking at water birds and shit.

Returning to the car, I thought the tires looked a little soft, and why not, it has been half a year since it was serviced. So stopped at a station and yes, they were at 27psi or so.

That was the day, pretty much.

Wednesday 9/2/2020

I had ten hours in bed, mostly sleeping, and got up feeling normal. No run today, the AQI was “unhealthy” and a strong smell of smoke in my living room at dawn.

I didn’t mention that yesterday I went ahead and ordered an airbrush and assorted accoutrements. That was a bit spendy, several hundred more in support of being able to build car models. But if you look at the YT videos by car model builders, well, all the cool guys have airbrushes. I tried to get by cheap with the little one which was $70 worth of frustration.

Also this morning I ordered a joystick. Two ironies here. I bought a Logitech Extreme joystick back in ’17, used it extensively with various games. Then I let it go for cheap in the Tasso estate sale. Now I’d like one again, and they’re pretty much not to be had. Recently Microsoft released the new Flight Simulator for Windows and XBox, the immense success of which has caused a run on joysticks, it seems, and they are out of stock on Amazon, B&H, and so on. But I found one at a reasonable price on eBay.

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Got an early email from Kim H.R. asking me and Marcia to a meeting. Turns out she wanted to get our opinions on a new staff program. A couple of weeks back, management paid to have Sodexo prepare stuffed 150 shopping bags of household goods to give to staff as thank-you’s. Since then, Rhonda encountered a local farmers’ cooperative that makes up boxes of seasonal produce, and they offered her a deal, $30/box off from $40, if she wanted multiple boxes. So they are thinking of giving 50 produce boxes to staff members, rotating through the staff. Kim wanted our opinion on whether residents would go for funding these.

My immediate thought was, why are you asking us, we just organize volunteers. The proper channel would the Residents’ Association, who actually have a budget, and a monthly meeting at which to propose this to everyone. Marcia, who is involved in, well, everything, had the immediate reaction that in just another month the RA would be starting the annual campaign for donations to the Appreciation Fund, the annual fund drive that compensates for our no-tipping policy. And any extraneous appeals for funds would conflict with that. They settled that the October house newsletter (Marcia is on that staff too) would do a story on the box giveaway to staff but leave the appeal for funds implicit.

She and I conferred about the Floor Rep meeting tomorrow. Which brought me to 10am, phew.

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Spent some time on Scribophile, a site where writers critique each other’s work. I’m building up karma points there, so I can post my novel for critiquing. Maybe. I enjoy doing constructive comments on other people’s work, anyway.

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Back on 1.220 I talked about the controversy over the T-Mobile antenna on our roof. On 1.248 I mentioned that Certain Residents had tried to interest KPIX 5 in the issue. Scott writes he saw a teaser on KPIX for the story, although he thought they mentioned “5G” which I believe our antenna is not. Anyway, set the DVR to record news on KPIX. Beyond that there’s a new sitcom to try, “transplant” and some other stuff.

Tuesday 9/1/2020

Did Veronica’s aerobics. Then faced a day with only one scheduled activity, the Writers’ Group at 11. I basically burned the time until then. I had no writing to contribute. Hey, I’ve been writing, just not for that. I wrote a lengthy & informative piece about Senate races yesterday which I posted to the in-house Opinion list. And have received several thank-yous for that.

In the afternoon I am feeling a bit “few”. Where did we pick that expression up? I think it was from Wes Shadduck, my late sister’s husband. “I just feel a bit few” was his version of “a little under the weather”. Bowels a bit uneasy, energy level low, no appetite. And now that I think of it, my temperature, when I reported it on the daily web form we have to fill out, was 98.5, about 0.7 higher than usual. If this keeps up I might have to report a “symptom” tomorrow. That will probably get me an instant visit from a nurse and 3 days isolation for observation. Hmmm.

Sat a while on the balcony and watched the hummingbirds swarming the feeders.

Oh, in the afternoon I went down my list of Senatorial campaigns and donated money to several, in amounts from $50 to $200. So that’s done.

Going to loll about watching TV for a bit and go to bed early.

Monday 8/31/2020

Went for a run, felt ok. then sat down to clean up my email. Which only took like 2 hours. People wanting to change their meal delivery assignments. Working out with Patty what day to go out for supper. Arranging to meet with Marcia. Commenting on Jerry’s new “how to use the radio” video, and then following up with a phone conversation. Drug insurance is all panicked that my credit card is expiring, so got online and updated that.

Then got an assignment from the tech squad: lady has a problem with her fairly new iMac. The screen started filling up with patches of color and now when she reboots it, it shows the apple logo, the progress bar, then goes solid chartreuse. My advice? I wanted to say, “In technical terms, your mac is fucked.” But I said “busted” instead, and she needs to call Apple. Which she said she would do, right after the yoga class she is following using Zoom on her iPhone. (Channing House people are technically pretty with it.)

Met up with Marcia after lunch and finalized what we need to do for the Floor Rep meeting on Thursday. I suggested she do the talking, and she said “OK” and that was that. No false modesty in that girl. The meeting I missed on Sunday involved Facilities manager Chris B taking the four people who had volunteered for the maintenance inspection task for a tour. They all got the use of an app the Facilities staff is using, by which you can take a picture of a problem like a stuck window blind or whatever, add a description, and upload it into their database for action. They also got a tour of the refurbished Facilities spaces in the basement. Marcia was very impressed by that, and took me down to show me. Chris B, whose prior experience was facilities management of a chain of hotels, has been upgrading the heck out of the basement area for his staff of five. Workshop much improved, organized, lighted, and a nice conference room.

In the afternoon I spent two hours organizing my understanding of Senate races this November. I want to contribute some money to campaigns, but which ones? I decide to contribute to Senate races where Democrats are in close contests, so presumably contributions might help swing a result. Here’s my spreadsheet. The polling numbers are the current values from fivethirtyeight.com. I’ll update them once in a while. There’s some kick-ass women in there: McGrath, first woman to fly a combat mission for the Marines, and Hegar with a DFC and a Purple Heart. Most interesting candidate, Bollier of Kansas, who was a long-time Republican in state politics, and switched parties when the Repubs went tea-party crazy a decade ago. Now running as a Democrat and has a chance of being the first Democrat to be a Senator for Kansas in over 100 years.

Tomorrow I’ll get on ActBlue.com and donate some bucks to most of those.

Sunday 8/30/2020

I had scheduled laundry for today, 10-12. Prior to that I had the usual Sunday stuff, read the paper, water the plants, do the big puzzle (which I blitzed in under 25 minutes). Then I publicized my new scheme of URLs to volunteer signup sheets, such that https://rlink.shop/MDTHISWEEK will always point to this week’s meal delivery signup sheet, and so on.

Yesterday, last night, and today I’ve been feeling a touch of anxiety, such as I last reported back on Day 187 (or 0.187 to match the current numbering) when I was in the midst of selling the Tasso street house. I guess from the extra responsibilities of the volunteer coordination? And not a little worry about politics and the upcoming election. Yesterday I twice had a “visual migraine”. So I took some pains to try to get all my uncertainties nailed down. Made a little spreadsheet to organize the signup sheets and make sure I had the right ones, etc. Can’t do much about the political part. I take some pains to isolate myself as much as possible from the daily news, but… I have neighbors who have a news channel on all the time, I can hear it as I walk down the halls. How can they stand it? Well, maybe it gives them a sense of control, of being in the know.

On the phone, Dennis advised exercise, probably rightly. I took a three-mile walk after lunch.

Oh dear, it’s tomorrow and I didn’t click Publish!

Saturday 8/29/2020

About 9am I sat down at my desktop machine (because I like to do my serious work on the big screen) and set to work combining all the Safety Sitters documents into a single proposal to be reviewed by Rhonda and her Infection Control Czar, Angela. This comprised an overview proposal written by Marcia, and my instruction sheet for the sitters, and some collateral, like the sign to be placed on each table giving the rules (masks, no food or drink, only two people, don’t move the furniture). I used Open Office for a couple of reasons. It was all highly formatted and I have been having trouble getting Pages to do what I want, it just seems to… well never mind. And Open Office can save directly in .docx format for the PC-impaired reader.

Late in the day I got approvals on that from Marcia and Kim so I formally sent it on to Rhonda. Except of course I forgot to attach the actual document, so had to send it again. Grrrrrr.

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So that was all done by 10:30 and my brain felt distinctly tired. So much thinking! Then I followed up on another issue, radio operations. We have an emergency radio on every floor, and at least some people on every floor are supposed to be trained in how to operate it. It ain’t rocket science for sure. You just pick the little doobie out of its charger, turn it on, set it to channel 3 (which it already is) (unless somebody turned it to channel 2 to eavesdrop on the housekeepers?), and that’s it. Push the talk button, say “This is the sixth floor checking in,” release the talk button, and wait for a response.

So I went to every floor to see if the radios were there. On most of the floors there is also a printed list of residents in each apartment, with those needing assistance in red. Not all floors. I have no idea who prepares these, need to find out. On some floors there was a printed “radio procedures” manual with illustrations. Not all floors, and not the same version on every floor. And on one floor (8) I couldn’t find the radio.

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Somewhere in here I got an email from Declan, the first young person (of four or so) that I had invited to be a beta reader of the novel, saying he’d just finished a big move and was getting back into the book and liked it. So later I sent him an updated PDF, as I had added some material since April when he got it. I mean, it’s meaningless, it has been weeks since I heard from any agent so probably all my queries are dead. But whatever.

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After lunch I tackled another volunteer issue. I’ve been using bit.ly to make readable URLs for the sign-up sheets for meal delivery and package reception. After all bit.ly/CHMD03 is a lot easier to read than http://www.slottr.com/sheets/18254036, right? Except there’s a new sheet each week for each task. So I was creating a new bit.ly link for each week (e.g. bit.ly/CHMD04). But why? Yesterday in the middle of a meeting I realized, hey, why don’t I have just two links per task, e.g. bit.ly/MDTHISWEEK and bit.ly/MDNEXTWEEK, and each week I’ll retarget them to the current and next sheets.

Nope. Bitly does not permit changing the destination address of a shortened URL. So not I spent I dunno felt like four hours but probably only 1, looking at all the URL shortening services (and there are many) finding one that is free, and allows editing the destination address. Turns out, none, but one, rlink.shop, has a fairly inexpensive “Pro” level that does. So signed up for that and created my links.

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Then I realized that “this week” for package reception was about to run out. Next week’s sheet was already partly signed up, that’s good, but I need to create the one for the week after. So I did that.

You know, I don’t think I worked much harder (or indeed, much more productively) at my last real job, at Silicon Graphics in the 90s. Taking the rest of the day off, now.

Watched Midway. Mildly entertaining. Thought the CGI battles were overdone. Don’t believe the planes, the flack, were that dense. But what do I know?

Friday 8/28/2020

Air quality being “Moderate” I went for a run. After that and my usual hour of futzing around reading the blogs I subscribe to, I re-edited my “what to do in an emergency” document, and then wrote my “How to be a Safety Sitter” document. Sent PDFs of both to Marcia.

Spent more time trying to configure Vendetta to work with my perfectly standard game controller. Ah, config.ini files. Such fun. Amazingly, this old (since 2002?) popular (many thousands of players, hundreds online simultaneously) game has no official doc on how to configure it, and the user generated stuff in the game wiki is old and not very helpful.

Later we met with Kim H.R. and then settled on what we are doing. We have two things going. One is the summary of emergency response, my terse summary to inform residents of what to do in case of fire or power outage. I sent that to Kim so she can try to reduce it to two pages that could be printed double-sided for distribution. She claims to be very experienced at such things.

Second is our proposal to open the 11th floor to people for meetings. In theory at least, people are not supposed to be meeting there now; only going up to exercise alone by walking around the outside perimeter, or to practice on the piano that is there. I went through the 11th floor penthouse to check on a couple of points in my instructions, and noticed three ladies having a nice conversation. They were masked and distanced, but sitting in the TV lounge area.

The reason that meetings are currently restricted to the ground floor lobby and outside meeting area is, that those areas are regularly cleaned and disinfected by staff. That’s what our “safety sitter” proposal would provide for the 11th floor. Except, not in the lounge area, which is all fabric covered seating and can’t be disinfected, and not with groups larger than two. Anyway, tomorrow I pull the sitter package together. In Rhonda’s Friday Zoom she stressed the need not to let our guard down, and how there had been reports of maskless meetings etc. “Which is especially ironic after all the grief we’ve been getting over trusting residents to do the right thing.” Oh, burn.

Spent more time trying to configure Vendetta for my gamepad, with no success. Finished the day with another episode of Travels by Narrowboat, but this one turned out not to be relaxing at all, as it involved his account of a very unfortunate incident that nearly ended his boat travel.

Somehow this got saved as a “page” instead of a “post”.

Thursday 8/27/2020

In the emails this morning: a note from Kim H.R. saying, terribly sorry, I wasn’t aware, and only just learned, that Helen (another resident) was in the process of planning for an 11th floor disinfection procedure to present to the Infection Control committee. So please put your plans for volunteer safety sitters on hold.

If I were still in the corporate world, and was a manager (which I never was, and always swore never to be) who was just putting the final touches on collateral material for the rollout of a new project, and got an email from my boss saying, you know that stuff you’ve been working on so hard? Well funny thing, it turns out that this other department is preparing a very similar project for presentation to the Board next week, so just put all that on the shelf… if that had happened to me in my wage-earning days, I’d have been rather seriously pissed. Editing my resumé pissed. Now, in this environment — I’m relieved. I don’t have to do any more on this project and the several things I meant to do before noon today? I don’t have to do them, and that’s good.

So I changed the bed and cleaned the apartment.

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Well, of course all that changed. Turns out Helen is swamped with other things and is happy to let us proceed with our plan. However, said plan will have to be approved by the Infection committee, so we will not be announcing this week.

Marcia and I met and split up the work to be done on two projects. One, preparing updated emergency instructions, to be shared withe Floor Reps at their next meeting, a week from today. Two, preparing various signs or instruction sheets for our 11th floor Safety Sitters program.

I spent a couple hours making a really terse, readable document of “what to do in case of (a) a power outage and (b) a fire.” Tomorrow I will deal with my part of the other project.

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During the day my order of a USB-C cable arrived from Amazon. I wanted that because I have a Gamepad controller which I want to use with Vendetta Online. The game doesn’t recognize the controller when connected via BlueTooth so I want to try it when connected by USB. In the evening I spent a couple of hours trying to get the game to work with the gamepad. It kinda does, but isn’t configured right.

I neglected to mention that yesterday I also spent more than an hour on a long-deferred clean up of some image files. My main photo store is on my iMac, where pics are keyworded and filed in a whole organization of folders. For months when I had a picture on my laptop, that I thought I wanted to keep permanently, I would move it to a folder in Dropbox, for filing “later”. So this was “later”, I went through those pics and decided where to store them in the folder tree on the iMac, which inevitably meant that I had to rearrange some of those folders, etc. Blah. But done now.

Wednesday 8/26/2020

The weather app said air quality: Good, so I started the day with a run, the first in more than a week. And that showed. My body said, whoa, let’s walk a bit, for a while during the first leg. But then I warmed up and finished the last 2/3 of the route at my normal pace.

Back home I settled down to settling my mind about all the different volunteer activities we are coordinating, and which of them needs active coordinatin’ by me, right now. Quite a lengthy list. Sent that off to Marcia to get her comments.

Then sat down to do what seemed like top priority, writing the job description/invitation for the newest volunteer program we hope to have ready for Rhonda to announce on Friday. I will include it here:

I sent that to Marcia and then sat down to make the sign-up sheet for it. That brought me to noon when I had signed up for a free seminar on writing books for the Middle School genre. This was interesting, although the speaker didn’t say anything that told me why my novel doesn’t sell.

At 1:30 I met on the 11th floor with Marcia and we set up three nice seating areas where a 2 or 3 people could have a conversation and decided how to proceed with the announcement.

At 3pm I attended a Zoom meeting, the CH speaker series, with a Palo Alto city council person. Not uninteresting.

From there I just kind of kicked back for the rest of the day — until at 4pm when I got a call that somebody couldn’t make the dinner meal delivery they’d signed up for. So I went and spent 5:15 to 6:30 helping deliver meals.

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Something completely different. I’ve mentioned being fond of web comics before. Today I saw one that, I think, demonstrates how the modern “comic” artists are using the freedom of web-based publication, to create a new kind of literature. That was Stone Fruit Season: A Comic. What is it? An “illustrated essay” maybe? The text is a personal statement about recovering from depression, with digressions about the history of peaches, but all the emotional power is delivered by the evocative drawings which are essential, integral parts of the piece. Even the closing words are in hand drawn script and would not work simply set in type.