I was Veronica’s only attendee at the 7:30 aerobics, so like personal training. The air quality is best described as “mucky” so no outside activity today. But plenty of meetings. Marcia and I met with Kim HR and learned several things. One, is that the staff has recognized a large (“like night and day”) improvement in resident morale since the volunteer programs have started. That’s important, more important than the dozen or so hours a week we are saving staff time.

Dining services would like to have the food delivery task back; but we are keeping it. We concede to them the bi-weekly “farmers’ market cart” room to room delivery of fruit and snacks. We stressed to Kim how much the restriction on using the main elevators impacts everybody, food delivery, people with walkers, etc. And a few hours later she emailed that the restriction was off. The fires are being contained and the risk of outages is reduced enough to allow use of elevators again.

We have two things to plan: a meeting with floor reps to emphasize disaster preparedness, and a scheme where volunteers would managed disinfecting the penthouse so people could use it for meetings. I prepared sign-up sheets for the next week of meal delivery and package reception. Marcia drafted, and I edited, an email to the CHBB with volunteer status news.

Spent a lot of time browsing hobby supply sites. I am almost ready to pull the trigger on buying a good quality airbrush, but I also watched a bunch of youtube videos on how to simulate rust and weather damage on models. With an eye to possibly working over the toy tractor for more realism. Not sure if that project is on or not.

Here’s a funny thing. Part of finishing the Ford model was applying several teeny-tiny decals to represent the enamel badges on the hood, trunk, and rear posts. So I applied the little badge to the center of the trunk lid, and then I cut out and got ready to apply the tiny little script Fordomatic to the right side of the trunk lid, and suddenly noticed that the center badge decal was gone. Just gone. I looked all over for it and of course couldn’t find it. So I secured the Fordomatic and then on the decal sheet found a very similar badge decal and applied that to the center of the trunk lid.

About 10pm as I was shutting off the TV and getting ready to go to bed, something about my finger caught my eye. What the…

There, stuck to my left pinkie nail was the missing badge decal. So that’s where it went…

Monday 8/24/2020

So early in the morning I woke up obsessing about our somewhat frail volunteers fighting through those fire doors, so went down at breakfast and again at dinner to caution people. No problem, don’t worry, everybody said, even the 5-foot tall 80 year old. So I’m a fuss-budget. I’d have been a crap manager.

In the day I remembered that I have VueScan, a lovely piece of software that I’d often used for scanning photos, but which has the almost undocumented feature of doing automatic OCR to produce text and a searchable PDF from a scanned document. I put it to work scanning my father’s autobiography. I had two copies, and one copy’s binding had completely crumbled so it was no problem lifting the pages out one by one. And in fact I had the PDF of a 200-page book finished in under two hours.

After which, in the evening, it was not hard to finally resolve an annoying mystery that has been bugging me and my nephew and niece for a week: why I have two old scanned slide images of my father’s John Deere tractor, except when you look close, they are two different tractors. Turns out he sold the first tractor, the one we all remember, after we had all left home. Then he decided he still needed a tractor and bought for cheap another one from a retired neighbor. That info was in his biography and, thanks to modern technology, took only a little more time to resolve on the computer, than it would have taken to read the damn book.

Sunday 8/23/2020

Went down to the lobby at 10:30 to meet with co-coord. Marcia to discuss various volunteer projects, but the latest news was that the Sodexo staff in the kitchen want to take back the meal delivery job. They had already insisted on delivering some of the carts at breakfast.

We can’t get any management input on this until Tuesday when Kim-HR and Rhonda come back from their days off. So decided that I would hang around and tell the lunch volunteers to give way to kitchen staff if staff want to do it.

Then we waited for what we thought was an 11am meeting with Chris B to organize “maintenance walkers”, volunteers who will walk the building once a week and report maintenance problems using an app the Facilities crew use. Except Chris B didn’t show, and when paged, said it was on his calendar for the 30th. Oh well.

I presumed that also applied to the 3pm meeting with him to organize the trash pickup crew. Turned out, it didn’t. At 5pm I learned he held the meeting and I wasn’t there. Hmmph.

At 11:30 Marcia returned from a phone call with the news that she had talked to the Sodexo manager Matt, and the volunteers are definitely laid off, for sure. She volunteered to email all the volunteers scheduled for lunch and dinner and tomorrow’s meals. I went back to my room and worked on the model and finished it! See below.

At 2:30 I got a call from Angela, another top staff person. She wanted to talk about how they could no longer prop open the fire doors for meal deliverers (see yesterday’s post). No problem, said I, we volunteers are off the job anyway. You can work it out with Sodexo if they need any help.

At 3:30 Angela called again to say, well I have looked into this, and we agree the volunteers should continue to delivery meals! Ohhhhkayyyy, so Marcia just emailed everyone that we are off, now we can email them again. Called Marcia; she can do the email; and we agreed that we needed to double up the delivery people at least for the more frail deliverers, so they would have someone to hold the fire door back for them. She would send the email and call two extra people for dinner, but is running a Zoom conference the rest of the day. No problem, I’ll go down and make sure the dinner deliveries go ok.

So back down to the lobby at 5. All three volunteers, plus the two that Marcia had called, showed up and all were confident they could get through the fire doors without help. Which they all did. So the extra two went away again, and after everyone had completed delivering at least one cart, I went back to my room for my own supper. Whew.

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In other news, I am hanging two humming bird feeders and have enough customers that they empty both in a 12-hour day. It’s like a swarm of hummingbirds. If they were bugs, they’d be yucky.

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So, the model. Here are some pictures, artfully posed so you can’t see the missing door handle and not sharp enough you can see all the many flaws in the paint job, of which I am acutely aware.

These are not great pictures even though taken with the Nikon instead of the phone. I have forgotten how to use the Nikon right. Need to do them over with a tripod and stopped down to get some depth of field. Whatever.

Saturday 8/22/2020

The air is heavy with smoke from the fires to the West and South. Because of uncertainty about power (although there have been no interruptions), we are supposed to use the freight elevator. However this is a problem for a couple of reasons. First, on each floor the freight elevator opens into a large vestibule at the South end of the building. Between that vestibule and the hallway that runs the length of the floor, is a heavy door. It’s probably a 2-hour fire rating, anyway a heavy door 36 inches wide. Under it is a, um, what do you call the plate you put under a door to bridge the transition from one floor surface to the next? A transom? Whatever, it’s an aluminum plate that amounts to a 1/4-inch speed bump for a cart or a wheelchair. Never mind that a wheelchair user could not possibly operate that door. It isn’t easy for a mobile person to open the door, hold it against its automatic closer, and roll a tall cart with 25 dinner trays over the transom plate. Which is what we have to do, because meal deliveries are to use the freight elevator.

So I went down to the lobby at 7 to meet with Marcia and discuss the fallout from Rhonda’s meeting yesterday. Are we going to turn the meal delivery back to the dining staff now they are released from quarantine? That would be kind of a shame, since we have 30 or so volunteers signed up to delivery meals over the next two weeks, and they all find it very satisfying to do. What did she mean by some other things she said, like, volunteers doing something about the excess of signage in the elevators (and why would that matter just now, when we aren’t supposed to use the elevators)? Kim of HR came by just then and we engaged her on this. Nothing conclusive from this except that she would talk to the kitchen management and come back to us.

Well, on signage, somehow I got tasked with replacing the signs advising people to wear masks and go only one to an elevator. I went back to my room and came up with some, I thought, rather cool signs, which I circulated and got approval on and eventually hung about near the freight elevator on each floor, later. Plus I printed up a fresh batch of the tally sheet we use to record packages in the volunteer package receipt task, and put them on the clipboard I provided for that. And that was the morning.

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Later I had another volunteer task to do. Tom the Resident Association head had gotten the Gift Shop to generate a check to pump up the R.A. treasury. I had to deposit this to our Wells Fargo account. Among the things I inherited with the Treasurer job was a folder labeled “Wells Fargo”, attached to which by a bear clip is an ATM card with the PIN conveniently recorded on a post-it. So I took that and the check and went off to Wells Fargo and deposited the check.

From there it was a block to the Farmers’ Market. I walked around, picked up some seedless grapes, and had me a good old sniffle-fest. Visiting the Farmers’ Market was a consistent part of our week for, oh, probably 20 years, maybe 30. By the mid-1980s we had established the pattern that, walking back from our Sunday coffee’n’paper, we would hash out what dinner entrees we would cook in that week. “You do that stir-fry, I’ll do mac and cheese…” At home we would write up the menu for the week, and make out a grocery list, and head out to shop. For a long time the first stop was the California Avenue Farmers’ Market. In the last five years or so, Marian decided it was more convenient to go to DiMartini’s farm stand in Los Altos.

So walking through the Farmers’ Market is a continual reminder of the things we used to look for, anticipate, and enjoy buying. Today, just into the market, there was a booth with stacks of nice looking sweet corn in the husk. How Marian would have jumped on that, “Oh, let’s have that two nights.” Flavor King Pluots. Nectarines. So I’m walking through the market sniffling inside my mask and not wiping my eyes because we don’t touch our face.

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For the afternoon I worked on the Ford model. I made up a two-page “punch list” of tasks to finish it and killed a lot of them. If it wasn’t that I have two meetings tomorrow I’d be sure of finishing it then.

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Nobody had signed up for the 5pm package processing task, so I did it. On the weekend we don’t have our doorman, Paul, who marks apartment numbers on the packages. So I had the fun of slinging a big sharpie. And calling about 8 people to say they had packages.

While downstairs Marcia came by to supervise the evening meal deliveries, and said that she had heard from Kim of HR that she, Kim, needed to discuss the volunteer meal delivery with Rhonda, but it should continue for the next week, anyway.

Friday 8/21/2020

This morning I scraped out the very last grains of my coffee. Peets’ has completely screwed up my subscription. Supposedly they send me a pound of Gaia Organic Blend every three weeks, with the last shipment to have been on 8/14. That order stayed in “processing” status for 3 days until I called. The lady said they had had a computer problem, very sorry, she would start a new order with a 20% discount. They refunded the cost of the lost order; and yesterday they charged my card for a new order, but it also has not shipped, and now I’m out.

Since the blood center yesterday said “no strenuous activity for 24 hours” I decided to have a walk instead of a run, and in fact, to walk to Peets’ at Town and Country and get me some coffee. Which I did, a half pound of Gaia Organic ground the way I like it. (They don’t offer my preferred grind on their subscription scheme.) I was in the store for a very brief time; everyone was in masks and distancing like mad. Cleaned my hands with alcohol on exit.

I made some progress on the Ford model and should finish it this weekend. Fussy stuff, attaching tiny bits of chrome and clear to finish the exterior, and attaching wheels.

Mid-day, Prudence, the CH Newsletter editor, asked for a story on the volunteer thing. So I wrote a 300 word piece for her.

At Rhonda’s open meeting, there was as usual good news and bad. Good: the second round of testing of dining and office staff had all come back negative, and restrictions were lifted. The dining staff is now able to put away wearing face shields over their masks, and allowed to come out of the kitchen. Which means, they will be able to resume delivering meal carts! Not sure if that is good or bad news. We have volunteers booked to do that through next week. Also unclear at this point whether the other volunteer tasks are to continue. Marcia and I will confer tomorrow and then try to get some clarity from H.R. person Kim.

In other news, owing to forest fires not that far away, just the other side of the Coast Range — Big Basin Redwoods park was destroyed yesterday, the oldest California park; I’ve been there several times; it’s a 30-minute drive, about — anyway, while it is highly unlikely that Palo Alto would ever be under evacuation order, the management have been updating their crisis plans again. If anyone feels nervous and wants to go and spend time with friends or relatives in another area, they may, and they won’t be required to do a 14-day isolation on return, assuming no symptoms. There was some amusing discussion of how to choose a refuge. Rhonda said, approximately, “If you have a choice between a healthy friend with a small house with no AC, or an aunt with a big house but she is coughing and has a fever, well, I know which I’d pick.”

Rhonda said their first response to evacuation would be to shelter in place; our building is made of concrete and steel and not in the middle of a forest. If they do have to evacuate, they have plans to bring in buses and plans for places to go. And everybody is to find that “go bag” we were all gifted last year and make sure it contains what you would need for a stay away.

2020 just keeps getting better and better, you know?

Thursday 8/20/2020

Thursday washday. Well, not wash, but the day a bag of linens and towels shows up outside my door. Make up the bed, clean the bathroom and kitchen, sweep, swiff, vacuum. All done by 10.

Spent a bit of time on the Ford model, and almost threw it in the bin. Yesterday I had attached the incredibly small and delicate outside mirrors. Today, trying to insert the interior/chassis unit into the body, I managed to break both, and knock a tiny chrome bit off the counter. I went looking for it but was muttering how if I didn’t find it, I would write off the whole project. I’ve learned a lot from this model, mostly by very painful trial and error. Anyway at the last minute I found it, and so continued.

After lunch I went and got the car and headed out to the Stanford Blood Center donation site a mile away in Menlo Park. Many many times before I had done whole-blood donations, but this time I had booked an appointment to do plasma apheresis. Why ever for? Oh, just for a change. Of plasma.

Fifteen years ago some researchers made some headlines by showing that if they transfused the blood of young mice into old mice, it reversed some of the effects of aging. Nothing much followed on those headlines until recently, when the same researchers, who’d been plugging away all these years, issued new research showing that the rejuvenating effects did not come from an infusion of young plasma, but simply from replacing the plasma, period. So I’m thinking, hey, I know of a free procedure in which they take away a couple pints of your plasma, and you get to replace it. Why not donate plasma, thereby doing a good deed for someone, and find out if replacing one’s plasma a fraction every four weeks, has any effect like replacing half of it in an old mouse.

Maybe I’ll turn into a mouse?

Wednesday 8/19/2020

When I stepped into the living room at 6:10 I immediately could smell smoke. There are numerous fires burning to the west, across the Coast Range. The air looking East was thick; I couldn’t see any hills. At that point I scratched the idea of taking my usual Wednesday run. No need to inhale a lot of smoke. (Setting aside that for a couple of decades in my middle years I was smoking over a pack a day of Pall Malls. Ah, good times. Which brings to mind that when we quit smoking — I’m sorry to say I don’t remember the exact year, sometime in the 1980s — I promised myself that when I turned 80, I would take it up again, smoking cigars. Not allowed at Channing House. Still, come the end of 2022, I might go out to a park and smoke one cigar, just for the heck of it. But I digress.)

All I did of a practical nature was to move everything back into my new closets, which about half filled them. Lots of open shelf space. The rest of the day I alternated between reading (a fun little SF book, book one of the Murderbot Diaries series) and working on the 1953 Ford model. That was quite frustrating.

The model suffered an irreparable loss, I’m afraid: the passenger side door handle. The door handles were chrome bits. Each one was about, well, when you next clip your fingernails, look at the paring from your little finger. That’s the size of the little chrome-plated plastic door handle. There were two, left and right, and while I was applying the driver’s side one, the passenger side one… took a walk. I have no bleepin’ idea where. I spent half an hour carefully taking everything off the work area, shaking out my clothing, down on the carpet with a flashlight. Just not to be found. I seriously thought about chucking the whole project; even more so when a few minutes later I found that the tiny little chrome spotlight doesn’t fit where it’s supposed to go. Well, spotlights were an option, along with the continental kit. I definitely won’t install the parts for the continental kit; I disdained those when they were a real thing and I wouldn’t tart up a model with one now.

I managed to fit one of the side mirrors, which comes as two tiny chrome pieces, and put the thing away for the day.

I’m giving many side-long glances at the tractor model Laurel sent. It’s on the media stand by the TV. It’s quite large, as models go, roughly 1/16 scale. I spent some time at online hobby shops trying to see if there were materials to make a trailer for it to tow, like the one that I, Dennis and Laurel remember so clearly. However it requires the rear axle of a dual-tire truck. So, buy a truck model and take the rear axle? Well, problem is, all the truck models are 1/25th scale, too small. So maybe no trailer. I can see my way to scratch-building the bed of the trailer, which was just 1×10 planks laid crosswise and bolted to a couple of squared-off tree trunks. I can remember how there was a pair of rusty carriage bolt heads at each end of each plank. Well, such things are available, scale model lumber and rivet heads and so forth, from the model railway suppliers. But I don’t see much chance of getting proper size wheels.

For entertainment I tried watching the movie La La Land, which is a cheerful musical set in Hollywood. I bailed on it in about 8 minutes. Just did not resonate with me at all. Very glad I did not pay to see it in a theater, which I seem to remember thinking of doing, back when it was in first release and being highly praised by critics.

So I watched the first episode of The Expanse and then one of Travels in a Narrowboat.

Tomorrow, something completely different!

Tuesday, 8/18/2020

Up at 4:45am to dress and make a cup of coffee before the scheduled meeting of volunteers who are willing to deliver newspapers! About 95 newspapers arrive every morning at 5:30am: SJ Mercury, WSJ, NYT, Chronicle. The distributor has marked them with the subscriber’s room number. They have to be sorted by floor and put in a cart and delivered, slipped under the room door. I’ve always been pleased that about the time my coffee water is hot, around 6:15, the paper magically appears.

This is one more of the jobs that staff said, could be handled by resident volunteers, freeing up an hour of staff time. It took a while to find enough volunteers but I finally had five, and we were all to meet this morning and try out the job. Well, not me; I am the coordinator and I have no plans to be up and dressed and in the lobby at 5:30 on any regular basis.

Today, I got one sip of my coffee and then realized that, owing to mask regulations, I couldn’t take the cup with me. Unless I wanted to suck coffee through the mask. Rats.

Anyway, it all went well. The morning staff guy, whose name is Beethoven, has decided he will keep the sorting job. But he will turn over a cart full of nicely-ordered papers to a volunteer at 5:45 each day, to be distributed to all nine floors. The five volunteers organized themselves into a schedule, two of them taking two days so we have seven day coverage, and we’re off.

Back to my room to drink cold coffee and skim the paper, then back down to check on the start of the breakfast meal delivery. Staff still is worried about power outages, so all meal carts have to take the freight elevator, and I wanted to make sure those volunteers got that word. And back to my room again to await the crew from Valet custom cabinets to build my new closets.

Here’s the deal on the closets. Two big closets in my bedroom, which date from the late 60s when the building went up.

The doors are heavy, and they always seem to be in your way no matter which side you want. The drawers are crude by any woodworking standards. When I moved in they had a nasty sour mildewy smell. Last July I spent some time in the basement workshop, sanding the insides of the drawers and coating them with Varathane. That got rid of most of the smell and the splintery bits but they still were heavy to slide. So that was then.

The new doors, which are not fully installed because they ran out of track? Or something? Anyway they are 1/3 width, triple-tracked, so you can expose 2/3 of the closet. And they are light and roll smoothly. And the drawers have handsome bronze handles and are soft-close, just a little push and they swooosh themselves shut.

I have to move a bunch of those shelves from the default spacing the installers left them at. But after I do there will be a nice array of bankers’ boxes in the hall closet, and a couple of shelves for model building supplies, and so on. That’s all for tomorrow.

Monday 8/17/2020

After my run, I waited around until at 9am I was called for the monthly COVID screening test. The procedure seems to be improving; I don’t think the swab got past my eyeballs this time. Before it went back past my ears, I think.

Then I tackled what I thought would be a big job: emptying my closets. Well, two of the four closets in this apartment. These are the bedroom closets, two large (but not walk-in) closets that have all my clothes plus a number of banker’s boxes of stuff.

The reason for the clean-out is that tomorrow at 8am, the crew from Valet is coming to start work on the closet remodel that I contracted for back in February. Remember February? I barely do. Anyway, everything had to come out. It really only took half an hour to move stuff out and pile it, clothes and shoes on the bedroom floor and the boxes on the balcony. It will take a bit longer to put it all back, but that will be fun: deciding how to organize stuff in my new remodeled closets.

The rest of the day was refreshingly free of meetings or other external responsibilities. I spent a couple of hours putting the chrome onto the Ford model.

I had been looking forward to this for some time. It had to wait until the paint was completely done. The “chrome” is a very thin foil that came in a single sheet (underneath the car in the picture). Remember how in high school you would pop a stick of Wrigley’s and then spend ten minutes carefully peeling the silver foil off the wax paper backing? This is the same stuff. Well, not really. It is “real metal” according to the maker. With a very sharp X-acto knife you cut around a strip of it, lift the incredibly delicate foil off the backing, and place it over a piece of the model. Then you carefully but firmly emboss and burnish it down onto the plastic, using a fingernail or a wooden toothpick. It forms nicely around every detail and with sufficient care you can get it looking pretty much like real chrome. Don’t do it carefully enough and it tears, or the toothpick makes a tiny hole, and you get to scrape that piece off and do it again. Which I did, frequently.

Tonight I prepared sign-up sheets for next week’s meal delivery and package reception and passed them to Marcia to fill in the people who have requested consistent gigs. Tomorrow I will publicize them so the eager volunteers can jump on the remaining slots.

I also set up an Instacart order for tomorrow, with a few things for me and a couple items for the Allens. Nobody else on the floor wants to participate in group grocery buys any more. I suspect that some people are going directly to the stores on their own, trusting in their masks. I can’t judge; I’ve gone into two drugstores recently myself.

Sunday 8/16/2020

I was awakened a 5:25 by a very loud clap of thunder. I got up and stood out on my balcony in my bathrobe watching the show. I wondered if I could photograph it, but how? Flashes were coming at one or two minute intervals but what are the chances of clicking the shutter at the right time? Then it occurred to me that the phone does video (now in hindsight, I realized that so does the Nikon, and at higher res). I shot several segments of video that contained lightning strokes. Later in the morning I edited them into a little video, and was able to pull out some nice still frames. Here’s the best.

Three volunteer meetings were scheduled for today. At 11, those who were interested in watering and tending indoor plants were to meet with the head of Housekeeping, who has been minding them. Previously we had a contractor who maintained the plants in the lobby and the penthouse on the 11th floor. With COVID, contractors are not permitted in the building. Housekeeping has been doing it; now Marcia led 6 volunteers to organize themselves to do the job.

Meanwhile, Facilities manager Chris B. met with the small group who wanted to do outdoor gardening. Neither of these meetings required me, but I went to the lobby to kibitz. While I was there at about 11, I got an email from Elizabeth on the staff, saying that owing to the lightning storm (which was completely over by then) they were worried about power outages, so the lunch meal carts would again need to use the freight elevator. I moved over to meeting the lunch volunteers and pass this message before climbing the 90+ steps to the sixth floor to wait for my own lunch.

At three I went down again for a meeting I’d called: the trash pick-up volunteers, again with Chris B. Except Marcia, who was there marshalling another set of volunteers, said, “Didn’t Chris call you? He canceled to next Sunday.” No he didn’t. He apparently called four of the five volunteers, but not the fifth nor me. Humph. Climbed the stairs again (well, I didn’t do any walking today, otherwise).

Went down again before dinner to make sure those volunteers were OK. Also at this time, I picked up a package: the John Deere tractor model from Laurel had arrived. I’ll have pictures of it later. It’s not exactly a scale model, more an elaborate antique stamped-tin toy. It is recognizable as a tractor of the same type we had on the Ranch in our childhoods, but needs lots of detail. Talking to Dennis later, he said to make it complete I really need to also model the trailer my father cobbled up from a truck rear axle and some fir logs. Hmmm. I said, sure, and I should also make a nice diorama for it, with a scale model barnyard with scale model cow-pies.