Thursday 5/28/2020

Did Veronica’s 7:15 cardio zoom. After a pleasant interlude of internetting I started the process of cleaning. About 9:30 my InstaCart shopper began shopping, and about 10:45 she arrived. I distributed the stuff to my two neighbors and my own refrigerator (I’ve got Sriracha now, as any well-equipped home should), and then got back to cleaning. Finished all that by lunch.

Along the way I had a phone conversation with Marc Lacrampe. No big news, just keeping in touch.

In the afternoon I did a little proofing at PGDP. About 1 an email arrived from the Computer History Museum. “Sadly we don’t see any way of reopening before July 6, etc.” Not a problem for me, as I won’t be back there before CV day (Covid Vaccine).

Later an email came from Jannette who runs FOPAL, detailing how they plan to go about reopening in a month or two. See CV, above.

About 4, came an email from Gretta and Aurora, curators at the Museum, inviting their usual volunteers to participate in a project. They’ve been going through the catalog trying to sort out and add consistency to the categorizations people have used for our 100,000 artifacts over the years. They’d put together a long (22pg) document listing all the topic words and phrases they’d found, with their proposed definitions, and invited us to edit it based on our industry experience.

Oooooh a chance to edit a bunch of technical definitions? Count me in! So I worked on that from 4pm until supper arrived at 6:15.

In the midst of that came the usual, daily, COVID-19 update email from the City of Palo Alto. Usually pretty boring stuff, but this time something caught my eye. The City has renegotiated their lease on the Cubberly community center. Cubberly is an old high (or middle?) school that was closed many years ago by the PA school district. The City leased most of it and rents out many of the old classrooms, offices, and portables to community and nonprofit outfits. Prominent among whom is FOPAL! So here’s what I saw today from the City:

the City will continue to lease the athletic fields, gyms, pavilion, and theatre from the school district. The school district has a need to take back the remaining buildings on their property and have requested that the City and its tenants vacate these spaces. This will impact community groups with leases on spaces owned by the school district.

Well, that’s a bit of a shock. I may have misunderstood the scope, but I’m thinking this means that FOPAL is going to be kicked out of its two portable buildings and its four classroom spaces. So much for reopening.

Finally, I found a cheat. I have several free iPhone games. Just nice mindless entertainment apps, which are free to download. They’re annoying, however, because between every game or every round, they show an ad for some other app.

Yesterday when I was killing time on car freedom day, I was down in the valley of Foothills Park, where there’s no cell coverage. I was playing one of those games and… it didn’t show ads between each game. Hmmm. So tonight I just switched on Airplane mode and… my free games can’t show any ads! Hahahahahahahahah!

Wednesday 5/27/2020

Went for a run. Put together an InstaCart shopping order, mainly for me, plus 2 other neighbors. What do I need? I realized I was lacking Sriracha Sauce, which would spice up some of the dinner entrees. Also some chardonnay.

Did a little writing. That was it.

Tuesday 5/26/2020

Started the day with Veronica’s morning cardio. It’s a nice 30-minute warm-up at the very convenient time of 7:15. Today there were 2 other people zoomed in. Then I read the internet for a bit. And decided if I was going to have a walk, I better take it before the predicted heat moved in. So I put on my panama hat and went out. My destination was to find a sculpture I’ve noted a number of times from the car, these crows.

Why would you, having a modest Eichler on University Ave, in between much larger houses, decide to put three 8-foot-tall crows on your lawn?

Anyway, walk complete, I found myself back in my room at… 10:30am. Time passes rather slowly.

I spent a pleasant hour and a half auditioning videos for a little side project. Back in March, when SFJAZZ announced they were canceling the 2020 Boogie Woogie Festival, I was looking at videos of people playing that style, and wanted to share. So I sent out a post to the house BB titled “Hump Day Boogie Woogie” with a video of one of my favorite players. Several people said they enjoyed that so I started doing it every Wednesday. There are a lot of boogie woogie videos on the net. But they aren’t all good. Some don’t have good audio, or good video. So I have to be a little bit selective in what single video to share. Plus I like to listen. So I put on my noise-canceling headphones and auditioned a dozen or so to select the next couple of weeks’ posts.

There are at least a dozen videos of people performing the Bumble Boogie, the boogie-woogie version of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumble Bee. You know who does the absolute best version? With the cleanest technique, the most panache, and the most solid left-hand beat?

You’d never guess. The dude rocks!

Later I spent an hour on the novel, editing the first few chapters, tweaking a bit of dialog here and there, but not finding anywhere to insert more action.

Afternoon I sat out for an hour on my balcony. The thermometer said 93º but, thanks to my Eastern exposure I was in the shade with a pleasant breeze and it was nice.

Evening, I finished watching The Titan Games. I still like that show, the inventive challenges, the serious athleticism (the ripped bods). I recommended to my neighbor Patty at our cocktail hour the other evening. She wrote today saying she tried it but “not my thing, sorry”. Well, tastes differ.

Monday 5/25/2020

Memorial day, although that has never had much significance to me. Other than nephew Dennis, who served in the Marines in Viet Nam, I have no connection to the war experiences being commemorated.

I started with a run. Then a little this, a little that. One little was an hour reviewing the chapter by chapter synopsis of the novel that I prepared a couple months ago while ramping up to submit to agents. Trying to think where among these points I could add a couple of different incidents of action or crisis — the primary criticism I’ve had is, not enough stuff happens.

I watched some videos about building model car kits. That was helpful. I learned a couple of new things, and was reminded of a couple of mistakes not to make. Also realized another few things, tools, paints, that I should have, so ended up putting seven small items into my Amazon shopping cart. When I checked out, Amazon broke it into three different orders. I already have two hobby-related Amazon USPS orders being tracked, plus two from eBay. Plus my Peet’s coffee subscription is due to ship. So in the next week I should be getting at least one package a day for several days.

In the evening I found two, 2-hour shows on my DVR, The first episodes of each of Titan Games and Naked and Afraid XL. I watched an hour of each.

Sunday 5/24/2020

Pretty much a standard Sunday-Rona. Paper, puzzle. Shocked when my morning weight was 174.8, highest in some time. Whyyyyy? I’ve been controlling my intake with care the past few months and had been bouncing around 173+/-1.

Watered the plants. Did some proofing at PGDP. They, along with Zooniverse, appear to be benefiting nicely from quarantime. Lots of people with time on their hands and computers.

In the TV section I noticed with pleasure that The Titan Games series is coming back. I really enjoyed that last summer. Beautiful physiques both male and female, doing amazing athletic feats over very cleverly-designed obstacle courses. It’s good mindless entertainment. Speaking of which, I also enjoyed Ultimate Tag the other night. Not as inventive as Titan Games, but again, gorgeous people doing athletic stuff.

In the middle of the night — maybe this should go in tomorrow’s blog, but whevs — I woke up with a decision: I won’t pursue Crafting Interpreters but will instead start spending my “real” computer time on the novel. I haven’t heard back from two of the three beta-readers I sent it to, but I have had enough feedback to know it mainly needs “more action”. More stuff happening. And a couple of other things. Rewrite time.

Saturday 5/23/2020

Saturday. What did I do in quarantime? Well, I spent some time with Crafting Interpreters, and was disappointed. In this book we are at a major breakpoint. The author, Bob Nystrom, has led us through building a working interpreter for a small programming language. His implementation was in Java; I made the same program in Python. The result works, executes code written in this language. But it executes slowly; any test of serious computation quickly stretches to seconds and minutes to complete. Not too surprising, because the implementation is not optimized at all. Dozens to hundreds of statements in Python are executed in order to execute a line of a test program.

His next step is to completely rewrite all the work done to that point, in C. It’s been a while since I wrote any code in C, although at one point I’d have classed myself as good-to-expert in it. Do I want to continue with the book? His presentation style annoys me. Every time I finish a chapter, I want to go back and rearrange it, present things in a different order. “Bob, look, it would be so much better this way…” So maybe I’m done with it, or boredom may drive me back to it.

In the afternoon and evening I spent a ridiculous amount of time on the question of how to get the correct body color on the Chevy model. Pat suggested DickBlick art supplies and that is a trove of paint colors. I went through all their liquids and sprays looking for something like the right color. I found a GM brochure from 1951 online, and by sampling it I prepared a swatch, see alongside here.

Compare it to the photo; of course amateur photos in uncertain light are not reliable color sources.

I’ve also looked at all the hobby paints in online hobby stores. I can say that Sherwin Williams “SW 6444 Lounge Green” is pretty close, but of course their paints are only available in quarts and gallons. And probably too thick to spray on a wee little model car.

Then I found trycolors.com, a fascinating site, where I can put in the hex version of my RGB formula (#839A78) and it tells me I can mix something that is within 99.3% of that using a ratio of “4 drops of yellow, 5 drops of magenta, 5 drops of cyan, 3 drops of green.” Now we are getting someplace! So back to Dick Blick and order myself some bottles of acrylic paint in primary magenta, cyan, yellow and green. I have days and days before all this shit arrives in the mail. I can spend that time worrying about how I can get an air-brush. Do I want to buy one? Maybe somebody around here has one already. Maybe the paint will look ok, brushed on.

OK, it passes the time.

Friday 5/22/2020

Started as usual for MWF with a run. I’ve been quite consistent with the running MWFs for some time now. Yay me.

I spent a bit of time trimming and fitting a couple more engine parts.

But now I really have to stop until I get paints. I could continue snipping bits off the, what’s the word for the stick with parts hanging off it like little grapes? The thingummy, and sanding them and so on, but then I’d have to keep track of many little individual parts loose in the box. Much better to have them on the thingummy where they have identifying numbers. When I can cement the bits together to make a bigger bit, fine. But I can’t do that until I have painted them. Or at least, I think painting will be easier this way. For example, the few parts in the picture need at least four colors of paint. I’m sure it would be much harder to paint the exhaust manifold rust color after I cemented it to the block which needs to be dirty iron color.

So, back in the box and put it all aside for a week. But! Thanks to that project, I got an email from someone I knew in the 70s who has, it seems, been reading this blog! The need to comment on the car model motivated her to get in touch. Hi, Pat!

At 4pm it was time for Rhonda’s weekly phone conference. No real news; except there were some questions from people wanting things to relax, and quiet but firm pushback from Rhonda. “This is a medical emergency. My concern is, if we get an outbreak, what will people ask us? Why did you allow this, what were you thinkng?” So, no to riding in another resident’s car; and no to reopening the library, although several callers wanted it. Apparently lots of people still read physical books, and miss our house library.

Could we open it, I wondered. OK, one person at a time goes into the library, selects books (or DVDs), goes away. When the items are returned, they go in a closet for a week to let the hypothetical viruses die. But then they have to be re-shelved, which means, handled. OK the librarian wears a mask and vinyl gloves. But, what about that borrower? In going around the library, they were touching things and breathing on things. Scenario: somebody borrows a book on Monday, has symptoms Thursday, and their test comes back positive on Saturday. They can have left live virus in the library on Monday, which means that now, every library user from Monday to Saturday has to go into 14-day isolation, and be tested! And every person they had contact with in between! And every person they had contact with… Take the library out of the picture, and the contact chain is much shorter.

So Patty and Gwen and I did our marginally-legal thing we had done the prior week. This time we ordered from Darbar, an Indian restaurant. Pat called the order in; Gwen drove to get it. The restaurant was supposed to pack three different orders, but they actually wrapped the three portions of Naan in one foil packet. I carefully unrolled the foil and we could each take the top piece of naan without touching other pieces. Also they provided only two boxes of rice, so Gwen dished out of the larger box with her clean spoon, slid the box to Patty who served herself.

Anyway it was a nice change from house food. We had picked Friday because it was Mac&Cheese night on the weekly menu. Tandoori chicken, rice and naan beat that hollow. Now I have half a plastic container of chicken and sauce, and half a small box of rice. I guess that will be Sunday breakfast, maybe.

Thursday 5/21/2020

Started the morning with Veronica’s aerobics class. Then a quick shower and out the door at 8:15 to walk to Midtown for coffee with Harriet. This is, if one wanted to be a troublemaker, a “gathering” in that I spent half an hour about 5 feet from a person not in my household. When I got back to CH, fortunately the person taking temperatures at the door did not ask me if I had attended any gatherings. It’s a gray area, all right?

Waiting outside my door was the Thursday plastic bag of fresh towels and sheets. So I got to work changing the bed and doing all the other cleaning. Finished, and feeling very well exercised, about 12:30. I mean, seriously: half an hour of step aerobics, followed by a 3.6 mile walk, followed by 90 minutes of wiping and vacuuming? Phone says 11,000 steps for the day, and well it might.

After lunch, I started, slowly and carefully, to work on the model car. I got to the point of completing the 6 pieces that comprise the engine (left and right halves of the block, left and right halves of the head, oil pan and valve cover).

This was a learning experience. The pieces are nicely detailed but they are not perfect. Nominally-flat surfaces tend to be a little bit bulgy, so two flat faces don’t quite mate. I made quite a bit of use of the sanding stick to make things flat and line up nicely. Not complaining, mind you!

I glued the halves of the block together, and the halves of the head, but stopped at that point, realizing that I would like to paint these pieces separately before assembling the engine complete. The oil pan should be gloss black but the block should be metallic dark gray (and I just noticed that little oil filter on the side, that should be orange!). Which made me realize that, oh crap, in all my buying of this and that, I didn’t buy any paints or brushes. What a doofus. So I spent a while on the ‘net buying a dozen bottles of Testor’s of various hues, as called for on the plan sheet. Such are delivery times these days that it will be over a week before they arrive. Which means, there won’t be much progress beyond this point.

Around 4pm, a cheerful guy from facilities showed up to hang my pictures. I’d put in the request for this last Friday, and heard nothing since, but here he was. So that got done.

Probably, next year, when the 6th floor gets its act together and redecorates the lounge, I expect at least the Yosemite painting will go to a more public location. But for now this is my private gallery, down here at the far end of the hall where nobody comes.

Notice that the Linsky landscape is hung on an ordinary hook, by the wire across the back of the frame. The Carol Aust one is not. Back in February I got a touch paranoid about how easy it would be for someone to grab a painting off the wall, take four steps through a door, and disappear down the freight elevator which opens to the street. Somehow that painting feels steal-able to me. The Linsky one, which is nominally about 3x its value, is more conventional and, frankly, a bit drab, in comparison.

So I went to the frame shop where I had an old print framed (Day 1.064) and asked about secure hangars, and they had some. That’s why that painting doesn’t lean, but lies flat to the wall. It took the facilities guy an extra 15 minutes to mount it, because the mounts need a drill, and screw anchors, instead of just nailing up a hook. But nobody is going to take it away casually.

 

Wednesday 5/20/2020

Car freedom day! Started with a run. Then after only a little time catching up with the internet (the various blogs and webcomics I follow in my RSS reader), I headed out in the car. My only destination was to visit the tree we planted for Marian last spring. It looks good!

The one beyond it, planted the same day… not so much. It’s just a stick.

Then I killed the 90 minutes until the garage opened at 11am just sitting in the car by the park, and driving slowly back up El Camino.

Back home I found an email asking me to do my first official act as Residents’ Association Treasurer. The steering committee has decided to put together a bonus for the staff. Tipping is banned, but there’s an annual Appreciation Fund drive every fall that nets a bonus for staff members. Given the extra stress they’ve been under, it was felt right to show a little financial appreciation sooner. So as I have physical possession of the R.A. checkbook, I got to write the check for that. Of course owing to the quarantine, I have not been able to go with the former treasurer to the bank to sign a signature card. So I made out the check, then left it in her mailbox for her to actually sign.

Yesterday I initiated an InstaCart order for groceries for me and 3 other 6th floor residents. It was supposed to be executed between 12 and 2pm but at 11:30 I opened the app and found that the shopper had just finished and was on her way. So I had the grocery bags upstairs, sorted out, and delivered by 12:30 just in time for my lunch tray to arrive.

In the evening a big box from Amazon Prime finally arrived with the foundation of a new hobby. Ever since I was tinkering with that metronome, I have been itching to make something. Making software is fun and all, but I really want to make something physical. So, obviously, a model car. Obviously? Not exactly. I last fiddled with model cars when I was 16 or so, because my best bud at the time was heavily into them, and I tried my hand at it. Anyway, why not? Should be good for some slow “quarantime”.

What car? Well, there are some gorgeous European models, 1/16 scale with hundreds of parts, but maybe I should aim a little lower. I looked around the ‘net for something that resonated, and, aha: a ’51 chevy, such as we had when I was 16-18. (I think it was because this kit was on the way, that I immediately thought to write about that car for the writers’ group this week.) I have some tools but decided I needed a better selection, so I ordered a Japanese model-maker’s kit, along with the car. And that package arrived tonight.

The tool kit is decent; well, the screwdrivers are junk but I have good ones. The white thing is actually a manicurist’s tool, a battery-powered thing with a selection of little abrasive heads for doing elegant nails. But it repurposes well for plastic model building. The kit itself looks great, highly detailed, many parts, opening hood, detailed motor, working suspension.

It’s a Bel Air coupe where ours was a Fleetline 4-door sedan, but that can’t be helped.

I ransacked the internet looking for a body color paint that would match my extremely clear memory of our family car’s color. I learned that GM called it Aspen Green.

Pea Soup Puke more like it. Here’s a restoration that’s pretty close. However, that is a very difficult color to find either as model paint or anybody else’s spray paint. I ordered one can from Home Depot; it came yesterday but sprayed out too yellow. I have another spray color coming from Michael’s Crafts. No rush; it will be weeks before I get to the point of spraying the body panels.

Tuesday 5/19/2020

Don’t know what I did. I can remember passing some time with this and that but… jeez, sorry. Must blog the same night.

Oh, right. Tuesday was Channing House Writers’ group. A dozen elderly people on a Zoom meeting, each in turn reading out some piece of writing they did, in response to a “cue” put out by the group leader. This week’s cue was “my life with automobiles” and there were a lot of interesting reminiscences. I think I will just dump mine in here to take up space.

There’s a “kodak” of me, age 3, absolutely enraptured, staring into a foglight on the bumper of a ’37 Hudson. I’ve been mesmerized by cars right from the start.

In high school, however, my driving was limited to what my family owned, which was a 1951 Chevrolet 4-door sedan. It was a drab pale green in color and devoid of any of the exciting performance features that I could read about when, each month, a new issue of Road and Track arrived at the school library to alert me further to the unattainable possibilities of performance cars.

The Chevy did not have a V8; it had a straight 6 engine that was ignored, when not positively derided, by the columnists of Road and Track. It did not have a stick; it had General Motors’ worst attempt at an automatic, the abysmal “powerglide” transmission. With that engine/transmission combination, if you “floored it” coming off a traffic light, all you got was a louder hum as the engine revved up. Then, with the stately motion of a battleship leaving the dock, the car would slowly accelerate, gradually working up to the speed limit.

But that was what I could use when, after I had my driver’s license, I could ask girls on dates. Before one particular Saturday night date, I spent most of the morning cleaning the Chevy, inside and out. I don’t recall what I did that afternoon, but I was away while my father used the car.

It is important to know that we were a farm family. Ours was a working dairy farm, with a small herd of cows that had to be milked morning and night. We had a fairly elaborate milk-processing system, milking machines to automatically divest the girls of their bounty and a refrigerated tank to store it until the tanker truck from the farm co-op came every second day to collect it.

Cows age and get retired (as meat products for the family freezer), and have to be replaced, so there were always a couple of young heifers being raised up as replacements. My father chose this particular Saturday as the time to go to a nearby farm and bring back a “weaner calf”. Nothing to do with sausage; a “weaner” is a calf that is old enough to eat solid food and has been weaned from its mother: a young cow, perhaps a bit larger than a Great Dane, easy enough for a grown man to handle.

My father chose to transport it in the back seat of the Chevy.

The calf was deeply upset about being separated from its home and put into a strange green humming box, and expressed its distress as calves often do, by pooping and peeing. Actually not as much as it might have done; perhaps it hadn’t been fed lately.

To his credit, my father made an attempt at cleaning up the car. He didn’t apologize, though, although I’m sure I made my distress known. It was a farm car and it got farm uses, and that was how it was. I put more hours into cleaning. I honestly don’t remember how the date went, or even which of my few high school girlfriends it was with. I hope I had the sense to make a funny story out of it up front, rather than keeping a window open and trying to pretend not to smell the lingering odor of cow poop.

And while I really never forgave my father for that event, I did come to get along with him in later years.

That Chevy will be mentioned again here in coming days. (Foreshadowing!) Here is the Kodak of me age 3 (so, 1945). I spent quite a bit of time on the internet trying to work out what make of car that is. That grille is very distinctive. I believe it is a 1937 Hudson.