March 9, 2020

Went for a run and timed myself. The run breaks naturally into four segments: east along Webster to the creek; west along the creek to Bryant; across the footbridge to Willow road and west to Alma; along Alma back to University. From there I walk on home. So these four legs timed in at approximately 11, 6, 10 and 7 minutes, a total of a shade under 33 minutes. In future I will see how consistent those numbers are, and maybe reduce them a bit.

During the morning, SWBB sent out an email offering season ticket holders a link to buy a seat in the sub-regional that Stanford will surely host, probably on 3/20 and 3/22. The link didn’t work of course, so I emailed my personal ticket rep Kevin (whose name shows up when I go in to “manage my account” at Stanford tickets). Later in the day he called me directly and finalized the ticket over the phone.

At 11:30 I presented myself at the Campbell office of Valet Custom Cabinets to review the design that Ward had made for my two large closets. I made some suggestions and he added those changes. I approved his choice of hardware (drawer pulls, mostly). The closets are going to be very nice, much more usable and many times nicer to look at.

From there I went to FOPAL and, finding no boxes of computer books (yay!) did two hours of sorting.

Back home I did a little work on the novel. Over the last couple of days I have figured out how to do the big dramatic finish. To work, it will require a change in the layout of a boat that is an important prop in the story. So now I went back and altered the description of that boat where it first appears, so it is suitable for the finish I have in mind.

At supper I sat with Patty and David. Much talk about The Virus and its effects on our respective travel plans. Patty noted that Kim Krebs, CH marketing manager (who showed me my unit back last year) was on holiday in Italy. After supper I sent Kim an email, suggesting she write to the CHBB mailing list to give her status because “we” were all worried.

Sunday, 3/8/2020

For my Sunday Morning Coffee I walked over to Mlle. Collette’s. Continued on up University avenue to buy deoderant at CVS (the excitement grows) and over to Ace Hardware to check on their hummingbird feeders. I’m not happy with the one I got a week ago.

After lounging around home for a while, I took off in the car to go to Bed Bath and Beyond for a new pillow. The one I bought about a year ago, before moving into CH, has turned into a lumpy mess. From there I checked the big Ace Hardware where Orchard Supply used to be, partly for feeders and partly to browse their plant selection, which turned out to be slim and uninteresting. Although, they had a few succulents, and I remembered with pleasure the row of little succulents we had on the kitchen windowsill at Tasso street. Possibly, if I can find a tray or shallow plant dish about 4 inches by 12 or so, I could put a row of little succulents in my side windowsill.

Next I stopped at FOPAL where I found some changes. All the snacks that are usually open for volunteers to take have been cleaned away, and a new sign says no public snacks for fear of spreading the virus. And a supply of exam gloves with the suggestion that you wear them while handling donated books.

So I put on gloves and processed five boxes of books for the computer section, sending most of them on to the bargain room. There were a few possibly valuable items. C. Gordon Bell is a well-known computer person, designer of the original PDP-1 computer and many other things, whose library apparently was at least in part donated to FOPAL. So there were four pristine copies of one of his textbooks, all signed by him. On Amazon, used copies were going for over $100. So that was a bit of a gift for the High Value section.

At 5:30 I started watching the PAC-12 Tournament championship game, Stanford against the formidable Oregon Ducks and Sabrina Ionescu. The game was close at first, and Stanford ended the first quarter ahead by 2 points. Then the Ducks took off on a 20-point tear and put the game away, ending 30 points ahead. If the Ducks aren’t in the Final Four it will be very surprising, and they could very well be national champions.

I was on my way out to find some supper up the street when I checked the menu at our dining room. Quesadillas and pulled pork? OK, why not. I had those items and some vegetable medley put in a box for eating in my room. It was only OK, not great.

But the new pillow was fine.

Saturday 3/7/2020

With the goddam taxes out of the way there is no further excuse not to work on the goddam novel. But it has been weeks. So I once again sat down to read the whole thing through, all 35,000 words of it. That took only a couple of hours; and again, as after previous readings, I was pleased with my work. There is a lot of good stuff there. I just need to finish the goddam thing. I have most of the elements of the finale lined up; I just have to decide what will actually happen: how the bad people will be exposed and humiliated, and what part of that my protagonists, who are kids, can realistically play in making that happen.

(In fact, since I’m writing this the next day I may as well say: I was obsessing over, half-asleep, endings for this from about 4am to 5am Sunday, and I think I know what to do.)

Around noon I decided to go to a Stanford baseball game, even though the weather was overcast and a slight mizzle was in the air. Stanford had announced, as part of COVID-19 precautions, that they would be limiting attendance at all sporting events to about 1/3 the capacity of the venue. But the baseball organization had emailed season ticket holders specifically to say that if you have season tix, you can get in. So fine, nothing else is happening.

I dried off my seat with paper napkins and, since a very light rain was still falling, hunkered down under my umbrella.

Note they certainly achieved limited attendance. The rain soon went away and the game was fine, Stanford winning 7-5.

At supper I opted for the newly-provided take-away option. Pick any combo from the menu and instead of putting on a plate the server puts it in a box to take back to your room. (Also, they have instituted a limited seating plan: no more than 3 people at a round table, where they used to set for 6, and no more than 2 at a square table. The dining room looks a lot like the above baseball seating.) One entree was a turkey-cheeseburger with sriracha aioli and arugula. That was my take-away, a box with a very nice burger, and a banana. The burger was really good, their spicy aioli sauce was excellent. I had it with a beer at my little cafe table.

At 8:30, it was time for the PAC-12 tournament semi-final, Stanford v. UCLA. The Bruins had won at Maples a few weeks earlier, in a game I didn’t attend because it was the departure day for my London trip. This game was close in the first half; then Stanford went on a 12-0 tear in the third quarter and put the game away. So the final Sunday will be Stanford v. Oregon.

A little grump: with the game in Las Vegas on Mountain time, it started at 8:30, ran to 10:30, on the night when we put the clocks ahead. Oh well, sleep is a luxury. See above about 4am obsessing.

Friday, 3/6/2020

I started the day with a run, which went well. I am pretty much back to where I was before taking a month off from exercise for the London trip. Next week I will try in a small way to pick up the pace, maybe actually timing myself to see what my baseline is.

Channing House has also hired a new fitness director, and it is in my mind to arrange a meeting and talk about resistance exercises, which has been an open issue since I dropped the YMCA back in July last year.

After the run I sat down to finish up my tax return, which I did. Happy to have uploaded all the PDFs and finalized the workbook. No doubt Katie at Wheeler CPA will have questions. Two unusual items for this (2019) tax year: one, about 25% of the initial fee I paid to join Channing House can be credited as a medical expense for continuing care. On the other hand: two, I sold 2340 Tasso for approximately $200K over the appraised value. I am very curious to see how those two offset, or don’t.

I had a delicious lunch of pizza. I didn’t mention that Wednesday evening I just felt like pizza, and walked out to a New York Pizza place on Hamilton avenue. I only ate half of a 12-inch pie, and brought the other half home. Today I pulled it from the fridge, nuked it, and had it for lunch. It was excellent.

Afternoon, I canceled two things and had more canceled on me. I love this XKCD cartoon. C’est moi, baby.

Some time ago I had bought a ticket to an SFJazz-sponsored concert with blues master Buddy Guy. It was to be this night, at the Paramount Theater in Oakland. Later I had accepted an e-vite from Suzanne and Chuck to a house concert at their place for tonight.

Realizing this conflict on Monday, I immediately decided, I don’t want the hassle of driving to Fremont, taking BART to Oakland, and return. Just… no. I had meant to just eat the ticket cost but today, SFJazz sent an email reminding everyone that (a) they are still holding concerts, just taking pains to disinfect all seats after every show; (b) but if you don’t feel well or don’t want to attend, you can turn back your tickets on our website. So I did that. I was too late to get a credit for the Buddy Guy show, but I will get an email showing its value as a tax-deductible contribution to SFJazz.

Which left the house concert. I’ve been to concerts at Suzanne’s place. She had commented on the Evite page yesterday that the concert was sold out. I pictured her living room packed with people, and thought to myself, no. Just… no.

Nobody there will have the virus, probably. But I do have some responsibility to my fellow Channing Housians. Somebody might have a cold, and if I get any cold symptoms, the CH instructions are to call the wellness nurse and self-isolate until you can be tested. Well screw that. I think I won’t take the chance. So I put my regrets on the Evite. And I’ll be staying in tonight.

Then, I had been booked to lead a tour at the Museum tomorrow, but today came the email: all public tours and demonstrations canceled until further notice. So my Saturday is suddenly open as well. Oh, and I was to meet Scott for a History Society thing on Sunday; that’s canceled as well. Kind of amazing how fast this is snow-balling.

 

 

Thursday, 3/5/2020

In the morning as scheduled, Ward from Valet arrived at 8:45. We talked at length about what he could and couldn’t do for my two main closets. He took a lot of measurements. We are to meet at the Valet showroom next Monday to see his design. Valet, and Ward himself, do a lot of work at Channing House, in fact his next appointment after me, was at room 612, just down the hall.

Oh, and there was a coincidence moment. When I led him back to the bathroom hallway he said, “Oh, you’ve been to Design Concepts!” Huh, said I. He pointed to the tall rosewood cabinet that was one of the pieces I brought from Tasso Street. He said he recognized it instantly as one that he had sold when he owned the Design Concepts store. Could have fooled me; all I know is we had that cabinet a good long time and loved it, and I still use it for all sorts of miscellaneous stuff.

Wait a sec. Checking the old home inventory file… wow! We bought that in 1994, it was custom-made, and we paid then over $3000 for it. No wonder I like it…

Anyway, Ward was done and gone at 9:30 and I drove right away to the Yosemite warehouse, arriving only a couple of minutes after the 10am start time. Spent the day continuing to open box after box on the hunt for the missing Ferrante plug-board. Saw some neat things in the boxes, including a huge (by which I mean like 3 foot by 2 foot) core plane. Zillions of tiny doughnuts on copper wire, just huge. Most core planes are relatively small and stacked in a module.

Back home to join an email discussion among the tech squad on whether, and how, to do video conferencing in place of things like floor meetings and events.

 

 

At 1am I woke up. Did the shuffle to the urinal, had a drink. Didn’t go back to sleep; instead came up with a new worry to gnaw on. I want to hang my big Carol Aust painting in the hallway, so it can be seen by others. Either outside my room, where only I and the lady across the hall would see it, or down by the lounge, where anybody going to/from the elevator can see it. That’s pending approval from everyone at the next floor meeting.

But then, my 2am brain realized, it would be so easy for anybody to steal it. Just lift it down, and down the elevator. To another floor perhaps. It might be a bit awkward to get a 5-foot by 2-foot framed painting out the front door, but it could be done. If the painting is outside my unit, theft is even easier; it’s only five steps to the freight elevator.

So I’m lying in bed, alternately wondering if I’d published a Tuesday blog post (I had written it but not hit “publish”) and wondering if there was such a thing as a theft alarm for paintings.

So I’m up looking into that. (clicky clicky) Surprisingly, there doesn’t seem to be any online info about how to secure a painting against theft, or any clever noise making alarms to prevent art theft. I can visualize something like a car alarm that is screwed to the inside of a frame, and triggered if the work is lifted off the wall. “STOP THIS PAINTING IS BEING STOLEN BEEP BEEP” and so on. But I don’t see that.

I believe I will consult at the frame shop where I had a print reframed last month.

Wednesday, 3/4/2020

So the actual day, when it came, was quiet. In the morning I worked taxes for a couple of hours and am at least half way through the workbook. Should be able to finish up on Friday.

Today, our new 6th floor rep, Jerry (who took over last month from Craig) announced the cancellation of the upcoming floor meeting. Shit being canceled everywhere. I should describe the Channing House virus actions, which are primarily in the Dining room. No more place mats (they are apparently hard to sterilize). No more salt/peppers on the tables (because they could pass virus from one person to the next). No more water carafes on the tables, ditto. No more self-serve salads or desserts; everything has to be served to you by a server, and once you have accepted your plate from them, you can’t hand it back for something else (because then their vinyl glove might touch your fingerprint and then be passed on to the next customer). All activities have been canceled, including two musical events that I was going to be the A/V person for.

After lunch I drove to FOPAL (yes, again) and did sorting until 4pm. Then back home and chill for the evening.

 

 

 

Tuesday, 3/3/2020

Shall I mention trivia? Fourteen months ago, specifically, Day 28, I mentioned having to buy a new belt. Well, over the past month, that same belt has developed cracks in the leather. Friday, I think it was, I ordered a near duplicate belt from Amazon, and it arrived yesterday by mail, only the mail wasn’t delivered at 6pm when I came out of supper, so I got it from my mailbox this morning. New belt.

First scheduled thing today was the annual meeting with my financial advisors. This was fairly short, quite sweet. I have enough money to support me in comfort the rest of my life. In fact, my rate of expenditure is less than the rate of growth of my investments, using quite conservative numbers. So barring a worldwide financial melt-down I will likely leave a pretty decent estate to my heirs. So that’s nice.

From there, about 11am, I drove to FOPAL and worked until 2:15 clearing out that other, stealth pile of computer books, that Frank had emailed about yesterday. I now have six boxes of “computer:priced” books, marked with prices, ready to shelve. Two weeks from now, I will shelve all I can, and then have several remaining boxes moved to our storage room.

Back at CH, Peter brought the scanner up and when attached to my computer — it failed the same as on his. We poked at it and speculated a while, then he left to price out a scanner of his own; and I worried at it some more. I figured out one problem was that both of us clever guys (and Peter is at least as clever as I am) had failed to notice that the flatbed-scanning piece was still in place. That’s a nice white piece of plastic that is the backdrop for opaque documents lying on the glass, while the light shines up from below. For transparencies, it is removed, exposing a moving light inside the lid that shines down through the slides on the glass. Removing it and restarting the scanner and the scanner app, may have made the difference. Something made the difference. By 4:30 I called Peter to bring his test slides back, and we successfully scanned one. He took the scanner back to continue working.

I had dinner with Craig, Diane, Margaret and Leon. People are watching TV obsessively to get early Super Tuesday election returns.

 

Monday, 3/2/2020

Went for a run, out the door at 7:30 on a morning almost warm enough to not need a jacket. This time I was able to maintain (my pathetic excuse for) a running pace the whole time. The first segment is hard, but then I get warmed up and things are better.

Then off to FOPAL right away where there was a big pile of books — unboxed books, just stacked loose — in front of the computer section. I complained about that to Frank; then got to work and processed the lot, which took 2-1/2 hours. Then did sorting until nearly 2.

During this period I got a phone call from a salesperson at Valet, the closet company. We set a date for him to stop by on Thursday at 8:45.

Back home I killed another item of the post-London to-do list: calling Road Scholar about my upcoming Switzerland trip. First I wanted to make sure they applied my $3000 credit (from the mix-up when I had to reschedule the Greek trip last fall) to this trip. OK, done. Second, to make sure that I had in fact bought trip insurance; I had. Third, to verify that if the trip could not be executed due to COVID-19 travel restrictions, the trip insurance would apply. It would. Done.

Before London, I loaned Peter my scanner so he could begin scanning his 35mm slides. He’s a smart and competent Mac user, but as of a couple days ago when I got around to asking him, he had not been able to make the scanner work for transparencies. So I called him and said the right thing is to bring the scanner back to my system where it was working 8 months ago. Then we’d know if the problem was the scanner or his setup. He said he had thought of one more thing to try, but will get back to me if that doesn’t work.

Late in the day, I got an email from Frank with a picture of a different pile of 9 or 10 boxes of computer books, stacked in a different part of the main room. Oh dear or dear.

 

Sunday, 3/1/2019

Slightly varying my hallowed Sunday routine, I did the NYT puzzle at home, with a cup of my own coffee. Mainly I wanted to really use my round “kitchen” table, on which I have a nice LED lamp which, it turns out, is perfect for doing a crossword puzzle under.

Then I strolled up University to Verve to read the rest of the paper.

On return I decided that an unscheduled Sunday was the right time to finally dig in to the tax return. There are two parts to this: one, gathering all the relevant documents, most of whose names start with “1099”, and scanning them into PDFs for uploading to the preparer’s site; and two, filling out the blanks in the preparer’s workbook. I completed step one today. I was able to use the contents of last year’s “Uploads” folder to make sure I had all the same stuff, and a little more (“1099S” is the report of proceeds from sale of property). Figure to do, or at least start, phase two on Tuesday.

Had lunch in my room watching the Stanford women winning at ASU. Friday night they lost to UA; today they had no trouble at all with ASU. This is the reverse of the usual pattern. Prior years, UA has been a push-over, and their arena has been very lightly attended, while ASU in Tempe is always hard to beat and their arena is packed, so if you wanted to attend, you needed to order tickets ahead. This year we are in upside-down world: UA’s arena was (as seen on the TV) full and they won, and ASU looked weak and their crowd, not so great.

Next I decided to begin implementing my plan to improve my “garden”, the collection of pots on the balcony. I’d put that off until after the upgrade; well, that’s now. I went to Summerwinds Nursery and bought four more pots, and two fuscias and a coral bells plant, and some potting soil, and a hummingbird feeder.

Came back, schlepped all that upstairs, potted out my new plants. Then there’s the Oxalis. I must post a picture of this. I spotted this nice prolific-looking plant outside a bank on Hamilton ave a few months ago. Small purple-bronze leaves, small bright yellow flowers, and it spills out of its container. I leaned over and snapped off a couple of shoots, took them home, rooted them. Fast-forward a few months, I have a foot-diameter bush of what Jean identified as an Oxalis variety, and growing very vigorously. So today I repotted it into my largest pot, and set it on its own wrought-iron pot stand. I expect it will turn into a fire-plug-size purple mound by fall.

Anyway, I now have something over 10 plants. I expect the fuscias will do very well here on the East side of the building. If they do, I’ll get more.

 

Saturday, 2/29/2020

Relaxed around the house until time to leave for the Museum to lead the Saturday noon tour. While relaxing, made the first move in getting my closets remodeled, by requesting a consultation with Valet Custom Cabinets, the closet contractor that I know is approved by Angela for work at Channing House. Also selected a smog test station.

Went to the Museum, led a tour for 15 people. Got a nice round of applause, and a “That was a great tour!” from a couple of younger guys. Nice.

Drove back up El Camino to the chosen smog test place, where I was in and out in about 30 minutes (one car ahead of me). So that’s done, except for paying the DMV license fee.

In the email, a note that the lobby art committee would be taking art on the theme of “World Wide Getaways: art found or made on some island” in March. I decided that my Pyrgos Doorway picture might qualify, so I printed that 11×14 and put it in a frame.

Feeling I’d accomplished enough for a Saturday, I chilled out for the rest of the day.