Friday, 12/27/2019

Not a vivid day in my recollection. Breakfast in the dining room. Had been thinking I had nothing scheduled and would perhaps wander down to FOPAL and sort, but then I actually checked my calendar and I had in fact signed up to lead a tour today. Oh, right; I originally signed up for the Friday, then they asked for help covering Thursday at the last minute, so I did that — and ended up doing two tours that day. Well, off to do my third tour of the week.

In the afternoon I looked at a couple of tutorial videos on how to play Surviving Mars. I’m just about ready to start building my own colony for real.

 

Thursday, 12/26/2019

Last week, the museum put out a request for somebody to please cover the public tours on the day after Christmas, and I signed up for the 12:00 one. So after taking a nice run this morning, I got in my red docent shirt and went down there.

The place was jumping, lots of visitors coming in. When I started the tour I had a crowd of about 40, which is too many for anyone’s comfort. I told them at the start, all the exhibits are well signed and informative, I don’t mind a bit if you just wander off. Quite a few did, but I still ended up with 20 or so that stuck with me.

There were still lots of people coming in. I checked the schedule and there was only one docent scheduled for the 2pm tour, so I stuck around. That was The Other Dave, and he was pleased to be able to split the crowd. He took the first 25 or so, and I kept the rest, another 15-20. I stalled for ten minutes by leading them to the 1401 lab and riffing on computing in the 60s. Then took them around and it all worked out nicely.

Chilled out the rest of the evening. My DVR is only 4% full, which is pathetic. What happened to all the shows I used to subscribe to? To fill the last hour before bed, I went to Amazon and browsed around and discovered that my fave actress of all time, Xena Lucy Lawless, has her own mystery series on the Acorn channel. So I watched one ep of that. Not bad. She looks great, the writing was pretty good.

 

Tuesday, 12/24/2019

This morning brought an email from Angela the Empress of Upgrades (seriously, she does a royally fine job) with the word that my personal move-back date is 31 January. I have been to a couple of upgraded floors lately and my golly the difference is amazing; the hallways are so bright with new LED lighting and paint and carpet that it makes this fourth floor look like a dungeon.

I picked up yesterday’s mail after breakfast. It included a fat package from the Tax People, the official return on Marian’s estate. Bottom line, I am the recipient of 11 million dollars (settle down!) of exemption from estate tax. Since I presumably had a comparable exemption already, I can leave as much as $20 mil to my heirs tax free. Seems excessive. Earlier in the week I had paid their invoice for preparing this form, $1500. Now I have the form, it almost justifies the fee, it is about 5/8 of an inch thick and weighs at least a pound. Oh, wait, when I look at it, the great bulk of it is “exhibits” consisting of forms I already gave them, like Marian’s will, the old Trust document, etc. Well, whatever.

I went out to run a couple of errands and went by the tree we planted for Marian in Bol Park. It has one little green leaf at the top, all others are brown. I hope this is just winter time and it will start coming back in a few months.

In the afternoon I spent some time sitting at the keyboard facing my novel and deciding what to do next. Which will probably tearing up and rewriting the last 3 chapters I wrote.

 

 

 

Monday, 12/23/2019

Went for a run in 50º chill. Felt ok. Then to FOPAL for four hours of work. And then home feeling a bit sore, promising myself “Two ibuprofen and a nap”. Treatment applied as directed, and I felt much better.

Did a couple more tutorials in the game. It begins to get hella complex; as the “commander” of the nascent mars colony you are to simultaneously manage robots extracting minerals, robots doing maintenance on machinery that continually breaks down, personnel assignments in the dome, keeping colonists happy so they don’t go back to Earth, building new facilities, earning money by shipping minerals back to Earth, and on and on.

All of which brought this thought up. We used to worry about violent video games teaching violence, Grand Theft Auto teaching disrespect for the law, etc. Well, Surviving Mars is just one of a whole genre of games where the player has to administer something, balancing complex nets of resources. Stellaris is another, and all the Civilization series where you have to build a nation from scratch. So, do these games teach management skills? Are players who excel at them, good at allocating personnel and resources in real life?

Late in the afternoon, a call from the desk, you have a package. I went down to get it and it was (ta-daaa) the rug I ordered from Amazon. It came as a roll 8 foot long and about 10 inches in diameter. So, not a thick luxurious rug, but I didn’t expect that. I left it rolled up and stowed against the wall. I won’t see it until move-back day.

I should mention that I checked in with Dennis on Thursday and again this evening. Toni had an operation on her foot earlier last week. As of Thursday, Dennis was a bit troubled because she was invalided more than they’d hoped. Today things were a bit better; she was getting around and beginning to work at home.

Day 21 a year ago, I started cleaning out the pantry of jars and boxes of staple foods I would never use; then attended the movie Bohemian Rhapsody.

Sunday, 12/22/2019

Coffee, newspaper, puzzle at the old stand, the P.A. Cafe, driving there in light rain. Coffee over, I was thinking about what to do with the rest of the day, and I really must learn to control this urgent feeling of needing to do something with my Sundays. This time I thought about a story in the paper about a Christmas market in the Ferry Building. I’ve walked through the Ferry Building market before, it was pleasant; what the heck, let’s drive to the city and do that.

As I went North on 101 the rain became heavier, and was torrential when I reached The Embarcadero. There were no obvious places to park and it was miserable out. This is really stupid, I thought, and decided to, as the GPS likes to say sometimes, “Make a legal U-turn…” and headed back the way I came. The rain continued very heavy, wipers on high and big puddles extending into the freeway traffic lanes at several points. Nasty driving.

Back home, I began to play the SWBB game at Texas, that started recording at 10am. Texas although unranked, seemed to have an excellent defensive plan. At any rate, Stanford shot terribly, 19% in the first half, trailed most of the game, got within 2 points several times in the final minutes, but lost. Their first loss of the season. Actually, it might be a good thing. They won’t be burdened with a #1 ranking next week, and they’ve had some weaknesses exposed they can work on.

For lunch I didn’t like the look of the menu at CH, and walked up University to Wahlburger’s (the rain had vanished) and had a very nice “burger bowl,” basically a salad bowl topped with guacamole, a burger patty, and bacon.

In the afternoon I started exploring a new computer game, Surviving Mars. I got it as part of one of the Humble Bundle discount packages. I worked through two of the early tutorials and it looks like it could be fun.

 

Saturday, 12/21/2019

The winter solstice, huzzah. One memory I retain from childhood was that my mother always noted the solstices. “December 21st, the days will start getting longer,” she’d say, with the clear suggestion of warmth, light, spring, to come. Of course, it’s a more meaningful turnover at the latitude of Tacoma, where winter days are significantly (and depressingly) shorter than here at the latitude of SF.

Post-breakfast the next scheduled thing was lunch with Scott at 1pm. What to do in the meantime? Well, I’d recently had an email from the Stanford Blood Center, my O+ type was in short supply. So I drove around to the donation center and donated. It’s actually close enough, only a couple of blocks off the route of my usual run, that I could walk there. But then I’d have to walk back while short a pint of red cells. I don’t think so.

I was pleased by my vitals: BP 105/63, pulse 60, hemoglobin 15.3, temp 97.79.

From there I came around to the T-Mobile store on University. Here’s an oddity: when I checked before departure, using Google maps on the laptop, it assured me there was a T-Mobile store there. But when I looked on the phone using Apple maps as I walked up University, Apple Maps didn’t know about it. Fortunately Google was right this time.

My desire was to switch the account so that the phone I always carry, ending in 1986, would be the primary, and the -3645 number, which I loaned to Jean, the secondary. When I first created the account (about ten years ago?), -3645 was my only cell phone, and -1986 was the land-line to our house. Two years ago I killed the land-line and moved the number to a cell, which was added as the second line on the account.

Problem is, when I try to log in to my T-Mobile account, it wants to send a TFA text to -3645, which is useless because that phone is at Jean’s house. The chap at the store said he could fix that, went away to the back, came back to verify which number should be which, went away, came back and said it was alright, I’d just have to “enter my PIN” when I logged in next, by which I assumed he meant the code sent by text.

So I just tried it; it says “there’s no primary account holder, enter the PIN you got at the store.” Fortunately it also was willing to take the last four digits of my SSN. And it still shows -3645 as primary and -1986 as “other line”. And it still doesn’t send a text to -1986. I assume a text showed up on -3645 causing Jean to wonder, if she even notices. (Later I got a text with a number I assume was the PIN. Later still, I tried logging in again; there’s no change. Looks like I’m stuck with -3645 as the main.)

Lunch with Scott was fun as always, and we tried Georgian food. I had a monster cheese boat, which the waiter should have advised was really meant as a shared dish.

Dinner was the Webster Street Grille reservation organized by Patty, featuring me, David and Helen Golden, and David and Mary Sue (I think?) Thornton. Three Davids. Lots of pleasant conversation, except that I was depressed to find that almost everyone at the table believed that Saunders and Warren are unelectable and only Biden could beat Trump. Post-traumatic stress of the Boris Johnson win in the UK.

 

Wednesday, 12/17/2019

Out the door for a run at 7:30 to find, whoopsie!, it is raining. I knew showers were in the forecast but could I be bothered to go lean over the balcony railing, or to look for green pixels on the weather radar? Oh no… but what the heck, it’s just sprinkling, carry on. So I did, and while my jacket got damp, it wasn’t bad at all.

I hung around the room doing I do not recall what until lunch time. Today was the day the CH publication, Scribble & Sketch, was to come out and go on sale at 12:30. So my plan in the morning was to have lunch, buy a copy, check how prominently they displayed the poem I had contributed, and then go on to FOPAL. But coming out of lunch I completely forgot about buying an S&S, just headed down to the garage and out.

In the evening I learned that they had completely sold out their (obviously inadequate) “print” (local copy shop) run and were taking orders for later. Anyway I got four useful hours in at FOPAL.

When I returned to CH I discovered that there was a local power outage and the building was dark! Well, not entirely; they have a generator which, among other things, keeps the automatic garage doors working, and lights on in the garage, the basement hallways, the lobby and dining room, stairwells. It also runs the freight elevators but not the regular elevators. So I walked up from the basement to the 4th floor, which like all floors above the first, was dark.

Apparently the power problem started at 4:28, which was just about the moment I left the FOPAL parking lot. Now, residents gathered in their floor lounges by flashlight to listen to announcements on the house emergency radios. Every floor had somebody manning the hand-held walkie-talkie for the floor, and everybody observed orderly radio procedure. The front desk made brief announcements, including that supper would go ahead as scheduled.

In the lobby I talked to the head chef and he explained that they had partial power in the kitchen, and their ranges and ovens were gas, so they could finish preparing the main entrees. However the heating on the serving line is induction plates which were not on the emergency power system, so they’d had to dig out the catering trays with the bottled gas flames. Also the dish washers are not on the emergency power, so they’d had to switch over to all paper.

When I got into the dining room I found that they had, indeed, in the hour between the outage and serving time, re-laid all the tables with plastic utensils, paper napkins, and little plastic bottles of water. The serving lines were filling paper plates from catering trays, and everybody got fed.

About 6:10 the three people who were riding with me to the game finished eating and we all trooped down to the garage and drove to Maples in my car. Probably another 10 from CH also went. (Why don’t we have the CH bus available for these games, there’s enough people to fill it? was a topic at dinner.)

Anyway, Stanford romped over Tennessee, leading by 10 at the half and winning by more than 20. Wally had attended the pre-game chalk talk and said the coach’s emphasis for the game was “box out” and rebound. Tennessee has no players under 6 feet, and more than one 6’5″, so it was important to work extra hard for rebounds. Stanford apparently took this advice to heart, as they ended up with 10 more rebounds, quite an achievement against average-taller players.