Day 359, rain, FOPAL, groceries

Wednesday, 11/27/2019

The first rain of the year arrived yesterday afternoon, first as a drizzle, then a quite heavy shower around 8pm, and another very heavy shower about 4am that woke me up.

At 7am I looked at the weather radar online and debated with myself whether a gap between two bands of green pixels meant it would be dry long enough for me to run. Then I leaned out from the balcony looking at the hills to the west and realized, “that’s a rain shower right there,” and decided no, I would get rained on. But what to do for exercise? I could wait around for the 9:15 strength and balance class, but (a) I like to get exercise out of the way earlier than that, and (b) there’s no aerobic component to it. So for the first time I went down to the gym in the basement and ran on one of the Channing House treadmills. Which are quite new, state of the art ones. I ran for approximately the same duration and speed as I would run on the street.

About 11am I went to FOPAL. Lyft had given me 25% off my next ten rides, so I used Lyft there and back again around 4:30. Both times I elected to use the “shared” option. On the way down, as typical, I had the car to myself, but on the way back at 4:30, the car stopped at two locations to pick up other people.

On Monday or Tuesday, somebody had delivered a very large donation of computer books. The donor appears to have been a practicing developer from 2000 to 2005, using, or at least interested in, the whole Microsoft world of .NET, Visual C#, Access, SQL Server, and more. Box after box of books, many the style I call “tombstones”, big heavy 1000-page paperbacks, mostly in mint or near-mint condition. Only a few showed signs of heavy use, post-its and dog-eared corners.

Sadly they were not really saleable. The most recent was from 2007, that’s twelve years ago, which is a glacial age in software time. I checked the version numbers of the software they documented and none were within even 2 or 3 levels of the current version. So the books can’t be used with the current software; and someone who for some crazy reason has to work with version 1.0 of the .NET framework, surely has any manuals they need. I ended up sending fifteen (15!) boxes to the bargain room. I priced and shelved maybe twenty books from the whole donation.

On return to CH I found a second elevator out. One of our three elevators stopped working on Friday, I think it was, and the latest word from management is that a part needs to be fabricated for it and it will be out 1-2 weeks more. Now today, a second one is “temporarily out of service”. I think I will be using the stairs. Fortunately I am currently on the 4th floor, so going down to meals is easy and coming back isn’t too bad. Leave the one elevator to people on 7 to 10.

In fact I decided to eat a simple PBJ supper in my room and went to bed early.

Day 358, laundry, plant stand, meeting

Tuesday, 11/26/2019

First thing in the morning I ran my laundry. While that was working, I unpacked and tasted a new low-carb meal replacement product that had come in the mail yesterday. Then I wrote a review of it on Reddit.

I’ve been following this little niche industry of meal replacements since Soylent was first introduced back in 2015. For quite a while, they were all distributed as powders to which you add water, sometimes also oil. To make a meal you mix up a scoop of powder, maybe a drizzle of oil, and water in a shaker. About 2017 if I recall right, Soylent introduced a “ready to drink” (RTD) product, a premixed liquid meal in a bottle. Some others have since added RTD lines.

A niche within a niche is the “Keto” meal replacements. These are extremely low-carb, one or two grams of net (i.e. non-fiber) carbohydrates per meal. If such foods comprise your entire nutrition, your metabolism enters a state of “nutritional ketosis” in which your cells extract energy from ketones rather than glucose. This is a medical treatment for some types of seizure disorders, and a dietary fad among some people. There are three companies doing keto meal replacements, and until now all had shipped only powders. But one, Sated.com, has been working on an RTD product forever, a lengthy kickstarter campaign which I’d subscribed to, and finally they shipped. So I was pleased to try the stuff and report on it.

That done, I walked to the hardware store and bought a can of green Rustoleum paint, and painted the bottom half of the iron plant stand. The next step is to put it back right way up and finish priming and painting the top half, which I had thought to do today. However, the green paint was still a bit tacky after lunch so I just left it to harden.

I spent a couple of hours after lunch working through this blog from day 1. I’m up to about day 90 now, and rather astonished at how much I got done this past spring. What I’m doing is adding “Tags” to each post, “Grief”, “Movie”, etc etc, so in principle I could quickly find various topics. However it is mostly a disciplined re-read and review of the year. I’m also copying out what seem like significant paragraphs. Somehow I’ll use all this to compose a year-end statement of some sort. This weekend, hopefully.

At 4:30 it was time of the monthly A/V committee meeting, where we review the requests for events for the next month, and assign people to run the sound and video. There is an official “event request form” where anybody putting on an event specifies the date and time and what kind of mics and so on they will need. Ian makes it all into a spreadsheet, typically 25 events or so; there’s a talk or a concert or a movie every other day or more. I ended up signed up to run A/V or three events toward the end of the month.

Day 357, mostly FOPAL, some blogging

Monday, 11/25/2019

Started with a run, which felt good. Then to FOPAL where I had just culled the computer books and was about to sit down at the computer to price 50 or so of them, when there was a rap at the door.

It was a high-school age young woman who introduced herself as Kai and said she was a volunteer and had been told she’d be sorting. As she was saying this, another young woman walked up. I forget her name, but it developed they were both doing High School public service hours. At noon when they knocked off, the second one had me sign a sheet where she was recording her volunteer hours. Over the past couple of weeks she’d done hours at, it looked like, 10 or more different service organizations. Awesome!

They hadn’t done sorting before. Somebody told them to show up at 10am to do that — why? There is not normally any sort of senior person or other sorter there at 10am on a Monday. Well, no problem; I gave them a quick training session in sorting and they dove right in energetically. Smart, hard-working girls, they did a lot of sorting in two hours.

I finished up my pricing, then did sorting along with the girls and continued after they left until the 2pm sorters showed up. I was pretty tired by then. Hey, I’ve got 11,300 steps, 4.3 miles on my phone today. A bit more than half would be my morning run. So I walked about 1.5-2.0 miles back and forth around the FOPAL book rooms — a lot of those steps I was carrying boxes of books. No wonder my back was a little sore and I felt tired. Had a good nap, did an hour on Zooniverse, then sat down to blog.

Before supper I spent an hour going through the first month of this blog. My main goal was to add “tags” to each post, so I can pull categories like Grief, Transition, Movies etc. But it also meant reading the posts. My life has certainly changed in these twelve months. From living in my house on Tasso, just beginning the downsizing project and not sure of where to live, to being settled at Channing House and pretty much everything stabilized and comfortable. I intend to write a longish essay summarizing the experience of this year of transition. It probably won’t be ready on Day 366, the start of the second year, but soon.

Day 356, coffee, market, SWBB

Sunday, 11/24/2019

For coffee this morning, I drove to Menlo Park to try the home store of Mme. Collette, the little coffee shop three blocks from CH where the pastries are better and more interesting than anywhere else, but there isn’t room for comfortable reading. The other shop has even nicer pastries, but very little more room. For just comfy sittin’ and readin’ it is hard to beat the old PA Cafe in Midtown, you know?

Well, I was out in the car, where to go? I thought I’d go and stroll the California Ave. farmer’s market, maybe shoot a couple of pictures. This market has been a success ever since it started more than a decade ago. I know, because this afternoon when I was saving the best shots from today in the folder named “farmer’s markets”, I noticed the last time I shot pictures there it was 2009.

20191124 squash!

This was the best pic I got today. Something about that sign on top of the avalanche of zucchini just tickles me.

At 1pm I went downstairs and met with Patty and Florrie to ride in Patty’s new Honda Fit to the SWBB game. Like other newer cars I’ve ridden in, it has the side-view feature: when you flip the turn signal lever, the screen on the dash shows a view of the road to that side behind the car. I’m fortunate in that my neck is still flexible enough that I can turn my head to look behind before changing lanes. For people who can’t, this is a lifesaver. And if I had it I’d probably use it. Along with other neat gadgets, it’s an argument for replacing a perfectly good Prius. (Against that, by the way, is the fact that Toyota sided with the Trump administration in the suit against California’s emissions law, which I have heard mentioned more than once among CH residents as reason not to buy a Toyota. We are a hotbed of liberalism here in the old professors’ and doctors’ home, ya know.)

Anyway, Stanford played the Buffalo (NY) Bulldogs, another team that, like Gonzaga, has a very active and pestiferous defense. Stanford had a hard time pulling away and the score was pretty even at the half. Then in the fourth quarter, the Bulldogs ran out of gas. Stanford was rotating all their players (every available player had minutes and almost all had some points), and they just ran the legs off the team in blue. The fourth quarter was a rout, ending in a 20-point win.

Day 355, plant stand, rugs, walk

So I did take the old indoor/outdoor thermometer apart. The flaky Set button consisted of the visible plastic button, from which a plastic peg sticks out and presses on a tiny metal dome. The metal dome or dimple, when pressed, goes “poink” and inverts itself to make contact with a solder pad on the circuit board. I polished that pad with a bit of paper towel (paper is a good mild abrasive). Then I taped a wad of four layers of printer paper on the back of the circuit board, covering the metal dimple, effectively making the plastic peg press harder on the dimple.

Old: 71.3/67.1; New: 73/69. Note the new one has the date, day of week, humidity, and the phase of the moon, too.

And that worked, I was able to set the time on the clock. So now I have two gray plastic tombstones that display the indoor and outdoor temps. Interestingly, they disagree. The newer, larger, smarter one reads 2 or 3 degrees F higher than the older, smaller, dumber one, for both inside and outside. Which is right, if either? And how can I tell?

Saturday, 11/23/2019

After breakfast in the dining room I put on “work pants” i.e. my oldest pair of jeans, and finished the job of de-scuzzing the plant stand, mostly using a wire brush on my drill, and steel wool on my finger for the small curly bits. Then I primed the bottom half.

And no, I did not leave the primer can on the balcony rail where the afternoon breeze could knock it down into the parking lot. Thought of that.

Tomorrow or more likely Tuesday I will spray that half with the black semigloss. Wednesday I’ll invert it and paint the upper half. (Edit: later I decided, no, it definitely wants to be dark green. Have to buy a spray can of that.)

Wondered what to do next. Well, I want to go to a photo store on Santa Cruz ave. in Menlo Park to buy 11×17 printer paper. And I want to browse area rugs at Macy’s. So why don’t I walk to those things.

I started by walking the few blocks to the Saturday Farmer’s Market and buying a nice raisin snail from one of the bakers. Walked on to Stanford Shopping Center where I looked at rugs at Anthropologie, Urban Outfitter, and Macy’s. Boring. Bought an orange juice at Jamba Juice and then hiked on to Menlo Park. Walking along El Camino I suddenly realized I was beside a rug store! Went in and looked at lots more rugs. Didn’t see any I liked but I looked up one maker, Nourison, on the phone and this one popped up, which of course they didn’t have in stock.

Walking up Santa Cruz ave I saw another rug store which I gave a cursory browse, and later two more, but didn’t have the energy to browse their wares. Bought the printer paper so now I can actually try printing 11×17 on the new printer, and caught a Lyft back to CH.

At supper, Pru suggested what I thought was a brilliant idea: that the Tech Squad have a regular open walk-in clinic hour that people could bring their laptops or ipads to and ask questions. Forwarded the suggestion to Craig and Bert.

Shopped online for area rugs. The best of a couple hundred was this one which I think is really nice. Also expensive. Problem is, as of now there are only 2 of the 8×10 in stock, so it is almost certain there’s no local retailer where I could feel it. And I really don’t want to buy a rug unless I have put my hand on it to feel.

Day 354, Shustek, play

Let’s go back a day for a grief episode. I think it was Wednesday night, coming back into the building, my mind wandered to the London trip I’m planning. It occurred to me that one thing I could do that week, would be to take the train out to Strawberry Hill station and walk over Twickenham Green past the house we lived in from 1975-78. Walk down the Thames bank to York House Gardens. And even as these images were flitting through my mind — and then the image of when we re-visited it in 2005 and the present occupants saw us gawking and politely asked us in — I was hit by such a stab of grief I was amazed. Those times were some of the best of lives together, and the idea of going back without my partner, seeing those things without being able to turn to her and say, “remember that?” was just… unspeakably sad. Wow. You just never know when a train of thought will plunge into a tunnel.

Thursday, 11/21/2019

A few days ago, I knocked over the indoor/outdoor thermometer that I’ve had for… probably most of this century? Little gray plastic plinth with LCD numbers to display the indoor and outdoor temps, and the date and time. The last couple of times I’ve had to change batteries in it, it has been very difficult to set the date and time. The Set button doesn’t work, or as I finally worked out, has to be pressed with all the might of one’s thumb for a while to work. And even then, it’s never clear the order of what’s being set.

So this time when it fell over, and the back cover fell off and the batteries popped out, so now I’d have to work out how to reset it again, well, drat. Let’s fix this. Such is the nature of the modern world that it was less than five minutes before I had selected a similar but of course more stylish and smarter (does humidity too! doesn’t forget the time when batteries are changed!) device on Amazon and ordered it. So now it’s here, and I picked up batteries at the hardware store yesterday, so this morning I set it up. Very easy to set up, the button user interface is simple and clear, it worked immediately.

Now to trash the old one. But I don’t want to! Faithful old thing, still working fine, barring that the set button doesn’t work and the battery door flies off. So it is lying on my kitchen table and I think perhaps I will take it apart and see if I can diagnose and fix the button issue, and maybe give it to somebody. Or leave it at FOPAL because they do take and resell gadgets too.

Then off to Shustek for a day of cataloging. On return about 5pm, I had to decide how the rest of the evening should go. I have a ticket for Anne of a Thousand Days at the Dragon Theater in Redwood City, 8pm. Have supper here or somewhere on Broadway in RC? Drive myself, or Lyft?

I decided it would be no fun to drive to RC so I would Lyft. I decided it would be more fun to eat out. So at 6:05pm I went down to the lobby and ordered a Lyft. Might seem a little early, but I thought there might be delays. First I selected the shared-ride option, but Lyft first scheduled a pickup by a car that was 11 minutes away; and after a couple of minutes deleted that and scheduled a different car that was 10 minutes away and on the other side of the freeway. So I canceled that ride and re-ordered a regular Lyft (for $19, ouch) which came in 4 minutes.

On Broadway at 6:40, I went for the easy choice of a Mexican restaurant (at least I didn’t sink so low as Five Guys Burgers or the Old Spaghetti Factory). To the theater at 7:30.

This production was not a success, for me. The play consists of Anne Boleyn, awaiting her execution, recalling all her interactions with Henry the VIII, with her parents, with Cardinal Wolsey and others at court. Except for Anne and Henry, everyone in the small cast doubled and tripled in the various roles. The director had cast a couple of women to play multiple male roles. One had to play both Anne’s father and mother in the same scene, stepping from Anne’s left to her right and changing her pitch and body language in alternate lines. This was clearly some kind of intentional statement about gender roles, but I couldn’t figure out what that statement was.

Most of the actors read their lines very well, conveying both meaning and personality clearly. The production was spoiled for me primarily by the (male) actor playing Henry VIII. His voice and accent were completely, annoyingly wrong. Nobody was attempting a British accent, but his accent was Southern, almost into “y’all” territory, and it was jarring. And he had no stage presence, none of the overbearing, egotistical masculinity that Henry’s lines and actions seemed to call for. Just a feeble performance that stood out among a lot of quite competent ones.

So I left at intermission and was in bed by 10.

Day 353, Anthem, Exercise, Fopal, Lecture

Wednesday, 11/20/2019

I wrote a few days back that the in-house exercise class–actually called “Strength and Balance” class–happened at the wrong time of the day. It’s at 9:15am MWF. In order to participate, I have to change my other regular habits. I decided to try it out today. It wouldn’t be practical to go for a run and be back for exercise at 9:15. Would it? So no run. But what about breakfast? I don’t want to go down to the dining room in my exercise shorts and t-shirt. So eat in my room. But then I’m all fed and coffee’d and newspaper’d by 7:30, with 2 hours to kill. It just upsets everything. Well.

Today I passed the time after breakfast and before exercise, trying to register with my new drug insurance provider, Anthem. I’d tried a few days ago and failed. I would enter my Anthem account number, first and last name, birthdate. It would recognize me, to the extent that it wanted to do 2FA by sending a text to my phone “***-***-1986” as it coyly said. Fine, do it. Then it would put up a cute error message, “Hmmm, that didn’t work for some reason. Try again later, or call support at…”

Today I tried it some more with the same result. So I called support. The person there, who had a very thick Latino accent, was able to find my information, and said well, it is having a problem with 2FA, I’ll turn off 2FA for this account and you can try again. Which I did, and was able to get to the point of providing a username and a password. Then it told me to go ahead and log in with this new id.

When I tried to do so, it put up an overlay message “Getting your information”; then wiped that and displayed a familiar cutesy message, “Hmmm, that didn’t work for some reason…”

So I called support again. This person was able to “find my information,” but she had the sense to ask, When does your coverage begin? Um, January first? Oh, well, you can’t use the website until you are within 30 days of your coverage starting.

Oh. Do you suppose the website might fucking SAY THAT instead of “for some reason”? No, I didn’t swear at the lady. Anyway, it was now 9:15.

Exercise class was impressive. There’s at least 40 people there. Most in street clothes; I think I was the only one in shorts, other than Clark, the staff fitness person who leads it. He does a good job. He leads through a rapid sequence of a variety of exercises, some I found quite challenging. Not because they demanded a lot of strength, but because they involved coordination. OK, sit forward and upright on a chair. Lift your right knee, swing the leg out to 45 degrees; bring it back, repeat on the left side. Keep doing this, left, right, steadily, but now put both arms out straight and make circles. And so on. There were some strength exercises using thera-bands, and various other things, 45 minutes worth, which got me breathing and lightly perspiring.

I had a shower (quite a few people in the class were exercising as hard as I was, in street clothes, and I wondered about that) and then drove up the hardware store to get batteries so I can set up a new indoor/outdoor thermometer I’ve bought. I had a smoothie for lunch at Whole Foods. Then I went to FOPAL; yes, I was just there yesterday, but that was really Monday’s session delayed to Tuesday, and this was my regular Wednesday sorting session. And it’s quite a bit more actual bending and lifting exercise than the class was.

In the evening I attended a lecture here, a local artist presenting on “Who Shot Vincent?” He reviewed the brief, tragic career of Van Gogh, showed lots of his pictures and discussed the development of his technique over the single decade of his painting career, and at the end presented the evidence that Vincent probably did not commit suicide but was shot accidentally by some teenagers goofing off.

Day 352, much FOPAL, booking

Tuesday, 11/19/2019

Since I couldn’t do anything at FOPAL yesterday, I determined to put in several hours today. After breakfast in the dining room I got to FOPAL around 8:30, first person in. There was a huge pile of books waiting for me on the floor at the Computer section.

six boxes off to the right, one more on the cart, and five piles

About twice the norm. There’s been a push on to get more sorting done (yay!) and this may be a result. Anyway, spent two hours culling these and pricing and shelving the worthwhile 50 or so.

(Time is really cruel to computer books. So many big fat tomes, The Complete JavaPerlC++ Bible, a 1000-page doorstop that sold for $35 when new in 2005, now irrelevant. Even when it’s the Third Edition Updated for Version 7.5!!, because I do a quick check and that product or language is now at version 14.3. So it’s off to the Bargain Room where maybe somebody will pay $1 for it, or more likely it will be recycled.)

That done, I started sorting. There was a small wall of boxes, mostly one donation, blocking an aisle. With a few other sorters that came and went over the next hours, we reduced and finally eliminated that wall. Yay us.

I headed on home, forgetting that I meant to stop at the hardware store. In the evening I booked one more theatrical thing in London. The first 7 days of the trip are pretty well filled now, and I think I’ll leave the last three evening open. When I’m there, I’ll see posters, or check the What’s On site, and find things to attend. Daytimes I figure to shuttle back and forth to different museums and galleries, maybe hitting the bigger ones multiple times. (Wally writes that, according to an art lecture he heard recently, you should go to a museum and just study one work, and leave. Well…)

Day 351, London, Bridge (not falling down)

Monday, 11/18/2019

Went for a run. Didn’t feel great, and I walked the last quarter mile of what I normally run. Home, showered, dressed, I sat down to do a bit more London booking. I booked a ticket to visit the Cutty Sark and the Royal Naval Museum in Grennich (as it is pronounced) on a Sunday morning. I also verified which Heathrow terminal Virgin comes into, T-3, which is on the central rail/tube hub, so it will be easy to take the Heathrow Connect train to Paddington.

Located my hotel with respect to its nearest tube stations, one of which, about 10 minutes’ walk, is: ta-daa! Paddington. From the hotel it’s a five-minute (or less) walk to Lancaster Gate station on the Central Line; ten minutes to Paddington puts me at the junction of four other lines. So assuming the weather isn’t super horrible (wait, this is February I’m talking about, of course it will be horrible) I can get about anywhere in London with a few minutes walking.

Next up was Duplicate Bridge; I’d let Craig talk me into playing in his third-Monday tournament. This is as I may have noted the prior times I did it, a whole goddam lot of bridge, 22 “boards”, i..e. hands, which take from 10:30 to 3pm (with an hour out for lunch). Had supposed I would go to FOPAL after, but nunh-unh, I was wiped.

Day 350, walk, London

Sunday, 11/17/2019

For coffee this morning I decided to emulate Dennis’ good example, and walked the 1.7 miles from CH to the coffee shop in Midtown. Wimped out and took a Lyft back, though.

Then with no small amount of nervousness, I booked the flight and hotel for a London holiday. I will fly on Sunday 9 Feb, departing SFO at 5pm. I’ll probably go there directly from Maples after the noon SWBB game. I opted to spend a bit and booked Virgin “Premium” seating both ways, two steps up from economy, one step down from Luxury or whatever they call it. Arrive in London around noon Monday 10 Feb. Depart LHR at 4:30pm on Thursday 20 Feb.

Later in the day I booked a seat at a musical, & Juliet, for the Wednesday night, and a seat at a concert at St. Martin-in-the-Fields for the Saturday night. I figure to book several more things, but that’s quite enough for one day.

Al Moon, a well-known and liked resident, is celebrating his 90th birthday today (somebody told me the other day CH has quite a number of 90+ people, dozens?). He booked the auditorium for a sing-along, to be followed by ice cream on the 11th. I bailed from the sing-along, I just couldn’t stand the sentimental song selection, badly sung.