Category: Uncategorized

Day 329, Printer, TSA, Repair Cafe, smoke

Sunday, 10/27/2019

Went out for coffee and to read the paper at Verve. Talked to Dennis on the phone while waiting for my cappuccino. Back at CH, I had an hour to kill and put it to good use. First I tested the new printer by printing an 8×10 of one of my Greek pictures on good quality paper. Screen on the right, paper on the left. It did pretty darn well.

It could be a little more contrasty and more blue, but for a first try with default settings, not bad at all. Certainly every bit of detail was there.

I had time remaining so I did what I’ve meant to do for some time, went to the TSA site and applied for Global Entry. This is a superset of TSA Precheck which supposedly makes it faster to return to the US from abroad.

Now it was 10am (gosh but I am productive in the mornings), so I took one of the house shopping carts from the garage and used it to roll my toolbox three blocks up Homer street to the Museum of the American Heritage, for the quarterly Repair Cafe. I was teamed with apprentice fixer Daniel and we had a pretty successful day. We repaired an old calculator quite easily, and a wooden floor vent with somewhat more effort. Then we got a stand mixer that turned into the Job from Hell. Spent at least an hour figuring out how to get it apart. Quickly identified the broken part, a worm gear, and showed the client how to order a new one on Amazon. Then spent half an hour trying to reassemble the goddam thing before, with the client’s encouragement, giving up on the whole job.

Finally we had another easy one, an electric jigsaw where the user had cut into the cord. The break was only a foot from the handle, so we opened it up, discarded the short piece of cord, stripped and reattached the good part of the cord inside the device. Fixed!

We were working outdoors under canvas marquees and several times the gusty wind in the courtyard threatened to blow our marquee away like a kite. “Grab a pole!” was the shout and people would rush to hold them down. It was all fun and games until you realized, every such gust up in Sonoma county was spreading the Kincade fire…

Due to the wind shift, the smoke from that fire finally came down to us, and by late afternoon the sky was yellow and the air smelled like an old cigar. At sunset I saw the color and took some shots with the Nikon from my west-facing balcony.

smoky_sunset

 

 

Day 328, laundry, docent, new printer

Saturday, 10/26/2019

The laundry room on each floor has a sign-up calendar, and I’d reserved the first slot on Saturday. Since I had to be out by 9, I got up at 6:30 and immediately started my two loads. I had it all wrapped up after breakfast, around 9am, including ironing my red CHM Docent shirt.

For some reason my newspaper wasn’t delivered this morning. I noted non-delivery at the Mercury website, and a copy was left at the front desk for me in the middle of the day sometime.

After lunch I went to the Museum and led the 2pm tour. About ten people, several of whom hung on my every word.

When I got back I had a voice mail from the front desk, you have a newspaper waiting, and a large box, it looks like a printer. And it was, my new Epson. Setting it up was interesting. It came with ten bottles of ink, two each of Black, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Photo Black, the same colors as the cartridges used in my old printer, but now in plastic bottles holding, oh, about six ounces probably.

The setup process involves charging the five ink tanks by carefully tipping each color bottle into its tank, waiting about 30 seconds while it goes glug glug glug, well, more of an alto tone, glig glig glig, and the color creeps up the side of the translucent tank. Then the printer takes seven minutes to initialize itself, and prints an ink jet alignment page. The pattern was perfect the first time. Nice. After it has done all that, you again uncap each bottle and pour the last ounce into the tank to take up the space used by the charging and testing. The second set of five bottles get stored for, well, in my case probably a year or so? Until I deplete the reservoirs.

Now I have to get find a new home for my old printer, which works fine. I will advertise it on the CH bulletin board mailing list, but not today I think. There are a lot of messages on the CHBB list about emergency preparedness and what to do if the power goes off, so I think I’ll wait until Monday.

After that excitement I flogged myself to the keyboard and wrote a key scene in the novel, an conversation full of important information for the characters and for the reader to know. This is the delicate problem of exposition: you want the readers to understand some important facts, preferably not by just telling  them, but having it arise in conversation between characters. But if these are important facts about this world, won’t the characters already know them? In which case, why would they talk about them? (Also known as the “As you know, Bob…” ploy, from the clumsy way that old SF pulp fiction would do it: “As you know, Bob, the Jovian Mind Eaters can only be blocked by an adamantium shield…”) Properly, you establish that one character isn’t in the picture, and you have the others fill him in. That’s what I did, hopefully in believable dialogue that sounds like actual people (or in my case, actual children) talking to each other. That done, I can resume moving the narrative along.

The other night I mentioned receiving a hand-written letter. It was slightly upsetting and I am still thinking about how I want to respond. Maybe next week my thoughts will resolve.

 

Day 327, SWBB event

Friday, 10/25/2019

Began the day with a run. Futzed around the rest of the morning doing I don’t remember what. Feeling guilty about not working on my book, for one thing.

Let me catch up on one thing. Two days ago, when I was printing 34 pages of the SWBB season tickets, I thought about how that would be affecting the ink cartridges in the printer. The Epson Expression 630 has been a stalwart companion for a couple of years now. It works just fine as a copier, a scanner, a document printer, and, thanks to having five colors, a decent photo printer. Two drawbacks. One, it uses fairly expensive ink cartridges, and it is hard keeping them in stock because they always run out on different schedules, magenta this week, cyan next month, etc. Two, it won’t print paper larger than 8.5×11. I think in future I would like to be able to print photos larger.

Both problems are answered by the Epson Expression ET7750. It uses large ink bottles and “comes with 2 years of ink”. And it prints on paper up to 11 inches wide. I have had that on my list of things to buy because I feel wealthy. A few weeks back I bought the better sound bar from that list. On Thursday I pulled the trigger on the printer, and it should arrive Saturday. Then I’ll have to get rid of the 630, which has plenty of life left in it, now that I’ve cleaned the excess ink out of it (Day 283). Probably somebody around here will want it. The only thing left on the “because I can afford it” list is a new TV and I really have a hard time justifying that for any reason other than that.

At 1:15 I started for Maples Pavilion and the Stanford Women’s Basketball season kickoff event. The day had turned warm (the car said the exterior temp was 91º, in October? really?) and there was no parking to be found anywhere near Maples. Walking to the garage I had the passing thought, maybe take Lyft? and now regretted not having followed through on it. Eventually parked near The Bing, a nice quarter-mile walk to Maples.

The event was first, to watch a practice, and after, to have refreshments in the lobby and hear Tara answer questions. The practice was a first chance to see the new freshmen, who look very good, ready to go. And to refresh my memory of the older players. Kiana Williams looked especially sharp. This team has the potential to reach the finals, I think.

Another perennial question is, is Tara Vanderveer still game-ready? She is 66, and there are always rumors she’ll retire soon. She did not look at all like retiring, or even show her age much. I think she’s good for several more years.

 

 

 

Day 326, Yosemite, not choir, another play, some mail

Thursday, 10/24/2019

Today I had in my calendar to attend a meeting of FOPAL volunteers at the Mitchell Park Library center. Except when I got there, no meeting. Got into Gmail on the phone, retrieved the e-vite, and of course: it’s the 31st, not the 24th. Bad enough when I forget to look at the calendar; now I’m putting the wrong dates in the calendar.

Anyway, on to the Yosemite warehouse for a partial day of working with artifacts. Then back to CH, arriving around 4:45. This is a problem for the following reason. When I attended the first Chorus rehearsal the other day, Mary the leader handed out a rehearsal schedule, with rehearsals at 4pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays for the next two months. Thursday is the only day of the week when CHM volunteers gather in the east bay to do collections work. I would have to leave every session an hour early, to get back to CH for a 4pm rehearsal.

I’m debating this, but I think on the whole I would rather be futzing around with old computers than singing in the back row of the chorus. Certainly my contribution to the former is a lot more substantial than the latter.

Waiting for me was the online links to all the tickets for the Stanford Women’s Basketball season. The Stanford ticket office does this in a rather lame way, sending you a list of 34 separate links, 17 to PDFs of individual print-at-home tickets, and 17 to PDFs of print-at-home parking passes (I paid the extra to park in the lot next to Maples Pavilion). I sat in my office printing 34 individual sheets of paper and organizing them into a packet, and sniffling quietly because this was a job Marian had always happily dived into, delighted to be setting up for a new basketball season.

By the time that was done it was supper time and I just didn’t feel like going to the dining room, so I had a PBJ and grapes in my room.

At 7pm was a theatrical presentation. Diane Tasca is large in local theatrical circles, formerly artistic director at the Pear Theater and often seen on stage at local shows. Today she and a partner presented a two-person play, “Love Letters”, in which the actors read out the letters written between a boy and a girl over their lives from grade school up. While the actors were doing a good job, the portraits the letters paint of the people, especially the girl, made me dislike them — the characters, not the actors. So I left at intermission.

Waiting in my mailbox were two interesting letters. One is from a bankruptcy court, setting out the details of the settlements from the bankruptcy of the San Jose Repertory theater company several years ago. The letter was addressed to Marian at the Tasso address, I presume because our season tickets to SJ Rep were in her name. The letter contains eight double-sided pages listing at least 150 names with amounts of $200-$500 owed. However, I’ve been over the list twice now and can’t find Marian’s or my name in it. So why did we get a copy?

The other interesting letter was hand-written, but I think I’ll write about it another time.

Day 325, FOPAL, theft, theater

Wednesday, 10/23/2019

Went for a run, sans sweatshirt as the weather has warmed up again. After that I wrote another long detailed note to the CHBB for MacOS users. Yesterday’s email had made the point about “your old 32-bit apps won’t run under the next release,” but that just raised the question, “which of my apps are 32-bit ones?”

Turns out it is quite simple to find out, but not obvious. So I wrote up how to do that: how to get your mac to list the 32-bit apps, so you could go down the list and decide which ones you actually use, so you can start trying to get upgraded 64-bit versions of them.

The big issue here is Adobe software. When Adobe went to the highway robbery excuse me, subscription model, a lot of people didn’t bother to subscribe. They just kept using the last version of Photoshop, InDesign, LightRoom that they had actually purchased on CD, which is the “CS5” edition. They work perfectly well. Unfortunately they are all 32-bit apps and will quit working when you next upgrade your OS. So you have the choice of paying Adobe an annual subscription, after which you can download the latest versions (and learn their modified UIs); or you can look for alternative products and learn a whole new app. I didn’t cover all that in the email; just how to find out what your 32-bit apps are.

About 10 I went to FOPAL. Well, first to the grocery store next door, where I bought about $15 worth, including some grapes and the sugar-free drinks I like to stock. I put them in the fancy canvas shopping bag that I had brought back as a souvenir from Mykonos, on the front seat of the car. And left the windows open.

I worked the computer section and then sorted until about 12, when I went back out to the car to have some lunch and chill out for a while. And guess what? My bag of groceries was gone. Some creep had reached in and taken my bag. I hope they were disappointed with what they got. I hope they choke on a grape. I really miss that bag, it was well-made and had a trendy hotel name on it.

After a while I went back in and did sorting during the 2-4pm open hours. Then back to CH to relax for an hour before dinner. I finished eating at 6:15 and left for the theater. I had tickets to TheaterWorks’ Mark Twain’s River of Song at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts. It’s basically a concert of early American music, around the theme of a trip down the Mississipi, conducted by Mark Twain remembering his riverboat days.

This was not very good, and I left at intermission. There were several problems. The first was that the performers really weren’t very good, either as singers or musicians; just average living room performers, mostly. They played banjo, guitar and fiddle, but at no point did anybody try to solo on an instrument; the kind of musicianship you get in any bluegrass group was absent. With one exception their voices were average to weak; the exception being Valisia LeKae, who has an excellent alto voice and can really act.

Second problem was the staging. This was a small show, just six people sitting or standing around, no dancing,  little movement. If it were presented in a small theater like the Pear or even Lucy Stern in Palo Alto, it might come across better. But the MVCPA stage is enormous, it’s a huge room, and this little group was kind of huddled in the middle. The big stage emphasized how average (and also static) the performances were.

 

Day 324, in-house activities

Tuesday, 10/22/2019

Lots of in-Channing-House activities today. I started with a 9am meeting with Patty. She is a former board member and the person who thought up the Heritage Circle, a separate fund, managed by the CH board, that acts as a granting agency to fund projects suggested by residents. The Heritage Circle has funded things like upgrades to the library, a program of day-trips to various attractions, and such. They solicit funds from members.

I started thinking about the Heritage Circle because it is also time to donate to the Appreciation Fund. That’s another thing entirely. There is absolutely no personal tipping allowed from residents to staff. However, residents subscribe to the Appreciation Fund annually, the value of which is equally divided across all staff, so like a year-end bonus. I made out a check to that for $500, because I’ve only been here half a year. For a full year, I expect to give $1000, which at ~$3/day seems little enough for the cheerful service I get in the dining room, from the front desk, and from the facilities guys.

But that brought the Heritage Fund to mind, so I asked Patty about that, thinking she would just tell me how to make out a check, but instead she wanted to meet and explain about the fund, how it is run, what it does. Which she did. So I wrote a check and now am a member of the Heritage Circle.

At 11am, tickets for Eric Johnson at SFJazz went on sale, and I bought one. Then I did some actual writing, yay. First was to write a detailed email to the bulletin board, telling MacOS users how to avoid the automatic upgrade to 10.15 “Catalina”. The internet’s opinion is that it has several annoying bugs and one should wait for the .1 or .2 release; plus also, it is the threatened future release under which all 32-bit apps will no longer run.

Second, I wrote a couple of key scenes for my novel. Back on Sunday, sitting in the classical music concert that I went to as a result of forgetting about the Boogie Woogie one, anyway, sitting there I was pummeling my brain trying to think of the phrase I wanted. And I did. Think up how the people in my future would phrase the idea that all genetically modified organisms must have some crippling flaw so they can’t spread into the environment. Since this is like a fundamental rule of that society (the violation of which is the main plot device), they would not have some labored way of saying it; they’d have a short phrase. And I finally thought it up: “All new things must have a lack.” That’s the snappy sound-bite they teach kids, like “Do unto others…” in our world.

Knowing that, I could write one scene where that gets said, and start another where it will get expounded and expanded on. Painless exposition.

Three PM brought the monthly Tech Squad meeting. My MacOS email was appreciated. Some other issues were discussed.

At 5:30 I met with Mary Ann who had put in a tech squad call about her comcast DVR on Monday, a call which had been assigned to me. We spent an hour, almost, going over all the features of the remote and the various DVR menus, and she gained a lot of confidence in using the device. Hopefully she will remember the simple two-step process that gets you to a reboot of the DVR, in case it gets wedged the way she described on Monday.

 

Day 323, long busy day

Monday, 10/21/2019

Started the day with a run, wearing a light jacket which I really didn’t need, but at least, I did remember. Then off to FOPAL where I processed four boxes of computer books, and did a little sorting.

From there I drove to the Alpine Inn to meet Scott and Denny for lunch. Google maps had pointed out to me a route I wouldn’t have thought of, but which worked great. FOPAL is just off Charleston road, which turns into Arastradero, which meanders into the hills and ends up exactly at the Alpine Inn. Parts of that I had bicycled many times, but I just didn’t think of it in terms of a car route.

Well, come to find out Alpine Inn isn’t open on Mondays! So we adjourned to a restaurant in Ladera shopping center where we chatted for about 2 hours? A long time. Well, Denny chatted. I had not seen him since, roughly, 1979. He has had an interesting life (in both the real and sarcastic senses of the word), has many stories, which he tells well.

Back at CH I didn’t even have time for a nap before it was time for chorus practice. I am still not persuaded I have anything to offer there, but Mary the leader and organizer is very persuasive, positive and encouraging, really a model of a group leader. I’ll keep attending for now.

Out of that, I had only a few minutes before it was time to grab my hat and head out for the evening. As I planned out in detail the day before: I walked to the Palo Alto train station and caught the southbound 5:56, which makes only one stop before reaching Diridon station in San Jose. Walked out of the station and caught a Lyft across to South 1st, where I had a delicious burger and shake at Johnny Rocket’s.

This was a sniffly emotional nostalgia trip, really. For several years before it died, we had season tickets to San Jose Repertory Theater. Marian and I would drive down, park at a garage on 4th street, walk past the theater to Johnny Rocket’s for indulgent burgers and shakes, then walk back to the Hammer Theater for the play. So I was recapping old haunts.

The event this time was the dance troup Momix, which specializes in using props, costumes, and lighting effects — along with spectacular dance and gymnastic skills — to create rather jaw-dropping routines. This video has samples of some, including several that I saw this night. It was good stuff.

I had worked out that if the show let out by 9:15 I would be able to Lyft back to the train and catch one back to Palo Alto, but if later than that, I’d just Lyft all the way home. It was, and I did.

 

Day 322, senior moments

Sunday, 10/20/2019

Had a pleasant coffee at Verve. Did a bit of reading, and then, on the general principle of GTFO of the house, decided to drive to the City and walk around some bit of Golden Gate Park and maybe take a picture or two. Took the camera and went.

Note that at no point did I consult my Google calendar. I just assumed this Sunday was unscheduled, as usual.

On the way into the city I missed a turn onto Sunset Blvd and in reversing course, noticed a skinny green patch on the GPS map and decided to investigate. It turned out to be Pine Lake Park, a westerly extension of Stern Grove. It’s a deep, steep ravine in the middle of the city, with a little lake at the bottom. I had no idea it was there. Lots of people playing with their dogs.

On to GGP. It was now nearly 1pm, which is of course the absolute worst time to try to visit the park on a Sunday. Every legal parking space on the park roads was taken. I stopped by a lake with a nice reflection of yellow leaves and took pictures of mallards. I found a spot near Stow Lake (which should really be called Stow Giant Bowl of Algae Soup) and walked around a bit. Then headed home via Skyline drive and 280.

Back to C.H. in comfortable time for a 4pm concert of classical piano music. I was waiting for that to start when I happened to open the calendar app to check on tomorrow and realized, with a nasty shock, that 4pm was exactly when the Boogie Woogie Piano fest was starting at SF Jazz. I had a ticket for that! I ought to have left for the City to attend that, around 2pm.

I really feel bad about this, for wasting the ticket money, for missing an event I had really wanted to attend, and in general for being such a lame doofus as not to check my calendar a day ahead.

There’s a lot happening tomorrow, and I spent some time planning the logistics for that.

 

Day 321, real estate, mostly FOPAL

I didn’t mention on Thursday and Friday about real estate worries. Early in the week I got a property tax bill from Santa Clara County for the 2340 Tasso house. Not sure what to do with that. I used the SCC.gov website to inquire: hey guys, I sold this property 27 August and the escrow included a prorated tax payment, what up? They replied that yes, they would send out a new bill to the new owners “in November”. Since the bill is delinquent early in December, I worried on behalf of the new owners, so I wrote to Chuck.

He replied saying I didn’t need to do anything, they’d be fine; but oh by the way, he was getting phone calls from Davey Tree service about an unpaid bill. Eh? I knew I had the invoice for that in my 2340 Sale folder; surely I’d paid it. I look for that amount in the online statements for my two checking accounts. Nope! So I called Davey. Nice phone lady agreed, nope, that had never been paid. Apologized, and mailed a check that day, Friday I think.

Saturday, 10/19/2019

For the first time in maybe years, I slept past 7am. What up, body? Had breakfast in the dining room, and about 9am went to FOPAL, figuring by now there would be some books backed up for the computer section. Indeed there were, six boxes. But also, when I got there, I realized that I had forgotten to do the post-sale inventory. That’s where I go through all the unsold books still on the shelf, and decide for each, whether to leave the price as-is for another month, lower the price, or give up and consign the book to the Bargain Room. I could have done a post-sale count as well, but since my stand-in had not done a pre-sale count, there’d have been no point. Anyway that takes an hour. Then culling the waiting boxes, and pricing and shelving the keepers, takes another two hours, then I did an hour of sorting, before coming home with a glow of accomplishment.

Later in the day I spent an hour implementing an idea I’d had last week. Each time a donor comes in to drop off books, they may or may not request a receipt, and they may or may not ask about sale dates in which case we give them a bookmark with sale dates on it. But they never get anything that would encourage them to volunteer. FOPAL runs on volunteers and always needs more; and that point of contact it seems to me, is the ideal time to try to recruit. So I made up a one-page flier headed “What happens to my books now,” outlining the process, with nice pictures, emphasizing the scope (40,000 books a month! $125,000 a year to the library!) and that it’s all done by volunteers, and you could be one, too!

I thought it was pretty good, so I sent it off to Janette (the one paid staff person who runs the whole zoo). We’ll see if she likes it.