Category: Uncategorized

Day 320, non-docent, pictures, eyelid news

Friday, 10/18/2019

I started the day with a run, for the third time getting out the front door and saying, “shit, it’s cold out here, why didn’t I wear a sweatshirt?” Whatever. Showered and shaved and put on my red docent shirt because today’s activity was to be a noon tour, a group of junior college students. I’d been thinking about this tour for days, wondering how to slant my pitch to people all of whom were born, probably, in this century. Well, no need to worry; at 9:30am I got an email from the museum, the group had canceled.

I did some reading. For a guy who says he does all his reading on Kindle, I seem to have a bunch of paper volumes around, but all free. The other day Jean handed me a copy of Born to Run by Christopher McDougall, about the Tehumara(?) people of Mexico who supposedly have superhuman running ability. I have two books I snatched from FOPAL while sorting. I’m 2/3 of the way through Just for Fun, Linus Torvald’s biography. And Wednesday I glommed onto a very fresh copy of Randall Munroe’s (creator of XKCD) book, What If? Serious answers to absurd hypothetical questions. Then yesterday, Toni had just received back from Greta, a set of old SF paperbacks by Melisa Michaels she had loaned, and I was intrigued so I borrowed them. All fun books, and I spent a couple of hours reading chapters from each.

Then I sat down for three hours of digital image work. During the Greek trip I had uploaded all my iPhone pictures to Smugmug. Now I downloaded them all to my permanent picture repository on the big Mac. I reviewed them all, and did minor editing: straightening horizons, cropping for better composition, occasionally a little bit of color correction. In the course of this I re-learned, or re-confirmed that the iPhone camera, while remarkably good at its default focal length, absolutely sucks when you zoom in more than a tiny bit. One of my favorite shots, morning sunlight making the Parthenon pillars glow, is just pixelated crap when you make it full screen. I had zoomed in maybe 50% to take it. Well, it was my considered choice not to carry my real camera; so you get what you get. Then I re-uploaded the edited versions to SmugMug.

At supper time I sat at an open table and was joined by four people I have talked to before, all nice, pleasant talk. When I returned to my room I noticed I had a voice mail. I had had a call from a 321- prefix and declined it, assuming it was a robocall. Well, not so. It was my opthalmic surgeon with the report on my eye thing. But she’d left a voice mail with the news that,

  • It was a basal cell carcinoma;
  • These are very common, slow-growing, and usually don’t come back if they are fully removed;
  • The pathologist reported that she had gotten a complete rim of normal tissue, so she believes it was fully removed;
  • I am to see her again in 3 months, 6 months, and 6 months again, just to make sure.

So that’s that, for now. The removal site, by the way, has not caused me any discomfort, just a round scab that is getting smaller, I think, already. Certainly healing nicely.

 

 

 

 

 

Day 318, tech squad, hair, docent, FOPAL

Wednesday, 10/16/2019

First thing was to be an appointment for a haircut at 9am. But at 7am I found an email from last night asking me to look into somebody’s problem with their Comcast TV; they weren’t able to watch the debate because inexplicably their TV had decided it wasn’t authorized for CNN, which is in our building’s contract basic package.

I passed this off to Craig, who said he had seen that problem. Then went and got my hair done, and then down to the museum to lead some Apple employees on a tour. Here I tried something new, that I’d been thinking about doing. I explained I would give them a 45-minute survey of the major technical developments,  along with pointing out the different galleries, and then they would be free to explore on their own, except that if they wanted, I would lead them back to look at some specific objects that I like.

The idea was I could include more stuff than the usual “keep it under an hour” tour allows. I’d do a cut-down version of my usual survey, then stroll back to look at the Xerox Alto, the Apollo Guidance Computer, maybe the SAGE system. Great idea, and I may try it again, but this time it definitely didn’t work. They all opted for independent exploration (or more likely, a quick exit) and nobody followed me as I headed back.

Something ridiculous also happened. I had mixed up a 500-calorie meal replacement shake and put it in an insulated shaker cup, which I’d never used before. The plan was to have it for lunch after the tour. But when I parked at the museum I discovered that I had not properly sealed the new shaker top, and it had emptied itself onto the passenger seat, out of sight because it was covered by my shopping bag of museum stuff. About 12 ounces of high-protein drink, half still on the leather seat, the other half down under it on the carpet.

I went across the street to the 7-11 and bought a roll of paper towels and some wipes, and got a lot of it up. Fortunately it was “pumpkin spice” flavor and now the car has a delicate cinnamon aroma. But I suspect soon I will be paying somebody to steam clean my carpets.

In the afternoon I went to my usual 2-4pm sorting job at FOPAL, which makes three times this week. Not what I want to do on a regular basis.

 

Day 317, what happened?

Tuesday, 10/15/2019

First time I’ve missed a post by this far, writing Tuesday’s entry almost 24 hours after I went to bed Tuesday night. What did I do this day? I spent a couple of hours at FOPAL sorting. I attended a free organ concert at the nearby church. Something else. Not sure what.

Oh, right, I spent half an hour at the keyboard trying very hard to solve a problem with my novel. Writing fiction is hard, have I mentioned? Not going into it now. But the people in the story, and the readers, need to know some important facts. There’s one point in the plot sequence where that info can be expounded. How to set up that scene, and how does this important knowledge get expressed? They’d have some kind of catch-phrase or sound-byte way of saying this important principle, what is it?

In the evening was the presentation of Carousel, the movie version. It had been given a big buildup by the guy who presents this series. I found it stiff and not engaging at all. Sure, “If I Loved You” is a wonderful song, sung as a musical performance. But for two people to be singing it back and forth to each other… nunh unh. Can’t get into it. I left, and I noticed I wasn’t the only one.

 

Day 316, eyelid, FOPAL

Monday, 10/14/2019

Started with a run, and was once more surprised by the chill. Next time I must try to remember to put on a sweatshirt. At 9:30 I headed out for my appointment with an opthalmic surgeon to have the “lesion” (as my appointment referral calls it) on my eyelid biopsied. The surgeon was a charming woman who looked at the 3mm white bump on my eyelid and explained all the different things it might be: a cyst, an unpigmented mole, or a basal cell carcinoma. If it is the latter, I don’t need to worry about metastases, basal cell tumors don’t metastasize, which is a bit of a relief.

She recommended removing it today. She would try to remove a 1mm margin of tissue around it, so if it proves to be malignant, the pathologist may report that it has been completely removed. If it is malignant and not fully surrounded by normal flesh, there will be further work to excise the remainder.

The procedure was about as minor as surgery can be. I laid back in a chair; she anesthetized my eyelid (“little pinch now”), and there was a little pressure as she fiddled around for a couple of minutes, and that was it. I’m left with a little divot in my eyelid.

eye_divot
This was not an easy photo to take! Can you figure out how I got this “selfie”?

She cautioned me that the anesthetic would wear off in an hour and I might have some pain. I didn’t. She said it might bleed, but it didn’t. I have a tube of erythromycin to dab on twice daily. That’s it for care; “eyelids heal really quickly”.

This was my first “procedure” as a bachelor. The familiar details, like waiting in the waiting room, being given a sheaf of paper with post-procedure instructions, and so on, brought back all the many, many exams and procedures that Marian went through last year. It wasn’t comfortable to remember those.

I came back to CH for lunch, then went to FOPAL. To my surprise, there were no boxes of books stacked by the computer section, as there normally are on the Monday after a sale weekend. So instead of culling and pricing, I just sorted for three hours. During that time we took delivery of a donation from a recently-deceased Stanford professor: forty boxes of books. I may go do some more sorting later in the week.

 

 

Day 315, walk, tech call, tv

Sunday, 10/13/2019

Started with the usual crossword puzzle and coffee at Mme. Collette’s. Then, it only being 9am I thought I would go for a walk around the Dish. That early on a Sunday, surely there would be parking up there, right? Nunh-unh, all the local walkers had already filled up the limited parking by the trail entrance. Plan B, I went down to the Baylands and did a walk there. There were lots of water-birds, including three different pods of white pelicans. Lots of ducks. Marian used to like to use her binoculars and pick out the different species of duck; and she doted on the white pelicans. I didn’t have binoculars with me, so I couldn’t tell a shoveler from a mallard. Actually I think I could have recognized the mallards, and there weren’t any.

I went the three miles from Byxbee park around to the foot of San Antonio road, but rather than close the loop with two miles on pavement, I just called a Lyft to get back to the parking lot where I’d left the car. Back at CH I had a snack lunch in my room and a nap; then went out again. First to FOPAL where the sale weekend was winding down.

Then down to sister-in-law Jean’s to help her with a software problem. She uses the Photos app to manage her huge collection of images, and she had somehow lost a bunch of them. I personally detest the Photos app because it takes possession of your images and stores them in its own proprietary “Library” files. Contrast that to comparable image managers like Adobe Bridge or Lightroom, which leave the images safe in the hands of the OS’s file system, each image a file that you can copy, back up, open with another app, etc. Those managers have their own catalogs, but they don’t hide the images in massive opaque globs where the only access to the image is through Photos itself.

But there it was: Jean had a Library of hundreds images taken in her work in the local diocese and sometime in the past month, most of the images in it had disappeared. Photos helpfully displayed the image names still, but only little blank rectangles to show they weren’t there.

Fortunately when I helped her set up her system, back in 2015 after her husband died, I set up a backup drive for use by the Mac’s Time Machine backup system. So now we just started the cool “Time Machine” effect and went back a week and restored that Library, all 27GB of it. One file, 27 gigabytes, contents only accessible through Photos. Unfortunately that version was still missing the images. So we restored a copy from two weeks back. Nope. Each restore cycle taking about 10 minutes for Time Machine to copy the file and then Photos to “recover” its catalog data, whatever that meant. Finally went back a month, and that version, when restored, was 51GB. That’s promising, we said; and when Photos had finished munging it, yes, there were all her pictures up through that backup date. She hadn’t lost a lot of work. So that made me a hero, yay me. I had gone into this assuming it was likely user error (e.g. she meant to delete one picture but accidentally selected a bunch of them), but now I think it equally likely that Photos has a bug where its database gets corrupted. Well.

Back home again, I had a nice supper sitting with Craig, Diane and Patti. Then watched more TV. Before heading off to Greece I had set up the DVR to record three new series that sounded good. One was Carol’s Second Act, Patricia Heaton as an older woman trying to have a second career as an intern. I gave up on this halfway through the second episode. The writing is pretty bad and the jokes are labored.

One was Stumptown, and this I’m kind of enjoying after two episodes. It’s basically a noir detective show, could be from the pen of Raymond Chandler or Mickey Spillane, except that the broke detective with the complicated past, the alcohol problem, and the propensity for getting beaten up, is a handsome woman, and instead of New York or L.A. the setting is Portland, Oregon.

Third is In a Man’s World, where women, with the help of Hollywood makeup artists, go undercover as men, to prove that they were unfairly held back. The first episode was entertaining, although it’s not clear what Emily proves, in the end.

Plus, a new season of Mom has started, and a new season of Bitchin’ Rides, and I have at least three eps of Austin City Limits, and … life is rich, I guess.

 

Day 314, quiet Saturday

Saturday, 10/12/2019

I spent a lot of screen hours this day, frittering away time on one or the other computer for various reasons. Around noon I went to FOPAL because it is sale weekend, and I like to tidy up the computer section, which buyers always make a mess of.

From there I meandered down to Best Buy and purchased a new sound bar system, a Polk Audio mini. Unlike the previous bar, which was cumbersomely large and hard to fit onto my media cabinet, this has a lunch-box-size midrange unit that sits neatly under the TV, and a separate small woofer. It sounds better than the old one, and I succeeded in pairing it with the XFinity remote so I can mute or change the volume from the one controller.

In the evening I went to a concert at Menlo-Atherton High. Not a high school concert, but a jazz concert that I learned about from a post on the house bulletin board, a recreation of Charley Parker’s “Bird With Strings” concerts of the 1940s. It could have been good but I was instantly put off by the sound quality. I don’t know if it was the room, the amplification, or a combination of the two, but all high notes were rough and discordant to my ears, really unpleasant. When the violins hit a crescendo it was discordant and really made me wince. I left at the intermission.

 

Day 313, phone fix, skin check

Friday, 10/11/2019

Went for a run, the first in about 3 weeks. First impression out the door: whoa, fall is here! The temperature was around 60º but felt quite chilly in my shorts and t-shirt. Back to the room for a warm shower.

Headed out in the car in time to catch the iPhone fixer when he opened at 10. There are several hole-in-the-wall iPhone places nearby, Smart Repair is close by, on University Ave, but I have been going to Fast Repair, on El Camino near California Ave. I was there earlier this year to get the battery replaced. This time I noticed his shop now has signs, “Apple Authorized Repairs.” I’d heard that Apple had loosened its former policies about third-party repairers. Anyway, a new front glass for my iPhone 7 costs $160.

Leaving the phone, I went to Town and Country and parked conveniently close to PAMF, where at 11am I was due for a dermatology skin check. I passed the time at Peet’s, then walked to the derm. dept. While waiting to be called I got the email from Fast Repair that the phone was ready.

My skin is mostly fine, one little thing to freeze on the tip of my ear, but there’s a little node on my left upper eyelid–to me it looks like a whitehead, maybe an infected lash?–but the doctor wanted it biopsied, and that has to be done by an opthalmic surgeon. So he referred me for that, and later in the day I got a call and made an appointment for that on Monday.

Back home, after parking the car, I heard another resident trying to start her car from what sounded obviously like a near-dead battery. Been there, done that, just yesterday. I talked her through what she’d have to do. Maybe I should carry jumper cables? I could have done a jump start, instead of referring her to AAA. Nah, when is that going to happen again?

In the afternoon was the monthly TGIF party on the 11th floor, this time sponsored by the 7th floor. They had a wine tasting and lots of snacks. I chatted with a couple of people, ate a lot of snacks, and didn’t feel like supper. So afterward I watched a whole lot of backed-up TV, determined to stay up past 11 so as to get my sleep schedule back to normal.

 

 

Day 312, and reviewing the trip

So, how was your trip, Dave? Well, not too bad all told. Betty and Jerry, neighbors at Channing House who took either the same or a similar tour last year, raved about it. Me? Well… I’m glad I went, especially glad to have seen Santorini and Crete. Santorini is spectacular to look at, although I would certainly not want to live there, or spend another day there for that matter. Crete was a surprise, a really attractive and scenic countryside, pleasant towns, and a functioning economy–as opposed to an economy based 90% on hotels and tourist shops, as at Santorini or the other islands. The other islands, Mykonos, Paros, Delos, are, frankly, bleak, windy deserts. Their villages are photogenic for sure, but only a hopeless romantic would dream of living in one.

Just for the record, according to the Health app in the phone, I walked an average of 4.3 miles per day, 51.4 miles total in 12 days. All the Road Scholar systems worked well; I can’t imagine a more competent, patient, charming group leader than Anastasia; and the other members were compatible and friendly.

I didn’t enjoy seeing the ancient ruins as much as I had anticipated. It’s interesting to think about people 3500 years ago (1500BCE, at Knossos and Phaistos, even earlier on Delos) building elaborate homes and having elaborate trading systems and rich religious beliefs. But on the spot, there’s just waist-high stone walls and a few fallen columns, and it’s hard to feel the history.

So how did it feel, traveling alone?

This was my first voyage as a lone bachelor. I can only think of three times I traveled alone, after I was married. In 1991 I attended Clarion West, an intensive residential writers workshop, hoping to find that I could write science fiction. I drove alone in our camper van to Seattle and lived in a dorm at Seattle University for—was it really six weeks? At the end Marian flew up to join me, and from there we went on a couple of weeks tour into Wyoming and the Tetons.

The other times were bike tours. I signed up for a ten-day, supported bike tour of Oregon. We drove the van to Corvallis for the start, then Marian went to a motel on the coast while I rode with the group, camping each night. A few years later I tried to do an unsupported solo bike tour around the wine country. Four days in I strained my knee and had to call Marian to come fetch me.

Those are the only times I remember being separated from her, phoning in every other night or so. All my other travels have been as half of a couple. The common theme is that these three were challenges I set for myself, really to test myself: could I become a fiction writer? could I handle an extended bike ride, with or without support? Marian supported me in these, but wasn’t interested in taking part herself.

Anyway, here I was this month, alone on another tour. I suppose it was again a challenge, to see if it would be enjoyable, or even tolerable, to travel alone.

Did I miss Marian, or miss having a travel companion in general? An emphatic yes to both. Several times I caught myself imagining sharing the experience with her, and getting emotional.

Also (and this was the big lesson I took away from that solo bike tour as well) having new experiences (good or bad) is richer, more real, more significant and memorable, when you share the experience with someone else. Being part of a tour group is a help. At meals we could talk about the wacky traffic in the narrow village streets, or the fact that Greek hotels, even the upscale ones, don’t supply washcloths. Sharing such observations validates them and resolves one’s feelings about them. This was an emotional support that Marian and I gave each other, minute by minute, through hundreds of travel days. Being in a group of friendly strangers was not the same as that, but better than being alone. A journal (i.e. this blog) is another partial substitute for a companion.

But also, as I realized a few days in, Marian’n’Dave was a bolder, more adventurous traveler than Dave is alone. Partly that was because Marian was more disciplined than I about traveling. She was on a trip, and she would by god make the most of it; where I am shamefully willing to back away from the effort to go out and explore this town, or attend that concert, or go find a meal in a strange restaurant. I have to fight the tendency to just wimp out and go sit in the hotel room.

Partly, it was that a couple can encourage each other, spot possibilities and explore trade-offs of different plans, more efficiently than a single person can do. Dave’n’Marian were quite a bit smarter, more flexible, and more observant traveler than Dave alone is.

Thursday, 10/10/2019

I slept for 10 hours, from 6:30pm to 4:30am. Then I got up, made coffee, and spent two hours cleaning up the accumulation of papers on my desk, and another hour reading the paper, before time for breakfast downstairs.

I had debated whether to go and work at Yosemite today as scheduled, but I felt dandy at 9am so I headed down to the garage… and found that I had left the front door of the car ajar, and the battery was dead. Now what? I checked with the front desk and no, Facilities doesn’t have any way to boost your car; call triple-A. Which I did. The truck arrived around 10. It was too big to fit down the ramp to the garage, but no problem, they had a portable booster pack. I escorted them through the front door and down the many basement hallways to the garage. In five minutes the car was running.

So off to Yosemite for a day’s work. The 1401 restoration crew were all there, scanning old ALDs (logic diagrams) for use in maintenance.

On return I wrote up this blog. After supper I shall for the first time in two-plus weeks, turn on the TV and see what has been recorded in my absence.

 

Day 311, returning (updated)

Wednesday, 10/9/2019

I was awake ahead of my alarm set for 2:30am. As I had planned the night before, all I had to do was do a quick wash and hair brush, put on my clothes, zip the bag, and out the door. Then wait around in the lobby for the van to arrive. There were nine of us all told, taking a 3am van to the airport for 6am flights.

The flight to Amsterdam was nominal, except that although the plane mated to a jetway in Amsterdam, we weren’t allowed to use the gate, but rather went down outside stairs to a bus to be transferred to another part of the airport. This was still in the security zone, at least, but I did have to go through an automated “passport control” point where my passport was scanned and my face photographed by a machine.

The SFO flight was already boarding when I finally reached that gate. For this long flight I had paid an extra $60 for an upgraded seat. Not business class, I forget what they called it, “just slightly more leg room and further forward than the real economy” class. This was money well spent for a 9-hour flight. Nevertheless sitting in one seat for nine hours is not fun. The KLM plane was a good old 747, with the upstairs lounge and all. Its in-flight entertainment system was notably less sophisticated than the Airbus I flew from JFK to Athens. The screen was VGA quality at best and washed out by light from the windows. When I brought up one of its games, the splash screen said “copyright 2005”. Well, carp carp carp; the flight was smooth and landed on schedule.

I felt really healthy striding through SFO getting to the Lyft pickup point. Why not, it was just coming up on 9pm Athens time. That faded through the afternoon until I was very ready for bed after a quick supper at 6, and turned in.