Day 280, coffee, drawers, show

Sunday, 9/9/2019

Harriet had texted suggesting coffee, and we met at 8:30 at the Midtown coffee shop. Nice lengthy chat.

Back at C.H. I pondered what to do for the next couple of hours, and decided to execute the plan to varnish the bathroom drawers. I took them to the basement workshop, did the sanding, put on a coat of varathane.

Back in my room, I noticed it was past 11:30 and about time for Dennis to arrive for our outing, and exactly at that moment my phone rang. Together we drove up to Foster City for lunch at BJ’s Brew Pub, and from there to the Hillbarn Theater for Anything Goes.

This was an excellent production. I totally fell in love with the lead actress, Caitlin McGinty playing Reno Sweeney. She apparently starred in Beach Blanket Babylon for three years and is now a realtor(!) but she nailed this performance. Oddly I can’t find a personal web presence for her. Neither actresses nor realtors are usually shy about having their own page.

In the evening I watched Guardians of the Galaxy on Comcast on-demand. I keep seeing references to this and thought I should really see it. I remember a year or so ago, I started to watch it on TV and when the blue-skin villain came on ranting about destroying civilizations, I didn’t see it as over-the-top meta-humor (which apparently some do) but as just tone-deaf boring use of a worn-out trope by bad screenwriters; and turned it off ten minutes in.

This time I stuck with it. It has some charm but really it is not good SF. And the special effects space battles are way too long and confusing to watch. Who’s who and which way are they shooting? And they take a cheap way out of one of the only real emotional conflicts, the battle between the green sister and the blue sister. That should have been resolved in some constructive way. (For that matter, why is only one of the daughters of a blue-skin villain blue? The mother of the green-skin one has some ‘splainin’ to do, I think.)

I’d give the flick a C+ at best.

Day 279, docent, quiet

Saturday, 9/7/2019

Right, of course, do the blog post next day and… what did I do yesterday? Well, I did lead a tour, the 12oclock one, and had about 30 people to start, 25 or so stuck around to the end. In the morning I called Dennis and arranged our schedule for tomorrow. Afternoon? Read some from my Bridge Defense book, read some from the Lisp book. I remember that at supper, I was disappointed with the entree. The menu said “scallops in polenta” and I was picturing a couple of seared scallops on a nice bed of polenta, but the reality was more of a stew, small scallops stirred in with mush.

I settled in to the new room, which is perfectly adequate. One minor point of annoyance is the drawers in the bathroom vanity cabinet. They are originals, similar in make to the ones I started varnishing in #621. I’ve given up on that project for #621; I’m determined that in February or so, after I’ve moved back, I’ll have all the closets professionally rebuilt. But for here in #435, maybe I’ll sand and varnish these ugly little drawers. I’ll see the top one daily; it’s where I store my hairbrush and comb etc, and I open it at least once a day. The unfinished interior has been stained, and has the outline, the ghost as it were, of a pair of scissors that were put in wet and stained the wood.

Day 278, move, museum, echo

Friday, 9/6/2019

The day I’ve been anticipating almost since moving in 10 weeks ago has arrived. Angela, at the head of a five-person crew from Gentle Transitions, arrived on the dot of 8am. I showed them about the computer desk and we chatted about a few other things. I grabbed the shopping bag in which I had my day’s necessities, and we went off to a guest room on the first floor, where she took my #621 key (little does she know that I have another one stashed in my desk mwahaha), gave me a brown-bag snack pack, and left me to pass the day.

I putzed around reading until 11ish, then went off to the Stanford campus where two exhibits had just opened. One was works by Jim Campbell at the Anderson gallery. Campbell uses LEDs to make moving images. He hides the LEDs inside plastic beads or behind little metal shades, and animates them with (I presume) a microcomputer to make shifting abstract color blurs or moving images. The one I liked best was this very large one.

It’s large, at least 10 by 10 by 6 feet, with the LEDs in a cloud of little plastic balls, so it strongly suggests looking up through a depth of water, and the swimming forms pass across it at random times and directions.

Next door at the Cantor a chummy volunteer docent at the door talked me into joining the museum. I am now a member and got a thick book about Rodin as a prize. I had come to see an exhibit of the sketch books of Richard Diebenkorn. It turned out to be a very small exhibit, one painting and an interactive video table on which you could page through about 20 pages of sketchbooks. I’m afraid I just don’t get Diebenkorn. “And this is good… why?” was my mental refrain. Oh well.

I had lunch in the nice Cantor cafeteria, benefiting from my 10% member discount, yay. Then back to my ~~purgatorio~~ guest room to kill another hour and a half until it was time to go to PAMF and have a stress echo. I had last done one of these in 2007, it turned out. One walks on a treadmill at increasing speeds and slopes, while wired to the max for ECGs. Then when you reach your personal “Very Hard” effort level, which I did just into the fourth level, you lie down quickly and the echo tech takes pictures of your heart action. The only uncomfortable parts were, (a), patches of my chest hair had to be shaved to get good wire adhesion and (b), you have to “take a deep breath and hold” several times when you are panting from your run. But the two techs, one on the echo and one managing the treadmill, were both charming, and in general I think I aced the test.

Now a couple more hours of waiting and finally, Angela appeared to take me to my new room. The movers had done a really excellent job. They had gotten everything, every little object, and put it right back where it was, or as near as it could be given a slightly different room layout. All my plants were on the balcony, and they’d noticed the little sender for my indoor/outdoor thermometer. My Comcast modem and DVR and TV were all set up and working. They’d booted up my iMac and done a test print on my printer. I had forgotten to put away my coffee cup, and left it on the coffee table when I walked out in the morning. The cup, now washed clean, was in the same place on the coffee table in the new room. To the greatest extent possible they made the transition to a new room as seamless as it could be. Really nice job, folks.

Day 277, Shustek, move prep

Thursday, 9/5/2019

Today I did a set of exercises, then had a hearty breakfast here, and headed out to Shustek for a day of cataloging.

On return I did a few little chores to prep for tomorrow’s move. At 8am tomorrow, Angela The Move Boss comes with the moving crew. Per her email, I get 15 minutes to give the movers any last minute instructions. Then I must Go Away for the day. I will have the use of one of the guest apartments if I want it. (Most evacuees spend the night in a guest apartment, and go to their new quarters next day. Because my possessions are relatively few, Angela plans to do my move in one day.)

In the evening she will meet me at my new digs, #435, and exchange keys with me. I should find everything from #621 properly arranged in the new space.

The only special instructions I want to give the movers is on how to move my L-shaped computer desk. It needs to be split, so the two halves are moved independently. If they try to move it as a unit — well, per the Amazon reviews, it won’t stand up to the torque. Like most furniture these days, it is assembled with bolts threading into metal inserts that are pressed into the vinyl-clad chipboard. The bolts that hold the pie-shaped corner piece will pull out under stress. So the movers have to unfasten eight hex-head bolts to separate the two halves. It shouldn’t be beyond them, but just to make sure, I put bits of green masking tape on the underside and drew arrows pointing to the heads of the 8 bolts. And taped the hex wrench to the top.

With the mail today came my zero-g deck chair, which took only a couple of minutes to set up and should do well.

I ate dinner alone, reading email on my phone. I just felt like that.

Day 276, car, FOPAL, dinner

Wednesday, 9/4/2019

First job this morning was to get the car to Toyota for service by 8. In fact, was a bit early. I wanted a routine minor service, plus balancing the tires in hopes of curing a vibration at freeway speeds, plus an alignment check because for months I’ve been noticing a slight pull to the right.

I dropped off the car; the service writer said “should be ready by lunchtime”. I walked the half-mile back to the shopping center and had a nice nosh at Peet’s coffee. Then walked across the parking lot to FOPAL. Only two boxes of computer books to cull and price, and yet again I found a high-value book, one whose used prices ran from $45 to $85. That’s always fun.

Then I settled in to sort books until Toyota would call me. This is always satisfying work, making order out of chaos. When I came in there were heaps of children’s toys and the sort boxes for the children’s department were overflowing. I tidied those and moved them to the back table for transport to the children’s department which is in another building.

There were piles of boxes of donated books on the front porch (Why do people ignore where it says “donations accepted 2-4pm every day”, and just stack the books by the door? We welcome the donations, but this is really kind of rude.) and a line of them on the table and a row of shopping bags under the table. I was an hour into it and had just gotten those on and under the table cleared when the “pickup” volunteer arrived. He has a literal pickup truck that he uses to go out and collect large donations from people who can’t come in. In this case his truck had 20 boxes of books, which filled up all the empty spaces in the sorting room.

I kept plugging along, got the boxes in off the front porch, sorted them, sorted some more boxes from the Mountain in the Middle, and it was noon. Finally it was 1pm and I called Toyota. “Looks like it’s ready to go” says the perky lady in the service department. Yeah, thanks for calling me like you said you would. Anyway, now I walked back to Peet’s because I had forgotten I needed to buy coffee for myself, and then back to Toyota, and home.

They had found some misalignment of the right rear wheel, which surprised me, but whatever they did had indeed fixed the pull to the right. It now tracks straight without needing light pressure on the wheel. That’s excellent. They found one wheel 20 grams out of balance. Tomorrow I will drive to Shustek and will find out, traffic permitting, if the vibration at 70mph is gone.

I had been invited to supper by Susan and Harry. They also asked Craig and Diane and we had a nice meal, talking until the servers were closing the dining room doors and pointedly cleaning up around us.

Day 275, many small doings

Tuesday, 9/3/2019

First thing, went for a run. All normal. On return I tidied up then sat down to organize the info about the Tasso street sale. Made a little spreadsheet showing the gross sale price and all the things that could be charged against it, commissions, taxes, and all the various contractors who were employed in preparing it for sale. Bottom line, it appears the net proceeds are just a shade under the appraised value as of December 2018. So there probably won’t be any capital gains charged; maybe a bit of a capital loss.

I put an hour into Zooniverse. Then Craig called; the tech squad had a request for help and he wanted me to come along. The caller, Grace, coincidentally lives in the apartment next door to where I’ll be moving at the end of the week. While Craig figured out why her Comcast email wasn’t coming up automatically like it used to, she told me how that next-door apartment was recently fitted with a new toilet, one of the high-efficiency kind that flushes with a great swooshing. Since that bathroom (soon to be my bathroom) backs up to hers, she hears the toilet whenever it is used. Knowing that is going to cramp my style a bit. Whenever I get up in the night to pee, I’ll be maybe waking Grace up. Well, it isn’t essential to flush then. It can wait to the morning.

After that I pursued a couple of items that have been in the back of my mind. One is to get a proper comfy reclining chaise for the deck. Early on I brought back a wicker chair from Cost Plus but it really isn’t comfortable for lounging. Several years back Marian obtained two very comfortable metal chairs for our back yard. Both of us napped in them often. They had deteriorated a bit and I let them go in the sale. Now I wanted one back, but what were they called? I looked at the outdoor furniture on the Pottery Barn and Crate and Barrel sites, but their idea of a “chaise” didn’t look right. Browsing Amazon and finally spotted what looked right. Turns out the key phrase is “zero gravity” chair.

A bit more searching; it appears they are stocked at good old Walmart. Well, not at the Walmart in Mountain View. So back to Amazon and just order one already. It’s only $50 and will be here Thursday.

The other items related to the upcoming trip to Greece. I figure to pack light and do my own laundry, which means, quick drying clothes. I have quick-dry casual pants on the way, but I have in my drawer just two quick-dry briefs. Plus, I’d like to have a USB charger with the Euro style plug, and/or a Euro style adapter into which I could plug a USB charger with US prongs. So I went off to the travel store at Stanford Shopping Center. Success there on a couple of pairs of quick-dry briefs, but they didn’t have the ideal adapter/charger combo that I was sure must exist.

So back to Amazon again and of course, there it was: plugs into a Euro wall socket, offers two US style outlets and two USB ports. So I can charge the phone and plug in the adapter for the Macbook, and also the charger for the camera battery, if I decide to carry my Nikon. All in one small cheap device.

There’s a theme here. Both cases, I knew what I wanted, and went looking for it at local merchants, and didn’t find it, so back to Amazon Prime.

At 6 I went downstairs to join Lily and her sister Helen who had invited me to join them for supper. Also invited, Tammy, who moved in the same day I did, and Michael, the newer new guy who moved in a week later. Also Lynn. Turns out, Michael lost his wife last July, and in December Lynn lost her husband and Tammy, her older brother. So we were the bereavement table, for a while.

Day 274, FOPAL, lunch

Monday, 9/2/2019

Today, Labor Day, the kitchen staff is to get off early. At breakfast they offered a “sack dinner” service where they made a sandwich to order and bagged it with a container of fruit or potato salad, a cookie and chips. I got my bag and put it in the fridge.

I opted not to do a run today, as I still feel vestiges of vertigo especially when I lean over, and I didn’t want to risk a fall. Before I went down to breakfast I did a set of the exercises I collected off the internet a few days ago, focused on core strength. It’s a start, but I need to develop more.

About 9am I went to FOPAL and processed the waiting computer books, then did a couple of hours of sorting. From there I picked up some groceries, mostly my no-calorie drinks, and went to get the car washed. While there, Scott called wondering where I was, or rather, why I wasn’t at the restaurant we’d agreed to meet at. Well, because I messed up the time, and thought it was 1:30 not 1. No harm done. Had a pleasant lunch and chat.

Back at C.H. for a quiet afternoon, although I did spend an hour studying Bridge Defense out of a book I snagged last week from FOPAL. It’s amazing how much you can derive logically from the bidding and the first trick, if you actually count and think. But it’s hard. Thinking, that is.

Then to watch SYTYCD and to bed.

Day 273, Scottish games

Sunday, 9/1/2019

When I had supper with Dennis and Toni (Day 266), Dennis was enthusiastic about the Scottish Games held at the Alameda County Fairgrounds Labor Day weekend. He planned to spend all day there and suggested I join him. So this morning I left about 8am, driving first to the old coffee shop at Midtown. Had an almond croissant still warm from the oven, num! and read the paper. Then drove 35 miles in light Sunday morning traffic to the fairgrounds. Connected with Dennis by cellphone (what ever did we do back then…) and we walked about. Sat for part of one concert by a band that played “bare-knuckle pipe and drums” and part of another concert by a group that did Celtic derived music but with electric instruments and a drum kit. Walked through part of the merchandise areas. Boy if you need something plaid, this was the place.

Dennis likes that we have, through my mother, a sliver of Gaelic descent specifically from the MacNeil of Barra. (Barra is a lump of rock at the ass-end of the Hebrides chain. Note in that Wiki article that the MacNeils themselves emigrated to the New World along with all the evicted crofters.)

Anyway it was now time for events to start in front of the grandstand. Dennis had obtained very nicely placed seats in the stand. We went there to watch the opening ceremonies. Then Dennis went off to spend an hour tasting Scotch. I stayed and watched all the games, the caber tossing and other ways to fling heavy weights around. This went on pretty continuously until 4, when the closing ceremonies started. The main feature of this was to be the massed bands, about 700 musicians mostly bagpipers and drummers, but with a Marine Corps brass band mixed in. They strung it out for an hour of preliminaries before finally massing the bands. I took some cell-phone video but the light was very poor; the bands were partly in the deep shade of the stands and partly in brilliant sunlight.

Anyway after the massed bands played they announced a folk singer at which point I thanked Dennis and departed. Home before 7pm, fairly tired. Vertigo was better today, only present if I leaned over as to pick something up. Hopefully it will be gone soon.

Day 272, docent, vertigo

Saturday, 8/30/2019

When I got up this morning I had light, but definite, vertigo. A few years ago (well, sometime in this century) I had a severe spell of it, barely able to walk while keeping a hand on a wall, nauseated every time I changed posture — it was nasty. It took a week or so to wear off. I don’t welcome it back, even in this mild form. I really only feel it on major changes of posture, especially leaning over or sitting up. Walking is ok.

So I took it easy and was very mindful of my balance while taking a shower. (Some other resident, I saw on the house bulletin board, had fallen in the bathroom and broken a hip.)

The main activity of the day was to lead the noon tour at the Museum. I had a good crowd, 25 or so to start, and kept the attention of most of them to the end. One lady was really on my wavelength, she laughed out loud at every one of my little witticisms, the ones that usually get a smile or no reaction.

In the mail today, the final statement of the escrow. Also the refund from Amy and her staging company for part of the staging fee. Only part, because they did all the planning and loaded their truck before we called off the open house. So I only get back the installation and rental for all the furniture they were going to put in the empty house. I kinda sorta wish we had gone through with the open house because I’d like to have seen what Amy was going to do with it. But on the other hand… no.

Anyway, I have now all the data on the sale and the costs of the sale. Sometime next week I will put together a package on that to give to the tax people next spring. Meantime, the Tasso street house is definitively gone. I was thinking about that, early in the morning before I got up. What exactly is different, versus a month ago? Somehow, even when I had left, I had a mental vector, an internal compass pointing toward that house. Not surprising, having lived there 45 years, that no matter where I was, in the car, in a hotel in some other city, I had a sense of the house “over there”, accessible at need. Now it is unquestionably someone else’s house. I have the mental compass needle but where it points, I would not be welcome. Not a distressing feeling, exactly, but different.

Also in the mail, the final trip information for the upcoming Greek Islands tour, the one that I had to reschedule. And boy am I glad I did. It would have been horribly stressful to depart on that the same day as I’m moving to my temporary apartment. That trip starts with moderately stressful logistics. I’ll have to get a Lyft to SFO around 3am, and take two long flights to get to Athens the next day. Not really looking forward to that, but at least, I can approach it as a single problem, not layered with other concerns.

Day 271, getting stuff done

Friday, 8/29/2019

Wednesday I had found various things niggling at my mind as needing doing so made a to-do list that got longer and longer, so after a run this morning I sat down to-do. First off was the laundry. While that was running I paid two credit card bills, filed some odds and ends on the desk.

Then wrote to Katherine the Insurance Person telling her that (a) my house is gone, you can close out my homeowner’s and earthquake insurance and please how much do I get back? and (b) if it makes a difference on my car insurance, please note that the car is now garaged in a secure gated garage every day; and (c) yes I want renter’s insurance but I don’t think I need coverage for $100,000 of property value as shown in your quote, maybe half that?

Then as I had half-promised, I wrote a nice five-star Yelp review for Chuck the realtor. He really deserved five stars, for all the back-and-forth and planning and phoning and texting that went into this sale. Which, I remind myself, he did while managing other clients at the same time.

Then I sent an Amazon gift card thank-you note to Deborah the Estate Sale lady, thanking her for being alert and encouraging the couple during the estate sale, who eventually became the new buyers.

Then went through my last eight months of credit card payments to try to get a handle on how much I spend. The point of that exercise was that I have an appointment with the Bob the Finance Guy on the 9th, where we will decide how to allocate the proceeds of the home sale. Bob and his partner Marshall have a recommended procedure where one keeps five years living expenses in a rotating set of liquid investments, apart from the rest of one’s capital. Well, to set that up we need to know what a year’s expenses are. Adding up the average of my credit card payments over the last 8 months, plus my Channing House rent, suggests that to maintain my present life-style I need… well, I don’t want to put the number here. But suffice it to say that by Federal poverty standards I am living very well as a family of four. So I sent an email to Bob telling him this info as prep. material for the upcoming appointment.

What else? Oh, I have it in mind to buy the painting that I saw on Day 154, Eight Pelicans. I had emailed the artist, Carol Aust, a few days ago and gotten tentative times to visit her studio. As she’s in Oakland I thought it would be fun to get Darlene and Jessea to go along with me. So I called Darlene, but they are going off for a few days. We decided the 20th would work. So I emailed Carol asking if we could come on that day. Later she replied that would be fine, so that’s booked.

By now the laundry was dry so I folded that and then it was lunch time.

After lunch and a quick nap I decided on two events I’d clipped out of the Thursday entertainment insert in the paper. One was Eric Clapton at the new Chase Center in SF. I checked the google map and it is a doable thing, it’s less than a mile walk or Lyft from the Caltrain depot. There are tickets but they cost just… If Eric was the pitcher, a nosebleed-level seat outfield of third base is $90. First balcony at the coach’s box angle, which I’d consider acceptable, is $325. Nope for now. I might reconsider the cheap seat. I mean, it’s rock and roll, so no problem hearing him; and surely he’d turn to his left once or twice so you could see his face through your binoculars…

Second was Momix in San Jose. I have good memories of seeing Momix at, I think, Memorial Auditorium at Stanford, probably 20 years ago. And this was quite reasonable, a good seat on a Monday night, $50. So I booked that one.

And now my monster to-do list was almost to-done.

I had seen an ad for Skechers shoes mentioning “wide fit”. I am having some trouble with a corn on my right foot and both my feet are odd-shaped so, how about it? So I drove to Valley Fair shopping center and bought a pair of Skechers. That took a couple of hours, round trip. About 6pm I went down to supper and decided I didn’t like anything on the menu. So I got back in the car and on a whim, drove to Palo Alto Pizza on California Ave and had a delicious small pizza and a beer. Brought home a couple of pieces for breakfast.