Day 191, power out, stuff, painting, condenser

Well, last night was interesting. About quarter to seven I was watching TV when I noticed red lights reflecting on my walls. Looked out, there’s a fire truck parked in the street. And just then the power went out.

I joined other neighbors on the street. Pat and Rich down the block had noticed fumes coming from a transformer on the utility pole opposite their house. They called various numbers and got no quick response, so finally they called 911 and got a fire truck in 5 minutes. The fire crew were standing around looking at the fuming transformer (like a 30-gallon oil drum up at the top of a rather high pole) when the power went out for our block.

The P.A. Utilities arrived a few minutes later, as one guy in a van. He looked up at the pole and talked into a mic. A few minutes later a truck with a cherry picker arrived. This guy went up in the air and looked at the transformer close up. And came down and talked on his mic for a while.

I went back in the house. It was now too dark for reading print. I read on my laptop for an hour, by which time there were two utility trucks, working different poles along the street. So I went to bed. As on the previous night, our Pacific Ocean cooling breezes failed to come in. It was still over 80º at 9pm. Expecting the power to come on, I lay on top of the bed in my clothes.

At 10pm the light came on! I had just sat up when it went off again. I looked out; the utility guys were still working. At 2:45am I got up to pee; they were still working, now on a pole across from my house.

At 4am the lights came on to stay. There were still two Utility trucks and several workers. Hats off to the P.A. Utilities for working all night. This morning I see there are what looks like new transformers on two poles. Mind you, each pole has wires coming off in several angles to serve different houses. It is no joke steering the bucket of a cherry picker up through that to remove and replace heavy pieces of equipment — in the dark. Good work, guys.

Tuesday, 6/11/2019

Owing the heat I decided not to do explicit exercise this morning. Instead stayed in and took care of more minor to-dos.

I went around the house clipping the Virginia Creeper tendrils back from the windows.
I went on eBay and found somebody selling old-style (TO-5) transistors and ordered a few to replace the ones that some visitor pocketed from me (Day 188).
I made PDF files out of my Medical Power of Attorney and Advanced Health Care Directive documents — the same documents I need to hand in at C.H. — and emailed them to the people named in them as my representatives, Dennis and Darlene.
Then I went on the DocuBank site. This is a site where you can file your medical info, and you carry a card with your user id and a PIN, and any provider can download your info. I checked; yup, it had my old Advanced Directive, naming Marian as my rep. So I uploaded a new one.
I went out to the Comcast/XFinity store and picked up my new DVR and cable modem boxes, and stopped at Fry’s to buy a digital audio cable.

Somewhere in this flurry, Deborah texted to find out when a buyer could take my bed. I said, I don’t need it after Saturday. Could they get it Saturday? Um, no, I’m gonna be kind of busy; is Sunday OK?

Chuck texted; the Lawyer Lady wants to come by “with an architect” to measure the house inside and out to make remodeling plans. Could they come at 2? Oh sure why not. So at 1:45 I left and for lack of a better option (in hindsight I can think of several) went to FOPAL and did sorting for 2 hours.

Then at 4 I came home, changed shirts, and drove to CH for the 6th Floor Meeting and supper after.

This meeting was helpful in one way. CH encourages people to hang their art on the hallway walls. The wall outside your unit is your gallery space. You are supposed to identify your prints and paintings with your name on the back, but there are many that are not identified. People die or move away, their relatives don’t pick up their art (or don’t care), things collect.

There is a large painting of a lighthouse just opposite the 6th floor lounge where the meeting is held. Agenda item 1, Craig announced, is that one of the residents would really like to have this for themselves, as the wife grew up near the depicted lighthouse. The painting has no name on it and nobody has claimed it. Would the assembled meeting be willing to give the painting to so-and-so. Aye, so moved.

Next, what to hang there? Someone had offered a painting of the Stanford Quad. A picture of it was passed around on Craig’s phone and nobody much liked it. Well, I have my Linsky painting of Yosemite Valley and had been wondering where I could hang it for public view that would have adequate light. I put my hand up and offered it, and later passed around its picture on my phone. Everyone liked it, so that’s done. On Saturday it can go straight up on the wall opposite the lounge.

After supper I looked at my phone and found Chuck had texted about the L.L.’s visit. One, it wasn’t an architect she’d brought, but her ex-husband! Looking for his OK? Apparently he approved, anyway. Two, the $50K deposit has been wired to the escrow. That doesn’t mean the sale is locked in, she could still pull out, but it’s pretty solid. And three, oh by the way, while they were there, they noticed the A/C condenser smoking, and pulled the breaker on it.

See the first paragraph of yesterday’s post! Did I jinx myself? I put the breaker back and tried the A/C. I could hear a relay click, but the condenser fan doesn’t turn. The condenser is pretty old — I could go get the red binder and check, but why — so not a surprise. I went on Yelp and did the thing where you request quotes from multiple vendors. Hopefully I can get it fixed this week.

Day 190, early bird gobbles worms left, right

Monday, 6/10/2019

This is the first day of the week leading up to my move to Channing House. Also the second day of a heatwave. Yesterday the A/C started up for the first time this year. I was pleased it seems to be working fine. I worry about something expensive breaking before I can get the place transferred to its new owner.

Due to the promised heat I started my run at 7:30, and was back in the house about 8:40, which is the hour when I usually set out, in cooler weather. Showered and shaved I started into a to-do list. Item one was to plant out the Bathroom Plant. Long boring story here. For decades we’ve had some kind of green plant in a nice pot behind the basin in the bathroom. There’s a triangular space just right for one. For the last, oh, decade? it has been a single plant, some kind of a thing that grew up in a single stem putting out radial shoots with pretty finger leaves, kind of like a miniature cannabis. Every couple of years it would get too big. Marian would ruthlessly whack off the top six inches, throw out the bottom, stick the cut-off top in fresh potting mix, and it would grow up again, a single stalk with pretty leaves. Last time she did this, I took the bottom with its root ball and planted it out in the back garden.

OK, I’m moving out, the new owner will likely demolish and rebuild the bathroom (at least, that’s what Chuck would have done as part of “staging” the house, had we got to that), so the plant needs to go. I took it out of its pretty pot; put that with the other pretty pots to be sold for two bits each, if that, in The Sale; dug a wee hole next to its previous incarnation, which is thriving in the back yard, and stuck it in. Good luck, little plant.

Next up, the wax plants. These are sentimental favorites of mine. They started from a single cutting that Marian’s long-time friend Lolly gave her. They’ve been hanging in two windows for at least a decade, surviving on a single, weekly watering, putting out copious blooms of their tiny amethyst and white flowers a couple times a year. I want to take them with me to CH, just for nostalgia’s sake, but how? It is possible to have pot hangers put up but it requires scheduling a facilities person, and also knowing where you want the bracket to go. No way to set that up prior to the move. So I bought the wrought-iron hangars in the picture on Amazon. They aren’t tall enough to handle the existing pots, which were suspended by two-foot-long wires. So I bought the nice hanging pots shown, also on Amazon (although I did shop three local nurseries first). Now it was time to transplant them.

The one in the kitchen window was growing in a round pot smaller than a tennis ball. I knew that inside that pot would be a solid sphere of roots and I would have to break the pot to get it out. I did, and it was. I cut it back quite a bit first, then broke the pot and moved it, pulling and tucking the branches to pass through the strings. And soaked it good.

The one from the dining room window was easier to get at, sitting in a 5-inch plastic dish. Again a solid root ball, actually a disk, which just fit the mouth of the new pot. This one I didn’t cut back, but that meant I had to do a lot of violence to the limbs to get them between the strings of the pot. Yeah, I could have untied the strings and re-tied them. But I didn’t. Anyway there they are, and if they don’t just wither up and die from the abuse, they’ll do nicely on the deck of my apartment.

About now I called Chuck to get a status on the sale. He had talked to the agent, who hadn’t heard anything from her client, but thought they would want to bring a building inspector and perhaps an architect, sometime this week. The appraiser is scheduled to visit on Wednesday. I don’t need an appraisal for the sale, but I do need it to document the value “as of” December, so Katie the Tax can properly calculate the value of Marian’s estate. If by chance the appraiser comes in with a number higher than we’ve settled on with the buyer, I could possibly claim a tax loss on the sale. (Hmmm — if by chance he came in lower than the sale price, I would by the same logic have to pay for a capital gain!) I don’t care about either; I will only emphasize to the appraiser that I want a number that will be bulletproof under the gaze of an IRS agent.

To-do items continued to fall: I mopped the kitchen floor, which needed it; I swept the wood floors in the bedroom and living room; I got out a copy of my Health Care Directive (aka “living will”) and my Power of Attorney and set them aside to drop off at CH next time I’m there, which I should have done two weeks ago.

Then I did something I only conceived of in the middle of the night last night. I was imagining showing the new owner around, giving her the benefit of years of experience with the house. I’d like to do that IRL, although it probably won’t happen. But, in the depths of the night, I imagined she would want to see the attic, and I remembered that in the attic there were several rat traps I had placed the last time we had unwanted roof-rat tenants. And very possibly there would be a mummified dead rat in one of them. Not cool! So I got out the ladder and climbed up into the attic and cleaned out the rat traps. There was one mummified rat, but it was out on the floor, not in a trap. Odd. Then I climbed under the house, just far enough into the crawl space to grab the three rat traps that I had put under there two years back (no dead rats). All into the trash. Now, if Lawyer Lady wants to see the attic or crawl space, she won’t be shocked.

(I am assuming that a thirty-something partner in a law firm is not a handy-person, rather one whose only acquaintance with screwdrivers involves orange juice and vodka, and who’ll have only a remote intellectual interest in things like attics, drains, or irrigation. That might be totally unfair! It would be pleasant surprise to find she really was into home maintenance topics.)

Next item on the list was to order my Channing House TV service and DVR from Comcast. I called the number Craig game me and got an odd message, “the service you request is not available at this time, try again later.” (I did try later and got to a helpful customer service rep who set me up. I’m getting the fancy DVR that Craig recommended, and an upgraded channel selection, for a total of $25/month. Which is about $115 less than my current DirecTV subscription runs.)

And then I wrote all the above, and it is just 11:05. Let’s hear it for early starts! Next scheduled event is the 12-2pm window when my last two bits of furniture from West Elm are due. I think I’ll have a nap.

The furniture delivery arrived about 1pm, two very courteous guys unboxed and brought in my new settee and my media console. I am very pleased with the settee; it looks like quality, and the color and style of the woodwork exactly matches that of my 50 year old coffee table (it’s actual mid-century modern).

The media console looks good and its color and style coordinates well with the other items. There’s a bit of a problem in that my sound bar doesn’t fit very comfortably in it. From the web catalog page I had hoped it would. Actually, it might fit; if rotated up on its front edge it could tuck into the back, but I’d need to hold it in place with duct tape or something. Or it would fit nicely if I took a jig saw and cut out two, 4×6 rectangles from some uprights, heh. To be determined. Also the subwoofer box doesn’t go into it. I may look for a smaller subwoofer.

Once the delivery guys left, I went out into the heat (over 90 in the shade) and went down to FOPAL. On this day-after-sale weekend it is time to look at every book in the section. Ones that have been around for 3 months go the bargain room. Ones with prices over $4 get repriced lower. Then I culled the 5 boxes from the sorting room. These had a very high proportion of books over 10 (many over 20) years old. If they don’t cover some relatively timeless subject, they go. I ended up pricing and shelving only about 20 books from the five boxes.

I grabbed some bottles of soda from the grocery next door, and on impulse some Indian food from the deli counter, and headed home to relax in the glow of a day of accomplishments. Yay, me.

Day 189, grief, shopping, annoying news

Sunday, 6/8/2019

For perhaps the last time I walked our old route to the Palo Alto Cafe for coffee. On impulse I decided to return the way Marian and I sometimes did. From the cafe we’d turn left on Middlefield for a couple of blocks, then up a little pedestrian alley and through Hoover Park, a nice green space with a playground, a Little League ballfields, and trees. This decision gave me some discomfort today, because as I passed the little playground it came back to me very strongly how Marian would often stop here and swing on the swings for a few minutes. It meant something to her, some recollection of girlhood; and one of the few times she indulged in play. This memory had me sniffling and blinking all the way home (and a bit now).

Well. At 10 I headed out in the car to take care of a couple of shopping errands. First to Bed Bath & Beyond to buy a better blanket for my new “Full” size bed. The one I bought a few weeks ago is really not satisfactory, although I’ll take it along for backup. Also I bought a pillow, as the one I’m using now is several years (at least) old. Back home I tested out the one I bought; it is quite satisfactory. So those two items went on the pile of things to be loaded in the moving van next Saturday.

Second stop on the shopping trip was at Lowes home store. Here I needed to buy a vent cover for the furnace outlet in the kitchen. A couple of weeks back, I broke the existing one by leaning back in my chair with one chair leg on the vent. It looks bad, and I thought I’d replace it for the new owner. More importantly, I needed to buy cabinet pulls for the new cabinets in Apt. 621. I selected some nice-shaped brushed-nickel handles.

At 5pm I drove to Channing House. First stop was Angela’s office in the basement to drop off the door pulls. She was at her desk, and glad to see me because she was just about to write me an email. There’s been a snag in the scheduling. The two counter-tops, one for the remodeled kitchenette and one for the bathroom vanity counter, have been back-ordered. She’s been promised them for sometime between the 10th and the 17th, and just maybe one of them might be installed before I move in on the 15th. But if they are both still missing, I won’t have any kind of basin for washing hands or spitting toothpaste. Toilet, shower, closets, all OK, but no basin. We joked about how I could brush my teeth in the shower.

She had reserved one of their guest apartments for me to sleep in, if I don’t want to complete the move, but I said I’d tough it out. Worst case, I can come back and sleep at 2340 Tasso for a couple of nights, although I don’t expect to. It’s annoying but I can’t get angry about this; I’ve lived through construction projects and know how they can go. Angela does an amazing job coordinating a dozen or more projects simultaneously and I’m not going to grump at her.

Her second annoying news came when I told her that I’d be on my way to Greece on September 6th, which is the last day of the move-out period for the 6th floor. So, could she please schedule my move to temporary quarters for earlier in that week?

Well, actually, no, we can’t. We always do it from the end furthest from the freight elevator toward it. And #621 is the last apartment right next to the freight elevator. So probably mine would be the last or penultimate move. OK, I said, as long as you can do it without me. Yes, no problem. We’ll work with you to plan the move, we’ll know where everything goes, and you don’t need to be here for the actual move.

So there we are. Moving in with possibly no sinks, and when I come back from my cruise, I’ll see my temporary unit for the first time.

Day 188, scary purchase, transistor, dvr

Saturday, 6/8/2019

One week from right now (9am) I will be preparing for the moving van to arrive. But this morning I did something scarier: committed to a tour in September. I’ve been talking for a while about taking some kind of cruise or tour, probably with Road Scholar, in September, after I’ve been moved to my temporary flat. Where to? people asked, and I casually said, oh, maybe the Greek Islands.

So yesterday I opened up the Road Scholar website and browsed around, and continued doing that this morning, and finally settled on this one: “Island Hopping in the Aegean“. It seemed the best combination of places, dates, and especially price, because single-occupancy wasn’t a huge penalty over double. It took a while to muster the courage to click through the purchase process, and I hesitated a long time before committing and am still spooked by it. But it’s done. Unless I decide to bail in the next couple of weeks, I’m at least financially committed to spending September 6-20 cruising in a small ship around some Greek islands.

It would have been so comfortable to have just said, “nah, I’ll think about it later” and clicked away. I could feel the pull of mental and emotional inertia, like the gravity of a black hole… Some of the impetus to go through with it was that I spent some time yesterday and this morning reading through our New Zealand travel blog. Just ten years ago we did those six weeks in a van around both islands. Funny, an ongoing theme in those blog posts is the constant hunt for internet connectivity. I bet that isn’t such a problem today.

Spent a bit more time completing the documentation package for Katie the Tax. Then left for the Museum, stopping on the way to mail my estimated tax payments. I have to thank the Channing House email list for that. Although I had the envelopes and vouchers ready to go in the “Current Tax Year” pendaflex, with a post-it on them saying “mail before June 15”, I might well have forgotten. But there was an email earlier in the week reminding everyone that the deadline was coming. OMyGod yes! I thought. And wrote the checks and stamped the envelopes.

I wanted to put a return address on them but realized that my return address stamp, which I’ve been using since the 1980s, has the wrong (old) address. So I hand-wrote the 850 Webster return address, and then went online and ordered return address stickers.

At the museum I led a tour for, initially, 25 people, but several dropped off so I ended with about 15. Only notable thing was that someone swiped my transistors! I had two TO-5 transistors in a little plastic box, which I let the group hand around, it makes the comparison to the vacuum tube (which they have handled at a prior stop) much clearer. Today, the little box didn’t come back to me, and when I asked the group at the next stop, nobody had any idea. Bummer.

I went out for supper, then while watching Jeopardy I made a list of all the shows I’ve got subscribed on the DVR. Planning to subscribe to the same ones, or most of them, on the new XFinity DVR after moving in.

Day 187, anxiety, paperwork

Friday, 6/7/2019

Starting last evening I began having mild anxiety, similar to the first couple of weeks. I guess the reality of the house being sold coming home? In reality, everything is on the planned track: the last bits of furniture arrive today and Monday … I have a modest list of things I need to do before a week from today to be ready for the move … everything is fine. Just fine. Tell that to my brain at 4am.

After a run, which felt fine (and the air was cool again), I settled in to assembling all the papers that the tax accountant wants to do that estate form, in summary,

Copy of death certificate (of course)
Copy of Marian’s will
Copy of family trust
Dec. 31st statement for bank account and each of six (6) Schwab accounts
Debts (of which we had only the December credit card statements)
IRS form 712 documenting the life insurance payment
Appraisal for home (I could use the price that has been accepted by buyer as the value, but I think I’ll wait until the appraisal “as of” December comes in)

and a few other odds and ends. That took a couple of hours and still isn’t done. It turns out that IRS form 712 has to be filled out by, not the beneficiary of the life insurance, but by an agent for the insurance company! Fortunately I still had documentation showing that this IBM group life policy was paid out by The Prudential, and the claim number. After an email to Katie the Tax, who recommended calling Prudential, I did that, and the customer service rep — after I got to her through a many-layered phone menu — quickly arranged for the form to be made and sent to me.

Part-way through this the IKEA delivery arrived. I must say IKEA’s contractor handled this very well, with two voice-mails the day before giving the delivery window of 11-2, and then calling half an hour before to say the truck was “5 to 30 minutes away”. Two long skinny flat packs for the bed frame, another pack of folded up wooden slats, another pack of two metal braces, and the mattress rolled up like a giant 5-foot long burrito.

I drove over to CH to check on the apartment. Although I couldn’t get in, I could hear power tools being used inside. I’ve been corresponding with Angela about the sink, and she has reminded me I committed to buying my own cabinet pulls. I need to do that tomorrow. Stopped at the bank to deposit a check, a small refund for overpaid car insurance. Then flaked out for the afternoon.

Day 186, Yosemite, realty

Thursday, 6/6/2019

Buzzed over to Yosemite for a day of museum work. Sherman and I did photography, and ran out of work to do about 2:45. While chatting in the lobby I got a text from Chuck. Two texts, actually, and an email. He was excited because he was actually on the way to a weekend trip to the Russian River, and nearly out of cellphone service, when he received the signed counter-offer from the agent for Lawyer Lady. She has accepted our price, and wants only extra time to complete inspections.

All I needed to do is print the document, sign it, scan it, and send the scan to Chuck’s office for it to be forwarded to the other agent. I headed home to do that, and had the PDF on the way before 4:30. The L.L. has nine days to find some problem and cancel the deal, but otherwise, the house is sold.

For the last several days, well, weeks really, I’ve been in short-timer mode. Bought toilet paper Tuesday and actually thought, last time I’ll every buy T.P. again. Tonight it was, I’ll only haul these garbage cans to the curb one more time ever. And so on.

Day 185, FOPAL, furniture, volunteer dinner

Wednesday 6/5/2019

Went for a run. It seemed a little harder than usual, possibly because, for the first time this year, the air was already warm at 9am. About 11:30 I went down to FOPAL for the usual Wednesday sorting session.

Back home I found an email from Katie the tax accountant, giving a list of the documents they will need to proceed with the estate tax filing, the infamous Form 706. It looks like an hour or more finding documents. I decided to defer that to Friday.

Also in my in-box: email from IKEA giving the delivery time for my bed and mattress: sometime between 9am and 9pm Friday. That led me to refresh the page tracking the order of my remaining furniture items. Back in April I went to West Elm and ordered a bunch of things (Day 137). A couple of items I took home that day as flat packs; they are now in the big pile in the dining room. A couple more arrived last week. Two other items were delayed. Now, refreshing the tracking page, I see that the last of them has arrived at the local warehouse.

Let’s see, I had a piece of paper documenting my last conversation with the West Elm deliver center, where did I put it? Panic, panic. Not in any penda-flex. Oh, there’s a banker’s box where I put all the stuff from the top of the desk. Hah! inside it, along with pictures and desk items, is the piece of paper with the receipt and phone number.

So I call the delivery center and the nice person sets me up for delivery on Monday. That will complete my furniture; everything will be here by Monday night, ready for the movers to take to CH on Saturday. Wow.

On the day I move I will need to unbox and assemble: a bed, a settee, a table, two chairs, an arm chair, and a desk. The bed is the only essential one, but I arranged with Angela to schedule a Channing House Facilities Person to assist me for three hours, 2-5pm that day. She is supposed to get back to me if that won’t be possible, owing to it being a weekend, in which case I will have to hire a gig worker, probably from TaskRabbit.com, the outfit that IKEA suggests for assembly work.

At 4:40 I headed out, to the Museum for the annual Volunteer Appreciation Dinner. A pretty low-key event, 50 or so gray-haired folks getting thanked by the Museum staff, free dinner and drinks. Some interesting news was mentioned by both Len Shustek (the board member and major donor, whose name is on the Shustek Center in Fremont where I spend alternate Thursdays), and by Dan’l Lewis, the CEO. When 20 years ago the Museum was able to buy its present building from the bankrupt Silicon Graphics (wow, has it been that long since SGI went under?), the $25M purchase included not just the big white building at Shoreline and 101, but 17.5 acres of land surrounding it. Most of that acreage is asphalt parking lots. Meanwhile Google has been buying up all the surrounding land, with future plans for a huge development, thousands of homes and retail.

Len reviewed some of the other computer museums, and talked about how difficult it was to create a museum that would last. The excellent Living Computer Museum in Seattle had only one major donor, Paul Allen, who died last year. Now its funding is in doubt. One I’d never heard of, the American Computer and Robotics Museum in (of all places) Bozeman, MT, is struggling. It was the work of a married couple, and now the husband has died and the widow is trying to carry on. So with these examples in mind, the Museum board is considering what they might do with some of their parking lots, possibly developing part of the space in a way that would increase the Museum’s endowment substantially and help ensure its longevity.

Day 184, AT&T, FOPAL, upgrade, SYTYCD

Tuesday, 5/4/2019

Exercise this morning was a brisk walk to the Y and a round of exercise. The exercises I do there, that I think have the most benefit, are not possible with the equipment in the CH gym, so I will likely keep my Y membership.

That’s not a large expense but it annoys me because I thought I would be dropping it. But that annoyance was assuaged this morning when I had an

email from AT&T

saying that “my bill” was past due. No indication of which bill. So here’s the thing: for nearly a decade I’ve had DirecTV with auto bill-pay. A year ago AT&T absorbed DirecTV and its website, and now anytime you try to look at your DirecTV account, you end up being shuttled willy-nilly into myAtt.com account management. There it kept showing me that my $60 monthly bill for internet is paid up all proper. There is no freakin’ way to get from that account page to my DirecTV account, to check up on my bill or payment method for the TV service.

Well, there must be, because after I switched browsers and went through the sequence a fourth time, suddenly and magically I was looking at my bill for the month’s TV, $153. And I supplied the credit card data they already had and paid it.

One of the pleasures of leaving this house will the fun of calling AT&T and terminating both the internet and TV services. Saving me just over $210 per month, which more than makes up for the much smaller YMCA membership bill.

Now, true, at CH I will be what I have studiously avoided becoming for twenty years, a Comcast customer! Always avoided it because of Comcast’s horrible reputation for customer service. Hah! At CH, I’m not the customer; a medium-size business (Channing House) is the customer. I will be paying a small amount monthly for a Comcast, excuse me, XFinity, DVR, which costs extra. (I went over this in detail with Craig yesterday.) But that will be a pittance compared to what I’ve been paying DirecTV/AT&T all these years.

Anyway.

Yesterday when I spent time at

FOPAL

tidying the Computer section I was appalled at the flood of donations that came in and were piled up waiting to be sorted. Today another volunteer speculated that it was the result of the Palo Alto city-wide garage sale over the weekend — all the books that didn’t sell in garage sales, were boxed up and dumped at FOPAL. And some actually were “dumped”, about 8 boxes were just left outside the door, which is rather discourteous.

So I went down today again and spent another three hours sorting. Didn’t eliminate the backlog but took a serious bite out of it.

Then I bought a pound of coffee and some toilet paper (there wasn’t quite enough left to cover two more weeks) and headed home. From there I went over to CH to attend the

monthly Upgrade Update

meeting. This was to let all residents know the status and progress of the rolling floor-by-floor renovation. This meeting was particularly for the Seventh and Sixth floors.

The 7th floor people got their dates for when they would move back to their renovated apartments (August 12-23), and we 6th floors got the dates for when we would be moved out to temporary units (August 26 to September 9th). (Note to self: thoughts of taking some kind of cruise in the fall: book for mid-September.)

We also learned what our temporary units would be, and got floor plans for them. I will be moving to the 4th floor and the West side. The unit is almost the same size and layout as #621, so there won’t be any need to store any of my furniture, and most of it can go to the same relative position. The only problem I foresee is that my plants will have more light and heat from the Western exposure. Rather than hanging around an hour for supper I just went on home for a simple meal and to watch episode 1 of season 16 of

So You Think You Can Dance

Marian and I watched the previous fifteen seasons of this show and enjoyed them all. When I noticed the DVR had recorded SYTYCD I was a little worried, on two conflicting accounts. Would it be too hard to watch, being bothered by thoughts of “She would have enjoyed this so much”? And conversely, would I find out it wasn’t as good as I remembered, and wouldn’t be fun to watch when I didn’t share it with another fan?

Fortunately, neither. There were sniffly moments when I thought about how Marian would have enjoyed it, but they weren’t too frequent or intrusive. And the show was just as good as I remembered. Better than some years, in fact. In some past seasons they have tinkered with their format in various unfortunate ways. This year they seem to have gone back to the original format, augmented with a whizzy new stage — which incorporates a circle of cameras, so they can capture a dancer in the air and show them in full 3D — and new judges who aren’t embarrassing. So, yeah. Good watching.

Day 183, men’s group, FOPAL, tech, realty

Monday, 6/3/2019

The CH Men’s Group met at 10 and I was to introduce myself and “talk about anything you like”. So I gave a capsule autobiography with some pictures culled from my collection. Maybe I’ll write that into this blog at some point.

In order to get my usual exercise, I walked from Tasso street to Channing House and back again, net 10,900 steps for the day. Then I went to FOPAL to do the Computer section work. There were eight boxes of books waiting. I ended up keeping about 30 books, sending seven boxes to the bargain room. I ruthlessly discarded into the garbage can somebody’s donation of a bag of 50 or so, 3.5-inch floppies. Nobody cares and they aren’t recyclable. I also put in the recycling a complete FrameMaker product box, containing a set of manuals for that software. Nostalgia: there was a period around 1992-3 when I used FrameMaker 40 hours a week, writing manuals at Informix. It hasn’t been supported, or used, this century, and wouldn’t run on any existing hardware.

Pricing, as usual, turned up some “high value” (average online price greater than $25) books, including one boring looking little textbook whose prices ranged from $70 to over $200. Those went into the “high value” cart for those volunteers to sell.

From FOPAL I drove back to CH to attend a tech group meeting at 3pm. This was to introduce ClearPass, a system of access control for the CH internet provision, so that each apartment could have, in effect, its own little wi-fi network carved out of the big building network. In this way, your laptops, phone, desktop and wireless-connected printer can all see each other — you can print on your printer from anywhere, and your Macs can use Apple file sharing between them — but other users in the building can’t see them. It seems pretty slick, making a couple of hundred apparently unique wi-fi clusters out of one big system. They claim they use this solution for major universities so each student in a dorm has a unique “micro-net” for their devices. I took a bunch of notes on the phone.

Drove home via Safeway to pick up a few groceries. About six, Chuck called. He’d talked at length to the other agent. As was said before, the Lawyer Lady loves the house but is currently tasked with a huge responsibility for a “billion dollar contract” (probably an exaggeration) within her law firm and hasn’t had time to make any decisions. Her visit to the house on Friday was a success, she and her decorator friend love it even more.

I told Chuck I could sympathize with her having this huge crisis, and don’t mind her thinking about it longer; but on the other hand, I want to sell. We agreed he would re-run the ad in the Daily Post that he had suspended last week in respect of their offer. And we talked about how soon after I move out (in 12 days!) we can list the house. Sometime in July.

Day 182, mostly baseball

Sunday, 6/2/2019

This is the day the Lawyer Lady is supposed to respond to our counter-offer. At some time I expect a text from Chuck saying whether we have sold the house or not.

Off to breakfast at the usual place. Punched the last hole in the discount cappuccino card. Not quite perfect timing, I expect to come there one more time, and will have to pay full price for a cappuccino. Caught the cinnamon rolls just as they came out of the oven. Warm cinnamon roll, num.

Stanford baseball has lost one game in its regional, so has to play the other loser today at noon. If they win, they will be allowed to play Fresno State at 6pm, and if they win that they will be allowed to play Fresno State again on Monday to see which team advances to the final four in Oklahoma. Since I paid for a regional pass I had better go.

Between breakfast and noon, I assembled some pictures to accompany my self-introduction to the Men’s Group at Channing House, on Monday. Then off to the baseball game. Lovely weather for it. I spotted several Stanford WBB players in the stands. Stanford got off to a good start, and in the seventh inning they batted around, running the score to 11-1. I decided that was a “W” and left at that point, about 2pm.

At 6pm I was back to Sunken Diamond for the second game. I had my cell phone charged up and with ESPN open in the web browser I could follow the Warriors-Toronto NBA game between pitches. The baseball turned into a marathon. At 8:40pm they had only finished the fifth inning. The Warriors game was over (Warriors won) and Stanford was ahead 6-4, and it was dark and chilly. I decided I had had enough, and went home to listen to the rest of the game on the radio. It didn’t wrap up for another 90 minutes, but did end with a Stanford win.

Around 9:30 Chuck texted that the other agent had not gotten back to him. Expect something tomorrow morning. Are they playing games? Nominally they had only to Sunday to respond, then the counter would be automatically be dropped and the deal is off. Well, what do I know.

And so to bed.