Day 122, anxiety, discards, cardio

Wednesday, 4/3/2019

Woke up to some anxiety this morning. Odd, because I had a very good night’s sleep, up once about 2am then slept to 6:30, eight hours total. Six-thirty is unusually late; all through the winter I woke up when the furnace fired up. The thermostat is set to start heating at 6:15. Yesterday and today, the furnace never started. Why? Because for the first time in months, the internal house temperature at 6:15 was 69º, the set-point for 6:15am. This is the true mark of the changing seasons, that no heating is needed in the morning. Another month and it’ll be time to switch over to cooling.

Oh, wait… another month and I won’t be here, probably.

So I arose to anxiety,

a vague feeling of wrongness that I think is associated with yesterday’s final acceptance at C.H. That’s a big commitment to a whole new mode of living. Am I doing the right thing?

To “not be a home-owner” was, as I’ve written before, probably the first decision I made when I began thinking about becoming a widower, a year ago, when Marian was first diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. My thoughts then were theoretical, speculative, but this stood out as a firm conclusion: if she goes, and I’m a widower, I won’t stay in this house. Researching ILFs and choosing Channing House is all the natural consequence of that decision.

I didn’t analyze it at the time; it just seemed right. I’ve explained it to other people since as not wanting the responsibility of a house, tired of worrying about maintenance and insurance and property taxes. That’s all true, but not complete. Analyzing it now, as the coffee water heated this morning, what came to mind was that I really wanted to break with the past. I don’t want to occupy a truncated partnership was the sentence that bubbled up out of my subconscious. (Whoa! Go my subconscious!) To unpack that sentence, I don’t want to continue to live as half a couple, alone in the shell once occupied by the tight little corporation of Dave’n’Marian. The house is the physical representation of that shell.

There are other life styles I could have picked. I could live in a regular apartment. I could become a world traveler, flitting from hotel to hotel with the seasons. I could buy a nice RV and become a “snowbird”, traveling to Alaska in the spring and Arizona in the winter. But C.H. has many practical advantages: it is comfortable; it offers a new community in which I’m pretty sure I can come to be an influential and helpful member; and the continuing medical care means I will not have to be a burden on any of my relatives as I age. The one time I talked with Marian about my “being a bachelor” notions, her only concern was to urge me to keep in mind that I wouldn’t have someone to take care of me the way I was taking care of her. C.H. answers to that issue.

Mulling all that I went for a run, which felt excellent. After a shower and shave, I did some

more cleanup.

I tackled two more shelves of the big steel cabinets in the shop. Here’s what I saw first.

check_boxes That’s right, two nice banker’s boxes labeled in Marian’s neat hand as you see. Seriously, we have been saving cancelled checks from 1965??? Oh yeah; and old IBM pay stubs, too: old_pay_stub I was getting $405.95 each pay period, which I think was bi-weekly, so over $800/month, not bad for 1965! (Plus, I see, $25 for “local travel”, i.e. mileage for driving around SF.)

Ignoring the wails of imaginary historians appalled at losing all that good data on the spending habits of mid-century Yuppies, the whole thing went into the recycle bin. in_the_box That exposed two shelves of my published books, multiple copies of each. my_books I won’t throw all of them out, but I fetched a box and put one copy of each book in it. The rest will go into the blue bin tomorrow.

About 1pm I went off to do three hours of sorting at FOPAL. One perk of that job is getting first look at all the donations. I pocketed a copy of On the Road, which I’ve been meaning to re-read, and one of Vonnegut’s Mother Night. I’ll read them (or anyway sample them, I’m not sure I’ll want to read all of Kerouac) and put them back in the stream another day.

At home I found an email containing the standard

Channing House contract,

a 51pp PDF. Sent copies to the financial guys and also to Chuck, who was curious about it. Need to read it carefully myself! Here’s the meat of it, from article I:

In consideration of the Entrance Fee, Monthly Fee and other fees payable by you under this Agreement, Channing House will provide you with residence, care and services at the Community for the rest of your life, subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement.

Also got a notification that my

Ziopatch results

were back, and: no Afib detected. I have rare PVC’s (pre-ventricular contractions, which I’ve had since the 1980s) as well as rare “premature atrial complexes”. But these little blips of irregularity I notice are not of concern. That’s a relief.

Day 121, life is just packed

Tuesday, 4/2/2019

I am four months along as a widower. Yesterday I had a mailing from Pathways, the company that handled Marian’s Hospice period. They have sent several supportive post-mortem mailings over the months. This one had a particularly accurate section, headed “Grief Bursts”:

Grief bursts strike like a lightening bolt. You are driving, listening to the radio when a song comes on that you both liked, grief grips your heart, tears sting your eyes, and you wonder what hit you. Grief bursts may be more disorienting to those who have gone back to their normal round of activities and who feel “okay” some of the time… By acknowledging these feelings as normal you can recognize the progress you have made…

Case in point: Today was walking back from the gym and for no particular reason started deleting unwanted photos from my phone as I walked along. Lots of casual pointless pics over the past few months, delete, delete, … and then I hit the last couple I took of Marian, and choked up. And a few minutes later I walked in the front door and noticed the big box that is the Apple return box for her iMac.

Yesterday I carefully used Godot to visit the sites that I’ve been using her iMac to visit these past months: Chase credit card, Schwab, and the credit union. It’s been very convenient to just go to her desk and use her machine which “knew” all the passwords and filled them in. But now I’ve got all the passwords on LastPass on Godot, and have verified Godot to those sites (they all wanted two-factor authentication for a visit from an unfamiliar machine). That makes the iMac now superfluous. I can box it up and send it back and soon will receive an Apple gift card worth $250.

Between those two things, seeing those last pictures, and the prospect of disposing of her iMac, I am now an emotional wreck, quivering lip, sniffles, the works.

I’ll be fine. Onward.

Got an email from designer

Tyra;

she can’t join me Friday to look over the C.H. unit, which is probably just as well because I wasn’t positive I could make that happen anyway. Replied asking if she would have time next week.

Got an email from Chuck; his retired office manager has recommended a woman,

Debra,

who might be willing to manage an estate sale for me. I called Debra’s number and had to leave a message.

Got a reply from

the Attorney,

who didn’t seem to have read the details attached to my message, just asked “who is your accountant” and what number to call me on. Since she has received (1) an email from my accountant and (2) an email from me mentioning said accountant and including the text of their first email, I kind of wonder at her reading skills. But anyway, I replied politely with my phone number.

All this before 11am, such a life I lead.

Suli arrived about 12:30 and we talked about how she will probably come one more time, maybe two. Then I packed up two laptops in the Apple return boxes (but not the iMac yet) and headed out for a round of errands. Errand one was to drop off the two MacBooks at FedEx.

Errand two was to stop at the local hardware store and see what they had in the way of

tool chests.

I need a somewhat bigger tool chest. I have a small three-drawer chest that I’ve owned for decades, which holds the essential fixing stuff; I schlep it to the Repair Cafe sessions. But there are some more tools that won’t fit into it. For The Transition to Smaller Quarters (does that work as an acronym? TTSQ?) I want to, one, triage my tools, and two, fit them into one portable chest. The current chest, which is 19x9x8, is just too small, as well as having a broken latch. So I spent time on Amazon last night shopping. Finally thought I’d see what the one remaining local hardware store has (damn, but I miss Orchard Supply). They had basically nothing, some cheap plastic thing. So back to the internet for that.

Errand three was to run down to

Jean’s place

and drop off a thumb drive with a selection of the pictures from the recent slide-scanning orgy, pictures that I thought she’d want in her collection. Her news was that she’d received the printed and bound copies of volume 3 of the history of St. Joseph’s Parish in Mountain View. This is the church she and Bill attended for decades. Bill initiated the project of producing a parish history back in 2006 and did the first two volumes. He had a lot of material toward the third at his death in 2016. Jean’s been working on it ever since, and is very happy and proud to have it finished and done with.

Back home another email arrived: congratulations, you have been

officially approved

for residence at Channing House! Please make an appointment to walk through unit 621 with our Renovation Coordinator, Angela. All right! I reply promptly with my availability, which is tomorrow and Friday.

I think I’ll close this entry now; that’s quite enough news for one day.

Day 120, day of doing stuff

Monday, 4/1/2019

Monday tends to be a “day of doin’ stuff” because I think of things I need or want to do over the weekend, and write them down on a list on the kitchen windowsill to tackle on Monday. I think I will just describe all those things.

First up, a run. That went and felt well, which was good news. The slight arrhythmias that I’d noticed, and were the reason for wearing a Zio-patch last week, were more noticeable over the weekend. As usual, I don’t feel them at all when exercising, and in fact didn’t notice them anytime today. But it is a relief that a heart symptom is not exercise-related.

Next, started

laundering

the towel and bed linen. It’s been two weeks (which I know because tomorrow is the day for the cleaning lady) so it’s time for that. With the bed stripped, decided to rotate the mattress. Funny story here. When Sheri the estate sale lady was here, she and I and Chuck were talking about estate sales, and she mentioned that you could sell a bed, but by law you can’t sell a used mattress. “So you strip the bed and leave your McCroskey mattress on it and say, well, you can have that with the bed if you want it.”

I goggled at her and said, “How did you know?” Chuck was puzzled; he’d never heard of McCroskey mattresses. Sheri laughed and said she hadn’t known, it was just the kind of expensive mattress people in Palo Alto often had. Guilty as charged, I guess.

Anyway, that conversation reminded me that you are supposed to turn your McCroskey every three months, which Marian had marked on the calendar and insisted on. I’d skipped the last turn, which came up in December, on the general principal of ISMISEP. But if it was a sales asset, I might as well take care of it, so I heaved the heavy thing around 180 degrees. This might have been the turn interval at which you are supposed to flip it over, but that’s way too much work.

With the laundry in process I watered the plants. That takes only a few minutes; so I turned to the first real task, working out the IBM

SHAP issue.

One problem is the number of agencies involved. My pension is paid out of Via Benefits, who administer the IBM benefits program. But the SHAP is administered and paid out of Acclaris, who apparently manage that particular piece of IBM’s benefits. But I needed first to know if I was in fact eligible. I called Via customer support; the very pleasant rep put me on hold for several minutes while she consulted, and finally said I had to call IBM directly, and gave me that number.

So I called IBM and that customer service rep looked up my and Marian’s accounts and said yes, as a survivor I was eligible for SHAP. But she couldn’t advise on how to fill out the SHAP form, which I some questions about. So now I called the Acclaris help line and that person (again, very sympathetic and helpful) talked me through it. I must say that the phone reps for all three agencies came across very well.

Now I filled out the SHAP form, and made a copy of the completed form to use for reference next year, assuming this one is accepted (we’ve had them bounced before for some minor omission), and put it in an envelope with stamp and address. Phew.

By now the bed linen was dry so I made the bed, then turned to two more items,

two “nudges”.

I sent a short, polite email to Kim at C.H. asking how the process was going. She replied a couple of hours later that she should have an update “in a couple of days”. I sent a ditto to Howard at the financial advisors. They had advised a meeting with the attorney who prepared our Trust documents, and had sent an email to said attorney on March 20th, and I’d heard nothing since. Howard replied later suggesting that I contact her directly, so I sent an email to the attorney.

Now it was early afternoon and everything on the to-do list had a line through it, so I drove down to FOPAL and spent an hour culling and pricing books for the Computer section. Came home and made some supper and sat down to watch

Stanford playing Notre Dame

in the Elite Eight game.

Very much against my expectations, Stanford started well, stifling the Irish offense and holding a small lead in the first half. Alas, Notre Dame found how to break through the Stanford defense in the third quarter and went on a run to take a ten-point lead that Stanford couldn’t close. So Alanna Smith’s college career ends (as does Shannon Coffee’s). Next year’s SWBB team will be quite different but likely even more exciting with a great recruiting class.

It pleases me that I remain interested in the team. Following SWBB turns out not to be one of the things, like TV cooking shows, that I enjoyed primarily because Marian liked them and I enjoyed sharing her enjoyment. My emotional involvement in the Cardinal is not as deep as hers, but I do still like watching them.

Day 119, art, visits

Sunday, 3/31/2019

Coffee and newspaper at the usual place. On impulse, I purchased a “cappuccino card”, a discount card where the last two of twelve drinks are “free”. Then I wondered, will I really be back here for twelve more cappuccinos? Or, if I’m living a mile-plus distant at C.H., might I come back here for Sunday mornings anyway, or would I find a nearer coffee shop? Transitions: breaking old habits, or adapting them. Ch-ch-ch-ch-CHANges! Thank you David Bowie, back in your box.

At 10:30 drove to Menlo Park to meet with Darlene and Jessea, who had invited me to join them looking at an exhibit of Ansel Adams photos being auctioned to benefit the Sempervirens fund. There were about 20, pretty much the gamut of Adams’ standard subjects, breaking waves, Sierra mountains, trees. It all seems very familiar now; partly because we’ve seen his pictures over and over, and partly because we all take these same pictures now, over and over. Adams showed everybody how to see these things, what to look for through the viewfinder, and the views are now clichés. But for any cliché, somebody had to coin it.

We talked about the technology changes. Take this shot, his Timber Cove breaking wave,

ansel_adams_timber_cove_coast_storm_c_1960_d5479140g

He did this with a big old wooden box on a tripod and a plate. How many very expensive 8×10 negs did he expose? Mind you, he wouldn’t have known what he had before he was back in the darkroom. (And maybe he didn’t go out to shoot a breaking wave; maybe he was there for the rocks, but back in the darkroom, he discovered he’d gotten lucky.)

Today, you’d sit on the same bluff with your digital camera, trying to time the waves, click, look at the back of the camera, nope, that wave doesn’t perfectly echo the shape of the rocks, do another — until you had the right one. And walk back to the car with your camera with its 128GB micro-SD card capable of holding a year’s worth of zillion-megapixel images, in your pants pocket.

So we had lunch at Anne’s Cafe, a throwback to the 1950s, which they enjoyed, talking about cameras and slides. Darlene and Jessea have the same problem as I, with thousands of slides, and not sure what to do with them. We talked about scanning, and they came back to the house and I showed them how I did slide scanning, which was fun for me anyway. But it emerged that they have a bigger problem in that their slides are nowhere near as well organized as mine were. They don’t have a catalog file saying what every slide is, organized by groups. More like, organized by rubber bands and shoe boxes. So just as they were leaving I remembered something: the slide sorter Marian used. A collapsing box, that opens to support a translucent screen with a bulb behind it, so you can move slides around, arrange and cull them in a batch. It would be worth nothing in an estate sale (not many buyers would even know what it was), but they could use it. So I pulled it from the back of the closet and handed it over.

Later in the day I ran the recorded game, #2 Oregon vs. #1 seed Mississippi State. Oregon won, and will face UConn in the Final Four on Friday. I have no plan to go to Tampa, but if Stanford should (against all odds) sneak by Notre Dame… nah. Probably not.

Day 118, museum, basketball

Saturday, 3/30/2019

Started an easy Saturday morning by writing the blog post for yesterday, during which I worked out the long (long) list of things that are pending some action by C.H. and the unknowns around them. Helps to have the known unknowns, spelled out.

Then after a shower and shave, did some desk work, paying a couple of bills. I do love the bill pay system that Marian built on the Credit Union’s bill-pay site. All the usual recipients are in there. All I have to do is click on one, enter the amount to be paid, click on a calendar to say when the money should be delivered, click OK a couple more times, done.

Then I spent a fraught half hour trying to work out this annoying bit of IBM retirement red tape called a SHAP (Special Health Assistance Provision). Once a year Marian would submit a form and get back up to $900 reimbursement for Medicare Part B payments that were not otherwise covered in her IBM pension. Am I eligible for SHAP? How much am I paying for Medicare Part B? To the second question I got an answer at mymedicare.gov; indeed I am, and over $200/month. As to the first, I’m not at all sure; and if I am, there are several ambiguous fields on the form that might want Marian’s info as the eligible retiree, or mine as the survivor. It’s tempting to say “fuck this” and forget the $900, but, well. On Monday I will call the IBM benefits line and try to clarify.

At 1pm I drove to the museum and led a tour, about 15 people, went OK. Back home just in time for the start of Stanford Women’s sweet-sixteen game. They won but it was agony watching. The same shooting slump that affected the game against BYU last Monday continued. They hit one of twenty three-point shots. They stayed slightly ahead thanks to superior defense and rebounding, but allowed Mississippi State to hang around, even get to within five points in the last two minutes, before closing the game. On Monday they play Notre Dame who just had a very high-scoring game against a good opponent. If they play as in the last two games they will get slaughtered.

Feeling unexercised I walked the mile to California Avenue and fed myself a small pizza and a beer for supper; and back to burn off some of the accumulated TV.

Day 117, estate no-sale, lunch

Friday, 3/29/2019

Exercise today was to walk (not jog) to the nearest ATM for my bank, the Stanford Federal Credit Union. That’s 1.8 miles each way, per Google maps, and the iPhone agrees, showing 9,338 steps for the day.

Chuck the realtor arrived at 11, along with Sheri Galvin, a vivacious older woman who runs estate sales. She looked the house over, admired it extravagantly (“I’d buy it myself if I didn’t have my family living with me”) but ended up saying, “I don’t see $10,000 here! I need to see that before I can afford to run a sale, I have to pay my assistants and make a little myself out of my 35%.”

She did offer to help me run the sale myself, if I wanted to. For a fee she would come for a day and price everything, loan me card tables for displaying stuff, and so on. I’m thinking seriously about that.

Meantime, as I explained to her and to Chuck, I am in limbo, waiting on Channing House to come back to me with specifics. Here’s what I know will have to happen.

Kim Krebs calls me in to show me a contract.
She and I agree on what upgrades will be done to the unit, for example re-do the kitchenette, replace the drapes, and — Chuck reminded me — I take a close look at the bathroom and maybe ask for improvements there.
That gets added to the contract; really, want it on paper.
We agree on a time-line for the unit upgrades. That work is done by C.H. in-house maintenance staff, and I have no idea how fast they work or what kind of back-log they have.
I liquidate the mutual funds in the one Schwab account to fund the needed entry fee. Here I’m not certain of the exact procedure, do I do it over the web, or should I have my financial advisor do it?
Money gets wire-transferred from my Schwab account to C.H.; same questions as the preceding step.
I have legal occupancy of the unit, yay! Except, can I start moving in, or do I have to wait for the upgrade work, and how long will that take?
At least, with legal occupancy, I can bring Tyra the decorator in to plan, and I can start moving items from the house to the unit, if only to stack boxes in closets.
Tyra has a design and she and I go buy furniture to be delivered.
When (almost) everything I want to keep is out of the house, schedule Sheri to assist, and set a date for a sale.

All that could start happening as soon as C.H. finalizes my application. I don’t know why that didn’t happen this week, after I got medical approval. I picture my application sitting on somebody’s desk while they check my credit rating. (Hmmm…. I put a freeze on my credit ratings a year ago. Well, if they need to know, they can ask me. Now, where did I put the info on how to un-freeze a rating… I think I know…)

With all this in mind I went to lunch with Scott and Steve. Lots of talk about our mutual pasts at IBM.

Back home I ran the DVR through the WBB games that involved PAC-12 teams. Sixth-seed UCLA gave 2-seed UConn a scare, but finally lost. Oregon State gave 1-seed Louisville a respectable game and lost. ASU lost to 1-seed Mississippi State. Oregon, a two-seed, started slow against upstart 6-seed South Dakota State, but pulled ahead in the second half to win.

Day 116, Yosemite, laundry, music

Thursday, 3/28/2019

Started a load of laundry and then headed out to do museum work at the Yosemite drive warehouse. I spent the day with Steve, cataloging the parts of a donation of a Data General file server from the mid-90s. There was a “deskside” server, a box about a the size of an ottoman and weighing a couple hundred pounds, full of big circuit boards, with its associated terminal and keyboard; and a RAID array of twenty plug-in disk modules, and a heap of spare parts, extra disk modules, extra power supply modules, circuit boards, cables. Over a 6-hour day we cataloged 24 items, with another 15 to go when next the volunteers hit Yosemite, in two weeks.

Back home I ate and continued the laundry process, and then had to go out to a Voices of Music concert. This is a local organization that puts on Baroque and other classical works. The musicians are skilled and I find some the music very enjoyable. Some, kind of boring.

Voices of Music was Marian’s discovery; she found their concerts a couple of years back and signed us up as season subscribers immediately. I considered not going to this, the final concert of their season, mainly because the prospect was causing uncomfortable emotions. I just have to get used to the fact that thinking about anything that she enjoyed is going to cause prickly eyes and constricted throat. That doesn’t seem to be changing with time. If I were an actor and needed to cry on stage, I could do it easily by thinking about her favorite azalea plant. Or in this case, her favorite concert series.

But the music would be good and I have an on-going goal of getting the heck out of the house and to performances. So, go. (And, note to self, sign up for their next season. Their usual venue, the Episcopal church at 550 Waverley, is about four blocks from C.H.)

This was a selection of works by Handel and by Bach, and like most of their concerts in my experience, some pieces were snoozers and some were wows. Most of the wow this time came from the vocal performances of Amanda Forsythe, a soprano.

Here she is with a group very similar to Voices of Music doing a similar Handel number: youtube link. Brava! It felt like a privilege to be in the same room as that voice. The thought occurred to me during some of her twiddly bits, “How come there are no sopranos in jazz?” Because what she’s doing is not that far from scat, except Ella et. al. did their scatting in a much lower register.

So that was good. Back home to fold the laundry and crash.

Day 115, glasses, FOPAL, burger

Wednesday, 3/27/2019

Started with a run, 37 minutes, felt fine. I’m sure I did something for the next two hours, but don’t remember what. At noon I set out to take care of a thing that had been bugging me for three months. For all that time, two pairs of Marian’s glasses have been lying in their cases on a bedroom dresser. I’d see them, think, “trash them”, then “no, donate them”, then “but where?” and then “deal with it later”. Over and over for 100-odd days now.

Well, yesterday I finally got around to an internet search for where to donate used eyeglasses. Everybody knows the Lions Club has that as their special charity, but it turns out they don’t have any local drop-off points. Further searching reveals all LensCrafters stores accept glasses for their OneSight program. And I know where there’s a LensCrafters. So I drove to Menlo Park and dropped off the glasses. Done.

From there I went to FOPAL and did 3+ hours of sorting. That’s damn hard work. I counted; I moved about 35 bankers-boxes of books from sorting to the sales room. I didn’t count the books I handled, but it was a lot. Per the Health app I walked 4.7 miles, 12,000 steps yesterday. A bit less than half of that would have been my run, but a lot was going around and around the sorting and sales rooms with boxes and cart-loads of books.

They really handle an amazing quantity of books. One cheerful donor yesterday brought in 25 boxes, which pretty much wiped out the gains we sorters had made in the hour previous. The donations vary immensely. Some people drop off boxes with mostly recent hard-covers. Or a box will have somebody’s accumulation of years of computer reference books (Windows XP Secrets, How to use MS-DOS, etc.). Yesterday there were a couple of boxes of very old paperbacks, many with cover prices of 50 cents and 75 cents. That keeps the sorting process interesting; you never know what the next box will have.

At 4:30 I left, stopping to buy a few grocery items. I decided to go and eat out for a change. Specifically, I decided, a burger and a beer. I went to Kirk’s Steakburgers in the Town and Country shopping center, but when I walked in, their drinks fridge had no beer. “Yeah, we ran out,” the counter person said. Well, a beer was an integral part of my plan so, feeling distinctly curmudgeonly, I turned around and left. Now what? Ah! I drove back to California Avenue and (with difficulty) found a parking place, and went to The Counter, where in fact I sat at the counter and had a beer and a burger.

When I got home I was quite tired; watched a little TV and went to bed at 9:30, and slept until 6, so that was good.

Day 114, mental exam, slides, art

Stanford gave its fans two agonizing quarters, seeming to be unable to penetrate the BYU zone defense while hitting exactly one of their first 12 three-point shots. Then in the third quarter they found their defense and offense at once, and put on a 17-2 run to take over the game. On to Chicago to play Missouri State and then, hopefully, Notre Dame.

Tuesday, 3/26/2019

First up today was an appointment with Dr. Melissa Frederick, the C.H. medical director. She’s a cheerful, young (by my standards) woman, very pleasant to talk to. This turned out to be mostly a brief test of my mental acuity. For example, in the next one minute, name as many words as you can think of, that start with the letter ‘F’. I thought that was quite a challenge; I could only think of 15. Turns out, eleven was enough. Phew.

Later I got an email saying I had passed. So, ok. Now only waiting for approval of my financial documents.

Back home I waited to see if Tyra, Chris’s designer niece, would call as I’d scheduled at 12. Meanwhile I finished inspecting the Japan slide group, and started scanning them. One more session will finish that job. When Tyra hadn’t called at 2, I figured, ok, so much for that. Then it occurred to me to wonder if I really sent that email. Um… no. Still in “drafts” 😳. So I changed it to say, call me Wednesday between 11-12 and actually clicked Send. Tyra responded shortly after.

Bored, I started walking around the house collecting all the art works I want to take along, and identifying those I could. One is a print we bought in San Juan Island around 2000. We liked it as an excellent rendering of the look of the Puget Sound as we often saw it from the Washington State Ferry boats.The name “Spaulding” is on the bottom margin. A little googling found a married couple of printmakers of that name, on San Juan. I emailed them enclosing a snap like the above, asking to verify it was theirs. (Note from November: they never replied.)

I also cleared out another couple of shelves of storage from the shop.

Day 113, jewelry, FOPAL, basketball

Monday, 3/25/2019

Began the week with a run, 40 minutes of my 4.5mph pace, felt just fine. I had a list of things to get done. One was that Louise was coming with the jewelry she’d taken for appraisal, at 10:30. Two were online, so I did them while waiting. One was to review my museum schedule and sign up for docent tours for the month of April.

The other was to go to Apple’s trade-in page, and arrange to trade in three Macs for apple store credit. The process is simple; you enter the serial number of the device and answer a few questions about its condition. Then their recycling vendor sends you an email to confirm, and later a custom box to return the device. When it is received, you get a gift card in the amount. I’m returning Marian’s old Air, which was made in 2006, I learned after entering the serial number. Got lots of good use out of that one! The other two are my old 2011 MacBook Pro, and Marian’s 2017 iMac which sits on her desk. (It was a recent replacement for a Mac mini that served her a long time; and it was preceded by a Cube — remember the Apple Cube?)

I realized from the email that the return offer is only good for 21 days. I’m not sure I’ll be ready to send off the iMac in 21 days. I use it for all financial stuff, bank statements, reviewing brokerage accounts, credit card bills. Just because the Chrome browser in that system knows all the passwords for those accounts and fills them in. Silly! I have the passwords; there’s no danger of getting locked out. I can do that work equally well from laptop Godot or my big iMac.

Louise texted she’d be an hour late, so I zipped out in the car to take care of two more items. One was to go to the Stanford ticket office and make sure that my WBB season ticket account was alright. Yup, it turns out I had indeed unsubscribed from emails from them (while shutting down all Marian’s email subscriptions). That’s why I never had a chance to buy a good seat for this weekend’s games. Fixed now.

The other job was to return some fluorescent bulbs to the hardware store for recycling. Back home, I had an email from Canopy about the memorial tree planting for Marian, now with a time and other info. So I composed an email to the people who wanted to attend. While I was working on that, Louise showed up. So I answered the door sniffling and had to go blow my nose before talking to her. She’s done a marvelous job documenting Marian’s bling. We talked about how to sell some of it, and she will get back to me with more info.

After she’d gone, I headed out, first to Office Depot because I wanted to see what kind of office furniture they had. For the new place, I want some kind of cabinet to set the printer on, with space for printer stationery and hopefully a file drawer. And I looked at desks, because initially I’d been thinking I’d keep Marian’s desk, but now I’m inclined to want something a little lighter, more open. Office Depot stuff didn’t attract me. Ikea’s desks are better.

From there I stopped at FOPAL to check on the Computer section. There were several boxes waiting, so I culled them and priced the keepers. Two hours logged in the book. I learned something today about the bargain room, where I send the unsaleable Computer books. But time presses, I’ll record it later.

Had a few hours to relax and eat some supper; then it’s out to the Stanford second-round game against BYU. I’ll report on that tomorrow.