Day 92, C.H. application in

3/4/2019

Started with a run, usual length, felt good. Drove to the Los Altos clinic and picked up the paperwork Dr. Marx had prepared. Put it in an envelope with the other 8 pages of the C.H. application packet, and then decided I wanted to make a copy of the whole thing before turning it in.

Drove home via the grocery store, picking up a few items. My grocery shopping is very easy these days. Well, except for one thing. I’m getting about half my calories from a meal replacement that you mix partly with heavy cream. Most stores only carry heavy cream in 8oz units, but my Safeway has been carrying it in quart sizes. Only today they didn’t have it.

Copied the whole application packet, put it back in the envelope, and drove on over to C.H. to turn it in. I was going to ask Ms. Krebs a couple of trivial questions, but she was just sitting down with other clients, so I left the packet with the receptionist. So that deed is done. I hope to hear something back from them soon, but it could well be weeks.

Headed home for a session scanning old slides. While the scanner whined away I worked with the new laptop, Godot, downloading the apps that I use on the old laptop. Pretty soon I’ll be able to switch entirely to the new one.

Day 91.5 grief (again) (yawn)

In the afternoon I drove to a Best Buy store and walked through their wonderland of TV screens. Gosh, TVs are impressively good these days. Of course they program very contrasty, heavily sharpened material so the images jump out at you. Anyway, many of their demo TVs had sound bars attached. And there was even a setup with ten different sound bars and you could in theory switch from one to another to compare. Only in theory, because three or four of the ten didn’t make any sound, broken or unplugged, and as for the others, someone — customers? bored salesman? — had turned the volume up all the way so when you switched to one, it blasted you and made heads turn across the store. Main problem, the item I’d decided from trawling the internets was the most interesting, a Yamaha one, was not in the store anywhere. Apparently Best Buy doesn’t stock them. (Nor did Fry’s.)

So I made some food and burned off quite a bit of programming from the backup on the DVR. One glob of DVR space is the folder of saved episodes of the last season of So You Think You Can Dance. There have been 15 seasons of that show, and Marian and I watched all of them together. It was our favorite TV show, and sharing it was a pleasure. For several of seasons, I left the episodes on the DVR to watch again. We’d play them back and select a few of the very best routines, the ones that made us say “Wow!”. These I would record off the DVR onto the computer, and from there (with several hours of work) make a compilation DVD.

Sound like a nerdy thing? Something one of Sheldon’s flatmates might do? Yeah. Let me check: in my file of recorded DVDs I have highlight discs of SYTYCD seasons 5, 6, 8, 10, 11, 12 and 13. Don’t know what happened to 7, 9, and 14. It is season 15 sitting on my DVR now.

This sounds like the slides all over again. DVDs take up a lot less space! But the issue is the same: I carefully curated imagery, stored it, only to never view it again. Before I resolve that, I want to think about about

Grief (good grief, again?)

So I played back an episode of Season 15 and got the strongest wave of grief I’ve had in days. Why? Part of the answer is a couple of paragraphs back: watching SYTYCD was a shared experience, and I’ll never share it again. But there’s another aspect. The words going through my mind were, “She loved this so much…” and it’s that which triggers the emotion. The same thing happens when I stop to look at her favorite azalea in bloom — a few days back, when I was showing Chuck around the house and was going to mention the azalea I couldn’t make my voice work. Something about realizing that here was something Marian loved, and that she can’t enjoy again, is just a very powerful inducer of grief.

Well, what about those DVDs of past seasons? Would I watch any of them again? Could I watch them — remembering that they were specifically the highlights she most enjoyed? And what about the current folder of season 15? Is there any point to re-watching those shows, or making a compilation from them? I think “no” to all. I’ll mull it a day or so then probably throw everything out.

Day 93, forms, desk cleanout

Sunday 3/3/2019

Sunday morning. Up and out to the coffee shop by 7. Pleasant sit reading the paper and doing the puzzle. I’ve only patronized this place for 30 years or so, usually coming in wearing a hat, and they never seem to recognize me.

Home theater dreams

I walked home and then drove up to Fry’s to shop TV sound bars. I designed my present TV setup years ago. Every audio and video source (TV, Blu-Ray, VHS deck, laptop) feeds into a receiver by HDMI cables; the receiver drives five speakers around the room and a woofer. It worked, but it is over-complex. Looking ahead at an ILF unit, I figure to dump the receiver, connect the Blu-ray and computer into the TV itself, and generate audio with a nice subtle sound bar in front of the TV. I’d already confused myself mightily by looking for “best tv sound bars” online and thought I’d get some clarity looking at actual hardware at Fry’s. But no, they only had a couple of brands and no real info.

Paperwork

Last night I realized that I forgot to go by the PAMF office in Los Altos and pick up the medical forms that the doctor was going to prepare for me. She was to have them ready for pickup Friday and, I thought, was going to message me when I could pick them up. In which case I’d have had an email. But I should have checked Saturday. The office isn’t open Sunday.

OK then, so let’s get the rest of the Channing House (C.H.) questionnaire ready. I sat down at the desk and spent an hour carefully filling out about 10 pages of questions. I was pleased to find, checking my Schwab online accounts, that Marian’s IRA has finally been combined into my IRA. For a while there was a little matter of $360K that I couldn’t access, but it’s back now. I was pleased to see that I have more than enough assets to pass the C.H. requirements. So all the paperwork is done, except for adding the doctor’s statements. Tomorrow I will pick those up, put the whole thing in an envelope, and drop it off at C.H.

Office supplies

Since I was at the desk I started cleaning out its drawers. If we hoarded anything, it was pens. We each had our favorite type of pen, and to avoid the annoyance of one running dry or not being to hand, we tended to order them in boxes of 12 from Amazon. Plus years’ accumulation of paper clips and post-its and… It took a good 90 minutes to inventory all office supplies and neatly bag up the excess by category.

I emptied the shallow desk drawers, wiped them out with Pledge, and restocked them with a small selection of tools (stapler, staple remover, eraser…) and a modest supply of paperclips, rubber bands, and post-its. Put a lot of stuff in the trash. Set aside a box of neatly sorted surplus items for the eventual estate sale. Anyone want a bag containing 39 roller-ball pens in assorted colors? Or a bag containing about 15 Sharpies of various sizes and colors? Or one with a dozen highlighters?

So now the desk drawers are organized, and ten of the eleven drawers of the tall cabinet beside the desk are empty. One has a tidy assortment of other office stuff: mailing labels, a small paper cutter, scissors, rulers, etc.

Basketball

Stanford is at UW at 2pm. I streamed the audio as I edited this post. Stanford had another easy win by 20+ points. That ends the regular season. I will be attending the PAC-12 tournament next week in Las Vegas.

Day 92, Women of the IEEE and others

So last night I had misunderstood the Stanford baseball schedule; they were playing away this weekend. So I didn’t have to brave a cool and possibly rainy night outdoors. I stayed home and streamed the SWBB game. Stanford — as the audio announcer kept pointing out — has never lost to WSU, ever, they are something like 39-0. He had to keep saying that and I’m thinking, “shut up shut up, just shut up about it” but it didn’t matter. They romped over the Cougars, winning by 30 points at the end. And so to bed.

Saturday, 3/2/2019

Today I was scheduled to lead a custom tour for the Women of the IEEE, Women In Engineering, or #WIELEAD (“we lead”, get it?). It was supposed to get underway at 11am. I asked the guys doing the 1401 demo if they would mind staying around after their 11am run to do another demo for my group at 12:30, and they generously agreed to.

Then I found out the WIE had also asked for a brunch table. Now, if they are going to eat brunch in the lobby starting at 11, when can we start the tour? There’s the scheduled Family Tour supposed to go at 11:30, will we be stepping on their toes? \Sadik, the young woman leading that tour, tells me her first stop was the IBM 360, so they would be ahead of us all the way. Fine.

Then Susan, the WIE organizer, was disappointed that I was not one of the docents trained in the Women in Computing tour. This was their fourth year doing this and they’d always had one of those. There’d been a miscommunication in the scheduling app or an error by the event scheduler. I said I’d do the best I could, and quickly opened Wikipedia to bone up on Margaret Hamilton and Grace Hopper. (Later I hooked Susan up with my boss, Katherina, who placated her with free tickets to the scheduled Women in Computing tour days.)

I managed to get the dozen women started about 11:40, but now instead of doing a leisurely tour, inviting questions, I had to cut my usual stuff short in order to get done before 12:30. Plus adding a stop so I could talk about Hamilton, and ad-libbing a reference to Hopper later. Half-way around we caught up to the Family tour who were being video’d by a professional crew. So I took my tour past them. Then there was another big private tour that we passed, but they caught up with us again, so I had to rush another stop to get out of their way… it was just a zoo. But the 1401 demo was a hit, and they all thanked me and made me stand with them for a group photo. So they didn’t notice what a zoo it was.

Back home, I sat down to begin adapting Godot, the new laptop, to my preferences. Go through all the system preferences and check them. When I start up Safari … it seems to know what sites I visit often; they are all lined up on the blank page. How did it know? One clue, I had connected to iCloud when setting up preferences. But still spooky!

Install Dropbox and get it started syncing all the stuff from there. Install Firefox. Install LastPass in both Firefox and Safari browsers. Open Gmail and Google Calendar — looks ok! Ordinarily I’ve been using Firefox for mail and calendars, and Chrome for everything else. I decide to see if I can use Firefox and Safari only, and not install Chrome. So I start opening all the URLs that I normally have tabbed in Chrome. They look OK. (I’m posting this from Godot.)

On Day 79 I told about trying to recover the contents of a drive out of an old Mac for Diane, but couldn’t because it was an IDE drive and I had only SATA enclosures. Since then I’ve acquired a gizmo that should let me connect an IDE drive to a USB port. Tonight I will meet Diane and Jean and try again.

Later: well, it worked. I was able to read the two volumes on the old drive and copy them to another drive. The three of us went out for Chinese food on Castro street.

Day 91 getting stuff done

Friday 3/1/2019

Started the day with a run, which went well. Usual distance, felt good. Then began doin’ stuff. Started the laundry. Paid a couple of bills. Sorted the tax folder and made up a spreadsheet (based on last year’s spreadsheet) of charitable contributions.

Cleared out another shelf of things. One thing in particular is a large brown-glazed earthenware pitcher in what I believe is called “piecrust” style, a supposed family heirloom. I can just make out words on the bottom, “THE BUCKEYE POTTERY MACOMB ILL”. I will look this up and see if it has any value. Then see if either a nephew or a niece wants it. What it certainly was, was dirty, from sitting for years on a shelf beyond the reach of the cleaning lady who’s rather short. So I washed it. Also on that shelf, two brass-colored (pot metal) candlesticks of no value, threw them out. And two large pine-scented candles in tins which were last lit for Christmas… 2000? I think?

Then cleared off the spice racks. Back on Day 2 or 3 I realized, I’m never going to cook again. In fact I do cook but in a very casual way: fry up a couple strips of bacon and two eggs in the grease. Chop up some fruit for a compote. Height of sophistication: the other night I sliced up an apple and cooked it in a dish in the microwave, and sprinkled cinnamon on it.

But nothing that needs spices beyond salt, pepper, butter and, ok, the cinnamon was nice. But we had many many other spices. Here’s all the jars after I finished emptying them.

Note that one in the middle with a date on it? We would acquire spices for some particular recipe, and put the jar on the shelf until it was needed again. Every once in a while I’d get suspicious about the age of some spice and I’d mark the date it was refreshed. Here’s a couple I noticed. You can see how in 2016 I said, this allspice doesn’t smell of anything! (And no wonder, since it was then almost old enough to vote!) So we got some fresh and I updated the label. Anyway, that felt kind of good, to get all those aging spices out of there. I also dumped the canisters of flour and cornmeal and put them in the dishwasher. Only one full canister left, granulated sugar. I don’t eat it myself but I need it to keep filling the hummingbird feeders.

With the laundry all dried and folded I took a short nap, then went to work scanning old slides. I believe I said, somewhere back in the several days of nattering about slides, that I was only keeping the ones that were emotionally significant, or were excellent photographs on their own. Here’s one of the latter. g802p001 looking at faberge eggs in Gumps window christmas 1979

The story here is that around Christmas 1979 Marian remembered how when she was a child the family sometimes went into the City to look at the store window displays. So we did that, walked the streets of downtown SF in winter darkness, and saw a display of Fabergé eggs in the window of Gump’s. I looked down and saw this girl and grabbed this shot. I don’t claim any skill here, but that is one of those fortuitous compositions that just works, every angle is just right, the line of shadow, the angle of her gaze, the line of the hair ribbon — it just all fits. And it has been sitting unnoticed in the slide box in the closet since… 1980?

I got a bit sidetracked at that point, spending the better part of an hour trying to get my printer to produce something like the color tones of the digital image, on some quality paper I have. (Shit, I wonder when I bought that box of quality photo paper? This millenium, I’m sure.)

Now, coming up on 5pm, I have the option of staying home to stream the SWBB game at WSU, or going to a Stanford baseball game. Well, I can keep in touch with the progress of the basketball on my phone, at the baseball game. But what’s the weather going to do? Answer tomorrow.

Day 90, Shustek and old movies

Thursday, 2/28/2019

Toddled off to the Shustek center for a day of archival work. I and Toni worked together to photograph items that had been cataloged. Three years ago when we were doing this work the photo setup was a couple of (in my opinion) lousy little HP pocket cameras, and the day’s pictures had to be uploaded for later processing. Now we have a fairly decent Canon connected to a laptop so the pictures go directly into the database.

We caught up, clearing the shelves of a backlog of “To Photo” items. Like the FOPAL work this is good exercise: I was on my feet, moving items on and off the table and composing the images, for about five hours all told, and when I got home I could feel it. But before I ate I sat down and scanned old slides for an hour. Got to keep that project moving.

I’ve accumulated a bunch of famous movies on the DVR which is getting under 40% available. So tonight I swore to get rid of some. It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World lasted only ten minutes. I stuck with Casino Royale for nearly an hour but finally lost interest. Two down.

Got an email from SouthWest reminding me of my reservation for a flight to Vegas for the PAC-12 women’s basketball tournament. This will be my first solo travel in, practically, ever(*). I’m nervous! Which is nuts; traveling by myself has to be easier than the last half-dozen flights I’ve taken, when Marian’s mobility and stamina were greatly limited, having to book wheelchair assistance, always checking the location of the elevators so as to avoid stairs, always looking to minimize walking distance between gates. And I booked those flights, and we executed all those travel plans, with confidence and panache.

So here’s another difference in my new bachelor life. Planning and carrying out travel as a couple, was easier (at least in anticipation) than it is solo. I need to think about what the difference really is.

At least partly it’s that I had the confidence of knowing Marian agreed in the plans. It’s like what I wrote about on Day 83: having made plans as a couple, the plans feel solid. When I make the plan by myself, for myself, I get the feeling I’m over my head and probably messing it up. I don’t know any cure for this but experience: go out and do it and verify that I haven’t screwed it up.

(*) The last solo trip I can think of is when in 1980 I drove to Seattle to attend the Clarion West writer’s workshop. After the ten(?) day workshop Marian flew up to join me and we drove back together.

Day 89, medical exam, FOPAL, “potlatch”

Wednesday, 2/27/2019

Started with a thorough shave, shower, tooth-brush. One wants to be clean for a medical exam. At ten departed for the PAMF Los Altos clinic for a routine physical with our long-time physician, Dr. Marx. She was, as always, attentive and kind. My numbers are all good. She’ll have the form wanted by Channing House ready in a couple of days.

In email, Marian’s relatives Darlene and Jessea and Liz all want to attend this tree planting in April. Hmm. So I passed on the info to a couple more people, and by midday they also replied with “yes, sure.” So that will be a thing.

Went to FOPAL with three more boxes of books. While filling them I eyeball-estimated how many more I’d need to take. Probably about 9 or 10. So, bookcases emptied in March. At FOPAL I worked a full three hours, then bought a few groceries and headed home, on the way stopping at FedEx to pick up Godot, the new laptop. It will take many hours to get it configured how I want it, but I started by introducing it to the wi-fi and starting it on upgrading to the latest OS level. It will probably sit all day tomorrow, then on Friday I will really dig in.

Making lunch in the kitchen I realized that though I had emptied out the canisters of various pastas and flours, I had never tossed the 30-40 jars of spices. Well, actually last night I used some cinnamon, and I still use the pepper grinder regularly. But I should clear out that spice shelf.

Thinking about furnishing a studio at C.H. has made me realize there are quite a few things I will want to hang on to, just to make an empty apartment homely. There’s a chair and a small table in the back yard that will do well on the large deck that is a part of all C.H. units. And a couple of plants that I know are hardy and have been thriving even under my minimal care. And some decorative objects that speak to me, including the Linsky painting.

Then I had a brilliant idea for the rest. I will damn well hold a potlatch! The problem is that so many objects have (apparently) no current market value, despite having been bought for their beauty or charm or skillful execution, and cherished for decades. One way to realize the value is to try to sell it on eBay, but from experience I know that is a frustrating, time-consuming process that is unlikely to generate any real money.

But focus on the end-goal, which is just to pass an object on to someone who will also cherish it! Instead of demanding money as a sign of desire, let’s just put the objects out and let people take their pick, guided by their own tastes. I have to think about the details, when to do it, who to invite, how to show the items, whether to include furniture items in the give-away. But the basic idea will be, invite relatives and good friends to come in, take one object each that they really like. Maybe a terrible idea, but at the moment it feels like genius.

Day 88, ikea and slides

Tuesday, 2/26/2019

Rain threatened so I drove to the Y for a little workout. Yesterday evening and again this morning I played with little scraps of paper representing scale furniture, on the plan of the Channing studio. Amy’s basic idea was to use stand-alone shelving/media units to create a partial wall between one side with the bed, and the other with a comfy space to watch TV. She pointed out that the units can be different facing the bed versus facing the other way, and don’t all have to be the same height.

Further thoughts on that occurred as I pushed bits of paper around.

One, the unit has tons of storage space already: two full closets. I did not pay attention to these when I was there, but I’m pretty sure one or more of my existing dressers (very handsome danish style items) would push into one of the closets and still leave ample hanging space for my needs. I think but am not sure, that the closets have a shelf above the hanging rod, as well. Most closets do. Bottom line, there is no crying need to create a lot of new shelf or drawer capacity.

Two, another almost equally important space is a working/office area. I need to have a desk, at least one drawer for files, somewhere to put the printer, room to roll an office chair around.

With thoughts like these churning in my head — which is dumb, because I don’t know if that unit, or any unit, will be available when I finally complete my application paperwork — I headed off to walk the trail of IKEA in East Palo Alto, and then Scandinavian Design in San Mateo. If you want to have a quiet, meditative look at furniture, you can hardly do better than to arrive at 10am on a Tuesday. I don’t think I saw six other shoppers all morning.

My shopping was inconclusive. I did come to the conclusion that I liked the IKEA foam mattress line in its firmest model. Regardless of the destination unit, I will be buying a “full” size bed (a couple inches narrower than “queen” size), probably from IKEA. So that’s some decisions made. At home, I found those items online and noted their URLs.

I had an email from Catherine at Canopy saying they plan to plant a tree in Marian’s memory on April 20th, would I attend? I forwarded it to Jean, who promptly said she’d go. So I replied yes.

Then I worked on scanning slides. Between that email and scanning pictures of trips we took in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, I found myself getting quite sad. There’s no particular reason, just the multiple reminders of a life that is over piled up on me.

Day 87, blood and real estate

Monday, 2/25/2019

First priority this morning was to get to the PAMF Los Altos lab and get blood drawn so the results would be in for my physical on Wednesday. The car of course is still sitting in the driveway with a flat tire, so I took a Lyft instead. Cheerful young phlebotomist got the needle in with only a tiny sting, and soon I was Lyfted back. For the return trip I opted for the cheaper, shared-ride Lyft. There was another passenger, a young woman in the back seat who chattered at high speed to the driver the whole way. Pleasant, she wasn’t carping or bitching, but goodness, draw a breath, lady.

After some delayed breakfast I headed out to walk to Chuck’s office where I expected to meet him to talk about the sale of the house. I got there and he wasn’t in. After a while his assistant — also his son, Andrew, whom I had not recognized when I came in, to my embarrassment, sheesh I’ve only met him like four times before — called Chuck up and discovered that he had expected to meet at my house, not his office. Mis-communication all around. So he came and got me, only a five-minute drive, and finally we got together.

Then I, Chuck, and Amy, his “stager” (an interior decorator who specializes in getting houses ready to sell) walked around the house and talked about it. Amy was full of ideas about what could or might be done.

We all agreed that everything depended on whether it would marketed to owner-occupiers as a place to live, or to developers as a site to build on. That decision still hasn’t been made. Chuck will talk to a couple of developers he knows and look at more comparables.

Meanwhile I heard all about what Amy would do at a budget of around $30K or $40K to make it more desirable to, probably, a young professional couple with no children (which pretty much describes me and Marian when we bought the place). Gut the kitchen and redo it entirely. Strip out the bathroom tile (which Marian and I had selected with great care and much shopping, in 1975) and redo it. Maybe find a way to sandwich in a bath of some type for the master bedroom.

I tried to hold my tongue on most of this, reminding myself several times that, whatever they did to the house, I wouldn’t be living in it. So the details really didn’t affect me in any way, except by their possible effect on the net sale value.

Amy also spent ten minutes with a copy of the floor plan of the available studio unit at Channing House, giving me several good ideas on that. Soon after they left the mobile tire repairman arrived and fixed the Prius.

Then I sat down with Photoshop and made a better floor plan including a scale-accurate ruler. I printed that out and used the scale ruler to make little scale-size paper cutouts of furniture items so I could push around and arrange different ways. That took me to supper time and there we are.

Day 86, flat tire and a game

Sunday, 2/24/2019

I tried something new for my Sunday morning coffee. Going to a coffee shop on Sunday morning to read the paper was a ritual for Marian and me for decades. I’ve written earlier in this series about the experiences, both positive and negative, around doing it without her.

A constant so far has been that I would do the NYT crossword at home, before going out for coffee and to read the rest of the paper. But that sequence was a consequence of the fact that Marian liked to sleep in, and I didn’t. So I would get up and spend an hour doing the crossword and futzing with the internet; then when she got up we’d go out.

So, um… I’ve no reason to wait now. So today I got up, dressed, and walked to the coffee shop at 7am, where I read the paper and did the puzzle in comfort, with a scone and a cappuccino. Not exactly an earth-shaking revolution, but still, one more break with the past.

At noon I went out to go to the final SWBB game of the year, and found that the car’s left rear tire was flat. I had noticed a low-tire-pressure warning yesterday, but I looked at the tires before I went in to the movie yesterday afternoon, and they looked alright. I’m glad it held up for the return trip from San Jose, 75mph up I-280 last night.

But, what to do now? The plug-in hybrid has no spare (no room because of the large battery in the trunk) and anyway I wanted to get going. So I called a Lyft. At the game I met with Harriet and her visitor, Bridget, who were using my pair of tickets while I sat in her single seat. She agreed to give me a lift home.

The game was against ASU, and the Sun Devils are usually a tougher opponent that the UA Wildcats who came so close to beating us Friday night. But this game went Stanford’s way early. They had a modest lead at the half, and in the third quarter blew it up to 20+ points and cruised to the end.

This was Senior Day, the last home game of the season (ignoring the fact that Stanford is almost certain to host the first two games of the NCAAs) and I had a bit of trouble controlling my emotions. I kept remembering how Marian had hoped to last out this season, and how pleased she’d have been to reach Senior Day and applaud Marta, Shannon and Alanna who she’d watched grow up for four years. So I couldn’t have talked coherently for a while, but fortunately had no reason to talk.

After the game Harriet wanted to show Bridget the outside of the Cantor Museum and the Rodin sculpture garden, so I walked along with them to that. Then she drove me home where I made an appointment for a mobile tire repair outfit to come tomorrow afternoon, then had a pleasant evening watching TV.