Day 85, museum and a movie

Saturday, 2/23/2019

The first scheduled thing for the day was to lead a docent tour at 2pm. So I settled in for a relaxing Saturday morning with the computer. After about two hours I was bored, so finally I left early for the museum — might as well be bored there as at home. Did my tour; went home; changed clothes; and headed out to meet Dennis at the Pruneyard for a movie.

This was my first experience with a theater that not only has the reserved-seat reclining chairs, but the chairs have a tray, and a menu, and you can order a meal. So we ate supper in the theater while the many trailers ran. Not bad food, either. I had a “sesame chicken on rice noodles” thing which had generous amounts of chicken and bell pepper chunks in a fairly tasty sauce.

The movie was Alita: Battle Angel, a sci-fi effects adventure based on a manga series. It was entertaining, although it got kind of draggy toward the end, with a long and complicated third act. The most challenging thing was figuring out how the digital artists at Weta Studios created the central character. According to the Wiki page linked above, famous director James Cameron intended Alita to be 100% CGI. The character interacts fully and continuously with the live-action actors.

mv5bota2ntqzote5nf5bml5banbnxkftztgwotq1mtqzndm40._v1_sx1777_cr001777960_al_ — Eyes like golf balls…

Throughout the film I was looking at the effects as effects, trying to work out how this or that was done. I was assuming that at least Alita’s face and head were that of a live actress, but the eyes… her eyes are at least 30% larger than real human eyes. Did they have to edit every frame to make the eyes bigger? I was trying to imagine a program that could automatically analyze every frame, find the eyes, and stretch them. No, probably the whole face and the rest of her is all computer imagery. And yet the actress Rosa Salazar is credited with playing the part. So presumably she supplied at least the voice, and perhaps some of her body movements were captured as the basis for the images.

Day 84, slides and a game

Friday, 2/22/2019

Started the day with a run but had some foot pain so cut the distance short. Finished reviewing all the slide groups. I have selected perhaps 150 total out of… I am not going to try to estimate accurately, but several thousands. Today I looked at some I am sure have not been seen since they were filed in the box, shortly after they were taken in the 80s or 90s. One group, from the Oughts, is a series that Marian took of me, before and after the operation to replace my aortic valve. I don’t think I had ever seen them.

In the afternoon I spent a couple of hours actually scanning and processing slides. Over several years and hundreds of scans I have polished that work flow down to a smooth pattern. I won’t go into it now. But it appears I can finalize 10 slides an hour, so the whole pile that’s beside my desk now should take about 15-20 hours total. Two weeks max. And then, I expect, I will dump about a bushel basket of slides representing 46 years of photography (the earliest slide in the collection is from 1973) into the garbage.

While I was eating an early supper, Dennis called and suggested we see a movie Saturday evening, so we made that date. Then I was off to a SWBB game against the Arizona Wildcats.

The game was a whole lot closer than any Stanford fan would like. They trailed by four with two minutes to play. With 29 seconds left, Alanna hit a three to give Stanford a 2-point lead. On defense, Stanford committed a foul, but the Arizona player missed both free throws and Stanford controlled the rebound. All Stanford had to do was hang onto the ball and let Arizona foul them, but with 10 seconds to go, they turned it over. Now the Wildcats had the ball. With one second to go, their best player put up a three-point shot. It hit the inside of the rim, rolled around three-quarters of the inner circumference of the basket — and popped out. Buzzer; game over; Stanford wins.

Day 83, yosemite and imposter

Thursday, 2/21/2019

Drove to the “Yosemite” warehouse for a day of storing artifacts. Putting heavy objects (old servers, very heavy metal boxes) onto a pallet, strapping them down. Thought about how hard it is to spell pallet because of the confusion between

pallet, a small wooden platform for piling goods for shipment,
palate, the roof of one’s mouth
pallette, the flat piece of wood on which a painter mixes colors.

Trying to make a note, artifact number so-and-so moved to palla… palle… pala… shit! It’s really hard. One ell or two? Second vowel an a or an e? How many t’s?

In the morning, making plans for the day, I had an episode of something like, but not quite, imposter syndrome. I’ve had spells of this earlier, but this was the first time I thought about the sensation and tried to describe it. Basically I feel like I am faking my life. I see myself from outside, sort of, and feel a sort of contempt for a commendable, but obviously flawed and ineffective, effort to act like a real person.

This is new to widower-hood, I’m sure. When I was part of a couple, there was the constant agreement and validation that what we were doing was right for us, appropriate, sensible. I mentioned on one of the very early days that I missed the frequent little verbal validations we gave each other; but here I am missing something deeper and more subtle. It’s the implicit, unverbalized, confidence that what “we” are doing, the course “we” are charting, while it may be difficult, may not be as we’d ideally like it to be, is still correct, inevitable, impeccable, and would be approved-of by anyone else who really understood our situation.

Now, while there are times I feel quite correct, and even times when I positively enjoy the new possibilities, the loss of old constraints; but there are also times like this morning, where for a while I get a sinking doubt in my rightness, a sensation that I’m clearly faking it and could be called out as a failure and mocked at any moment. Not a sensation based in reality, and it isn’t crippling or even very bothersome. But I thought I should write it up as one more effect of bereavement.

Day 82, FOPAL, haircut, groceries

Wednesday, 2/21/2019

Pretty routine day. Started with a run. Reviewed a couple of big slide groups. Not many left, now.

Drove to our long-time hairdresser, Chris, to trim my increasingly thin hair. Really not a lot left, but what there is, looks better for being cut. Chris said she had been going over her recipe file and had noticed how many of her recipes she had gotten from Marian. Over the years the two of them swapped recipes often.

Down to FOPAL a bit early so started sorting at 1:30 and didn’t leave until 4:30. Bought some groceries and was surprised when the bill came to $70, probably the most I’ve spent on food since December. Well, some stock items like a big brick of cheddar at $15 which will last two or more weeks.

Relaxing in my chair, the doorbell announces a visit from neighbor Pat, just stopping by to see how I am. We chat for a few minutes about this and that.

The evening’s entertainment is watching an episode of “Brokenwood Mysteries“, not on the DVR but streamed on Amazon Prime. I like that series and am pleased to see from that Wikipedia link that it has been renewed for another season. But with me watching streamed stuff, TV is stacking up on the DVR; I noticed this morning it is 55% full. Must watch or delete something. Oh, the burdens of being a responsible consumer of media. (jk)

Day 81, real estate and baseball

Tuesday, 2/19/2019

For no reason I can fathom this has been a hard day emotionally. I started with a brisk walk (brisk because the air was chilly, but the sun was bright which makes all the difference) to the Y and a little workout. Then I reviewed some more slide groups while waiting for Chuck to arrive to talk about selling this house. Maybe something in the slides? No, even before that I was just awash with, I don’t know, call it grief. I’m sure the Norwegians have a very precise term for it. Walking around the outside of the house with Chuck, I was going to point out Marian’s favorite azalea in mad bloom, and I couldn’t get the words out, my throat just locked up. Oh well.

Chuck is an old friend and, as I think I wrote on Day 78? he was also our agent in two prior real estate transactions. Today he looked over the house and the neighborhood, considered the size of the lot, and so on. I have to say, looking over the house with a third-party’s eye, its age really shows. But no matter: ISMISEP, baby. That’s our mantra.

Chuck went away to research comparables and think about whether the house will most likely sell to a developer who’d scrape it (always my and Marian’s assumption), or someone who’d want to remodel it and live in it. What depends on this is whether, or to what degree, the house should be “staged” before being shown. If the owner/occupant option is what to aim for, “staging” might go as far as remodeling the kitchen and bath, expensive stuff. A developer, however, only cares about the size of the lot, the location, and any impediments to construction — take for example, the two protected oak trees that they would have to work around.

Chuck also mentioned he works with a designer who plans his staging. I sat up at that, because a designer is exactly who I’d like to consult with, in planning the layout of a hypothetical unit at Channing House. Later in the day I obtained the floor plan for the one available unit there, the jumbo studio, and emailed to Chuck with the request that his designer give a ballpark idea on whether it could be made a livable unit with spaces for working, reading, watching TV and sleeping. Maybe nothing will come of that, but.

I started scanning some slides and was surprised and disappointed with a couple of the ones I’d selected for their pictorial quality, as I saw it looking into a hand-held slide viewer. When actually scanned and on the big monitor, however, both these turned out to be soft, not properly focused. One is a lovely composition of a water bird (a male Smew, actually) moving through the water. The light was perfect, it made the water look like liquid glass and the bird is posed just right. Except, damn it, the bird’s head and eye are not in focus. The sharp focus was just past the bird, on his tail and the water. Looked fabulous in the hand viewer, but in detail it’s a complete miss. I’m sure when we projected that slide back in ’95 we jointly lamented the bad focus. But still we kept it. Sentiment.

In the afternoon something reminded me of baseball, which reminded me I’d been talking (to myself) about getting a Stanford Baseball season ticket. Well, why not now? And I did. It was only $220 for a 35-game season and what I know is a good seat at Sunken Diamond. I compared their schedule to mine and printed out the tickets for the games I think I’ll be able to attend (about half of them).

Then I sat down to watch Gene Kelly in An American in Paris.

Day 80, slides, tour

Monday, 2/18/2019

I started the day with a run, the first in a week, and felt pretty good for it. This is President’s day, a Monday holiday, and the Museum will be open — normally it is closed Mondays. I had signed up for the 2pm tour, and as of the morning, nobody else had, so I supposed I might have to deal with a big crowd as I did on Saturday. However the desk crew said attendance had been light so far; and just after I got there, Steve showed up as well. I started my tour at 1:59 with the 20-odd people who were ready, and Steve stayed back to pick up stragglers.

I must not have been as interesting as usual (though I didn’t do anything different) because half the 20 had dropped off by the end — although the ten remaining seemed really interested. Then I went back to sit in on the last stop of Steve’s tour. He had a group of a dozen who’d showed up after 2pm. I liked how he finished his tour, more formally and clearly than I do. I think I’ll shadow his tour sometime and see what else he does differently.

Back home I reviewed a couple more groups of slides. I should be able to wrap that review task up this weekend, and then it will be on to scanning and keywording the 150-odd slides I’ll have set aside by then. Keywording is adding keywords to the metadata of each image file so that I can do a search and turn up, for example, all the slides that relate to “Marian” or to “bridge” or “vehicle” or “London”. Or Boolean combinations of those, “Marian AND London” etc. This is an absolutely essential step in managing a collection of digital images. Without it, you just have a mass of hundreds (thousands?) of images and the only way to find anything is to scroll through a sea of thumbnails trying to spot what you want. (Which is exactly what I observed Jean doing yesterday when she was looking for a shot she wanted to show me.)

Anyway, scanning slides involves (1) the actual scan, which deposits the image as a file; (2) looking at it in Photoshop, possibly cropping, straightening, or adjusting color; (3) storing it in its appropriate folder (the folder for its group) with a correct filename (like g201p043 Mt Shasta from I5); (4) going over a group in Adobe Bridge or Lightroom and adding the keywords; (5) uploading the group to our online collection. Then it’s accessible and searchable. Here for example is the result of searching the collection for “Ireland Marian”.

And when that’s all done, hopefully before the end of March, there will be a day when all eleven boxes of slides get dumped into the black garbage can.

Day 79, game and geek stuff

Sunday, 2/17/2019

Yesterday I was so busy describing my busy Saturday that I forgot to mention, I also did three loads of laundry in between all the other stuff. Go, me. Today in domesticity, I changed the bed linens and washed them.

After reading the paper at the coffee shop, I completed scanning some old pictures that I promised to do for Jean. I like doing this; I use Photoshop to optimize and restore these faded old prints and it is a satisfying activity. I copied all the scans onto a thumb drive to take to her this afternoon.

Then I reviewed a few more groups of slides. The end of that activity is in sight. Then there’ll be maybe 200 cherry-picked slides to scan. That’ll be my background task for the next couple of weeks, I suppose.

At noon I sat down to listen to a SWBB game, streamed from USC. It was an agonizing game. Stanford trailed for 38 of the 40 minutes, turning the ball over a bunch of times, barely staying in the game thanks to offensive rebounds. They took their first lead with three or four minutes to play, were tied with a few seconds left, and won the game with a layup with three seconds left.

A week ago Diane, a long-time friend of Jean, emailed asking if I could help her get the data off the hard drive in a very old Mac, a 2002-era Power Mac G4. The old machine couldn’t be booted any more because she had no external monitor or keyboard for it. I said we could take the drive out of the old chassis and maybe mount it in an external drive enclosure, and plug that into something current. So this afternoon we tried that. I brought an external drive enclosure I had around, and Jean brought an old one from her late husband’s collection of hardware.

It was easy to remove the drive from the old chassis. Unfortunately it turned out to be an IDE drive, and both the enclosures, although old, were for SATA connectors. hdd-sata-ide I’m not sure what she can do. She’s going to ask the guys as We Fix Macs. I’m not sure they’ll be able to do anything.

Jean copied the scanned pics, and the three of us, at Jean’s suggestion, walked to a nearby pizza place for supper. Jean, Marian’s 90-year-old sister, leading the way.

Day 78, busy Saturday

Saturday, 2/16/2019

A busier Saturday than it had to be, as it turned out. The Museum is preparing to open its new Education Center, and I am signed up for two events related to that. The first was for docents only, today, from 11:30 to 2pm. And I was signed up to lead a tour at 2pm. The other event is for the public, next Saturday, starting with a brunch at 10am. Somehow I had mixed up these two events and thought today’s started at 10, so I arrived at the Museum at 10, and spent a while searching all the conference rooms etc. for the meeting until I got myself straightened out and had an hour to kill. Anyway…

The Education Center is going to be a very interesting experiment. It’s a cleverly designed space that can be put to all sorts of uses. We’ll see how it goes.

There was a biggish crowd — probably 35 or so — for the 2pm tour, and I managed to keep at least 25 of them to the end. I’m getting better at ending my talk cleanly, so the audience knows it was the end, and will start clapping. Often before I just kind of wound down and nobody realized I was finished; they would kind of stand around waiting for what I’ll say next, and I don’t have anything. Today there was a definite end and a nice hand.

Then home for a one-hour turnaround before heading out to Chuck and Suzanne’s place for a concert. They are music teachers and I expected student work, but in fact the star was Hanna Huang whom Suzanne introduced as “a professional musician who happens to still be in high school” and this was not overstatement. She ripped through a Beethoven Sonata with the skill and authority of a much older musician. After that I wanted to jump up and yell “Brava” but the rest of the audience of 40 or so — mostly parents and relatives, I would guess — didn’t stand, so I didn’t. Hanna also accompanied a young baritone, Austin Thompson, singing two Schubert leider, and then she was joined by a high-school-age cellist and violinist to do a Brahms trio. They played that very competently but I kind of lost the thread in that long and complex piece and my mind was wandering. Kudos to the kids for just being able to play it.

During the snacking and hospitality period after the music I managed to get some time with Chuck, to ask him if he would represent me in selling the house, and was glad when he said he’d love to. He was our agent back in the 80s, first selling an apartment house in Menlo Park, and then buying a rental complex in Seattle. Those deals were the real foundation of our fortune, such as it is. We came back from our years in England with a surplus of cash, which we put into the Menlo Park place; then (with Chuck’s help) did a tax-deferred trade-up for a larger place North of Seattle. I’m trying now to remember when we sold that; it must have been late in the 90s. Anyway the appreciation on those properties left us comfortably fixed. So I am confident Chuck can help getting the best value out of the house here.

Day 77, lunch and a game with friends

Friday, 2/15/2019

Spent the morning going through more groups of slides, still averaging about 1 in 50 to scan for permanent storage. I can understand why we took most of them: to document a moment or a place, or to try to capture something striking or beautiful, scenery or a flower or such. I can understand why we took the trouble to cull the slides and arrange them as a show, and project that once or twice for relatives or friends.

It is harder, now, to understand how we thought there was any point to cataloging and filing them for an indefinite future. It was just the spirit of the collector, I guess. OK, take Pioneer Day. In the 80s we bought a house for my parents to live in, in Paso Robles, near my sister. We often visited Paso Robles, and in particular in ’92 and ’93 we attended the Pioneer Day parade, when Paso Roblians parade their horses, cars, marching bands and old farm equipment down main street. OK, we shot 10 or 20 pics of the parade and us and our relatives each time. But when did we imagine we’d ever go back and look at them again, ten or twenty years along? I certainly don’t care now about some antique farm tractor, or some high school marching band, in Paso Robles 25 years ago.

Went to lunch with Scott and Bob Johansen (sp?). I didn’t known Bob well at IBM, and he I think didn’t remember me at all, but we had a pleasant lunch anyway.

At 5 I went around to basketball fan friend Harriet’s house where I watched Stanford vs. UCLA along with her and two friends of hers, and had a very nice dinner.

Day 76, simple day

Thursday, 2/13/2019

As usual drove to the East Bay to the Shustek center to meet with other volunteers and work on the collections. Today I was assigned to taking photographs. Each object that comes into the collection is documented with photographs before being stored. In prior years, for example 2015-2017 when I was cataloging at the Yosemite warehouse, the photo setup was, in my opinion, substandard. The photo equipment now at Shustek is much nicer, a decent Canon camera connected directly to a PC so the photos can be uploaded into the database instantly.

In the afternoon, all hands turned to packing the objects that had been processed in the preceding month or two. After being cataloged and photographed, objects are carefully packed into acid-free boxes eventually to be housed high on shelves in the warehouse. Each object has its unique number on a barcode tag. So first you play a tetris game of fitting objects into a box so they aren’t touching, and are cushioned with chunks of archival plastic foam so they can’t move around. Then you scan their barcodes, along with the unique barcode of the box, into the database, and put the box on a numbered cart and enter the cart number as the box’s current location. Eventually movers will move the cartloads of boxes to the warehouse, put them on shelves, and scan the box numbers to enter their new shelf locations. So any of the over 100,000 objects in the warehouse can be found again.

Last week we actually ran this system in reverse, going to find a dozen objects that were needed by someone doing research. Find the boxes, look in them for the objects — and there they were.

Home for a quiet dinner and TV.