Day 75, Esthetic Education

Wednesday, 2/13/2019

My plan was to drive to Alameda on the other side of the Bay to attend the free appraisal event at Michaan’s Auctions. Bring up to five items for free verbal appraisals, anytime between 10am and 1pm. This turned into a bit of an adventure because of the weather. A “pineapple express” rainstorm blew in. I heard heavy rain several times in the night, and wondered if I wanted to make the long drive in traffic, in the rain. Instead of departing at 8:30 as I’d originally planned, to arrive at the 10am opening time, I left at 10 in hopes of easier traffic. It was a slog but only really slow for a couple of miles in Oakland, and I arrived at 11:30. The auction house is a classy-looking place with lots of impressive antiques and cases of pretty things around the floor. About ten people were ahead of me.

IMG_3603a — The guy with the pink tie is Frank, the appraiser I dealt with. Frank by name, frank by nature, too.

Two older women were seated near me. One was called out to talk to the jewelry appraiser who worked in a different room. When she came back she told her friend, “She said it’s all costume jewelry.”

You could bring pictures or objects. I took a good print-out of my oil painting of Yosemite — have I included that before? Well, here it is again. Besides that I took a picture of an elegant 4337722_orig ceramic piece we bought in England and brought along two Eskimo soapstone carvings.

Taking these in reverse order, the soapstone carvings, despite being esthetically pleasing, nicely made, and by identifiable native artists, would likely bring $25-$40 dollars each.

The ceramic piece was signed by the artist, Sandra Eastwood, and I had done the research so I could tell Frank when she worked and the kind of things she did in London in the 70s and 80s. However, he was only interested in one thing: could he find auction records of sales of Eastwood ceramics? No. None at any of the sources he could check. So although he agreed the piece was charming, he doubted it would bring more than $20.

OK, quick check. When I google “Sandra Eastwood” indeed nothing turns up. But when I search on “Sandra Eastwood ceramics” I find references to her and her work. She was a teacher of pottery in the 70s and had a studio in Teddington (just down the road from where we lived in Twickenham, so very possibly the piece I have was bought there!) until 2012. However: no auction records or sales info at all. So nothing that would change the appraiser’s mind.

And the painting, for which I had rather high hopes. Here again the problem is that the artist, Dean Linsky, has only a few traceable auction sales, and they were all in the low hundreds of dollars. Very low, like $200. That was for a smaller painting than mine, but still, that was … a disappointment. (Like finding out your family heirloom necklace was costume jewelry.)

What to do next? Well, as to the carvings and ceramics: they will go in the estate sale. This is the sale I anticipate will happen around the time the sale of the house closes. And some people will get some very nice bits of decorative art for not very much money.

The painting? Well, I’m of two minds there; no, three. I could offer it back to the artist. In his email he mentioned he’d buy it back if he “were in a position to do so”. I wonder if he’d give me $500 for it? Two, I can try an eBay sale, with, say, a $500 reserve price.

Or three, I can keep it. At every ILF I’ve visited, the halls are decorated with art and photos belonging to the residents. I can see it hanging in Channing or Webster House for others to enjoy. Or hanging in my own unit at one of those places.

Got home, ate a sandwich, tossed three boxes of books in the car and went off to sort at FOPAL. Home and tired to eat blog and relax.

Day 74, Scanning and Channing House

Tuesday, 2/12/2019

The refurb-Macbook seller is being extremely nice about my ordering the wrong kind of laptop. I don’t have details yet but they are quite willing to exchange what I actually ordered for something that sounds like what I intended to order.

I started out for a run but the temperature was so low, 41º, which, I know, would be quite comfy for people in some parts of the world, but I quickly found it too cold for running, even with a jacket on. No, I don’t have any sweat pants. So I cut it short, a bit under a half mile.

I scanned one picture of my father that had turned up in the pile of pictures I sorted through with Jean on Day 70. That day had yielded a little wad of old pics that I need to digitize and share with Jean, and this was the first. But looking where to store it in my Pictures folder structure, I realized there are some shortcomings in how pictures related to my own history are organized. I need to spend an hour sorting that out before scanning more.

Then I worked my way half-way through the biggest slide group of all, “120 Big Loop of 00”. In ’00 we went on a six-week ride in our van across the South to Memphis, up to Chicago, West through the Dakotas to Seattle and home. The slides are excellent documentation of that trip, if one wanted to relive it. Pictorially they aren’t yielding much.

At 1:40 I headed out for a meeting with Kim Krebs, the marketing director at

Channing House

where I learned the nitty-gritty about pricing and availability.

Availability is slim at the moment, owing to the on-going upgrade project that Craig told me about when I toured the place on Day 50. When that finishes in two years (!) Kim will suddenly have 20-odd units to sell — the units now being used to relocate tenants as one floor at a time is cleared for remodeling. Still, units also become available in “the natural cycle” as she put it. People die or make a permanent move to the nursing wing at fairly regular intervals. As a unit becomes available, Kim offers it to the next person on her wait list that is interested in that size of unit.

There are actually eleven sizes of unit: four sizes of studios; four sizes of 1BRs; and three sizes of 2BR/2bath units. The only vacant unit at the moment is an Alcove, which is a jumbo studio. She showed me this unit. Picture a rectangle about 25×30 feet. One wall is mostly glass and opens on a 5-foot-wide deck. The inner wall has a walk-in closet and a bathroom. There’s a minimal kitchen, more of a wet bar, by the door. (“We could install a cook-top,” Kim said.)

I’m sure that a good decorator could work out some kind of room divider arrangement that would give that space the feel of a living room plus semi-private bedroom, but I can’t imagine how to do it. Although this unit is ready now for anyone who wants it, I think I would hold out for a real 1BR. (Although again, the floor plans for a 1BR look a little confining, with about 700 sq.ft. divided almost equally between living and bedroom. Maybe the Alcove could work — if I only knew a good designer…)

I now have the official rate sheet. Both the entry fee and the monthly fee are different for each floor plan, and different for higher versus lower floors. For a single person the entry fee ranges from $200K for the smallest, lowest studio, to $500K for a medium 1BR, to $800K for the biggest 1BR on an upper floor. These are not outrageous numbers, given what they buy: lifetime occupancy with “continuing care” at no added cost (“We are a CCRC with a Type A contract” was how Kim worded it; here’s an explanation of that.)

There’s a monthly fee that also varies with the unit type and floor (the rate sheet is quite elaborate!). The range of monthly fees goes from $3600 at the lowest to $10K at the highest. For a medium 1BR it’s about $5500 in 2019. Kim said these fees typically rise 3%-4% each year.

A very interesting financial point is that about $2000 of each month’s fee can be attributed to “medical expense” and thus deducted from one’s taxes. Also, approximately 25% of an entry fee can be a deductible medical expense. I will discuss this with my advisors when I talk to them; I’m not sure what the net effect would be on my taxes.

We talked about the issue of “bridging” between the entry fee and the sale of one’s home. Webster House offers a 90-day interest-free note (a fact that seemed to be news to Kim). Channing House’s policy is 20% down on move-in, and the rest can be paid later, but they charge an annual rate of 10% on the unpaid balance.

Let’s say it takes 60 days to complete the sale of one’s house. The numbers for the $500K fee for a 1BR would work out like so: 20% or $100K down, $400K borrowed for 60 days at 10%, which if I do the numbers right, means paying about $6600 in interest. One would have to consider carefully (or actually, one’s financial advisor could get out the old calculator and do some real work) whether it would be cheaper to liquidate some stocks and pay the whole fee up front. (Bearing in mind that up to $120K of the entry fee is deductible, which ought to offset some capital gains. Not simple!)

In any case, Kim’s advice on selling is to not wait until a unit is available to start the selling process. She recommends getting your real estate person involved now to talk about what needs to be done to expedite a sale when it’s time. As it happens, I’ll be talking to one potential agent this coming Sunday, so I’ll bring it up.

Anyway I am going to begin their application process. This involves two extra steps: they have a health form they want filled out by a doctor based on a recent exam. So I need to schedule a routine physical. And they want a “non-refundable, non-applicable” $500 fee. What that gets you is sort of adjunct membership: you are on the wait list, you get the house email newsletter, and you can attend any of the concerts and such they schedule. I think it will be worth the money to be on the wait list whether I go with Channing or not — which is still an open question.

Day 73, waiting for Godot

Monday, 2/11/2019

As I expected, when I checked at 8am, the FedEx tracking for my new laptop said “end of the day Monday”. So I need to be home, ready to sign the package, until the white truck arrives. At 8am, the package was “On FedEx vehicle for delivery” out of Newark, just across the Bay. So it might arrive any minute, or 9 or 10 — right? Ergo, I couldn’t go for a run at my usual 9am, because sure as eggs is eggs, once I am out of sight of my front door, the truck will come.

I put a bright yellow post-it on the door-post with an arrow pointing to the doorbell button, and the text “I am home!”. Then I began filling time doing things I had mentally scheduled for later, Tuesday or Wednesday. I patched together some beat-up cardboard boxes I had picked up at FOPAL so I could bring three boxes down there on Wednesday. I filled the boxes with books.

Painting etc.

I took down the big painting of Yosemite, took it outside and posed it in good, but indirect, light, and took a good picture of it. I also took a picture of one of the tchotchkes I had inventoried back on Day 32. The reason for these photos is that I have decided to attend an Appraisal Event at a local auction house . One can bring up to 5 objects or pictures, and they will give an opinion on the likely auction yield.

I see I mentioned on Day 68 that, after two fine-art galleries had stiffed me on a consignment sale of the painting of Yosemite valley, I had resolved to contact the artist himself. But I see I did not mention the result: Dean Linsky replied very promptly but not with good news. He agreed that galleries are always reluctant to deal in consignment sales, but he couldn’t offer any help with that. He recommended I look at auction sales, even eBay, provided I set a good reserve price. That set me looking for local fine-art auction houses, and found the one linked above, in Alameda, with the offer of free appraisals.

I need to get those pics into Photoshop, then print them. But that would be in the office at the back of the house and I want to stay in the front so I can spot the FedEx truck. (Not trusting them to actually push the doorbell button even though I flagged it.) So now I got out slide boxes and reviewed about 10 groups of slides, capturing another dozen socko images for scanning. Then I listened to some podcasts, and ate lunch. Then I took a nap.

Godot

About 3pm I decided that when the new laptop arrives, its system name on the network is going to be Godot, because I have done nothing but wait for it. It is now 4pm, and I am still waiting.

Oh geez

At 4:30 the FedEx truck rolled up, I signed, I happily opened the nice box and found… not a Macbook Pro, but a Macbook Air. I already own two Airs, the one Marian wore out and the one we bought to replace it. I had fully intended to order a refurbished 2016 Macbook Pro, but apparently after having a dozen of them open in different browser tabs, I finally clicked on and bought… an Air.

I seriously wonder about myself. Am I losing it? Anyway, messaged the seller, who is a dealer with dozens of refurbs for sale, asking if I can exchange it. Gosh I feel pretty bad.

Day 72, game and crafty stuff

Sunday, 2/10/2019

Sunday breakfast at the PA Cafe as usual. Home to plan out a craft project. At the museum the Education group has their own collection of artifacts. Items in the “real” collection are handled sparingly, with gloves, then packed away in archival-quality materials never to be touched again unless brought out for someone doing research. Items in the EDU collection are kept on shelves in a closet and are available to be handled (pawed, mauled) by school kids during various classes. I know about this because sometimes I help another volunteer who’s been building a catalog of the EDU collection.

Two weeks ago we cataloged a couple of real core planes, which are insanely delicate. I recalled that in the 1401 lab, they hand around a core plane during their demo, but it has been sandwiched in clear plastic — a good idea, given how easy it would be to poke a finger right through it. Toni and I thought it would be a good idea to put plastic on these also. We drew a plan for the pieces. She went to TAP Plastics last week and had the pieces cut. I picked them up when I was at the Museum Saturday and today was the day to assemble them.

I started with a trip to ACE Hardware to get the needed bolts nuts washers. Then it turned out that TAP had misread my drawing, or something, and some holes didn’t line up and two pieces were too long. Fortunately I still have tools. I used a carpenter’s square, two C-clamps, a box cutter, and my nifty little Bosch drill that Marian gave me Christmas 2017. (This helped clarify how much of my tool collection I should retain in The Transition. Quite a bit of it.) By the time I had the plastic pieces cut and drilled it was time for

Basketball

On Saturday I was so into getting down my thoughts about photography and slides that I forgot to report the result of the Friday night game, which against OSU. It started badly when the Beavers were ahead by 6 after 1 minute. Then Stanford’s defense woke up and they shut OSU down. After five minutes the game was never in doubt and Stanford won by 25.

Today was not so much fun. The Oregon Ducks are ranked #3 in the country — Stanford is #11 but likely to go down after today — and they played like it. Oregon dominated at both ends of the floor, were up by 24 at the half, and finished up by 35.

After the game I made one more stop at the hardware store and then did

more crafty stuff

producing two nicely encased core planes. Here’s one.

This is a 1960-era plane, perhaps from a 1401 or some other IBM machine of the very early 60s. The other plane has amazingly tiny “donuts”, a quarter the size of these, and probably comes from a minicomputer of the late 60s. Anyway, no grubby-fingered student is going to be poking at this one, but they can still see the toroids and the wiring.

I made a bit of supper and sat down to watch TV.

Day 71, slides, tour, fedex fandango

Saturday 2/9/2019

I spend a couple of hours reviewing two groups of slides, and select out about 2% of them for scanning, either because they are particularly fine scenics or because they show Marian and me in not-bad poses.

About photography and slides before 2005

There’s time to mull some more on the contradictory problem of why we kept the slides all those years and so rarely looked at them. In fact, one group I went through, “116 Eastern Canada 1996 (328 slides)” I am pretty sure had never been seen since 1996. It was a nice trip: in a rental car we hit Toronto, Montreal, Quebec, and Nova Scotia. On return we would have spent several evenings going through the slides and discarding at least half. Then Marian would have spent a couple of days cataloging and numbering them. Then we would have had Jean and Bill over for an evening and projected the final show for them.

Then they went into a box and probably stayed there undisturbed until today. So, why did we even bother? I can come up with an answer, not a good answer, but an answer. It’s that the taking of the pictures was an important, satisfying hobby for both of us. Looking for picture subjects added a lot to the experience of traveling. It helped us remain aware of the quality of light, the texture of the sky, the shape of the land. So did the activity of taking pictures, trying different angles and zoom ratios and ways of framing a scene, looking for just the right composition.

In those days the payoff for this effort was delayed until weeks later when the slides came back and we could project them. Then we could go through and critique what we’d got, congratulate each other for the good ones, select the best, decide how to sequence them for a nice program. That was fun and satisfying. And showing the final product to our relatives that one time, that was validation for our work.

From today’s perspective, having to finally do something with these relics, I kind of wish we had just dumped the slides into the trash at that point. But we had two reasons for keeping them. One, the finished set of slides represented so much time and care and effort, it would have been unthinkable to just throw it away. And two, there was always the possibility that someday we’d pull the set out, put the slides back into carousels, and project the show again. A few trips, we did show more than once. Very rarely more than twice.

This particular show, Group 116, seemed really flat. The scenery wasn’t dramatic; we didn’t get any super shots of quaint Vieux Quebec or anything. I set aside five (5) of the 328 for scanning.

Slides in the digital era

One huge difference in digital photography is that you know immediately, on the back of the camera or the face of the iphone, whether you got the shot you wanted. If you didn’t nail it, you can frame it up and take it again. Well, for scenery at least. People and animals may have moved away or stopped being cute. A second difference is the freedom to shoot many more exposures. We were always aware that every slide ended up costing 25 cents or more by the time it was processed; and always aware that the camera only held 36 exposures before you had to reload. You were miserly with your shooting.

A third difference is that you can fiddle and fudge and crop and edit the images after the fact, while a slide was a final product, unchangeable, its exposure and framing fixed at the instant you took it. One satisfaction of scanning old slides is that if I want to take the trouble, I can improve contrast or brightness, even edit out annoying wires (or people). So over the past decade I’ve moved quite a lot of our better work into the digital domain, on disk and into the cloud. Here’s one slide from Group 101, for example.

Hawaii 1982 (and 1988 and 2001)

Of the groups I’ve gone over in prior years I’ve scanned anywhere from 50% to 100% of the slides. I’m applying a much finer comb to the unexamined groups I’m going through now. Partly it’s impatience; I want to get this job done. Partly it’s that I feel quite ruthless; if a picture doesn’t engage me strongly for its own sake, it doesn’t make the cut. Previously I kept more pictures because Marian liked every picture to have a context, be part of a sequence. She’s not here to comment now, so I’m keeping only the ones that really pop visually, or really tell a story about us; and narrative be damned.

Docent Tour

Normally there are two docents for the 2pm Saturday tour and we can split the groups. When I walked into the lobby today I could see the place was busier than usual. There was only one person on the front desk, so I helped for a while doing the bag-check thing. I was hoping another docent would show, but nope. So when I started I had a tour group of more than 40 people. I’m pleased to say that at least 30 were still with me at the end, an hour later, and several thanked me for my interesting talk.

Fedex Follies

My new/old laptop was to have been delivered Friday. Signature required. So I was home all day and it didn’t come. Tracking said it would be delivered “Tuesday by end of day.” But of course when I got home from the museum there was a FedEx tag on the door. Shit.

I tried to get into “my” FedEx online account to get more info. It has been a year or more since I last used FedEx. Apparently at that time (whenever it was) I created a FedEx account. I use LastPass, and it had a record of my FedEx user ID and password. FedEx recognized the user ID but said the password was wrong.

Ohhhh-kayyy, now what? Well, I can answer a security question. Good! “What is your father’s middle name?” What?!? My father never had a middle name, that I know of, and I would never have set that as a security question. Never mind, click the option to send me an email to reset my password. Ten minutes later — no email.

Ohhhh-kayyy, I will call them. Call the customer service number, which is answered by a pleasant female-voiced robot with a zero IQ. Please say, she coos, what you want to do. “Hold a package.” She gets that, but then, she wants me to “say” the door tag number. I read it out, “D T 7 3 3 0…” etc. “Sorry, I didn’t get that. Please say the tracking or door tag number.” “DEE. TEE. SEVEN. THREE. THREE…” “Sorry, I didn’t get that.” I start mashing the zero button until she deigns to connect me to a guy with a strong east-asian accent.

He is able to tell me where the package would be held, if it were held: Newark. If I want to hold it, he’ll have to transfer me to a different department! If I don’t hold it when will it come? He says because it is “FedEx Home Delivery(tm)” they deliver Tuesday through Saturday, so, Tuesday. Can he give me any time window? No, just before 8pm. I point out this is a twelve-hour window. (I don’t mention how it was supposed to have arrived before 8pm Friday and didn’t.) He can’t do anything.

I decide I will take my chances on delivery (but I double-dog betcha it comes Monday, not Tuesday); can he help me get a new password? No, that’s technical support, would I like that number? No, not really. I give up on the phone.

Back on the web, I just create a new “personal” FedEx account, different user id but all other info the same. FedEx has no problem with this; it is not bothered that the same address and email are (I assume) already registered. Well, perhaps not, as that password reset email never arrived (and yes, I did think to check Marian’s email account too). Might I have possibly created that account so long ago that I had a different email? It’s been at least five years since I had a different one. Who knows.

Day 70, old pics and a game

Friday, 2/8/2019

When I went out to pick up the paper at 6:30 the sky was clear, and the TV news said the rain wouldn’t come until the afternoon. I assumed I could do a run, but it started to rain just as I was ready to leave at 8:30, so instead I drove to the Y and ran on the treadmill.

Then I set out to tackle those boxes of slides that I mentioned on Day 67. The slides are exquisitely organized and cataloged into “groups” where a group is usually one trip, but sometimes a category. There is an index file that lists each group by number and topic and shows which box it is stored in, as well as a catalog that lists each slide by its group and serial number and its subject.

Over the past decade I’ve spent many hours scanning slides from various groups. I would inspect a group, and scan the slides that were either emotionally significant, or pictorially fine. For some groups that was most of them; other groups just a scattering. Those scans are now on my main computer as well as in the cloud. But now I need to get serious about finishing this job: looking through each unscanned group and deciding which, if any, slides in it deserve to be retained.

I made a copy of the index, and emboldened the entry for each group that hadn’t been scanned, and printed it out. There are 20 or so, for example group 102, “New England Fall 1972”. Sitting in a chair that faced a window, I popped each slide into a hand-held viewer and made fast editorial decisions. No; no; no; don’t care; why’d we keep that; no; hm that’s nice; no;… I set aside a few to scan. On to the next group.

I’d gone through quite a few when Marian’s sister Jean arrived at 1pm. I’d asked her over to go through the memorabilia I had that was purely Lacrampe family stuff. Jean’s attitude toward old stuff is very pragmatic (the Lacrampe women are all unsentimental). Anything she wants to keep, she scans into her computer, “then I toss it.” For this exercise we went through several piles of stuff, mostly pictures. She recognized most of them. “I’ve got that. I have that. Huh, I’m not sure I have that, I’ll take it and scan it.” I set aside a few pictures of Marian that I didn’t have already. Jean built up a pile of 25 or 30 things to add to her collection. The great bulk went into the “recycle” pile.

The mound of pictures for the recycle bin.

The only part of this that had much emotional impact on me was going through a fat envelope of memorabilia from Marian’s trip around Europe. She toured Denmark, Italy and England for a month in 1960. In the folder were all the letters she’d exchanged with her mother and brother, and about 40 postcards which she’d bought along the way and used for notes on each day’s activities. Of course, I felt guilty consigning all this to the recycle bin. It crossed my mind that I could read all these letters, transcribe them into a text file, and have a complete journal of that trip. But then I thought about how the envelope had sat in a drawer in the closet for forty-plus years and, as far as I can recall, she never got it out to look at it. And, as far as transcribing it — there was nobody in the world better qualified to transcribe that material into a computer file than she! And she didn’t. And who now who would want to read it?

There’s a SWBB game at 6pm. Just time for a nap before that. Results tomorrow.

Day 69, Yosemite day

The play, American Night, the Ballad of Juan Jose, is a wild satirical farce, the fevered dream of a Mexican immigrant who’s been studying too hard for his U.S. citizenship exam. Toward the end I realized what it had been reminding me of: the old S.F. Mime Troupe (which to my surprise is still a going concern). It had the kind of wacky political farce I remember from watching the Mime Troupe in the 60s. It got a little weak in the final scenes, when Juan Jose and a couple of others are on stage, but other members of the ensemble are out in the audience shouting Trump/Tea Party slogans at him. “Send them back along with their anchor babies” and the like. The actors on stage did not have good responses to this kind of unfair but emotive heckling. Anyway, it was well done and fun to see.

Thursday, 2/7/2019

Not much to say. Drove to Yosemite warehouse for a day of work arranging and archiving old machines. Enjoyed eating lunch with a bunch of friendly people. Home again. Told myself to remember I had tickets for another play, at the Pear Theater, tonight.

And then forgot about it, and here it is 10pm and I didn’t go. Well, shit.

Day 68, a damn good day’s work

Couldn’t exercise this morning because the car-detailing crew showed up promptly at 8 to start on the Prius. So I settled in to gettin’ shit done in the APR. First up, a few financial details. Brokerage statements are in for the various accounts, so I could update the portfolio spreadsheet that I had created, following Marian’s design on Day 31. The news is good; the total is about 7% up from year-end 2018.

Next I tackled a heap of my personal memorabilia that had accumulated in a binder and a big plastic envelope for years. I really didn’t know what I would find. There were a few keepers.

IBM History

One was a letter I had written to my mother from San Francisco at the end of 1966. At the time I was working for the phone company, and I detailed how in the new year I was to start a “ten-week course” to become a full-fledged “inside wireman”. What I hadn’t known then was that the ten-week course would be the most boring, leaden, plodding thing imaginable, taught by a crusty old guy who was marking time to his retirement and who had no real insight into the complicated systems he was supposed to teach. Before two weeks had passed I was looking for new work, and stumbled hopefully into the local IBM branch office. Because IBM was just in transition from older systems to the new 360 line, they needed people, and hired me.

The sent me to Rochester, Minnesota to be trained on the older electro-mechanical systems. Another keeper was a hand-written letter by me to my sister, dated April 24, 1967. (Of course in the present era, this would have been an email and probably lost forever.) In it I wrote in part,

We took a quiz on the 514-519 machines today after closing up the local night club the night before. (Shame on us.) I got a 90, top grade in the class. Also showed expertise in lab sessions, so should get a B. … Tomorrow begins 6 days instruction on another machine (085) followed by an 18-day course in tab machines…

When I give tours at the CHM, I point out those machines, the 085 sorter and the 403 “tabulator”, as historic, and try to explain how they were the essence of “business data processing” for fifty years.

Niece stuff

Most of the rest of the pile I discarded. However, I gave each letter a cursory glance, and noticed in several of them between 1961 and 1963, my mother mentioned my niece Laurel. She was living with my parents, her grandparents, during that time. Some of the mentions touched on things that were probably significant to her. So I set those letters aside, and put them in an envelope to mail on to her. I figure I can trash things about me that I don’t care to remember, but I didn’t want to make that call on her behalf. Not sure it’s really doing her any favor, as some of the topics may be painful memories. Hope it was the right thing to do.

Anyway at the end I had reduced a large pile to a wispy handful which I distributed into the pages of a family album, and there: done. All the Cortesi family history reduced to one smallish box.

I was on such a roll I tried to tie up more loose ends. I emailed my sister-in-law suggesting we meet to go over the pile of Lacrampe family history that I hope she’ll take over from me.

I called IBM benefits, the ones who wouldn’t talk to me about Marian’s account, even to say if it was closed, until I proved I was her executor. This time the phone rep didn’t have anything to say about that; either she didn’t know that rule or else the account had been marked for me as executor. Anyway, all is well there. That was the last loose end of red tape needing to be tied up. Marian is quits with the world.

Finally I followed up on that painting I discussed on Day 46. On Day 54 I mentioned my impatience with the one gallery who wouldn’t return my calls or emails, and said I would contact another. Well, two emails to them had gone unanswered now. So this time I emailed the artist himself, reminding him of the painting, how he had toured Yosemite valley with us before making it, and asking if he had any idea how I should go about consigning one of his works. Hopefully he will be able to light a fire under one gallery or the other.

Afternoon

The detail guys didn’t finish until 12:30. I decided that, since I didn’t have any boxes, and since it was just before the biweekly sale so FOPAL would be jammed with stuff, I wouldn’t take any books down this time. I’ll take 3 boxes next week, maybe. Anyway so I will go to FOPAL on foot, a 40 minute walk, then take a Lyft home.

Evening

Which I did. Sorted. Appropriated a couple of New York Times crossword puzzle books that came in. Had an early supper, then out again at 7:15 to a play at the Bus Barn in Los Altos. Review tomorrow.

Day 67, dashcam, memorabilia

Tuesday, 2/5/2019

First thing this morning was to present the car at the Car Audio Specialties at 9am for installation of a dashcam. That’s the first of two things I’m lavishing on the Prius now I’m settled on keeping it. Tomorrow it gets a polish job.

The installation was smooth; the guy took great care to get the front and rear cameras installed where they were out of the way and had a good view. He took me through downloading the phone app and basic usage, but I still need to get on the company website and review the features, of which it has many.

At home I tackled more of the infamous APR closet. This has been our low-use storage area for decades. Periodically Marian, or sometimes I, would go in and organize some part of it. But basically it was the place where we kept stuff-to-not-throw-away-but-also-to-not-think-about-just-now. Assorted items of family history. Photos. Collected things.

I declared the shelf on the right wall was “things for the estate sale”, and the shelf on the left wall was “things I will keep”. Stuff to discard went on the floor until there was a mound, then I carried it to the garbage can or recycle bin.

To the right went the Kodak Carousel projector, a lamp shade, some stadium seats, other marginally valuable stuff. To the left, quite a pile of family memorabilia. Eventually I broke that down into three piles, “my/our history”, “Marian’s history”, and “Lacrampe Family” (Marian’s relatives and ancestors). The latter pile I will go over with my sister-in-law. Hopefully she’ll take at least some of it. (Mind you, she’s likely to have to do her own downsizing soon. Sorry, I’ve got my own problems.)

Some things were easy to throw away. There were several pillows that we’d used on the rare occasions we had guests. Old, used pillows: trash. There was a drawer where Marian had put all the medical braces, slings and wraps that either of us had needed, like my sling from when I dislocated my shoulder about 25 years ago, and her wrist brace from some RSI problem at least as far back. All trash. A folder of news items about the great Oakland Hills fire. A folder of news items about the ’89 earthquake. Recycle. One drawer held assorted exercise equipment. Some of that, small dumbells and so on, went on the right shelf; some like elastic exercise bands, to trash.

Then it got harder. One drawer was all kinds of stuff from our times in England: guides to various castles and stately homes, guidebooks, maps. All of no use to anyone. But we’d accumulated all those on the spot and saved them — why exactly? Not planning to go back; but neither of us ever went to that drawer to review places we’d been. Harder even was another drawer where Marian had saved a thick stack of SWBB memorabilia: programs from the last dozen end-of-year awards banquets; programs from Final Fours we had attended; newspaper and magazine clippings.

I got very emotional flipping through this stuff and carrying it to the recycle bin. I was both crying and raging, repeating what’s the point of fucking memorabilia if you never go back and fucking look at it? I did not want to deny, or to denigrate, the care and effort Marian had put into keeping this stuff, yet I cannot accept the alternative, to retain it all indefinitely, packing and moving and finding storage space it in whatever new home I get. I would feel stupid trying to carry these memorabilia onward when I know I’ll never look at them. I don’t want them; they have zero value to anybody else; so they have to go — but effecting that puts me in the position of being the executioner, in effect, killer of a part of her life and our lives together. Not a job I asked for, but here I am, doing it.

There’s another hard part coming:

About thirty years of photographic slides, from 1973 when we first started serious shooting to circa 2003 when we went digital. Somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 probably. Now, (a) they are all organized and cataloged in detail, and (b) quite a few of them have already been scanned and digitized. My next big job is to inventory which of the catalog groups have not been scanned, and of those, which are actually worth my time now, to scan them and preserve them (if any are).

Marian and I had several conversations over the years about the value of the slides, debating why we took the trouble to catalog and keep them, when (here’s a familiar refrain!) “we never go back and look at them”. Yes, that was said, by both of us, more than once. She was sure that when we were gone, nobody would give a shit (her words), they’d just be thrown out. So why keep them now? And we never had a good answer, really; yet we didn’t toss them — then. I’m pretty sure they’ll be tossed soon, but I need to review the un-scanned groups first.

Day 66, various mishaps

Monday, 2/4/2019

It rained a lot through the night. But at 8am there was sunshine outside, and looking at the weather radar online, there were only a few green pixels and they seemed to be vanishing. So I went for a run. Just halfway through I noticed a charcoal-colored cloud looming over me, and rain started to fall. I kept jogging along getting wet but after a few blocks I decided to get a Lyft the rest of the way. I sheltered at Philz Coffee and started calling a Lyft. The selected car was several minutes away and not approaching fast, when I noticed the rain was tapering off. So I canceled the Lyft and resumed my run, arriving home wet but fine.

I had scheduled a mobile auto-detailing service to polish the Prius today, but yesterday evening they called to reschedule, citing the weather. So now my morning was open, and I decided to go and give blood. I’d had an email over the weekend saying my type was in short supply, and I was just coming eligible (I gave blood on day 6, so just over 8 weeks). I drove to Menlo Park and went through the very familiar check-in process, but there was a hitch. The last step is to take a drop of blood from a finger and check the red-cell count with a little machine. The machine said 11.9, and the lower limit for donation is 13.9.

This has happened before, several years ago. My doctor wasn’t concerned. I took iron supplements for a few months until at my next checkup, my labs showed normal hematocrit. She advised me to discontinue the iron then, as too much can be a problem.

Well, so I can’t donate blood today, or for the near future. I picked up some iron tabs on the way home. I’ll take one a day until mid-year, when I’ll get a routine physical. Probably my labs will be up then and I can try the donation again.

Back home, I launched into a different programming project and made good progress until late in the afternoon I decided to upgrade one of the libraries I depend on. Bad move. The installation process changed something and the library stopped working at all; and in trying to fix it, I did something else that messed up my whole development setup. Trying to fix that, I keep running into messages about “Your MacOS system is too old and is no longer supported.” I had been avoiding installing the latest OS on this laptop for at least two years (long story), although I had upgraded the other machines around the house. Now the lack of upgrades bites me. Well, I don’t want to go through an OS installation on this machine now, when the replacement laptop arrives Friday. I’ll want to spend time installing things on it, including the very latest OS level. I’ll rebuild my development environment there and proceed on that machine. Or maybe just move to the big iMac which is very up-to-date.

I went out to a restaurant for supper. I’ve got plenty of food at home; I just felt like going out (so there).