Saturday 01/07/2023

Yesterday, I forgot to note, I ran the numbers for the year in finance. That is, I filled in the December column on the spreadsheet where I keep track of The Nest Egg, and started the sheet for 2023. Looking back — a long way back! — I created this spreadsheet on Day 31, New Year’s Day 2019, to continue one that Marian first created in 1997. I noted then that the Nest Egg was down about 7% on that year (2018). Well this year it is down just over 8% over 2022. In between it has been up a couple times. So it is still about where it was then. In any case the bottom line is enough money to keep me in crack and hookers for a very long time, especially since I actually consume zero of those.

Alright, that was in poor taste. Whose blog is this, again?

I follow several YouTube channels. Mostly “makers”, people who create stuff. One of the best is Sampson Boat Company, about Leo who is reconstructing a 100-year-old sailing yacht. Leo does the work at a boat yard in Port Townsend WA, and in the latest episode he films a Christmas day trip from Port Townsend to Bellingham to pick up some newly-made diesel tanks.

I was completely blind-sided by the emotional impact of this episode. After some discussion of how the tanks were made, Leo shows the ferry ride across the sound and later, driving across the Deception Pass bridge. As soon as I started watching that ferry-boarding footage I teared up big-time. From 2000 through 2016, Marian and I went up to San Juan Island every summer. Paul and Katie’s farm was an integral part of our lives. The Washington State ferries were part of that; you were checking the ferry schedule all the time, and rode them anytime you had to get off or on the island.

And that’s all gone now. Paul died of brain cancer in 2017. Katie suffers from early-onset alzheimer’s and lives in a care facility. And of course Marian’s gone. Somehow that ferry-riding video just brought all that back in a rush.

I took a short walk up to Ace Hardware. Then at 1pm I headed out to lead a tour at CHM. I’ve been thinking of a couple of tweaks to my talk, but one of them requires there to be at least a few older people in the group. Today it was about 30 people who looked like they ranged from 20 to 35 years. Anyway, they mostly stuck with me and seemed to enjoy themselves.

Friday 01/06/2023

Took a standard walk. Felt fine. Entered the final numbers in the master spreadsheet. The Nest Egg ended the year about 8.5% down on the prior year. Which is a bit better than the financial markets as a whole, so let’s hear it for the Value Investing brokers.

Opted to kill part of the afternoon working at FOPAL. Back home, read and listened to a jazz concert.

Thursday 01/05/2023

The big storm was pretty much a nothing-burger as far as drama goes. Periods of moderately heavy rain, but no thunder, no floods, no local power outages.

At 9 I headed out through light rain to the Yosemite warehouse in Milpitas. I spent the day working with Toni building a custom box for an awkward-shaped artifact, a huge complicated circuit board. We also helped locate some objects and doing research to fix up the computer records of some items that had been returned from a loan to Stanford.

Bought gas on the way home. First fill-up in a couple months.

Wednesday 01/04/2023

Boring day. It threatening to rain in the morning, and then did rain from noon on, so I never went for a walk. I went out in the car to Safeway for snacks and hummingbird sugar. Also went to CVS where I presented the UHC/IBM health care ID card and the clerk fixed up my drug coverage in about 2 minutes. So I almost have that change-over complete. Yesterday I uploaded pictures of the card to PAMF (Sutter Health that is). The status of that 24 hours later is “coverage pending review”.

I took down and put away the last of the London Bridge photos from my picture rails. What to put up instead. I looked through the pile of prints that I had shown previous, and picked out all the ones of fruits and veggies in farmers markets and put them up instead.

The TV news people are orgasming over the promise of heavy rain and high winds. Well, it did look pretty exciting on the weather map about 4pm. Channing House parked their elevators on the 1st floor, fearing power outages.

But it came and passed. It was a rainstorm. meh. Supposed to be possible thunderstorms around midnight; we’ll see.

Tuesday 01/03/2023

Didn’t do much today. Except, first thing, I called the United Healthcare/IBM insurance customer service line and started the process of paying my premium by direct EFT. They were super helpful and nice.

A week ago I had received a mysterious debit card from Optum Bank, which I’d never heard of. It was accompanied by a double-sided sheet filled with 8-point type legalese, but if you looked long enough you might see the acronym HRA. Nothing about IBM or insurance or benefits, but it did mention HRA, which I knew to be part of IBM’s retiree benefits, a Health Resources Account (or Allocation?).

The UHC/IBM lady couldn’t help with info about it, however, but offered to transfer me to the customer service at Optum bank. So I was on hold to them for ten minutes and the call dropped.

Called the bank line directly; robot cheerfully says “The time to the next customer service person is, One, Two, Six minutes” but it offered to call back. It did call back after not quite an hour and after another ten minute wait, I got to talk to a person. Yes the card is for my IBM HRA. Its current balance is $500. What can I do with it? I can use the debit card to pay for authorized medical expenses. Could I just cash it out as money? No, it has to be spent in paying for authorized medical expenses.

But, the Optum person gave me a key piece of info, the URL ibm.optum.com. This turns out to be a lovely simple little web page where you can type in keywords about any kind of expense, and it will tell you if that is authorized for purchase using the HRA card. I tried all the expenses I could think of and most were authorized. However most are also covered by the UHC/IBM policy already. So I will have a problem finding anything that I can actually buy with my Optum debit card. In fact, if I find such a thing, it will be because I have a health problem that the insurance doesn’t cover, in which case, $500 probably won’t go very far. Oh well.

Took a tech squad call to help someone with problems with Photos and Mail on a Mac. Sat through the writers meeting contributing nothing. Signed up for two CHM activities later in the week. Idled away the rest of the afternoon.

Monday 01/02/2023

First job today was to set up a Book Talk event, for auditorium and zoom. I can’t believe I didn’t mention how on Friday I discovered that a little iPad-like controller had been removed from the auditorium. That made it impossible to use the Zoom Room PC there to operate our events. I had emailed our IT staff but being a holiday weekend they didn’t get back to me.

This meant that today’s event would have to be zoomed the old-fashioned way, running the camera and audio in and out of a personal laptop. Thing was, the event was at 11 and I wanted to leave for the basketball game at 10:45. Ian came to my rescue, saying he could run it if I could get it set up.

Which we did, starting at 9. By 10:15 the zoom session was running nicely and all seemed in order so off I went. Later Ian described some problems people had reported by they really seemed flukey and nothing to do with our setup.

The game was versus Arizona, expected to be a bigger challenge than the game two days ago, and so it seemed at first when Stanford committed a turn-over on each of its first three possessions, so was down 0-6 after 2 minutes. But they pulled themselves together and had a 15-point lead by the half, and eventually won by 20.

Back home by 1:30 I went on down to FOPAL and cleaned up my section. Had a nap and then had dinner with Patty and the Goldens.

Sunday 01/01/2023

In the morning I had to update my spreadsheet where I keep my crossword puzzle results. I created the tenth annual sheet, to receive the 2023 results. The first one was made in 2014. The 2022 numbers are now final.

There’s a fairly clear trend if you ignore the Saturday numbers. The Saturday LA Times puzzle (what the San Jose Mercury prints) is “hard” in that it has jokey clues with puns and obscure allusions. Fridays, the puzzle generally has much longer words or whole phrases, with tangential clues or pop-culture references.

The puzzles for Monday-Thursday are much more predictable. It is interesting how well they are graded to get gradually harder through the week, each day taking 1-3 minutes longer to solve than the one before on average.

What’s significant to me is the steady rise in solving time for Monday-Thursday. These are the days where the puzzle basically tests your ability to recall your vocabulary, to remember instantly that a “church section” is going to be either “nave” or “apse”, “party torch” is a “tiki” and so on for a few thousand typical crossword puzzle words.

For those M-Th puzzles, there is a clear trend of slower recall. For several years I regularly solved the easiest, Monday, in under 7 minutes, now it’s averaging 8. Bye-bye brain.

After doing that I took a walk over to the creek to see if it was still flooding. Not at all. Running strong, but far below its banks. Must have been some kind of trash clog yesterday.

The big event of the day was a pizza party. Edie and Carolyn, our 6th floor organizers, set it up. I got to order the pizza. Which was supposed to come at 5:30 but actually came at 5, which was annoying. But we got the 6 pizzas up and put them in the oven of the range in our dining room and it worked out ok. 16 people had signed up for this. Then two of those opted out, they got invites from their children or something. Yet there were 16 in the dining room at the peak, so I don’t know who came but there was pizza for everybody. Very nice affair. Sixth Floor rules ok.

Saturday 12/31/2022

I was invited for lunch with Kent and Marcia. Afterward, I met with Stew and Mary in the auditorium. They wanted to try out karaoke-style singing along to 50s tunes, to see if it would work for the Sock Hop in February.

There was fairly heavy rain all day, and around 11 we got an official warning from the City about possible flooding. Apparently San Francisquito creek had overflowed near Chaucer street. At 3pm I went out for a little walk around the neighborhood. Some gutters were running level with curbs and there was water over the sidewalk in a couple of places. Tomorrow morning I will go out and take a look at the creek.

At 5 it was time to leave for the 6pm SWBB game. This was the first PAC12 game of the season, against Arizona. We play Arizona State on Monday at 11. Whoever planned the schedule is cruel, making the UA and ASU players spend the New Year’s weekend away from home.

In any case, Stanford commanded the game from the start, and won by 30, 101-69.

Friday 12/20/2022

Went for the benchmark walk and it was fine. Well, the weather wasn’t fine, overcast and threatening, although no rain fell then. But the creek was up. But I felt healthy. As I mentioned the other day, the fact that I’m 80 continues to mess with my mind. Do I feel like an 80-year-old is supposed to feel? Eighty-year-olds are old. Should I be walking like this? Shouldn’t I be more, well, frail? I don’t feel frail. Am I kidding myself? This arbitrary number is dickin’ with my head.

Today I had an opportunity to introduce another resident to the new TV system that will soon be installed for everybody. She has been trying to use the 11th floor TV because there was a problem with the one in her unit, but had some problems with it. Since that is the exact system and remote that will soon be universal, I grabbed the opportunity to try training someone in it. One of her problems was, she couldn’t get the closed captions on. She was tickled pink to discover that you can just hold down the microphone button on the remote and say, “captions on” and it does it. Or say “PBS” and it switches to KQED. “I like the news channels,” she said, so I grabbed the remote and quick succession said to it, “CNN”, and then “MSNBC” and then “Headline news” and it happily switched to each one in turn.

Later on, I took a careful look at the Road Scholar website and made a big decision. Instead of planning my own trip to Barcelona, I will let them do it for me. I signed up for a Spanish Art trip that hits Madrid, a couple of other famous art centers, ending in Barcelona. Almost the same dates I had already planned, mid-April.

Another decision, less momentous, I would go out for an old-fashioned burger and fries dinner. I drove in the dark and the rain — paying very close attention as I drove because I’m 80 and therefore clearly not safe to drive at night, if at all — actually I had no difficulty whatever and I don’t think I’m deceiving myself about that — down to the In & Out Burger place on Rengstorff. Had a cheeseburger fries and a chocolate shake, sitting in my car listening to rain on the roof. Shades of Seattle in my youth.

Thursday 12/29/2022

Did the gym thing. That’s really not much of a challenge. I should probably extend it with time on the cybercycle. Maybe I will. But likely won’t.

Did a tiny bit of writing on the novel. Got bored and decided to go down to FOPAL. Probably I would find a box of books, clear it out in 20 minutes, and do some sorting. In fact I found quite a large pile of boxes and spent two yours getting them culled and priced and shelved.

Back at CH, at 2:30 was an in-service training for the 15 or so people who have offered to provide tech help for the Great TV Turnover. The what? Channing House has negotiated a new contract with Comcast. Currently most, but not all, apartments have Comcast boxes of various ages and models, some DVRs and some not. Under the new contract, Comcast will install new, X1 DVR boxes in all units, with new remotes.

For some who, like me, have an older X1, there will not be any significant change. The newest remote looks a little bit different but has all the same buttons, and the user interface of the box is the same as I’m used to. But for lots of people who have older, and often non-DVR, boxes and remotes there will be significant change. And this meeting was to introduce us technical help people to the new remote and its functions.

It was led by Gerald of the IT department and the feeblest kind of meeting, in which he went through a professionally prepared slide set, and basically read the text of the slides. Well, he had set up the zoom meeting rather cleverly so he could show us his fingers on the remote, and the screen of a TV, so he could demonstrate each point as he read it out. We had a lot of awkward questions, which I may get into another time.

From there I went down and joined Stew’s meeting on planning the 50s Sock Hop, in progress. Jerry was there which pleased me as he knows more about doing video with scrolling lyrics than I do.

That was it for the day.