Monday 11/28/2022

First thing, I went for a walk. My leg did not want to go the full distance (2.8 miles for the day) but I did a 2-ish mile loop. Walking a bit slower and shorter steps than normal it felt pretty good. Gonna be normal pretty soon. Walking around in the evening, it felt darn near normal, i.e. I walked to the elevator and didn’t think about the leg at all.

Back by 9:30 and it was time to do something about the glasses. Dennis called with a pointer to a place that repairs glasses, but they are in San Jose. I was going to call and see if they could fix mine while I waited, but decided first to settle the issue of when I could get an exam. With an updated prescription I could just order new lenses and frames, and if that was soon enough, I could make do with the masking tape fix.

So I called the optometry group at PAMF and waited on hold for 27 MINUTES and gave up. Better use of my time would be to go there, so I did. Drove over, parked, found my way to second floor of Jamplis bldg, stood in line for just two minutes, and was able to make an appointment for Thursday. Yay!

Went on down to FOPAL and processed a bunch of books. When I clean out my section after a sale, sending everything that has seen 4 sale days to the bargain room, I always worry if the empty spaces will fill up again. But they are filling nicely.

Back home. Went down at 5:40 for supper, didn’t see anybody I wanted to sit with and nothing on the menu I wanted, so I quietly exited back to my room. Remembering on the way, that I had the box of leftover pasta from Saturday. Heated that up, it was delicious. Heck with socializing.

Sunday 11/27/2022

When I picked up my glasses to clean them, which I do every morning right after toweling off from my shower, the left lens fell out in my hand. Huh? The frame had broken, the metal snapped just above the middle. So that became a priority issue right away. I dressed and went down to the basement to get my soldering iron from my toolbox in my storage cage. Brought it up and, no go. The metal of the frame didn’t want to hold solder. I tried a drop of superglue. Nope. So I fell back on a little strip of masking tape, which did the job for now.

You like the “meta” here? Glasses photographed over the blog about glasses? Huh?

I had a docent tour at 12, so I put on my red shirt and headed out at 10. Over to University avenue to LensCrafters. Nope. The guy there said there was no way any of the hundreds of frames on display would fit my lenses. There’s no such thing as standardization in frames, apparently. It has been a year and a half since I had an eye exam, so I put in a request for an exam appointment at PAMF. Probably Monday I’ll hear when that will be. Hopefully the masking tape can hold up for a few weeks.

Off to CHM, led about a dozen people on a tour. Back home. Called up George M and clarified some things about the three (!) upcoming events he is sponsoring.

Then it was time for the SWBB game from Hawai’i. Supposedly that was on TV. Hah. It was on ESPN+, which is a $10 a month subscription thing. I listened to the audio stream instead.

Saturday 11/26/2022

Indulged in some food today. I walked (2.6 miles total) ending at the downtown farmers market for the first time in months. Bought a chocolate hazlenut swirl, also 2 lbs of dried apricots. Ate on that sucker.

There was a SWBB game, second day of the Hawai’i tournament, at 2pm. Only audio. They romped. I’m glad I didn’t travel to the tournament.

At 4pm I met with David M. and Lennie in the auditorium, and we walked through the process of initiating and running an event using the Zoom Room tech. David M will be running a real event on the 30th. Lennie late in December.

I decided to continue the food indulgences by taking myself out to supper. I drove over to Mike’s in midtown. They have really good pasta. I had a plate of some kind of pasta shape I can’t even spell, with pesto and sausage, it was excellent. Also, as I’d known it would be, a very large serving so I brought half home in a box.

Friday 11/25/2022

Went for a walk in the morning. Still having to moderate my stride. 2.3 miles for the day.

Dropped down to FOPAL, which turned out to be a good idea as there were 7 boxes waiting. I processed four. Then back home in time to listen to SWBB streaming audio — no TV — from their game in Hawai’i. They won.

Had dinner at the community table, being sociable.

Thursday 11/24/2022

In the morning I went for a walk. I had to shorten my stride and go slowly to avoid pain, but by the end of the day I see I have 2.1 miles total. So really walking.

I had been invited to lunch by Sandy, along with three other people. Marcia, Kent, Jean. Anyway, pleasant group. Then frittered away the afternoon and had my sack supper along with only four other sixth floor residents in the floor dining room. Dr. Margaret had baked two pies in the floor kitchen. She had entertained some family in her apartment for lunch, but brought the last half of a pumpkin pie to share. So that was nice.

Wednesday 11/23/2022

So the big activity today was to lead a docent tour for 9 of my neighbors. This had been set up and arranged by Barbara B., who arranges museum outings and other such day trips. The museum entrance fee is paid by Channing House directly, and billed to the monthly fee of each person who attends. In order to keep the group small I had specified we would use the small bus, which holds 9 plus the driver. I’m doing a second one next week. There was a wait list on the sign-up sheets for both trips.

The bus left at 1. I led my tour from 1:30 to 2:30, then people had a few minutes to hit the gift shop or bathroom before the 1401 demo at 3. Everybody was very enthusiastic and complimented me a lot on the presentation.

My leg/hip held up very well. It’s almost better.

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Oh. The number in the title. Something is wrong. Somewhere back there I messed up. The official year of this blog ends on 12/2; 12/3/2018 was “day zero”. So today should be day 3.356 not 3.346. Oh well.

Tuesday 11/22/2022

Used the gym in the morning. The days I want to do it, Tues/Thurs early, are not well chosen. Harry and Susan and Larry are all in there. I am going to try going half an hour later, 8am instead of 7:30, in future.

Anyway, I found out which specific exercise twinges my injured hip. It’s the leg-lift, where you bring your leg up against a weight load. Others, including pedaling the cyber cycle, no problem. Also, this evening, I was walking around downstairs for several minutes not even thinking about the hip, so it is definitely mending.

The writers group met at 10:30. The cue this week was “a perfect day”. All I could come up with was what I had written for the same group, way back in July 2021 (https://codgerville.net/2020/07/08/1-219-writers-fopal-model/) so I read that again.

With nothing more on the schedule I went and got in the car, and drove down to the P.A. Cafe at Midtown, and sat at a table there for an hour plus, writing on the novel. Mostly extending the synopsis/outline and adding notes on a twist I thought up at about 2am this morning. There is just a staggering amount of work left to do. I get very daunted thinking about what has to be done to finish it.

Had dinner with Marcia and Kent and Sandy.

Monday 11/21/2022

Tried going for a walk. Nope, the hip isn’t ready. No pain or problem sitting, lying down, or standing; only when actually swinging the leg.

At 10:30 it was the Event Coordinator’s meeting. I noted all the events for December in the magic A/V spreadsheet and almost all are covered. So probably I won’t have to hold a team meeting this month, which will please everybody I think. Spent a couple hours in the afternoon emailing people and making schedules and stuff.

After the meeting I went down to FOPAL, where I found a couple of boxes of books to process, and spent an hour doing sorting just for fun.

And only now at 7pm do I realize, I meant to attend Rhonda’s open meeting at 4, and I completely forgot. Just blew right past it. And I was interested, she was supposed to present some of the pictures taken by the professional photographers last month. Crap.

Sunday 11/20/2022

Off at 11am to the SWBB game versus South Carolina, #2-ranked us versus #1-ranked them. We led most of the way but they tied it in the final seconds of regulation, and then they won in overtime.

Back to CH in good time to set up for a Sunday@Home presentation, resident Paul presenting his best pics from a couple of decades of nature shooting trips in Alaska. Really fine photography. I was most pleased by the fact that the whole zoom-hybrid meeting thing worked very smoothly, no glitches. Possibly the first time ever.

Saturday 11/19/2022

Only scheduled thing today was to lead a docent tour at noon. I actually spent an hour working on the novel, mostly making notes on different characters’ motives.

At 11am I slammed an ibuprofen and a tylenol, and by noon I was able to walk pretty freely, as long as I went slow and took shorter steps than usual. If I walked with my normal stride it hurt, although not as much as yesterday. I figure to be back to normal sometime next week.

The tour went ok, about 20 people.

Back at CH I got a tech squad dispatch for a person with Apple Mail problems. I don’t like Apple Mail. Turned out to be a tricky thing. She had bought a new iPhone with the latest iOS 16. iOS 16 is a major update that changed a lot of things. It seems that it added a new Privacy feature to the Mail app on the phone. If that is turned on, which it was on the new phone, Mail on the phone will not download any linked content in an email, such as images.

Somehow Mail on the phone magically transferred that rule to the Mail app on her MacBook. It stopped downloading linked images too, but instead of explaining why, it would just put up an obscure message about “some content could not be downloaded privately.” Which was the main issue the person had. Turning this off on the phone magically cured the MacBook also. It’s all juju, really.