Saturday 04/23/2022

Didn’t do too much. In the morning I drove across the bay to what is as far as I can tell, the only functioning hobby store in the Bay Area, in San Leandro. I wanted to find a car model kit that would justify using the “dusty rose” (kinda pink but cooler) spray paint that I bought to do the 1/16 T-Bird model. Then I found out that as a model kit, that stunk, so I gave it away, so had a can of dusty rose spray and no suitable model. So maybe another T-Bird, or even better, a ’69 Cadillac. Well, I did NOT find one of those but did find a 1/24 scale (the usual size) 59 t-bird which will look fine in dusty rose. Also on impulse bought a 1953 Studebaker kit. Gosh that was a lovely design.

So more modeling in the future.

Printed another picture for the picture rail out front. And that was about it for the day. Was invited to supper with Craig and Diane and Trish.

Friday 04/22/2022

Went for the walk in the morning, and it was ok. My ad-hoc half-keto diet plan is working; my weight today is down 5 pounds from the peak of 2 weeks back. It’ll bounce around but I should be able to go back to normal eating (somewhat modified from before, just one fewer snack a day should eliminate that steady creep-creep rise) in a week or so.

At 10:30, an hour ahead of schedule, they called the sixth floor for the scheduled 2nd Booster shot. I wonder if I’ll feel any effects?

At 4 I went up to 11 to help Kass, who was doing A/V for the 4:30pm TGIF party. No severe problems that we couldn’t work around, but it took some fiddling. That whole system is cobbled together and very complicated.

The TGIF party was the first in over 2 years. They used to be a monthly event, arranged by a different floor each time. This was the 9th floor and they did a nice job.

At 8pm I am attending a performance of Steel Magnolias at the Bus Barn. I bought two season tickets, so at the party I circulated around and invited various people to join me. Unfortunately lots of people already had plans for the evening but finally Mary Ann, the only other Washington State product around, said she’d be glad to join me.

…and oops. They had moved the dates of this show due to Covid, and either didn’t tell me or (very likely) I failed to update my calendar. Anyway, no play tonight. I and Mary Ann had a nice drive over to Los Altos and return, period.

Thursday 04/21/2022

Met with Dr. DiBiase the cardiologist. The MRI of two weeks back has not yet been interpreted. Hmph. Based on my report of moderately more fatigue after benchmark walks, however, and the echo of a month ago which showed increased regurgitation, she said “It’s probably time to take some action.” That would probably be a TAVR but she defers that to the “interventional cardiologist”.

She acknowledged that I had good results with the aortic dissection at Stanford from Dr. Watkins, but she strongly recommended against going back there now. She said there was a nurse’s strike impending, and generally “things aren’t happy over there.” She noted that she had visited their echo lab recently and they were backed up with over 50 echos, in-house ones, waiting to be interpreted.

PAMF has their own interventional cardiology group based out of Sequoia hospital, and I agreed to be referred to them. She told me the name of a doctor but I forget it and she didn’t write it into her after-visit notes. Anyway, I wait to be contacted by them.

Later I went out to buy coffee and some groceries while Wanda tidied my room. Then I completely spaced out and forgot to attend a Strategic Planning meeting at 4pm. Very embarrassed.

Wednesday 04/20/2022

Because two weeks ago I moved my laundry reservation (on a magnetic white board in the laundry room) to Tuesday, this week I had to take Wednesday 8am. So first thing up I had to get the laundry started. Then while it ran, I finished my draft of a Heritage Circle grant, complete with shopping list and a diagram of what to install where in the auditorium. I sent it off to Jerry, whose plan it started as, and to Vanessa, who had added to it, for comment.

After lunch I had the FOPAL monthly zoom. Then there was a gap in my schedule so I took the walk I would normally have taken in the morning.

At 4pm I had to meet with John and Frances in the auditorium to advise on them showing a DVD this coming Saturday. Turned out using the Blu-Ray that is built into the equipment rack backstage couldn’t seem to do close captions, so they changed to using a MacBook with a DVD drive.

I had been invited to dine with Cindy and Caroline. Afterward, at 7:30, was to be a concert with a local soprano (at dinner, Caroline talked about her and her family, who go to Caroline’s church). I took a look at the program and passed. Too classic.

Tuesday 04/19/2022

Nothing much to do in the morning so I was browsing the internet when I stumbled on an essay that resonated with me. It was about “apathy of impotence”, a great phrase that nicely sums up how I feel about the world today. So I wrote a comment, and the comment kind of took on dimension so I pumped it up a little and by 10am I had something to submit to the writers group. I’ll append it below.

After lunch I took a tech squad call: Roku remote not functioning, and we found out it had one good battery and one completely dead. Probably the customer had mixed up the batteries while changing them? Put back one old one along with one new? Anyway, easy fix.

Later in the day I spent a couple of hours converting the official Heritage Circle grant application. It is distributed as a paper form to be filled out, and I don’t want to be trying to edit and re-edit paper forms. So I figured out how to scan it and put its image as the background of a Pages document, so I could “fill it out” by typing into text boxes positioned over the image. Tomorrow I will put some text in those text boxes.

Here’s what I read to the writers group:

---

I thought I had nothing to say this week. Then I read an online essay (link below) that I think the author, a professor of Philosophy at Cal State Fresno, intends to be inspiring. In this well-written essay Prof. Fiala decries the “apathy of impotence,” a condition that

grows from the feeling that there is nothing we can do to change a world afflicted by systematic and structural problems.

He concludes that

The vortex of despair is overcome by going out and getting to work. We find hope when we join together with others who are actively working to make change.

I’ve certainly felt the apathy of impotence. From under that personal cloud of doom I look out at my activist neighbors, writing letters and attending rallies — exactly the kinds of action Prof. Fiala advocates — with bemusement. So I wrote the following as a comment on his piece.

Oh yes. “We can make a difference,” the organizers cry. The apathy begins when you simply stop believing them. The practical evidence on the ground that “We can’t” is quite strong. Why? Because none of the available targets for social action — political parties or candidates, particular corporations, etc. — are fundamentally at fault. Each identifiable social villain is but another head on a vast Hydra whose amorphous, ubiquitous body arises from the fetid slime of those basic flaws of human nature: fear, and greed, and stupidity. From the incomprehensibly rich conferring at Davos, to the minimum-wage clerk in Tampa drawing a sense of personal significance from the latest QAnon conspiracy, all are utterly ruled by fear of losing what they have, by greedy compulsion to have more, and by a sullen unwillingness to agree to any change whatever in the routine of their lives.

This Hydra, this looming monster with an uncountable number of devouring heads, will not be affected by social action against any one of its blind noggins; it will roll on, obliviously drowning our social world, until it slams hard into the real limits of the physical world. The society that remains after that shock will be very different, and probably much smaller, than ours.

(*) https://onlysky.media/afiala/apathy-of-impotence/

Monday 04/18/2022

Took a standard walk, which felt ok, better than the prior two times.

At 10:30 it was time for the Events Committee meeting, to review the calendar for May. Lots of events coming.

After a quick bite I went to FOPAL and spent 3 hours working through 4 boxes of contributions. Don’t know why it took longer than usual. Well, the computer I use was acting up and I had to reboot it. I cannot believe how long Windows 10 (or maybe it’s 11?) takes to boot. Compared to MacOS, that is.

At 4pm it was time for Rhonda’s open meeting, at which she was to review the separate Resident and Staff satisfaction surveys taken some time ago. Taken early in 2021 actually, so not exactly current news. Whatever, I completely forgot this event was happening and missed it. Nothing earth-shaking anyway.

Had dinner with Patty Craig and DIane. Craig assured me that Rhonda’s meeting was wasted time, owing to how Covid changed everything then and since.

Sunday 04/17/2022

Usual Sunday morning. Took a 1-mile walk. There was a special lunch today, Easter Sunday, but I missed out on it in a fit of pique. I needed to eat early because I had to leave at 1pm, so I went to the dining room at 11:30. Only a few tables active. I sat alone at one of the 8-person “open” tables and waited for someone to take my order. And waited… after ten minutes I decided that I didn’t care that much about the special lunch and went and had a light lunch in my room.

Anyway, out at 1pm to the museum where I led a tour. About 25 people and I kept most of them to the end.

As usual on holidays, supper was a brown bag special. I picked up my bag on the way back in, and at 6pm some of us 6th floor people met in our dining room for a picnic. That was nice.

Saturday 04/16/2022

In the morning I drove over to Safeway and bought some items to support the diet I’m on. I haven’t mentioned dieting. Well, not a big serious thing, but I had put on 5 points since last fall and I want them off. So I’m doing low-carb (aka sloppy keto). Breakfast and lunch are low-carb snacks in my room. When I go to the dining room I have just the protein and salad, like tonight there was chicken, rice, and cooked spinach, and ordered just the chicken and spinach.

At 11 I talked to Patty about the A/V Heritage Circle grant proposal. Good news, the deadline is not 4/30 but 5/24, so much more available time. She knew as did I that the IT manager Vanessa was duty weekend manager, and she shamed me into actually going to the front desk to make an appointment. Vanessa herself was at the desk doing something and we agreed to meet at 2pm.

I spent some time preparing more EBay listings for FOPAL. Here’s one of the three I posted today: https://www.ebay.com/itm/284770277532

Some of my technically challenged neighbors had asked me to turn on the 11th floor TV for the Warrior’s game at 5pm, which I did. Then went down for dinner (aforementioned chicken and spinach) and back to blow my carb quota on crackers and cheese which the Warriors fans had laid out.

Friday 04/15/2022

I made notes on what I did as the day went on because I had a feeling it was going to be busy.

• First up I worked on the letter to Wells Fargo. Yesterday I sent a draft to Joanne, stupidly as a PDF because I was using Pages on the Mac and she has an old PC. So she had sent me back an email with corrections. I entered all the corrections she wanted, then I exported the letter to .doc form and sent it to her. Hopefully she can open it and she is in charge of it now.
• Next it was 8:30 and time for my appointment with our CFO Jaisie. There was a mixup, she wasn’t in today, and had expected a telephone appointment. No problem, I called her. I learned a lot about what I wanted to know, namely, how does the Gift Shop do its banking.
• I wrote an email to Joanne summarizing what I had learned, and how sadly nothing about how the Gift Shop does banking is of any use to the Resident Association after all.
• I called Bert, mainly to find out why he hadn’t responded to my call for suggestions on what to ask the Heritage Circle Fund for. Well, he’s recuperating from a small operation and is behind in email. We chatted about several things and I learned some useful things.
• I called David M. about the speaker on Monday. I had told Harry, the event manager, that I would provide Zoom support, not realizing that David M. intended to do the A/V and had advertised the event has having no Zoom. I was pleased about that as it meant I was off the hook for doing A/V on Monday evening. David M. is a smart volunteer and extremely generous with his time so I am not going to complain about anything he does.
• Now it was time for a walk. Standard walk, and like the previous time, I felt more tired than I recall from earlier. I doubt if I could walk more than 3 miles now.
• Lunch.
• Realized I had received the powerpoint file from the presenter for Monday, when I thought I was doing the A/V. Emailed them on to David M.
• Talked to Jerry about his proposal for the Heritage Circle grant. We decided what to do next, mainly that I would write an email to IT manager Vanessa. We need her approval and support before going on. Later he called with the news that Vanessa is the duty manager this weekend (the staff managers rotate weekend duty) so she will certainly read her email and might even reply or meet in person this weekend.
• Spent an hour composing a fine email describing the project that we want to do and think the Heritage fund would certainly approve and pay for. Sent it to Vanessa. Then made an abbreviated version and shared it with Jerry, Lennie, Bert and David M, so whoever talks to Vanessa first will know what she has been told.

And that was the bulk of the day. This is what I call manager shit. I will get free of it I swear. It all started when Ian’s wife died and in the aftermath he asked me to take the A/V committee from him, and how could I say no to that? Now Ian goes about free as a bird…

Thursday 04/14/2022

It’s housecleaning day, so before I left for Shustek across the Bay, I tidied up for the cleaning lady. I also worked on the letter wanted by Wells Fargo, and sent it to Joanne for checking. And also sent an email to my AV team list, asking for suggestions on what we might ask for a Heritage Circle grant.

Then off to Shustek for a day of cataloging artifacts. One thing that I and Steve Madsen cataloged was a “Data Glove”, a fabric glove with lots of wires, part of a 1980’s research into human input to virtual worlds or something.

---

At one point of the morning the people working at Shustek discovered that we were all recent widowers. Well, I guess I’m the oldest in that status, having lost Marian in 2018. Dave Bennett lost his wife just last November; Steve Madsen lost his just recently in I think it was February; and Sherman (forget his last name) also lost his wife recently. The Widower’s club. Statistically unlikely, given that (judging by Channing House) there are lots more widows than widowers, but there we were.

---

In the middle of the day we had an indoor picnic lunch, all the volunteers from the other group at Yosemite came over, to hear a talk on the progress in converting the whole artifact database to a new software base, all in the cloud and hyper connected and shit. Another reason for this break was to give a surprise baby shower to Greta, one of the two absolutely stellar women who keep that place organized. We will have to get along without her for a lengthy maternity leave now; I hope she will come back from it.

This was a nice contrast on the two kinds of volunteer work. What I do for CHM and for FOPAL is simple. Although the work requires attention and effort, it is well-defined and bounded in scope and time. You go there, you do the job, you walk away and go home, done.

The other kind is what I’ve been calling “Manager work”. It has no boundaries of time, it is always on my mind. You have to get opinions from other people, you have to get concensus, you don’t do something and dust off your hands, all the tasks hang around pending on something else which relies on something else, etc., with no resolution. It’s what managers do, and I am a natural “member of technical staff”.

---

In the evening I got an email from fave artist Carol Aust telling of the Hunters Point Open Studios weekend. I attended this in May 2019 (Day 0.154) and enjoyed it, and ultimately bought two paintings from one of the artists I first saw there. So I marked the calendar for this year, Saturday 4/30. Anyone want to join me?