Sunday 10/03/2021

So, Sunday. Feed the hummingbirds, water the plants, do the big puzzle. Then I got out the car and drove to California Ave where I walked the whole thing, just because. I bought a cute little cyclamen in a pot, to occupy an open floor on my multi-level plant stand. Bumped into Harriet, said hi.

Back at CH I potted the cyclament. Then the plan was to eat an early lunch, and pick up neighbor Tom in the lobby, and drive to Maples pavilion for women’s volleyball. Lennie had offered three tickets earlier in the week, free. Tom took one, I took the other two thinking Dennis might come along but he couldn’t. I tried to get anyone at the lunch table to come along but everyone was fixated on staying in and watching the Giants to see if they could clinch the NL West in the last game of the season.

So, off to Maples for the first time since 2019? Maybe there I went to a game there in the first weeks of 2020, I don’t remember. I could check, or what’s a diary for? Yes, last home game of the 2019-2020 season was on February 24th, 2020 (blog day 1.084). I came back from my trip to London and the game was a couple days later. And two weeks after that, Santa Clara County ordered a shelter in place, and there were no further basketball games at Maples in 2020 or 2021, until the upcoming season starts in a few weeks.

At Maples, bumped into who? Harriet! Hi again! Stanford dispatched Arizona in straight sets, boom boom boom see ya. Checked on the Giants who were cruising to an 11-4 win so that’s alright.

Anyway that was pretty much the day. But note: I attended a play Friday night; a play Saturday night; and a sports event on Sunday. That’s a good level of activity.

Saturday 10/02/2021

Took a short direct walk to the farmer’s market where I bought one of those amazing “peanut butter mound” pastries from the “other” bakery, the one that doesn’t offer hazelnut choc swirls, but does these monstrous cookies, my word that thing weighed half a pound I swear (I didn’t weigh it, should have). It occurred to me that the most amazing thing is, it’s over an inch thick, not overcooked on the outside, but cooked evenly, right through. Anyway I nibbled on that all morning and finished it around 11 and didn’t feel hungry for lunch. So my food today was that giant cookie, and then regular supper.

Much email back and forth among members of the tech squad about Bill, who I mentioned the other day. His short-term memory is increasingly bad, and one result is, he puts in a call for help with his computer, but by the time anyone responds, he’s forgotten what the problem was, and indeed forgotten placing the call. This has happened multiple times; and the conclusion was to punt the problem to Elizabeth, the house social worker, with a recommendation that Bill’s son be involved.

I spent some time writing an email to Nancy who at supper the night before, asked for science fiction recommendations for her 12-year-old grandson. She wants to buy books. I gave her some random suggestions, also suggested that she check carefully whether he actually wants printed books, or might prefer to read on Kindle on his phone or computer.

I spent some time setting up a Google Sheet to record requests for A/V assistance. And gave it a short URL, bit.ly/CHAVDOC. So, not entirely idle.

Patty had put together a dinner party including Joanne, and Stew and Cathy. Joanne talked about how she and her husband retired to Port Townsend. From that it turned out that four of the five at the table had some kind of connection to the San Juan Islands.

Which got me thinking about the years from 2000 to 2015 when every summer we went up to visit Paul and Katie on San Juan. Which made me sad.

Anyway, off at 7:15 on foot for the short walk to Lucy Stern theater for Palo Alto Player’s production of Working, a musical based on the working-people interviews of Studs Terkel. I give it a C at best. (Where Tiny Beautiful Things of last night would be a C+.) Not really a musical but a musical revue, a series of sketches with singing. A couple of them worked pretty well, carried by the verve and skill of individual performers for that number. But as a whole it had me regretting there was no intermission, because I would have left at one.

Friday 10/01/2021

Went for the benchmark walk; fine. Spent some of the morning beginning to search for a new Medicare Part D drug plan. Last year I had opted away from whatever I had then, to Anthem Blue Cross. It was an ok deal, cost $21 a month, paid for most of the cost of the meds I got. But they just sent a fat brochure detailing (very clearly, to their credit) how the plan would change next year. The premium quadruples to $90/month, the deductible goes up, and something else increases. What? Why?

Coincidentally Medicare had sent me an email saying, open plan election time is coming, and we have all the comparison data. So yeah, Medicare, to its great credit, has a very clear website where you put in your meds and your preferred pharmacies, and they show you all the plans that match and you can sort them various ways. There are several that are clearly better deals than Anthem.

Something I forgot to put in yesterday was ordering Pikolinos. Those are shoes. For many years I wore Mephisto loafers. Sometime 3-4 years back, when a pair of brown Mephisotos were wearing down, I went to I think probably it was Nordstrom? and bought a pair of loafers of some other brand. They fit, I liked the look, fine.

Last year the Mephisto pair started to pinch on my growing bunions, and I started wearing the black loafers all the time, and have been wearing them daily for a year. It occurred to me that, putting on 15-20 miles a week, they would be wearing out. So I should see about lining up a replacement. For the first time ever I looked at the brand: Pikolinos. Which turns out to be an upscale Italian line.

Few minutes of searching and I was able to identify the exact model and size of the shoes I’m wearing. And just in time, it turns out; they must have been discontinued recently, because everywhere they are on offer, they are discounted by about half ($90 vs. $150 for similar models of Pikolinos) and available in only a few sizes. But I found the exact same shoe and size online and ordered a pair. Now I’m good for footwear for several years to come.

After lunch about noon I looked out my window and realized it was a beautiful day and I should get out in it. But I also had things to do here at 3pm and 4pm. But I started out to go for a bit of a drive. In the lobby the staff were greeting everyone with little goody bags of fall candies and treats. I took one and went on to the car. Driving up Sand Hill road I was also trying to open the goodie bag. Turns out, one goody was a packet of hot cocoa mix, not well sealed, and it flipped over and got cocoa and sugar on the passenger seat. So now I had a new goal, to get the car vacuumed. I completed a short drive through the hills and back to the car wash place on El Camino. It was time for a wash anyway.

At 7pm I left for the Bus Barn theater where I saw Tiny Beautiful Things, a play based on a book by Cheryl Strayed. Strayed apparently at one point in her checkered career had a gig as an advice columnist with the pseudonym Sugar. The cast of four has one playing Sugar, the other three play various letter writers who present Sugar with a range of problems from silly to heartbreaking; and Sugar answers with heartfelt homilies about the need for openness and love, often exposing her own sad history and current problems. Patches of it were good; patches of it were trite. I disagreed with a lot of Sugar’s advice, but maybe I was supposed to.

Thursday 09/20/2021

Did AJ’s aerobics class. For the second time this week, and for the second time in a row, I was the only attendee, on the 11th floor or by zoom. Just AJ leading and me trying to do the same things at the same speed.

Afterward, straight down to the computer history museum, the actual museum, not either of the east bay locations. Today the regular volunteer crew was doing cleaning. There is a regular janitorial service but they only dust the plastic cases and don’t touch the artifacts.

The cleaning was not because they had scheduled a re-opening. They were going to reopen on Sept. 1 and backed away from that when the County got strict again. Now the management don’t say or predict (“Not a whisper” said Aurora the curator), but they have promised the staff 30 days notice of it. Aurora guesses it won’t happen until they can reopen with few restrictions to enforce (vaccine proof but no masks, maybe?).

Anyway, I got assigned to plexiglass cleaning. Many many exhibits have objects in plexiglass boxes. I had a spray bottle of plastic cleaner and microfiber towels, and worked my way around the winding path of the “Revolution” exhibit space, along with Toni, wiping and wiping. Couple hours of this before lunch, another couple after lunch. There was also some tall sheets of glass.

Here’s Dave Bennett (aka “the other Dave” on our team) dusting a robot.

Having my nose rubbed in it, so to speak, alerted me once again to how well designed that exhibit space is. There are just tons of things in there and all well displayed and explained. I also discovered two things about the place I hadn’t even known, despite hanging out there for years. One, there is a whole alcove of stuff about computer music generation that I’d never seen. Two, there are men’s and women’s bathrooms half-way around and I never knew that!

At supper I shared a table with Mickie, Gloria, Jan and Robyn. Robyn talked about trying to sell her car. It’s a 2001 Toyota Avalon, 100K miles but basically clean. She is asking $3000 but I did a quick look online and similar cars are going at up to $4500. I told her she should ask 4K and settle for nothing under 3500, but she wasn’t interested. Anyway, my main point is why she is selling. Which is because her license expires in November. And at age 95, she doesn’t feel like renewing it! Robyn actually doesn’t look 95. I’m not that good at ages but I might have guessed 80 maybe. But there you are.

Wednesday 09/29/2021

Went for the usual walk. On return had only an hour until my appointment time for a haircut, the first professional one since Day 2.157, 138 days ago, back on May 13. I would have had Leah cut my hair at least twice in that time, but whenever a staff member tested positive, they would shut down the part of the building where the little one-chair salon is, to prevent anybody walking through there to infect the AL and SN residents. But it finally opened up last week and I made an appointment right away. Leah did a nice job, here, let me grab a selfie.

After lunch I went down to FOPAL to deal with those multiple signed books by McCracken. Searching the used book market I found that two of the titles were selling over $30 so those five books (multiple copies of each title) could go to high value. The rest are selling around $7-8 dollars, which ordinarily I would price at $3-4 and put on the shelf, however I don’t frankly think any of our customers would want them. I mean, A Guide to Programming in FORTRAN IV, or the COBOL one, etc., are not hot movers. So I sent them to the bargain room. Maybe a hasty decision, and Frank the Bargain Room guy may send them back.

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OK to relieve the doom and gloom from yesterday’s essay, I thought I would put in a piece of writing by another member off the writers group, Susan. I thought this was just a very nice piece of writing and should be comforting. Remember, the topic was “What remains to be done.”

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The last jar of 2020 Pesto is almost empty, and summer is officially over.
What remains to be done is to make this year’s batch.
The basil plant on the balcony droops thick with big, juicy leaves. I’ve a new bottle of extra virgin olive oil, and there’s a head of fat garlic cloves on the counter. Checking the refrigerator, I see that I need more grated Parmesan and pine nuts and butter. This a good excuse for a walk to Whole Foods, which, for heaven’s sake, has no pine nuts. Nor does the Willows Market, when I drive by later. Ye gods! Is there a glitch in the pine nut supply chain? With trepidation I arrive at the Midtown Safeway. No pine nuts on the shelves under the produce. My heart is in my throat. But never fear … hanging on a rack in the baking aisle is a plethora of little bags of pine nuts. My mouth begins to water in anticipation.
All that remains to be done this afternoon is to exhume the well-washed half-pint jars from last year’s pesto and pull the blender from under the sink. I will set out all the ingredients—the oil, the peeled garlic cloves, the washed basil leaves, the Parmesan and pine nuts and butter and salt—in the proper amounts.
Next I will measure the oil into the blender and toss in the garlic. Setting the blender to “grind” (the lowest setting), I will watch the garlic swirl in the golden oil, gradually dicing and blending. At the proper moment I will begin adding the other ingredients, a handful or spoonful at a time, through the hole in the blender’s lid. I challenge myself to divide up the butter and basil leaves and cheese and nuts and small handfuls of salt so that they come out even as the mixture thickens and turns a gorgeous basil green. Occasionally I stop the blender to run a soft rubber scraper down the blender’s sides, making sure that everything is perfectly combined.
At last, the roar of the blender falls silent, and it’s time to pour and scrape the pesto into two of the little jars. If I’m very careful, none will spill and I can screw on the lids without making a mess. Of course a small spill will be the occasion for swiping a fingerful of pesto straight into my mouth. In either case, I’m the winner, and it’s time to repeat the process with the next collection of ingredients and jars. How many jars will I fill? Not as many as I used to, when I was a daily cook and had cooking friends to supply. But enough.
Yum!!

Tuesday 09/28/2021

Did the aerobics class. Asked leader A.J. about his “strength with weights” class. This because the cardiologist urged me to start working with weights to slow loss of muscle mass. Unfortunately A.J.’s class comes on Tuesday/Thursday and just doesn’t fit my regular schedule; anyway it didn’t sound like it would be enough of a challenge. I shall have to try to use the machines in the gym. Oh sigh.

The writers group met; the cue for the week was “What remains to be done.” Last night in about an hour I wrote up something that had been growing in my head for a while. I will put it at the end. Well received as usual, and several other people immediately made the connection to Yeat’s poem “The Second Coming”. We agreed that the lines,

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   
Are full of passionate intensity.

was the best description of Facebook that could be written. Or Fox News.

Went down to FOPAL and processed 6 boxes of computer books. The major find there was a stack, nearly half a box, of books by Daniel McCracken. He was a prolific and respected writer of books on how to program, from the 1960s into the 1990s. What’s unusual about these is that they are mint and are all signed by the author. So like he had a stack of new books to sign for some reason, and did, but they stayed together and got dumped on us 25 years later.

It’s a problem because they ought to be worth something but what, and to who?

OK here’s my cheerful little essay.

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What remains to be done is…

Nothing. And Everything.

For the Human species, an accelerating series of catastrophes will, I confidently expect, reduce global population from its present 7.8 billion by at least a third, possibly by half, at the end of this century. Sea levels will rise, deserts will expand, growing seasons will become shorter in the north temperate zones. All of these will contribute to natural disasters, and to huge movements of displaced, distressed people, and these will legitimize ever more authoritarian governments as nations “respond to the present crisis”, and the next crisis, and the crisis after that.

At least three of the Four Horsemen, Famine, Disease and War, will ride freely and in coordination. The drying, or flooding, or — in Northern Europe after the imminent collapse of the North Atlantic Circulation — the freezing of farmlands, will lead to famine; famine inspires desperate attempts to seek new food sources, causing people to pioneer for arable land in jungles and other new locations, which in turn brings pandemics of new zoonotic diseases. Famine and disease lead to mass movements of displaced, resentful people, which in turn lead to border skirmishes, armed intrusions, and all-out war. Eventually there will be jihads, righteous crusades, against the developed nations that stubbornly continue to burn fossil fuels and make the climate worse.

I don’t think the Human species will be wiped out, not even if some geriatric Caesar, in the last throes of nationalistic, racist rage, uses nuclear weapons. I do think that economies, borders and national governments will be reshaped in completely unpredictable ways, so that the geopolitical map of 2099 will be vastly different from today.

None of this will be pleasant. None of it will be pretty, or elegant; most of it will be carried out to an accompaniment of willfully-ignorant demagoguery, self-righteous bombast, and self-serving denial. Inconceivably vast fortunes will vanish, dry up and evaporate, leaving millions who thought they were secure, in poverty. New, smaller fortunes will be grubbed together by opportunists.

And people will die; there will be deaths, in percentages of populations, not seen since the First World War or the Black Death, but because the total is so much higher, the absolute numbers of deaths probably won’t be matched in history again — because the total population of a climate-changed Earth will never be as large as it is now.

People born in the current decade will grow up in this chaotic world, and the best of them will try to manage it, to maintain, sustain, hold things together until the species completes a vast “downsizing”. The luckiest of them might live to see a smaller, stabler world system beginning to emerge in 2100. They have Everything to do. Bon chance, kids.

We have — well, no, I won’t presume to speak for anyone else, so — I have Nothing to do. The ways are greased, the fuse is lit, the avalanche has begun to move; I can imagine nothing that I, personally, could do to alter the course of the Juggernaut that has begun to roll. Oh, sure, I’ll vote for, and contribute to, the right, or rather, left, candidates. I’ll keep my carbon footprint as small as I can, shrinking my grain of the global sandstorm. But I expect these things to have about as much effect as they have had in the past.

So I’ve nothing to do except pass the days as each comes.

Monday, 09/27/2021

First thing, I assembled a small spreadsheet with my morning and evening blood pressures for the last two weeks. Then at 9 I headed out by car to PAMF. By car because, the last couple of times I went there, the admitting nurse took my BP and got a nice low reading, 120 or 118. This is 20 points lower than my average, and I attributed the low number to the fact that I had walked there both times, and she took my BP while I was still nice and warm from exercise.

This time she got 135 so, hypothesis confirmed. Blood pressure was the main topic of my talk with the cardiologist. We agreed we didn’t like mine. She said, although the small mass on my adrenal did not seem to be having any measurable hormonal effect, it might still be having a “sub-clinical” effect, so she wants to try something new.

She prescribed a combination pill containing HCTZ, a mild diuretic, combined with Spironolactone, a drug specific to high BP caused by excess aldosterone, the primary output of the adrenal gland. In the event that my adrenal gland is overproducing, this should have an effect on BP. It takes a while to build up, and it can have side effects, so I’m to get a metabolic panel in ten days.

We agreed that Dr. Yalamanchi, the endocrinologist, was great; see Day 2.258 where I called her “the cutest person”; but Dr. DiBiase had more substantial reasons for liking her, praised her highly, said her notes on the patients she sent to her were “so helpful”, and called her a “star”.

We also agreed that since it is a year since I get my cardiac stent, I can stop taking the Plavix. Yay!

Then I bopped back to CH and set up to work with Connie in the auditorium. She is scheduled to do a poetry reading (as part of the Sunday at Home series) on 10/17 and wants to have a zoom simulcast. I had worked out how to do that, which I showed her.

After all the waffling and frustration about how to get an image of the stage into the computer and shared with Zoom, I had finally realized that Zoom will do it for me. I set a Macbook Air on the seat of a chair, and set the chair on the front edge of the stage, with the computer facing the performer, which in this case is just Connie standing by a lectern. The camera is wide enough that it gets the performer from below the knees up, and with room for them to move left and right a few feet if they want.

Start a Zoom meeting on the laptop. Set it so that everyone who joins is muted; and set the view to show the speaker. Anyone who joins the meeting sees the performer in the middle and hears whatever sound is picked up by the laptop’s mic. The volume was adequate. The sound had a bit of echo because the computer could hear the performer’s voice directly, as well as picking up the amplified sound out of the ceiling. But it was adequate.

This will do for the time being. It would be preferable to supply a feed directly from the audio console to the computer, that would eliminate the echo. But I don’t know any way to do that, not least because as noted on day 2.290, we can’t figure out how to get line output from the console. If we could, then we could try to figure out how to get it into the laptop doing Zoom.

Sunday 09/26/2021

After the usual Sunday start, I set out for a walk, thinking in terms of walking to California Avenue. However, a mile out, I had a feeling I should check my calendar. Yup, this is the day I am scheduled to visit the Anderson Collection at Stanford. So I turned around and headed back, and then shortly out by car.

I parked on The Oval and first walked across the campus to where I could get an OJ and pastry. There were lots of people, mostly families, walking around enjoying grass and sunshine — and no masks! Well, almost none. Surprising.

Then back past the car to the museum. It took me the barbarian less than an hour to walk all the works.

I was last at the Anderson on Day 1.168, May 2019. Much of the work has changed since then. Probably the collection has more things than can be hung at once. I wasn’t taken with what’s there now. There were several of the kind of thing that gives contemporary art a bad name:

Back here to attend a memorial on the 11th floor at 2pm. There isn’t usually an on-site memorial when somebody dies here. Depends on the family, I suppose. In this case the lady’s husband organized the event. They had lived here together for several years (and her mother was a former resident for 20 years before they moved in). As usual you learn a lot about a person from people reminiscing about them.

Saturday 09/25/2021

During the morning I prepped to show Connie options for her reading, and then she couldn’t make it. Rescheduled for Monday; and then when I realized I had a doctor appointment, rescheduled for later on Monday.

I also worked on STIP and concluded that it wasn’t working. I had started a major renovation of what I’d done already, and toward the end of that work, I ran into a brick wall, something that just wasn’t going to work. One problem too many. I didn’t trash everything but I shut down, made the Github repository private and deleted the Leanpub book project. Done.

At 3:45 I left for a memorial for Deb Gumbly. Deb was an even more rabid SWBB fan than we were, but much more. Marian and I were never close to her, I think partly because initially, back in the 90s, we weren’t at home with the gay crowd. Not that we had anything against them, but didn’t quite know how to relate. Anyway, Deb was always friendly with us, but we didn’t know her beyond saying “hi” at basketball games. Turns out, today, listening to all the tributes from her friends, we missed out on that.

Friday 09/24/2021

Went for the morning walk, although I took the shorter route, losing a half mile. No reason, just felt like indulging myself on a Friday.

Caught up with an ongoing project, the “online ERF”. Someday I will describe it. When it’s finished, if ever.

In the afternoon I met with Bert in the Auditorium and we worked for an hour trying to get audio out of the system into a computer or a camera. Without success. At length we proved to our satisfaction that although the audio system has phone jacks labeled, “CTL ROOM L/R”, “PHONES”, “AUX MON1” and “AUX MON2”, none, zero of these jacks has any audio coming out of them. You might think at least one of these would carry the mixed audio that is going to the house speakers, but nunh-unh.

Repeated emails between me and Stew about Connie’s upcoming poetry reading. Stew is the event coordinator for this, and he wants some kind of Zoom simulcast because he thinks there will be more than 50 people, the current Covid-limit on auditorium seating, who want to attend in some fashion.

Connie is one of my favorite people and I want to help make her reading a success, but this whole simulcast thing while obvious in principle, is just very difficult.

The least of the reasons is because we can’t figure out how to get stinkin’ audio out of the system into a computer — which means that the audio track of a Zoom session will not be same as what’s coming out of her lapel mic. It will be whatever the mic in the laptop that is hosting the Zoom session, can pick up, there in the auditorium. Which means a blend of the speaker’s voice and the sound coming over the house speakers. If that sounds like a great recipe for echo, if not for squealing feedback, hey, welcome to A/V Hell.