Saturday 02/12/2022

First thing to do today was to get the Prius smogged. The DMV says I must take it to a STAR-qualified smogger. So I get out google maps and search. There’s a convenient one on El Camino, and their website says “Open 8-5 but call us first”. I call at 8:10 and they don’t answer. And there’s no answering machine either.

OK, back to maps. There’s a STAR smogger on Middlefield in Redwood City. I call; they are open. I head for the garage and on the way get a call-back from the guy at the first outfit, saying he is “returning a missed call?” I just say thanks, no worries, and carry on. I might have said, dude, invest in an answering machine but didn’t.

I drive into Redwood City. Middlefield in this part is kind of slummy, it’s a little bit of Mexico with bodegas and such and sketchy-looking people on the sidewalks. I locate the supposed smog place but it is just a little alley between a car wash and something else, no parking, small sign, nobody around. I park down the block and get out the phone.

Aha, there is another smogger not far away just off the 101 freeway. I use the iPhone for driving directions and you know? I like its directions better than the GPS built into the car. But I probably will stick with the one in the car because I don’t want to get a phone holder.

Anyway down by the Marsh Road interchange, the smog guy is just coming to work. He opens his door and goes to work. A smog check these days appears to consist of nothing more than sticking a computer into the OBD jack under the dash. He’s done in 10 minutes; by the time I’ve gone into the adjacent gas station and bought a bottle of gatorade, he’s writing up the bill. Prius rates PASS in all categories.

Crafts

Back home by 10:30, I spend the rest of the morning alternating between printing another pretty photo to put on my picture rail, and gluing bits onto the VW model. It’s coming along pretty well. In the afternoon I go for a moderate walk, and that’s the day.

Schedules

Well, except for an email conversation with SWBB fans which causes me to look into the scheduling for the rest of the season. Next week, they go to the Oregon schools. The following week they are home for two games and that’s the regular season. I figure to attend those, 2/24 and 2/26.

The following week, 3/2 – 3/6, is the PAC-12 tournament in Las Vegas. I will not go there because I dislike everything about Vegas. I went to the tournament in 2019 (my account starts on day 0.096) and I do not care to repeat it.

However, 3/16 through 3/20, Stanford will be hosting a sub-regional. Following that, the NCAAs move to regionals, and surely Stanford will be assigned to the West regional which is in Spokane, 3/25-27. I like Spokane and I might make that my first travel in 2+ years. Should I book that travel now?

Next after that, 4/1-3, is the Final Four which is in Minneapolis. I am tempted to go to that as well. But should I book it? It is highly likely, but NOT certain, that Stanford will make it through the Regional games and be in the Final IV. If I commit to air fare and a hotel now — well, I can watch other good teams…

Friday 02/11/2022

My first of two appointments was at the imaging center at the big Stanford medical campus that they created in Redwood City over the past decade. I’d been there a couple of times with Marian. My previous CT scans were at a smaller clinic in Palo Alto, but for unknown reasons the Stanford schedulers had moved me to Redwood City.

I elected to use Lyft for this three-cornered trip. First up to Redwood City, leaving just before 8am. This was a CT with contrast, which means, they put an IV in my arm and during half the procedure they shoot a glob of contrast juice into me. This causes an immediate flush of warmth in my head and neck and a taste of burnt metal at the back of my tongue. Whatever works. The whole procedure took half an hour and I was out a little after 9.

So now a Lyft over to the main hospital to meet with the surgeon. I believe I mentioned when we met last August, that she was showing pregnant. Today she was not, but I didn’t think it would be polite to mention that because one never knows how this change occurred. Anyway, good for me that she’s not staying home being a mommy.

The actual good news was that my aorta is healing nicely. It has closed up more of the “false lumen”, the bulgy bit where the outer wall separated from the inner wall. And some “micro leaks” around the stents are no longer seen. So now I am on a 1-year callback instead of 6 months.

I asked the nurse practitioner who talked to me first, about the renal cyst. She found it quickly and said it was 15 cm (about 6 inches) which sounds large. So in my spare time sitting there waiting for various people to come and talk to me, I messaged Dr. Tamrazi who drained it last spring. He replied back later in the day that compared to prior images, it was about 33% of the former size, and not displacing any other organs, so let it be.

From here I pondered walking home, about a 2-mile walk. But it was near noon and I’d had not a lot to eat or drink yet, so I took yet a third Lyft. I gotta say, Lyft is working swell. I had to wait 7 or 8 minutes for the first ride, but only 2 or 3 minutes for the other two. And the cost? About $50 total, $16*3 in round numbers. Yes I could have driven myself, but it was very relaxing not to have to worry about parking or routes.

At 4pm it was time for Rhonda’s open meeting on Covid issues. She said we could all hope this was the last such meeting she would need to hold. Although not all restrictions are off, and the dining room won’t be open for dinner for another 2 weeks, quite a few things have been relaxed as the Ommy-cron surge seems to be passing.

At 6 it was time to go down and wait by the garage door for others in our Maples car-pool. I’m in demand because, having contributed to Stanford Athletics, I have a parking pass, so no matter who drives, me or Patty or David G, I show my pass and we park next to the arena. How to be popular…

Utah played Stanford close for the first quarter, Stanford only ahead by 10 at the half. Then early in the 4th quarter Stanford went on a 14-0 run and put it away decisively.

Thursday 02/10/2022

I did feel normal this morning. I went for a shorter than usual walk. Then at noon, I drove across the bay to the Yosemite warehouse for some artifact work. First time there in a while. Helped to construct custom-fitted boxes for artifacts that are to be loaned out to the City Museum of New York.

Left early in order to be back for a 4pm zoom meeting. Last week we had the annual official Board meeting and Treasurer’s report. A small group of residents drew some wrong conclusions from the (admittedly somewhat confusing) numbers that were presented, and raised some rather hostile questions.

Today’s meeting was the response to that by the staff and the Board. Just holding such a meeting was really quite an impressive display of responsiveness. This place is not run in a top-down corporate fashion. Well as I’ve noted before, it’s full of retired doctors, university provosts, and managers.

Anyway they went through the numbers in detail showing that we’ve been making a reasonable and expected rate of return from the various funds and endowments. Comments after were of the nature of “well if you’d just shown us those details before…” So that flap is settled.

Tomorrow is a large day: CT scan in the morning, follow-up with surgeon (who last time said, if this part keeps spreading we will need to put in another stent); and a basketball game in the evening.

Wednesday 02/09/2022

In the morning I contemplated a walk, but just didn’t feel good. No temperature, no specific pains, just felt “few”. Vaguely tired and unwell. So I drove to the store to buy a few grocery items, then did my laundry starting at 10am.

At 2pm it was time for the resident association executive committee meeting. Discussed various things. The only real news was that some restrictions are being loosened, although not all.

Simultaneously the Stanford Women were playing Oregon State. This was televised so I could record it for playback later.

At 3pm I attended a zoom meeting in which the speaker was one Jitze Couperus, showing a selection of pictures taken from a light plane over the Bay Area. I was unimpressed; everything he showed I had seen one time or another, on arriving or departing in a commercial flight.

Then I could squeeze in the basketball game (Stanford won by 20 or so) until it was time for the 4:45 6th floor floor-meeting. For once pretty nearly everyone showed up, although there was no particular news to share and due to covid, no refreshments. But it was nice to meet as a group instead of on zoom.

By evening I was feeling fine. I hope that continues to tomorrow.

Tuesday 02/08/2022

Went to the gym first thing. Halfway through my second round my body seemed to say “enough” so I bailed. I also had nothing for the writers group at 11, although I listened and applauded other people as usual.

Last night and this morning I was calling exchanging emails to set up yet another speaker meeting. This is something I had let slide, I thought somebody else was handling it. But one of my neighbors, Lennie, came up like a hero to host the meeting on short notice.

In the afternoon I set out to do something I have been putting off for weeks, namely, to go to the T-Mobile store and upgrade my phone. I have two numbers, one in an iPhone 5 that Jean was using. Actually not using very much. And my iPhone SE second generation has problems inside our building. So the idea was, to replace the SE with an iPhone 13, which has 5G ability and hopefully better antennas. Then replace the little old iPhone 5 with the SE.

Unfortunately Shirley the teenage clerk (ok, maybe she’s 21, but very young) had bad news: upgrading to an iPhone 13 would cost $800. (Checking the t-mobile website now, yes, it says $799.) I had been tricked by some kind of tricky wording on a T-mobile TV commercial that I heard, something about “iPhone 13 is on us”. I wonder what it really said.

Anyway I couldn’t accept $800 for a hypothetical improvement in service. So I thanked Shirley for her time and left.

Monday 02/07/2022

Opened the day with a normal walk, which went fine. On the return let I stopped at Ace Hardware. My bedside lamp uses two little halogen bulbs and one had burned out last night. This morning I took it out and used the internet (of course) to work what kind it was (T4 shape, G9 base, 120V 35W). I could have ordered a couple from bulbs.com, but I thought I would give the local store a shot, and they came through; they had almost the same bulb, 40W instead of 35 which is fine.

Next up was a Book Talk by a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford, Nils Karlson. As AV committee chair it was my job to set this up, which I had done by arranging with Veronica to open a meeting on the house Zoom account, and arranging with David G. to be the host, which he does very ably for other big meetings. Delegation is my skill. So I had to attend, although the subject didn’t interest me much. Karlson’s book is about how two different modern democracies, Sweden and Australia, had both implemented serious economic reforms in the 90s and 00s. It had nothing to offer current politics as far as I could tell. I asked how his analysis would work for Brexit and he said he is working on a book on Brexit now.

As soon as that was over I headed down to FOPAL to process 6 boxes of books. On return I could relax for an hour and then it was time for the second meeting of the day. This was the first of two meetings where the staff responds to resident complaints. This one was about the recently announced increase in the garage rates from 65/mo to 90/mo which had produced a lot of complaints, I think more because it was announced rather suddenly without any kind of survey or preparation. It turns out that parking is a major issue in several ways. The City has greatly reduced the number of employee street parking permits that businesses can get. Quite a few employees cannot use public transport (I know one commutes from Gilroy) although we reimburse public transit fare use. So quite frankly the raise is hoped to motivate a few people to give up their underutilized cars, allowing more employees to park inside.

Monthly parking in a covered secure location runs a lot higher than $90/mo and I feel quite fortunate to have the space I do and will happily pay the increase.

Food today was three Keto Chow shakes. My weight has been steadily creeping up over the past two months and I am going back on the keto diet for a week or two to knock it down again.

Sunday 02/06/2022

Today for the first time in… maybe forever? I didn’t leave the building all day, on foot or by car. In fact, I only left my apartment twice, to pick up meal trays.

I did some paperwork, doing the January entry for the Nest Egg spreadsheet (down 3% from the prior month, thank you stock market). Did quite a bit of work on the VW model; only a couple more hours of work to finish that.

At 3pm it was SWBB at USC. I was able to watch only the first quarter when it was time to switch over to Sunday @ Home, an occasional series where a selected resident lectures on their specialty. This time it was Gloria Hom, giving the details on Chinese New Year. This was the talk I had helped her prep for a couple of days ago. She managed her slides with only minor problems.

Then back to the basketball. Stanford led by 20 at the half and ended up winning by 30. Back home now for a makeup game with OSU next Wednesday.

I had to work the 6-7 shift on tray distribution because only one person had signed up. Then back to my room to eat and watch some Olympics.

Saturday 02/05/2022

Started the day by taking a modest walk and of course stopping at the farmers market. Brought home a giant pastry and a bottle of organic apple juice. I put those aside, except for a couple of bites, for later. I had signed up to do trays in the 6-7pm slot, with my own tray scheduled for 6:45. So I would have a long gap and used the pastry and juice for a gap-stop or early Tea.

I did some paperwork but did not, as I had planned, take a first look at the tax accountant’s online workbook. Reason, Schwab won’t have all my various statements ready before the end of the month. It’s a good excuse.

I did quite a bit of work on the VW model. After lunch I did some gardening. I chopped back the big dragon-wing begonias as I do each spring. And a month ago, Jean gave me a begonia in a pot off her back porch. This thing has been in the same pot for 40 years, she said; do what you want with it. It didn’t look very well, kind of stunted and brown-edged. Well, today I popped it out of its pot — it did not have a solid big root-ball, to my surprise — and stuck it into a much larger pot. Either it will die, or it will burst into vigorous new life. Or maybe it will just sit there, you never know with plants.

At 6 I went down and joined Lily handing out trays. When mine came out of the kitchen at 6:30, she shooed me away saying she had it. So I went up and watched some olympics, although I don’t feel much involved in them.

Friday 02/04/2022

First thing, I went to the gym for the first time in a couple of weeks. Paced myself carefully; it went ok.

At 9am I was to meet with Gloria. She is giving a talk on Sunday, on zoom, planning to share a powerpoint presentation. I did not want to see her fumbling around like I have seen so many people do, and wanted to walk her through the process of sharing her presentation. Sure enough, she only knew how to make the powerpoint do a slide show, as a full-screen show. Which would have left her floundering at the point the host said, share your screen, because she’d have started the slide show and it would fill the screen, hiding the zoom window with the “share” button!

So we worked out how to make a powerpoint slide show play inside a window, and then the tricky bit where you click Share and it pops up a window with miniatures of all your windows and you have to pick which one to share. She’d never seen that and it would have thrown her. But now she knows.

I was to have taken a tech squad call at 10, but that person had left me a message saying it was all ok now, don’t bother. Good. That meant I was now free to take the Smalltalk book down to FOPAL, to a part I’d never been in, the “annex” which is a workroom off the Children’s section, which is in a different building. There I met with Lisa whose volunteer work is selling on eBay and mailing sold items. She walked me through the process of mailing the book to its new owner.

Then it had to be dropped off at a post office; she recommended I just leave it at the UPS office in Midtown, very convenient to my route home. So I also stopped there for a smoothie and a cookie. Haven’t been in that cafe for a year or so.

There was a lot of email back and forth to deal with, about an event happening Monday. And I did a bit of work on the VW model. There’s a lot to do, but it’s coming together. Here’s the interior.

I am particularly pleased by the red release buttons on the seat-belt latches, which are about 1/8 inch by 1/32nd inch. The thing is, when it is complete you would have to peer in through a side window the size of your thumbnail to see this interior at all.

At 4pm Rhonda held a Covid-status zoom meeting. They are beginning to see the light; down to only 3 staff out for quarantine. As a result they will reopen the dining room, but only for breakfast and lunch. They still don’t have enough people to handle dinner as well; that will continue to be order online and carry out. Which means I get to make another week’s sign-up sheet for tray dispensing volunteers. I did that after supper.

Thursday 02/03/2022

Went for a walk in the morning. Then did little stuff: paid a bill, set up meetings with two different people for tomorrow.

After lunch I drove to the Shustek center in Milpitas for an afternoon of artifact work. This used to be a full day, well, starting at 10am, and lunch with other volunteers. But Omicron; no more lunches together. Anyway, spent three hours working with Sherman, photographing artifacts.

In the evening it was SWBB in Los Angeles, playing UCLA on ESPN. Stanford won easily, leading by 20 at the half and 30 at the end, despite the absence of two starters due to Covid protocols.