04/07/2021

Being Sunday, I watered the plants and did the NYT crossword. Then I walked the 1.5 miles to California Ave, meaning to reward myself with something from the Midwife and the Baker stand at the farmers market, but unfortunately, they have apparently killed that market in favor of filling up the roadway with more restaurant seating. So I took a Lyft back.

Spent a few hours working on hobby projects. At 4:30, I went down to Dennis’s place in SJ and had a good supper and pleasant chatting. Left there in time to get back to CH by 7:20, and set up the A/V for the evening’s party. Which was quite nice. Well organized and fun. At 9pm we adjourned to look at at the fireworks to be seen around the horizon, in about a normal quantity for a 4th.

Saturday 07/03/2021

In contrast to yesterday I took it easy today. I felt a little under the weather in the morning but that went away later. I went out in the car to run a couple of errands, then relaxed until 2pm when I met with David Golden and Mary on the 11th floor to organize Mary’s setup for the 4th of July party, scheduled for 8pm tomorrow night. Got the video and audio all set.

Over other times of the day I did a bunch of editing on Pelajis and started to set up the actual book on Kindle Vella.

Friday 07/02/2021

I took a walk this morning, but before I did I wrote a to-do list to get everything I needed to do down on paper, and there was a lot of it. Just all sorts of responsibilities swirled up on me yesterday.

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For the CH Treasury, I needed to print an invoice documenting the case of masks I bought, and cut a check to myself, and record that in the journal. I did those things right after the walk.

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I needed to contact Mary who is running the 4th of July event and set a time to practice putting her powerpoint slides on the big TV, and where she wants the lectern, etc. I sent an email to her before I left and she had replied by mid-morning and we settled on Saturday at 2.

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I needed to communicate with the long-dormant A/V committee now that events are starting to happen, to see if they still want to be on the committee. Sent that email before the walk; got a few replies later.

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I needed to follow up on the idea of selling old computer books from FOPAL, at the Vintage Computer Fest, which will be held at the Computer History Museum August 7-8. The organizer had not responded to my inquiry. So I re-sent it this morning, and he did respond later in the day. He offered to let FOPAL be a vendor, for free. So then I had to write several FOPAL people to find out if we should go ahead. I’m not sure if that is going to work out. One issue is, who is going to organize the crew of 4 or 5 people we will need to cover all of two long days. Another is, will we actually sell any books? We’ve never done this.

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Mary Beth called about 12, asking if our Slottr membership still worked, because she would like to do a sign-up sheet for the Food & Dining Services committee. So we met in the lobby at 2pm and I showed her how that worked and we built her little sheet. As the manager of the gift shop she has a real budget (the gift shop generates the only real income the resident association has) and will probably get her own slottr account.

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In the midst of all this, I was trading messages via Sutter Health with Dr. Marx. She has referred me to a urologist to talk about the kidney cysts (I want to know if they could be contributing to loss of appetite or too higher blood pressure). And also, the full report on the CT scan reports a node on an adrenal gland, “probably adrenoma”. Anything ends in -oma is a concern, although Dr. Marx says these particular findings very rarely mean anything. However it would be up to an endocrinologist to decide, so she referred me to one of those.

So I made the phone calls to set those two appointments.

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Then I put in an hour editing Pelajis. Having in mind that pretty shortly I am going to put it up on the new Kindle Vella service, and I need to get that done.

Retirement. It’s a thing, I hear.

Thursday 07/01/2021

First thing was to walk up to PAMF for the CT scan. I was scheduled for 8:30; I got there at 8:15 and was done and out by 8:35. Two hours before my next appointment. I had coffee at Peet’s and then walked home, thinking about what to do next. I had just time to get in the car, drive to Safeway and buy a couple of things I want, and make my 10:30.

Which I did. Dr. Dibiase upped the quantity of metoprolol to see if I can lower the BP some. As to the anti-clot Plavix, which annoys me by making any wound or shaving nick bleed, and make bruises come up on my arms from a hard look, she said very sincerely, “You have a lot of hardware in your system. So I’d say please, keep it up for at least a full year.” That would be this fall, November-ish.

By this time the analysis of my CT was online and we had a look. It appears the problem is the kidney cysts that were noted on the prior CT, back in February (Day 2.079). At that time they were dismissed as not a problem. However I notice that at that time, the urologist Dr. Chung, had specifically asked if I had “unusual feelings of fullness”.

On the report for today’s CT, it was noted that the kidney cyst is pushing things forward, which is what Dr. Marx presumably felt. I haven’t heard from her about this. When I do I will ask if, possibly, the kidney is compressing my stomach, leading to a reduction in appetite, leading to my recent loss of weight.

The question is, what can be done about the cyst(s)? I will investigate further.

From there I drove to Shustek. I was too late to meet with the gang at lunch, so I just waited until they came back to work about 12:30. Dave Bennet and Steve Madsen were already working on cataloging, so working alone, I cataloged a BRAINIAC, a simple digital-logic kit that was sold in the late 1950s to the mid 1960s. It had many parts packed in paper envelopes which were degrading and brittle. So I repacked everything in archival plastic bags. It took 2 hours in all.

At supper time I went down and bumped into Marcia and Kent and Martha and oh darn forgot her name, who invited me to join them. Pleasant conversation for an hour.

Wednesday 06/30/2021

First up was to drive to Los Altos to see Dr. Marx for a checkup. I was a little disappointed because since I had seen her last November, she couldn’t do a “medicare wellness exam” but rather did an abbreviated checkup. However, when palpating my abdomen she noticed something she didn’t like but couldn’t identify.

Well, I am scheduled for a CT for a surgery follow-up on the 1st of August. No, she said, combining that you are still a little bit anemic (although in normal range) and you passed a fecal blood test earlier this year; and given you have lost a couple more pounds of weight (164 down to 161); I am inclined to be a bit more aggressive about this. I’m ordering a CT scan of you for sooner, if you don’t mind the extra radiation.

I called to make that appointment right after, and got a slot for tomorrow morning, 2 hours before my scheduled meet with Dibiase.

On the way home I stopped at a CVS to get an eyeglass repair kit, and when I got in, I replaced the missing screw from my frame. And did my laundry.

A few weeks ago I accepted Ian’s request that I take over the chair of the A/V committee, which has been dormant for a year and a half and looked like going on being dormant for months, until we get the auditorium back. Wrong! Got a request from Mary who is on the Events committee and is planning a 4th of July party. Wants audio and a big screen to show a powerpoint, on the 11th floor for Sunday night.

Previously the A/V committee insisted on an ERF, Event Request Form, at least 30 days in advance. Anyway I spent the afternoon, with Bert’s help, making all the audio work on the 11th floor. There’s a portable podium with wireless mics, and it ties in to the speakers on the walls. Took a while to find all the things with dead batteries and verify everything works.

As to a big screen for a powerpoint? There’s a big TV, about 6 foot diagonal, but Mary wants something bigger. Sorry, there is no such thing. She’s thinking of the auditorium where we have a big projector on the ceiling and a 20-foot diagonal drop down movie screen. But nothing like that on 11.

Tuesday 06/29/2021

Did the aerobics in person on the 11th floor. Now that Veronica is on pregnancy leave, our leader is AJ who is younger, male, and definitely pushes us (me and Eva in person, Michelle on zoom) harder. Definite sweat.

Soon it was time for the writers group. I read my little thing about 5th among the group. Went ok.

I left the writers at 12 exactly and went to FOPAL, arriving 12:30. There were 6 boxes of computer books. Eventually I sent 5 boxes to the bargain room. Of the rest, about 8 turned out to be “high value” and went to that department for sale online. Shelved the rest.

I really want to sell books at Vintage Computer Fest West in August, but so far have had no reply from the organizers. So I have a stack of 4 boxes of “VCF candidate” books — manuals for old computers, etc — that are in the way.

At 6pm I met with Mary and Andrew who had invited me to join them for dinner, and they had also asked Gloria, who I have had dinner with before recently. Nice pleasant chat.

About 8pm I was just sitting down in my easy chair when the right lens fell out of my glasses. The little screw had come out of the corner of the frame. I searched on the floor and in the chair for a while, no luck. Plan B, I know I have a glasses repair kit… or do I? Apparently not. Plan C, get a paper clip and needle nose pliers and hack up a piece of wire to hold the frame together.

Tomorrow is a busy day: Doctor appointment for annual physical in the morning, then laundry. I have to squeeze in a trip to CVS to buy a repair kit.

Monday 06/28/2021

Today I was determined to get a few things done, and did. Went for the standard walk first. Then paid a couple of bills.

Then settled down to take all the comments I had received from three other writers in our critiquing group, and integrate them into Pelajis. Useful, nothing large except for Susan’s major comment that it takes too long to get going, there’s nothing happening, where’s the adventure?

This is not the first time this has been said. Well, I’m sorry, but there are things happening. With every scene, the characters, and the reader, are learning about this unfamiliar world and how it works. And to me as the writer, this learning, this discovering the details of this new place and how to navigate within it, is interesting. Exciting, even. I like to think there is a class of readers, little nerds like me at age 10, for whom it will be exciting too. Or maybe every child’s mind has been so conditioned by the bright fireworks of saturday morning cartoons that those little nerds are all gone.

After that I was determined to write something for the writers group this Tuesday, and got that done before and after lunch.

Finally I scanned the cover of Software Tools in Pascal and started converting it for I am not sure what purpose. No covers were harmed in the making of this image.

Sunday 06/27/2021

OK, I missed a day. This day I went for a Sunday drive, by myself, up the back roads and highway 1 and back down 280. Eh, exciting.

Saturday 06/26/2021

Went out in the morning and over-bought at the farmers market: dried apricots, cherries, two kinds of pastries. By the time I’d eaten one and half the other pastry, I didn’t need lunch, so skipped it.

Wrote a program: a Python program to read a Python program with interspersed text, and write a new file that is in Markdown text with interspersed code blocks. Nice that I can still write code that works. This worked after I fixed a couple of typos.

Mid-afternoon I told myself to get the bleep out of the house, and went for a walk. Went down for supper at 5:30.

Continued reading War for the Oaks, one of maybe six partly-read books on my Kindle. It’s a fantasy that involves a musician getting mixed up with the Faerie kingdoms that are warring over control of … Minneapolis. Not the greatest; it has a lot of dialog that goes nowhere, just bickering. But I am just interested enough to keep reading.

Friday 06/25/2021

Off at the crack of dawn — well, 7:15 — for the PAMF lab in Sunnyvale to give blood for labs. Returned to Lytton avenue in Palo Alto for a nice breakfast of coffee and pastry at Mme. Collette’s. Chosen partly because it is nearly adjacent to my bank, where I went at 9:15, brushing off pastry crumbs.

Stanford Federal Credit Union has multiple agents waiting for you to walk in the door. I ended up with Nick, who listened to my tale of trying to get VIA benefits to do EFT. He looked at the record of my account and didn’t see any problem, and talked to his manager and got the same advice.

Then he placed a call to VIA customer service and talked that person through the thing. The VIA customer service can’t take direct deposit info over the phone. One must go online and log in, or have them send a form. We got her to escalate one level to someone in “payments” but it was the same story there. They have no ability to look at any log of attempted transfers. They don’t even have as much info as I do; they don’t see the “Reason R15: account holder deceased” message. And they have no answer other than to try again to enter your direct deposit info.

Nick spent nearly 40 minutes sitting on the phone with me, he talked to the people as did I, but got essentially nowhere. So I have officially given up. I will ignore all requests from them in the future to do EFT and simply keep cashing their occasional checks.

In the evening I had a ticket for a play at The Pear theater. Turns out, so did several other people here. So I got a ride with Patty, Carol and Mildred. The play was a muddle of a fantasy by Christopher Chen titled Late Wedding. Which had nothing to do with the play, there were no weddings. Supposedly based on, or at least inspired by, the fantasies of Italo Calvino, it was in my humble opinion a very lazy mish-mash of ideas thrown together with a lot of meta-stuff about the nature of plays and being a playwrite.

If it had had an intermission (and if I’d been driving) I would have left at intermission. But it didn’t, and I wasn’t. So I sat through the whole thing. Big humph.

But, on the good side, it was the first time out to a live play in 16 months or so.