For half the year I’ve been anticipating writing this note. Here’s the story.

Every day, Monday through Saturday, I do the LA Times crossword puzzle, which is carried in my daily paper, the San Jose Merc. Back in 2012 I started recording my solving times in a spreadsheet. Each morning I use the stopwatch feature of my watch to time my solving of the puzzle, and record it. Obviously I have the spreadsheet keep the average time for each day.

I start a new “sheet” in the spreadsheet file each year, and about 2014 I began including in the current year’s sheet, the difference between this year’s average and last year’s. Early in 2021 I noticed what looked like a trend, which has remained consistent for the whole year.

Third row shows the average of the times for this year. You can see how the LA Times puzzle makers very nicely grade the difficulty of each day’s puzzle, so that Mondays take less than half the time to do, as compared to Friday, and Saturday is the hardest of all. The Sunday column is for the NYT big puzzle.

Top row, as it says, is last year’s average, minus this year’s average. It’s red if the result is negative, meaning this year’s time is longer. Notice they are all red. My average solving time for 2021 is, as you can see in the middle row, from 8% to 19% slower than it was last year, across the board.

Does this mean I’ve gotten 8-15% slower in my verbal thinking this year? It might mean that. It might mean the puzzle has gotten harder, which I very much doubt, because how and why would they do that? For more info I pulled in more data. I graphed my solving times for all the years I had.

Here the vertical axis is minutes to solve, and the horizontal numbers are the annual averages. This graph omits the Sunday times, so it doesn’t have to be tall enough to show 35-40 minute values. What does it show?

It seems to show that I had trouble with Friday and Saturday back in ’14 and ’15. That aside, just looking at 2018-21, there seems to be a fairly clear trend, a shallow rise.

Will the numbers for 2022 continue the trend? Am I getting verbally slower? And if so, will the change continue a slow climb, or will it accelerate?

Thursday 12/02/2021

Palindrome day! Also my birthday. I got an email from Laurel, a phone call from Dennis, later a phone call from nephew-in-law Marc, and a text from Darlene.

I did my resistance exercises at 7:30, and by 9:45 was across the Bay at the Shustek center. Steve and I catalogued several things, most notably a prototype or test model, of the flight computer for the Cassini mission. I remember following the Cassini mission from launch in 1997 through its termination in 2017. I didn’t take a picture of this object; it was just a circuit board about 7 by 10 inches, mounted in a big metal frame with a bunch of test circuits around it.

On these CHM volunteer days I work alternately with two brilliant women, Gretta and Aurora. Both are smart, creative managers. Gretta, who got married last year, is now pregnant, expecting around April, at which time she will take 12 weeks off, and the job of cataloguing incoming donations, which she manages, will be put on hold for that time. Or so she says; I bet they can’t let a backlog build up that large. But we’ll see. Today I was a bit shocked when for the first time, I went out to what’s referred to as the loading dock, but is just a big enclosed space, and saw there is already a quite large untidy pile of unprocessed boxes of stuff. Mainly documents, which I don’t work on. I heard they were about to receive over 100 banker’s boxes of documents, the archives of CompuServe (remember CompuServe?). Anyway. Not my problem.

Oh, and there is what is so far only a rumor, that the museum proper will start to reopen in January, probably weekends only.

Wednesday 12/01/2021

Oooh look at that date. Tomorrow, day 365, is going to be a palindrome, 12022021. Cool.

Went for the standard walk. Then did my laundry. At 3pm I met with Ian, of the AV team, and Mary who is the choir director, to talk about the order of events at the upcoming holiday celebration, including the choir and various solo singers and instrumentalists. This takes some planning.

Later I worked on the VW model, practicing laying metal foil. The most difficult issue on this model is the chrome strips on the side.

This is a standard 1/25-scale model so the entire body is about 7 inches in total. Barely bigger than one of my fists. The chrome strip is molded into the model as a raised bead about a millimeter wide. The question is, how to make that shine like chrome? The kit includes skinny decal strips but they aren’t really shiny, just kind of metallic gray. I could try to paint along the bead with a chrome paint pen that I have, but I had a really bad experience trying to paint the similar raised bead of black on the VW Golf I did earlier this year. I am positive I could never get a uniform width.

The alternative is to lay down narrow strips of Bare-Metal Foil product. I have used it before but wanted to be sure it would work on such a narrow bead and that I could apply it, so I applied some to a similar size bead I found on the floor pan part.

Tuesday 11/30/2021

Did my resistance workout first thing. At 11, attended the writers meeting, although I had not written anything. Sprayed a 2nd coat of primer on the VW. Now it has to sit and harden for day at least, before I can sand out a few imperfections.

Here are a few pictures I’ve taken with my phone yesterday and today.

Monday 11/29/2021

Went for the standard walk. Stopped at Ace hardware to pick up a plastic dropcloth. My new spray method is to drape the conical basket chair on my balcony in plastic and use it for a spray backstop. I sprayed the first coat of primer on the VW.

Down at FOPAL I found only three boxes of computer books, down from 6 last week. The in-house wi-fi was having tantrums, but I managed to get the books all priced in 90 minutes anyway.

Kathleen, who is running the candle-lighting hannukah(?) thing in the lobby, asked for help setting up a mic and I did that. Although she’s pretty competent and means to be on the AV squad some day. Soon, I hope.

Sunday 11/28/2021

After the usual Sunday morning stuff — well, I ripped through the NYT big puzzle in 28 minutes, so that was fun — I decided to take a walk. Instead of walking toward California Ave, I went North to Santa Cruz avenue in Menlo Park.

More than a year ago I had printed some big prints (8×10, 11×17) of photos and put them in cheap frames, aiming at a photo display on my hallway wall. Today I started thinking about that again. Reviewed my hall wall space which is mostly taken up with two large paintings, Leap 2 by Carol Aust, and a realistic view of Yosemite by Dean Linsky. The Yosemite one will probably be moved to the 6th floor Lounge. The committee decorating the lounge would like it there and I’m in favor of it being more visible. I decided that after the painting moves to the lounge, then I will put up a couple of picture rails and start doing a rotating exhibit as I had planned. But nothing to do now, although I may start printing pictures again.

That was the excitement for the day. Well, I set out the paint colors I mean to use on the VW bug. I cut its hood and engine cover off their sprue and carefully sanded the edges to get a perfect fit in the body. Then I washed the body panels in detergent using a bit of fine steel wool. This hopefully gets off grease and other contaminants, and scuffs the surface to take the primer. I need to get a plastic tarp to use when spraying on the balcony, then I will spray the body. I’m doing this model in reverse: the body will be a perfect gloss paint job before I start on the little detail bits like the engine.

Saturday 11/27/2021

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Numbering note I knew things weren’t right. This blog starts on Day One, which was 3 December, 2018, the day Marian died and my new life as a bachelor began. I started numbering the headings with the year to keep them in order. This year’s blog started with 2.001 on 12/03/2020. So the numbers should be approaching 365 as we approach 12/02/2021. Obviously they weren’t. I went back over the whole year of posts and found that 02/17/2021 had day number 2.077, and then somehow, I headed 02/18/2021 with number 2.073 when it should have been 2.078. So I lost 6 days in the count. There was probably another slip somewhere. Anyway this day should be 2.360. You would think “one more than yesterday” would be simple enough to do, wouldn’t you.

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Went out to grab a pastry and some green grapes at the farmers market. On return I took a tech call, working with Gloria on getting mail and contacts to all sync up between her desktop mac, iPad, and iPhone.

Today was the third game at the “pink flamingo tournament” in the Bahamas, featuring Stanford Cardinal v. Maryland Terrapins. The Cardinal got a bit of a break from what was expected to be a challenging game, because the Terps were short a couple of key players. Stanford took an early lead and stretched it, finishing the game 30 points ahead.

I just idled the rest of the day away, pretty much. So to spice up the blog, here are a couple of student-athletes.

Anna Wilson is ripped. Actually, if you look through her Instagram, Cameron Brink is pretty cut as well.

Friday 11/26/2021

Day after a holiday felt like a holiday. First activity was to try to watch SWBB from the Bahamas, playing South Florida. They started badly and were down 10 early. However the promised video stream from “flohoops” didn’t start on schedule so the only way to follow the game was the live stats page. So I gave up and went for a walk.

Jean had brought the old iPhone SE that had been Marian’s, and which I’d kept on the contract (since a two-number T-Mobile contract was almost the same price as a one-number one). But I kinda sorta want to change carriers, or do something about the poor reception in the building. So I had her bring it back to me so I could have it along when I went to, say, Verizon.

I carried both phones and walked up University to the T-Mobile store. They do offer an interior hot-spot (such as I had at 2340) but it turns out that it requires a wired (cat-5?) connection to “your modem”. My modem is embedded in some ceiling or other, there’s no wired connections here. The guy thought maybe if I called customer service they might have a “signal repeater” which sounds like it might help. So I didn’t walk back to the Verizon store and change carriers. This time. I felt very dithery about this.

I decided that I deserved “a cup and a cake” as they say in New Zealand. It was now about 11am. The line to order at Verve was 20 people long. I thought, OK, I’ll just go down a couple blocks to Starbucks. There I found (a) another dozen-person line waiting to order, but also (b) a dirty, dingy, ugly store, with trash and sticky stuff on the floor and sketchy people at the few tables. Never mind, two blocks more and there’s Blue Bottle coffee with a nice patio. And again, a line of 15 or so people waiting to order. Everybody in the world was out this holiday morning.

While waiting for my coffee to be made I checked back into the game and found Stanford had managed to get ahead by a couple of points, with a few minutes left in the game. For the fifth time in the last 10 games, going back to the end of last season, this game came down to Stanford with a 1- or 2-point lead, seconds on the clock, and the opposition in possession. Other times, the opposition hasn’t been able to score, which is how Stanford got to be national champs last spring. Today, the USF players were able to score, hitting a three with 2 seconds left, and Stanford lost by 1.

The rest of the day was very quiet, reading and futzing around with the computer. Oh, well, I got out another car kit and kind of looked at the parts.

Thursday 11/25/2021

A little tidying in the morning. About 9:30 I went to the 11th floor to try to… wait. need to explain in order.

SWBB is playing in a tournament this weekend, in the Bahamas. Their first game is today at 10:30. The games are streamed on “flohoops”, a small sports network. Jerry has paid $29 for a month of flohoops. His plan is to start a zoom meeting at 10, and share his screen, showing flohoops, to the meeting. Then anyone in house can join the meeting and watch the game.

My job is to join the meeting with my Macbook and put its screen on the big TV on 11. I did that on Wednesday and it worked fine. Today? Of course not. The Macbook recognized the HDMI cable; it reformats the screen to fit the dimensions of the target. But the TV continued to show “no signal”. Tried a different cable. No go. Left Jerry a phone message and went back to my room.

About 10:30 he called me; he was on 11 trying to connect with his Android PDA. It also didn’t work. So that was it for putting the game on the big screen. Craig passed the ID of the zoom meeting on CHBB and eventually maybe 8 people were watching.

At 11:30, sister in law Jean arrived. I thought she’d never seen the place, but she says she saw it just after I moved in. Now, in the evening, I can check: yup, Day 0.200, 6/20/19. I’d completely forgotten. I showed her around anyway. At 12 we sat in the lobby watching the last 2 minutes of the SWBB game (they won by 3 points), and were joined by Paul and Elizabeth. We had a very pleasant lunch trading stories of when each of us had lived overseas.

In the evening, since the dining room had closed after lunch and I didn’t order a bag supper I needed to go out for some food. I found that at Wahlburgers, where two employees were holding the fort for a handful of eaters.

Wednesday 11/24/2021

Took a walk. Futzed around. Had a lunch of leftover pizza from last night.

Had my AV Committee meeting at 4pm. I ended up stuck with the big Holiday celebration with the CH choir and stuff. Well, Ian said he’d help. It will be a bid deal with at least 4 wireless mics needed, at least one rehearsal (probably two) and two performances. I need to talk with Mary, the director, ASAP.

Went down to the dining room, looked at the menu, came back up to my room to make a sandwich. Later got a call from the front desk, saying, “your birthday dinner is ready.” That’s weird as it isn’t my birthday. It was on the calendar that today was the November birthday dinner. They do one special dinner per month. You have dinner in the same section along with other people with birthdays that month. Everybody sings happy birthday. Gag me with a spoon.

In any case, I thought you had to sign up to get your name on the birthday dinner list. I certainly have not signed up for November, and have no intention to do so in December either. So I sat down to eat the rest of my sandwich.