Sunday 06/06/2021

Thought I would walk to Mme Collete’s and get a pastry. But as I approached, just after 8am, I could see they weren’t open. Disappointed, I turned and walked back and had breakfast in the dining room for maybe the first time. Ordered pancakes, they were huge (and somewhat tough if truth be told).

Worked on the software project in the morning, and on Pelajis in the afternoon, and finally at 5 it was time to go to Stanford for baseball. If Stanford had won that would have been it, they would move on to the next round. But they not only did not win; they played a four-hour game with many long innings and pitching changes and all the things that stretch out a game. So it was after 10 when the pod car, in this case Patty’s Honda Fit, pulled in to the garage. Of us four, I think only Prudence is determined to go to the deciding game at 7pm tomorrow. I’m dubious; I think I may watch from home until the late innings, then perhaps go to see Stanford win — if they look like doing that.

Saturday 06/05/2021

Yesterday Dennis suggested a walk and then attendance at a girl’s basketball tournament. His son Bill’s daughters Kaitlin and Kaylee were playing. (Grand-nieces, I guess?)

So we did that, walking my usual 2.2 mile walk with a stop for coffee. Then off to Menlo College. The 12-14 year old girls play ferocious basketball, very high energy. They are pretty skilled at defense and ball-handling, but their shooting percentage is low. Anyway K & K’s team won 36-30.

After lunch I had a nap and worked some on the software project. Then it was 5pm and time for Stanford baseball. I and my pod partners went in Martha’s car this time. Stanford won fairly easily thanks to a big second inning. The game took 3 hours, so home at 9:30 and to bed.

Friday 06/04/2021

In the morning I had a half a degree temp more than the usual, 98.3, so labeled myself “convalescent” and instead of a walk, took the car to do some errands. Bought a few groceries.

In the open parking lot of the Safeway, I re-activated my Toyota Safety Connect. I had renewed that service a month ago, but gotten a letter saying it needed to be activated, basically by getting it where it had a cell signal and pushing a button twice.

Thing is, I had another letter from Toyota saying that Safety Connect in my car used an older protocol (something-3, so one less than G4 less than G5) which was to be discontinued by the carriers in 2022, after which it wouldn’t work anyway.

Dropped by the post office to manually mail my estimated tax payment checks. And (I remember at this moment) completely forgot to do the other item, stop by CVS and pick up a prescription that’s waiting. Well, tomorrow.

Had a quick lunch and it was time to join my pod-mates to watch Stanford play North Dakota State in the NCAA baseball regional. I dug out almost my only long-sleeved shirt to avoid getting sunburnt on my arms like I did last Saturday. It was one I’ve owned since (I think) the 80s and kept for nostalgia. Stanford won, so tomorrow they play in the winner’s game at 6pm, so I can wear a short-sleeved shirt for that.

Hmmm. Now at 10pm my temp is 99, so technically I’m not well yet. But I feel fine.

Thursday 06/03/2021

Had a slight temp and small feelings of illness in the morning. However when the nurse checked me after lunch my temp was normal by her infrared gun. When I said I felt ok, she removed the red dot and I was free to come and go.

I didn’t do any coming and going, other than to go down to dinner. Tomorrow I will do some errands in the morning, and hopefully will still feel well as 12:30 when I leave with my “pod” of 4 for the baseball at Stanford.

Wednesday 06/02/2021

So when I got up my temp was 98.3, half a degree above normal. I took a very modest walk of 1 mile, after which I was ready for a nap. About 11am my temp was 99.3, a gen-yoo-ine fever reading. I started my laundry, and when around 1pm when it was nearly finished, I was at 100.2.

At this point, rather belatedly, I decided the right thing to do was to report in to the wellness center and maybe get a fast COVID test.

Valentina took my vitals, I was now at 100.3 on their thermometer (which means my little battery powered one is spot-on) and decided that they should red-dot me. That means, quarantine in your room. They place a red dot on your nametag outside your door. Then, no going out for any reason. Fortunately I had not gone to the dining room for breakfast or lunch.

She swabbed me for the fast COVID test, and while we waited 15 minutes for the result, I emailed Ann to ask if she had any symptoms. A while later she responded that she had no symptoms and felt fine, and gave lots of advice for dealing with a fever.

Valentina escorted me back to my room (I guess to make sure I didn’t socialize on the way?), picking up my last dryer load on the way. And here I am until my temp drops. They bring your meals on a cart, just like last year.

This is all extremely annoying, because I bought a 4-person pod of seats for the NCAA Baseball Regional which starts Friday. If my temp is down tomorrow, I may be able to go. But if not, Valentina said they would give me a PCR test Friday (when all the staff get one) and keep me red-dotted through Saturday until the test results come back.

One more chore I had to do in the afternoon: distribute the tickets for the Pod to my Pod-mates who had bought in: Patty, Prudence, and Martha. Stanford is all about e-tickets, so I had received “tickets” that were links that, when clicked on the iPhone, stowed the ticket image in y Apple Wallet. Stanford has an athletic ticket app which is supposed to support transferring tickets to other people. Of bleepin’ course it didn’t work. But when I emailed them, the answer was kind of blindingly obvious. To transfer a ticket to someone else: just display the one ticket in your wallet; take a screen shot (home button + power button); email the screen shot to your recipient. Because, bottom line, all that matters, all that lets you in to the stadium, is the little QR code on the ticket image. And you can display that from an email as well as from the Wallet.

So I tediously made 12 screen shots of seats 1, 2 and 3 for games 1, 2, 3, and 4, emailing each to one of my partners. That takes us through Saturday. I’ll work on Sunday and Monday’s game tomorrow.

Tuesday 06/01/2021

Today was the day for the aerobics class, formerly on zoom from Veronica’s home, to move to the 11th floor. The only attendees were me and Joan. AJ led us, and worked us a little harder, although not as gracefully, as Veronica.

After showering and dressing I realized I didn’t feel totally well. Achy shoulders and back and a general mild malaise. Joyce’s husband Wes called this “feeling few”. My morning temperature, after weeks of 97.7 +/- 0.1, was today 98.3. (Oh, and checking it now at 9:30? 99.6 which really means I’ve “got something”.)

So I took a couple tylenols and had a short nap. Then felt well enough to put in an hour on the software project. After lunch I went to FOPAL and processed two cartons of computer books.

I actually don’t feel bad right now despite having nearly 2º above my normal. But I’ll go to bed and take it easy tomorrow. Nothing on my calendar but doing the laundry.

But this virus — if it is a virus — given the typical incubation, would have been picked up at the baseball game Saturday or at lunch with Ann on Sunday. Dang it, supposing it’s a cold, it’s the first I’ve suffered in 15 months. I remember having a mucus-fest of a cold coming back from England January 2020. I miss the pandemic!

Monday 05/31/2021

Memorial day. I toyed with the idea of giving myself a holiday from walking. Hah hah no. Went for my usual walk. After that I spent 90 minutes editing the Pelajis novel, incorporating comments I got from the critiquing group last week.

After lunch I put in another 90 minutes on the software project. It is just so fun, just the right level of challenge.

That was about it. A day of quiet accomplishment.

Oh, two weeks ago when I cleaned up my balcony (day 2.154) I also hung out the two hummingbird feeders. For a week the level of syrup didn’t change. Then last week the buzzers found it and the level started to go down. Now both jars are near empty after 48 hours.

Sunday 05/30/2021

OK, today was the day I had agreed with Ann Armour to meet with her at a restaurant near her house.

Who?

Ann and I were close in the years of (about) 1965-66. This picture is from then.

The almost unbelievable arithmetic says that was 55 goddam years ago. I last spoke to her in about (without a diary, “about” is the best I can do) 1967. Although she says she invited me to lunch a year later. I don’t remember that. In fact it seemed like, “Really? I don’t remember that” was something we each said a lot today.

Ann contacted me by email in late 2019. We had a tentative exchange of email. I was initially upset and a bit dubious about her motives. That period of my life was an emotional turmoil and I wasn’t pleased to be made to remember it, even after 55 (goddam) years. But I settled down and we agreed to meet at a restaurant near her house in Kentfield (Marin county) around the middle of March 2020.

We all know what happened to that plan. Anyway, now that we are both vaccinated, we again agreed to meet. We had a very pleasant 2-hour brunch at a really nice restaurant, and brought each other up to date on what major events had passed in our lives. It was all very normal and comfortable, no strong emotions roused. Turns out we are both healthy considering our ages (she’s a few years older than me) and comfortably situated.

So that’s pretty much that. She’s a nice person, we had good conversation, we’ll probably meet up again some time.

Dennis, who would have been about 12? 13? at the time, is certain that I and Ann took him along with us to a show at “Coffee & Confusion”, a folk club in North Beach. If so that would have been really irresponsible of me. But I was an immature 20-something asshole, so irresponsibility would have been par for the course.

When I mentioned Dennis to her she didn’t remember meeting him, but when I mentioned Joyce, his mother, it reminded her of a strange event. She recalls that once, she showed me a new pair of shoes she had on, and pointed out that the maker’s name, Joyce, was imprinted on the soles, which made me burst out laughing saying “You’re walking on Joyce!”. Probably I was on the outs with Joyce. Did I mention being an immature 20-something asshole?

Drove home, took a nap, had dinner. That was the day.

Saturday 05/29/2021

About 7am I thought about what to do, and decided to do the Dish walk. I started by eating breakfast in the dining room for the first time ever. Took a Lyft to the trail head and did the entire 3.6 mile loop with its ups and downs.

I had a ticket to the last regular season game of Stanford Baseball. That was to start at 12:30. Believing there wouldn’t be any concessions, I took a ham sandwich from the grab-n-go section of the new dining room, but when I got to Sunken Diamond there was an open concession stand. And the ham sandwich was quite dry, with a mayonnaise packet that I couldn’t get open. So I dumped the sandwich and bought nachos.

Something else unusual about this game: I took my old scoring forms and clipboard. Back story. In the 1980s Marian and I were big Giants fans, attending many games and listening to games on the radio. During the 90s we went off them a bit, eventually taking up SWBB instead. No matter. Also in that time, it was the very early days of the internet, I got involved with an organization called Project Scoresheet. This was an attempt by amateur volunteers to build up the kind of detailed scoring statistics that Major League Baseball had, but which they kept for themselves. Amateur would score games in detail and … I don’t remember if we sent the paper forms in to be collated? I think so, there was no online form.

Project Scoresheet developed their own scoring forms and methods, quite different from the conventional scoring form you find in the back of your program if you go to a ballgame. I was using pro documentation software tools in my work (I think this was while I was working at Informix?) and was a pro tech writer, so I took it on myself to make really nice versions of the score sheet and to write a 25-page manual for how to use it. By the time I’d done it the Project had evaporated and nobody cared. (Story of my life…) But I still had those forms as PDFs — somewhere?

I got back from the Dish at 10:30 and had 90 minutes until I had to leave for the game. In that time I managed to find the old scoring docs (last modified in 2002) on a separate disk. Printed out the double-sided form, and spent ten minutes skimming my own manual to remember how to do it.

Well, the game wasn’t that good. The OSU Beavers, not normally a very competitive team, scored in every even-numbered inning, 2 in the second, 2 in the fourth, 3 in the sixth. When we finished the bottom of the sixth and Stanford had managed only one run, I took note that my bare arms were feeling sunburned and called it a day.

The final was 9-1. This will do Stanford no good whatever in the eyes of the NCAA Selection Committee. I set up to record the Selection show on Monday, but I expect that Stanford will not be one of the top 16 seeds who get to host a regional. In which case the tickets I reserved (Day 2.171) will evaporate.

But it was fun scoring, and as usual the act of scoring helped keep me involved in the game.

Tomorrow morning a whole different adventure awaits.

Friday 05/28/2021

Not much going on today. I spent a couple of hours working on my software project, which is proving to be just hard enough to be challenging and interesting. It sucks up time, though.

Rhonda’s weekly zoom ended in a record 30 minutes. No news is not necessarily good news. She doesn’t expect any change of guidance from the State or County departments of health until after June 15, so the next two Friday meetings are canceled. So at a minimum two more weeks of wearing masks when outside our apartments, washing hands before entering the building, no condiments on the dining tables, etc.