Monday 10/25/2021

Started out with the usual walk, which was just fine. The vertigo I mentioned yesterday is going away I think. It still bothers me if I do particular things, like bending down and then standing up, or looking up and then down. When I first got up, there were a couple of steps where — how can I describe this? — my foot didn’t come down where I expected, and I kind of lurched left or right. This kind of thing is serious, because as I’ve mentioned, falls are how people get seriously hurt around here. But that went away entirely by the time I started my walk, and hasn’t come back.

In my spare time I’m working on an A/V document. There are a number of shortcomings in the “upgraded” auditorium system. My colleague Bert made such a nuisance of himself about these issues that he was asked to step back from the whole situation. But there are things that need to be resolved, so I am taking it up. I am trying to create a complete problem list, so phrased as to not raise any hackles. This is quite time-consuming. I spent some time in the morning on that.

After lunch I went to FOPAL where there were seven boxes of books, a large number of them from one person, an engineer presumably now deceased, or maybe just retired. Anyway a surprising number of them proved to be “high value” (over $25 used, at Amazon), and easily 40 of the rest were worth shelving at $3 to $10. That took me past 4pm.

I had been invited to dinner by Susan and Harry, Caroline and Ann also. Very pleasant dinner and talk.

Sunday 10/24/2021

I’ve been flirting with vertigo for the past week or so. Moments when my internal balance goes wacko: I lean back and look up, then look forward; or turn over too fast in bad; or bend over. Today it was a little worse, making me a little nauseous just getting up from a chair. So I took it very easy.

Taking it easy was made easier by the weather, the first heavy rain in, probably, more than a year. The TV weather persons were practically having orgasms at being able to talk about “possible flooding” from this “atmospheric river”. It’s been a long time since they’ve had anything to talk about other than low humidity.

So I had a couple of naps, did a couple of crosswords, read a little. About 4:30 I got an invite to drinks and dinner, and had a pleasant evening of chat. I didn’t have the drinks part. The vertigo makes me miss a step sometimes and I don’t want to fall, so no need to add alcohol to that hazard.

Saturday 10/23/2021

With nothing scheduled, I went out to buy a few things. (The title above is because I couldn’t think of a word for the opposite of therapy. Retail not-therapy.)

I wanted 5 pounds of sugar for the birds, and I got that. I also wanted a quart of heavy cream, because I want to try mixing my Keto Chow breakfasts with that instead of oil. I got that at the third store. Also I would like some quadrille pads, otherwise known as graph paper pads, just because. I didn’t get those.

I bumbled around to a big Safeway, to a Walmart, to Office Depot, and to a Costco. All were very busy. If there are supply chain issues, they were not apparent today. Full shelves, lots of people filling up huge cartloads of stuff. had a Costco membership and let it expire. According to their website if you don’t have a membership you don’t get sale prices and you pay 5% extra. Cool with me, if they have heavy cream, which Safeway nor Walmart did. Very busy and very large store. Very harried clerk, and a sign saying “If your membership isn’t current, the cost of renewal will be added to this purchase” which is not what the website said, but anyway I hadn’t brought my expired membership card. I was just explaining that to the harried clerk when the guy behind said, “It’s alright, he’s with me” and held out his card to scan. What a prince of a fellow.

I was very disappointed with Office Depot who didn’t have the pads I expected. Oh well.

Friday 10/22/2021

Today was the day scheduled for a tour of Chinatown. One of our newer residents, Gloria, used to lead tours of Chinatown on a regular basis. (I first mentioned Gloria on Day 2.158 when I was invited to a dinner party that included her.) She had offered to lead one for CH residents and this was it.

There were 23 people signed up, fortunate since the larger CH bus holds 24. It’s a Ford, or anyway a bus built by somebody on a Ford chassis. And functional but not deluxe at all.

Gloria is well-informed and well-organized. She talked a lot about the unique culture of Chinatown, which derived most of its early inhabitants from one very small region of China. That group spoke a regional variation of Cantonese, which is still spoken there today, despite that since the Communist revolution, Mandarin has been the only language taught in any schools in China, with Cantonese now restricted mostly to ShangHai. She went over the early influence of the Family associations. I had not known that China has only 400-some unique surnames and you are not supposed to marry someone with the same surname as you. Etc.

We visited several places, including, uniquely, a museum of the history of Chinese show-business, created by a friend of Gloria’s who was herself a showgirl in the 40s.

Thursday 10/21/2021

Hit the gym at 7:30am to do my round of the resistance machines. At 9:15 I headed out under partial clouds (it rained last night) for the East Bay, Fremont, the Shustek center. Where I spent the day cataloging. Cataloging what? Well mostly a donation that consisted of a variety of ergonomic mice. Lots of companies tried to make mice that would avoid carpal tunnel, or something. Plastic blobs shaped by holding a big lump of clay and gently squeezing it, and taking a mold from that.

For the afternoon we were joined by relatively new volunteers, a couple, Paul and Katherine. I had met them first a couple weeks ago but didn’t really inquire into their history. Today one of the museum curators stopped by to answer a question, and he an Paul started an animated conversation in which I learned that Paul was the Paul Laughton who wrote Apple DOS, the original OS for the Apple II. (No, Steve Wosniak designed the hardware. Steve Jobs managed the development and marketing.)

And that his wife Katherine worked at Atari and wrote their editor/assembler.

I felt almost as impressed and star-struck as when I talk to my CH neighbors, John and Francis, who worked on the Apollo Guidance Computer under Margaret Hamilton.

Wednesday 10/20/2021

Went for the benchmark walk. Then started my laundry. When it finished, it was time to join the monthly FOPAL post-sale, section managers zoom.

In between and after, I was dealing with email. I had accumulated several emails each of which represented something I needed to read and respond to. One was from a committee member proposing we get a device that would make producing Zoom simulcasts easier and more professional. It included links to the manufacturer and to two YT videos, so I had to read a bunch of stuff and watch the vids, and compose a reply. Two were about editing a form that we are trying to redesign, the Event Planning Form by which somebody putting on an event asks for help of various kinds. So that meant printing out the draft versions and marking them up.

About 3:30 I noticed a half-hour old email telling me that Gigi needed a microphone and speaker in the dining room at 5pm because she wanted to welcome people to the October Birthday Dinner. She had asked Paul, one of the IT staff, and he had passed it on to Bert, head of the resident tech squad, who passed it on to me, because it was an A/V request. Gigi is desperately well-meaning but not the sharpest knife in the drawer. She picks 3pm on the day to phone Paul and ask for a PA system for 5:15. Grrrrrreatttt.

At 4pm I called Paul and he volunteered to bring the little PA lectern down from 11. I met him and we set it up in the dining room. I showed, well it turned out to be Barbara, who is tiny and bent over but sharp as a tack, how to turn the mic on and how to hold it.

Then I sat down in the common area and waited to see how things would go. Barbara did her brief announcement then passed the mic to Gigi and George to sing a song. George took the mic and held it at belt level during the singing, so they might as well not have had a mic at all. No matter, everybody was pleased. I went away and came back about 6:30 to shut down the lectern and move it back to the 11th floor. I’m exhausted.

Tuesday 10/19/2021

For exercise, I went down to the gym and did two rounds of the resistance machines. It left me feeling tired, which is good.

Normally Tuesday would be the day for the writers group at 11. However, Connie the leader had decided we should take a week off. So at 10 I went instead down to FOPAL, which I’d normally have done at 12 or later. I processed four boxes of books.

That was about it for the day. To take advantage of the open space, here are a couple of pictures of Connie’s poetry reading on Sunday. I had to take these with Stew’s phone, because my phone was on the stage, logged in to the Zoom session.

Monday 10/18/2021

Went for the benchmark walk. It was ok.

At 10:30, attended the Event Coordinator Committee meeting, where all the people who put on events go over their plans for the next month. Some discussion of Sunday’s simulcast poetry reading.

During the E.C. meeting I remembered that Apple was having an announcement event this morning, and since I was sitting in back, I peeked at store.apple.com. And oh yeah, they had finally fixed the MacBook Pro. The new one has a decent number of ports on the side, including an SD card slot; and it does not have that silly touch-bar thing but real function keys; and they have brought back the Magsafe(tm) power connector instead of forcing you to use one of your USB ports for power. After the meeting I placed my order for one.

After that I sat down with MyMedicare.gov and worked out what Part D med insurance to have next year, after Anthem Blue Cross had quadrupled their premium. And I have to say, the MyMedicare site is just about the best-organized, most friendly, helpful site I have ever seen. Just a really, really nice job of summarizing and presenting a whole lot of complicated info in a clear format.

In the afternoon I frustrated myself greatly on the Chrysler body. I had applied liquid mask goop to all the molded-in chrome trim, before I sprayed it. Now I tried to remove the paint and masking goop from the masked bits. It did not go well. In some places the stuff doesn’t want to come off. (And this after only 48 hours.) In other places it was impossible not to remove paint that shouldn’t have been masked, leaving numerous small areas that will need touching up.

All this trouble and I haven’t even gotten to the part where I try to draw the chrome color (I have a very realistic chrome paint in a pen) and not get it onto anywhere it shouldn’t go. I despair of ever having an adequate technique for this.

Sunday 10/17/2021

Watered the plants, fed the insatiable hummers (I refilled the two feeders 3 times today), did the Sunday crossword. Then as planned I walked to Walgreen’s in Midtown.

This was interesting. Online at Walgreens.com, 90 tabs of Famotidine were $8. At the store it was $10. I asked the nice clerk doing Sunday morning duty about it. She explained that I would have to order the stuff online for pickup at the store. Then she could hand me the two boxes of pills I was waving at her, and I would already have paid. If I just went ahead and bought them from her I would have to pay the shelf price.

So I stood there with my phone and ordered the two boxes from Walgreens.com for store pickup, and as soon as the sale completed, she showed me a text she had gotten saying Mr. Cortesi was coming to pick up these pills, and handed me the boxes, and off I went.

I had a lovely breakfast at the PA Cafe. That’s where we used to get our Sunday morning goodies for so many years, and I still did in the early days of this blog. Then I walked back (total walking for the day, 3.8mi).

Took a nap and it was 2pm and time to start prepping for Sunday At Home, the first Zoom simulcast we’ve ever done. I walk into the auditorium and find: the chairs are still arranged as for an employee event on Friday, in a big circle. So we need to arrange the chairs in rows. I call Stew, the event manager, and he comes down and starts on that.

I set up the podium, the lights, the mics, the tripod with my iphone on it. At 4pm Lennie starts the zoom meeting, I sign the iphone in, and we are off. Connie does a very nice reading of her poetry, some of which is really good. An audience near the Covid room limit of 50 is there, plus another 50 from various places, family and friends across the USA as well as in Channing House, on the Zoom. Which a couple of people told me worked really well.

So dang, we will probably have to do it again.

I eat dinner at a large table Connie reserved for her friends and have nice conversations.

Here’s one of Connie’s poems:

Home After Urgent Care

Suddenly, near sunset,

a shadow hummingbird

on the pale blue wall

beside my desk,

its fluttering form

dipping in, dipping out —

fish-like body

upturned tuft of tail,

blur of wings further blurred

by the sunlight’s cast.

I hold breathless,

not to frighten the shadow bird.

What must whir out there

is silent here.

One sunbeam

carrying a bird-shaped shade:

Nothing touches the wall,

only the bird without the bird.

Saturday 10/16/2021

Strange how in prospect, I welcome a day with nothing on the calendar. When it’s here, what do I do with it? In this case, I walked over to CVS planning to refresh my stock of Famotidine (aka Prilosec) of which I take one, 10mg tab each evening. (This is how I know I forgot to take my evening pills: I wake up at 1am with strong heartburn. If I remember my evening pills, including the famotidine, I do not.)

CVS wanted $36 for 90 tabs of the CVS-brand equivalent (branded Prilosec was more). That seemed excessive. A quick check on the phone, yes, they were available for less than $9 elsewhere. So I walked home.

Later in the day I was going to drive to the Walgreen’s at Midtown to get them. Then I conceived a plan to walk there, tomorrow morning.

I spent an hour masking the chrome on a 1955 Chrysler. A miniature one of course. This is the model where I am By God going to have the body perfect before I start any other part of the kit. After masking, I sprayed a coat of paint. Very pleased with how the new spray techniques are going. Later, a second coat. A third coat tomorrow. Then masking off and chrome on; then clear coat and then polish.

That was about it. At 4pm went up to 11 and made the TV there show the Stanford-WSU football. Several other residents arrived. It is not magic, people. It’s just knowing how to choose the Roku as the source.