Thursday 02/18/2021

After Veronica’s cardio, I had not much to do. I tidied the apartment so it would be neat for Wanda’s housekeeping round in the afternoon. While watering the plants I noticed that one of the two fuscias was budding out nicely, and also was developing a nice crop of those nasty little white flies.

At 1:30pm I took the car out and got it washed for the first time in weeks. Amazing how dirty a car can still get, sitting in an underground garage. Then to the nursery to by a spray bottle of insecticidal soap. Back home, apartment all tidy. I sprayed the leaves of the fuscia.

The facilities guy had been in and had done most of what I wanted. The biggest job was where there were some gouges in the plaster where the old closet fixtures had been demo’d. He had plastered them nicely and put up blue tape saying “still wet”. So what did I do? Without a second thought I reached out and touched the plaster, making two nice fingerprints in the soft stuff. I leveled it out as best I could but I will need to sand it when it dries. Before the guy comes back to paint it.

Wednesday 02/17/2021

Early the facilities shop called, could they send someone to evaluate the work I wanted done? Of course, I’ll be back from my walk by 9:30. Then, to make sure that was true, I cut my walk some short. Later on Fernando came by and we talked about the simple fixes I want done. Basically, clean up some raw edged that were left when the closets were remodeled.

I sprayed some clear coat on some parts, with pretty good results.

Two things I’ve had to learn this past few days. One, dust control. I wiped down the little spray booth with a wet rag, run the fan and spritz it with my plant atomizer a few minutes before painting. Two, thinning the paint. From the internet I learned that a major cause of orange peel is simply that the droplets in the atomized spray are tiny, and their thinner evaporates during the 4-inch trip from airbrush to surface. The cure is to add more thinner, so the droplets arrive at the surface wet, and have time to self-level before they dry. That means moving the spray more slowly or holding it closer. There is a complex function between speed of moving the spray, amount of thinner, and distance from the surface.

After painting these parts I had to pack up the spray stuff, compressor, booth, gloves, mask, and move it from the bathroom to the porch. I don’t want Wanda being confused by all this stuff in the bathroom when she’s cleaning.

There was a lecture at 3pm, but it didn’t hold my interest. So that was about it for the day.

Tuesday 02/16/2021

After aerobics I called Facilities again. I am trying to get some old maintenance taken care of, since Facilities is supposedly back up to full staff and no longer dealing with relocating the 3rd and 4th floor campers. Not a satisfactory call. Not sure when, or if, anyone is coming.

At 11 it was the writers’ group. Connie had asked us to write about our meal practices, eating alone in our rooms. I was surprised how many of my neighbors go to the trouble of taking the food out of the green plastic clamshell serving containers and putting it on plates. And warming the plates in the microwave, and setting a table. Pffft. I just put the green plastic compartmented tray (kind of like an airline meal tray, but larger) on the table and dig in. I wrote about my meal-time entertainment, that is, my favorite YouTube creators.

Right after lunch I headed out to FOPAL, where I processed several boxes of books, pricing a dozen or so, finding a couple of high-value ones, and moving three or four boxes to the reject table.

From there I drove to Safeway in Menlo Park, that one instead of the one on Middlefield which would be more on my way, because I know the big one has Coke in the mini size cans.

That was about the day. Evening our in house movie savant, Rob, had sponsored a showing of The Awful Truth, a “screwball comedy”. I dropped in, watched five minutes, was not amused, and dropped out.

Monday 02/15/2021

Went for the usual walk in the morning. Met briefly with Eva to answer a question about her Mac. Some questions about Mail, which I don’t use or understand, but I have a book about it, which I sent to her later. If she reads it she might be more of an expert than I.

At 1pm I took my pre-med for my dental appointment, and an hour later I walked to the dentist office, a whole five minutes away. I had expected this to be a fairly lengthy and perhaps painful hygiene, since it was my first since, I think, late 2019. However, the hygienist was quite pleased, not much plaque and done in twenty minutes.

I put a second coat of color on those four MG parts which came out quite smooth. Next up, clear coat.

Today there was supposed to be a Stanford Women’s game against Oregon on ESPN2 at 4pm. But around 2pm I got an email from Stanford saying there was a change of time. In fact the game was now on ESPN (not ESPN2) at 6pm, not 4. Stanford appeared to have the game in hand, running out a 15-point lead early in the 2nd quarter. And then Oregon tightened up their defense, ran off a 10-0 run, and made it a close game. It stayed close all through the second half, with Oregon taking a small lead with 2 minutes to go. Stanford was ahead by 2 with seconds left and Oregon with the ball. The Oregon point guard made an unforced error and turn the ball over, and Stanford escaped with the win.

Sunday 02/14/2021

I had finished watering the plants and reading the paper and doing the Sunday crossword and it was 9am. What shall I do this morning? I decided to drive to SF, walk in Golden Gate Park, and return. Which I did: drove up into the Park, stopped more or less at random next to the fake waterfall at the Portals of the Past, and walked for a mile or a bit more. There is now a “disk golf” course through the forest there, so I watched people sending frisbees for amazing distances between the trees.

I started back on Sunset Boulevard and around Pacheco street I noticed the marquees of a farmers’ market. Well why not, so I came around a few blocks, found parking, and walked the three block length of it. Then continued home, arriving back in the garage with about 15 minutes to spare for the lunchtime tray delivery.

Later I sprayed four little parts of the MG and they came out well.

These four parts, the left and right outer door panels and the left and right sides of the petrol tank, have been painted, and stripped, and painted, and stripped, while I’m trying to figure out how to get a decent coat of paint out of the airbrush. This time they look pretty good, especially the doors. There is an obvious zit on one tank panel and some smaller ones in the middle door. I will sand those very lightly before doing one more coat. If that comes out OK, it will finally be time to try applying clear coat.

Saturday 02/13/2021

An early start to the day. Yesterday I had noted that volunteers were being slow signing up on the new meal delivery sheet, and there was an open slot for Saturday breakfast. At 8pm I signed myself up to fill the gap. (By this evening all the remaining open slots had been filled.) So at 7:20 I had to head downstairs and delivered three meal carts. Michele, who anybody who didn’t know her would call “frail”, stoutly informed me I needn’t have bothered, she and one other person can do the job just fine.

After that I worked on two different projects. One involved going through my estate planning documents and framing a question or two for the upcoming annual meeting with the financial advisors. The other was the perennial problem of getting a good coat with the air-brush. In the course of this I managed to get two tiny dots of cherry-red paint on my jeans. Unfortunately they are not blue jeans but tan ones, so the red dots show. They are very tiny red dots but they don’t come out and I will have to replace the jeans. However, I think I have the painting problems resolved and will try painting actual parts tomorrow.

Following lunch I sat with Doctor Margaret while we tried to get her new iPad loaded from her old iPad. That was quite painless, actually, the two devices had a side chat through Bluetooth, and that was that. Except for the iCloud business. We just couldn’t get her iCloud, or Apple ID, password resolved properly across all her iDevices. Eventually we had the old and new iPads, her Macbook, and her iPhone, all layed out on a table in the lounge, and among them three of them agreed but the Macbook was frozen out. It kept saying, authorize on one of your other devices, but none of the devices on the table were showing an Apple ID authorization message.

I think in hindsight what was happening was that there was one other device: her prior Macbook, now long recycled, still shows up as an authorized device. I betcha iCloud was sending the authorization message to it.

At 6pm Stanford played Oregon State. This game had been rescheduled and was not on any of the PAC-12 channels. Stanford had supplied a link to an Oregon State live stream, which started out with no audio but a minute after play began, it suddenly had audio and an announcer. The Beavers who, because of various Covid cancellations, have only played 12 games this season, to Stanford’s 20, were unexpectedly feisty and the game was tied after the first half. Apparently Tara’s half-time talk was unusually effective because Stanford took over in the second half and finished the game up nearly 30 points.

Friday 02/12/2021

My first event today was to have a CT scan (with contrast) at 10:15, “please arrive by 9:45”. As I was headed down in the elevator for the garage, it occurred to me, why use my car? I had a second appointment, the 3-month callback with my aortic surgeon, at noon. I had assumed I would drive to the imaging center near California Ave., then drive to Stanford Hospital to see the doctor. But that would mean parking in the boring underground garage. I could just take a Lyft, and a Lyft, and a Lyft. So I took a Lyft to the imaging center.

The first nurse failed to get the IV properly set in my right arm, so she stuck a cotton ball under a strip of that stretchy stuff and called in her colleague. That nurse had no problem setting the IV in the left arm, and a few minutes later I climbed onto the luge-like sled in the hole in the giant bagel of the scanner. And a few minutes later, I was done. Nurse 2 pulled the IV and stopped the hole with a ball of cotton under a different color of stretchy stuff. (Foreshadowing!)

I got dressed and headed out. It was just 10:30. I walked a couple of blocks to a grocery and bought a bottle of OJ to start hydrating away the contrast fluid. Then I thought of calling the next Lyft when it occurred to me, maybe I could walk? I got out Maps and by golly, 300 Pasteur drive was 3.1 miles away, just the length of a normal Friday walk. So I walked, which was a nice way of killing exactly the time between the appointments.

Dr. Watkins breezed in and her news was good: my aorta is healing around the stents “beautifully”. I asked about the Clopidogrel (aka Plavix). The prior meeting, she had said the false lumen (the gap between the inner and outer lining) was not filling with clot, and she blamed the Plavix, which is an anti-clotting med. It was prescribed because of the cardiac stent that was placed in advance of the aorta operation. Dr. Dibiase doesn’t want to stop the Plavix. So it turns out, my aorta is clotting up and healing despite taking Plavix, so Dr. Watkins no longer sees any need to end it.

Something else showed up on the scan. One of my kidneys has a largish cyst. This has been mentioned to me before as something to keep an eye on. It is large enough, Dr. Watkins says, to be worth a consult with a urologist, so she is going to refer me to one. She didn’t see anything on the scan to suggest it was any danger, or going to turn into anything bad, but maybe a urologist would recommend draining it. I wonder what that involves? Probably a very long needle and a local anesthetic.

Dr. Watkins is looking quite pregnant, maybe 6-7 months? I have no experience with these things. I did not mention it. I was conflicted. One side of me wanted to say, “congratulations”. The other side wanted to say “Noooooo, I might need you and you will be off being a mommy!” I’m a terrible person.

Back home I got the kitchen scissors and snipped off the stretchy stuff from the left arm; dropped that cotton ball and strap in the wastebasket; snipped off the other one; dropped that stuff in the wastebasket. This is exactly what I have done other times after a blood donation. But this time I had forgotten the Plavix. by the time I dropped the left arm’s bandage in the bucket, the right one was running a nice stream of dark red blood. Oh shit oh shit. I grabbed a kleenex and noticed that the left arm too was starting to bleed. Oh shit oh shit. Trying to hold a kleenex on each elbow at the same time I headed to the bathroom. I alternated dabbing at the slowly-bleeding spots with toilet paper, and getting out bandaids. Peeling the wrapping off a bandaid takes two hands. Dab, peel, shit! dab dab, peel.

I managed to get the top off my little bottle of styptic solution, soaked the pad of a bandaid, slapped it on the right arm, the one that bled more (the one that nurse #1 had messed up). Peel, dab on the left arm, peel. More styptic onto the new bandaid and stuck it on the left arm. Hah. Both leaks stopped.

Damn Plavix.

Thursday 02/11/2021

Aerobics. Then a pile of little things that I did because they feel like accomplishments.

Composed an email to CHBB about SWBB; I have been taking it on myself to send out a reminder of when games will be played and on what TV channel you can record them. Except there was a late change and I had to send out a correction email soon after. Created the sign-up sheet for next week’s meal delivery, send to Marcia to have the regulars filled in. Then I forgot to broadcast it until 9pm. I tidied the apartment ready for Wanda to do housekeeping. I filed the WFB statement for January in the folder for the RA account.

Now a tech squad email arrived: Randy’s Mac was giving him “time to back up” messages and he didn’t know what to do. I called him, then went to his apartment. Turned out he had an adorable tiny 1 fucking Terabyte USB drive (I cannot get over one million megabytes being smaller than a pack of playing cards) and didn’t really know what to do with it. Walked him through Time Machine backups.

Then got an email from Elizabeth, to whom I gave my Epson 630 printer back in 2019, it was demanding an ink cartridge, and she thought it was because she’d messed up replacing the black cartridge. But no, it was demanding a yellow cartridge. I told her to get a pack of all 4 colors because if it wanted yellow now, it would want Cyan next week.

After lunch I took the car out for a brief spin. Then met Eva in the lobby to walk to the Apple store for her genius bar appointment. I didn’t describe her problem yesterday. She had installed some malware, she’s not sure what it was, but as soon as it installed it changed her password and she couldn’t log in to her new Macbook Air. We tried repeatedly to reset the password using the “Recovery Mode” screen. It would say, password changed, but the new password would not be accepted.

We had to wait almost an hour; the Geniuses were running behind. But we eventually got to meet Gilbert who went through the Recovery Mode password change again and it failed again. He then took it away behind the scenes, and came back a little later with what appeared to be a working system. Not sure what he’d done, but in fact, he hadn’t fixed it, although it was by chance we found out. He had set the password to “apple”, and Eva said, I want it to be my son’s name and the year he was born. So in front of us Gilbert used the normal way to change a password, with the system running and Eva logged in. Then he logged her out, and tried to log in, and … the new password didn’t work. The malware was still there, doing what it had done before.

We left the machine with them, it will be taken back to factory-new and hopefully when Eva gets it back, and restores her files and settings from iCloud, it will be gremlin free.

Two unappreciated jokes. One, there was a Reddit post in the Prius subreddit, about crossing Canada in a Prius, and they included a picture of a winding gravel road through pine trees. I commented, “Damn, I thought they had paved Maple Leaf 1 by now.” Of course we drove Maple Leaf 1 back in the 90s and it is a coast to coast freeway, as any Canadian would know. Well that was a funny comment but after three hours it had gotten not one response or an upvote.

The other I self-censored. I think it was really funny but I was afraid somebody would find it bad taste. In the public post about the meal delivery sign-up sheet, I had ended with,

Thank you for your devoted deliveries… hmmm, that didn’t come out right… makes us sound like “cart doulas”…

I got a good snicker out of that, but thought, maybe not. Somebody might be offended. And took it out.

Wednesday 02/10/2021

Went for the three mile walk first thing. Today’s main thing was to have been dental hygiene at 11:15. However, yesterday they had called to reschedule. The hygienist was having a bad reaction to her 2nd Covid shot. So that’s off until Monday, leaving the day pretty much empty, except for doing the laundry in my 12-4pm slot.

Shortly into the morning it felt like I was doing a lot of little stuff, such as I never remember to record here. So I started a list, and here is how the day went.

• filled pill cases
• sorted laundry
• made out a new pill list (check list for pill cases, old list was all marked up)
• took 3-mile walk
• picked up mail
• spent an hour helping Eva
• took old tax documents to basement (making room in the tax box for this year’s)
• tried training the garage door opener onto my car’s rear view mirror — didn’t work
• advised Gwen about connecting her mac to a tv (hallway consultation)
• started laundry
• emailed Bert re garage door opener training which he had asked me to test
• got email from financial advisor’s office asking for 2019 tax return
• lunch cart arrived – no lunch for me! – called kitchen
• folded some laundry
• lunch arrived
• emailed tax accountant and asked them to send 2019 return to fin. adv.
• emailed fin. adv. about that.
• had another session with Eva and Bert in the 10th floor computer room.
• finished laundry
• fin. adv. writes to say they have received 2019 returns, thanks
• helped Eva schedule a “genius bar” appointment for tomorrow
• emailed to FOPAL colleagues about yesterday’s work

Just another day at the ranch.

Tuesday 02/09/2021

Did Veronica’s aerobics. Then plonked around until 11am and time for the Writers’ group.

Yesterday I included the poem “Relief” by Kay Ryan that was supposed to inspire something today. The more I looked at it, the less I liked it. Some evocative phrases, but some that looked like they were meant to be evocative and did nothing for me, like “the quick humility/of witnessing a birth [terrible rhythm there, wit ness ing a birth, it just slides into a ditch] “how love seeps up [from where?] and retakes the earth [what? how?]”

During the night, around 2am, I was half awake and trying to compose a poem that would basically say, just throwing some words together with arbitrary line breaks does not make a poem. I got the first two lines composed in my half-dream state, and was thinking I should get up and write them down, but couldn’t quite do it. Fortunately I did remember them and between 9am and 11am, finished this, about the relief that (I assume) a writer feels when they give up poetry and just let free verse happen:

Poetry’s no fun; rhyme and meter, hard as hell
when your brain’s an empty attic and you’ve got lines to fill.
The fix is easy: discard rhyme and beat.
Disperse three thoughts across a block of prose
of lilac hue; insert line breaks at lengths discrete;
Voila, a poem! And there’s relief, disclosed.

Got some laughs from the crowd, was asked to read it a second time. Yay!

As soon as lunch was down my throat I left for FOPAL. The official work time for the Computer section (and several others) was 1:15 to 4:30. So with my KN95 mask on I walked into that untidy little building for the first time in nearly a year. They are taking a lot of pains to keep it safe. Donated books go into a week of quarantine before they are sorted. Volunteers have to swear they have none of the familiar symptoms. Only a few (I think there were 4) people in the building at a time, and everyone has put down their name, email, entry and exit time in a “contact tracing log”.

Just the same I am not 100% sure that Channing House would approve, so don’t rat me out. It could be called a “gathering” although nobody got within 6 feet (rarely less than 20 feet), the doors were open, all were masked.

Anyway I culled a couple of boxes of books, priced and shelved a dozen, in 90 minutes, and then left. Went into Piazza’s next door to buy a couple of things.

And home in plenty of time for the next meeting, our 6th floor meeting. That was just an hour of pleasant chit-chat mostly.