Tuesday 01/19/2021

Got my shot. After the cardio class, I sat around sanding the clear coat on the three MG parts that I sprayed with the Tamiya can, reducing the wrinkles and craters. And of course managed to sand through the clear and the color on a couple of edges, so there’ll be touch-up to do.

At 11:15 I was called to go downstairs. Got the shot. Decided not to go late into the writers’ group zoom. After lunch I took a nap, and a moderate walk. Filled out my menu for next week and dropped it off. That was about it for excitement.

I was very impressed by the first real public action by Biden/Harris,

Simple, effective, touching. I wonder who actually planned that? Nice design. Okay, totally meaningless in any practical sense, but the presidency is not always about practicality. Symbols mean something. A serene, quiet, symbolic action is the exact opposite of the preceding administration.

Monday 01/18/2021

Started my usual walk more promptly than usual, at 8am, so as to be sure to be back in good time. At 10am, we who volunteered to help with the vaccine clinic met for orientation. I and my neighbor Steve were given radios and dispatched to the 2nd floor at 11am. Periodically over the next hour a person in the lobby would radio us and say, send down three more. We knocked on people’s doors and sent them down to the lobby to get vaccinated. Reminded them to carry the vaccination card they got with the first dose.

By 12 our parts were done and we handed off the radios to other volunteers to do the fifth floor. I believe the clinic went very smoothly this time, not the drama and delay of the first one.

That was the excitement for the day, I didn’t do much else. Burned through some TV off the DVR. On Masterpiece, Miss Scarlet & the Duke series. Tried it; got bored. Too obvious and melodramatic. Nature, on the Alps. The voice-over was just such heavy, over-dramatic, purple prose I couldn’t stand it. Another delete. Back to Netflix tomorrow.

Sunday 01/17/2021

In the winter, the plants don’t need much water (big discovery). But my daphne is almost in bloom. Its buds have opened very slowly over a couple of weeks but one is finally showing color.

About 9 I got in the car and on a whim, drove to Half Moon Bay. There I just walked up and down the length of the main street. There are still a lot of shops although only the deli and coffee shops were open at this early hour. I got back home by 11, just in time for the Stanford Women against Colorado. Colorado played like it was their last game on earth, and with 30 seconds to play the game was tied. Then Stanford got a score, so up by 2. There was a turnover and Stanford had the ball, with a lead, and a few seconds on the clock. All they had to do was inbound the ball and run the clock out. Unfortunately for them, a Colorado player anticipated their inbounds pass perfectly, stole the ball, down the court for a layup; tie game; overtime. And in overtime, Stanford lost by two points, 75-77. Their first loss of the season; they are now 11-1.

In the afternoon I experimented with clear-coat spray on pieces of the MG with highly unsatisfactory results. Despite all I can do for cleanliness, tiny craters open up in the finish.

The orange peel is undesirable but could be sanded out, except that the very last thing I want to do, is to to have to sand every tiny piece of this car. The most important pieces have convex and concave curvatures, etc. But those scattered little dimples? They are openings in the coat, and if you sand them out, you’ve basically removed the clearcoat.

I have ordered a different brand of gloss clear acrylic, a liquid meant for use in an air brush. I am giving up on the rattle-can clear by Tamiya, even though reviewers said it was the best.

Yesterday and today I did some writing on an essay for the writers’ group but the way it came out, it isn’t really appropriate for them. Or anyone.

Saturday 01/16/2021

Started with a modest walk which wrapped around to the Saturday Farmers’ Market which was actually there, for the first time since before Christmas. So I got a Chocolate Hazelnut swirl, yay.

The red light on my phone was blinking. The message was from my neighbor, Dr. Margaret (as her email address has it) who was having big trouble uploading pictures to Sutter Health. We met in the lounge with her laptop, ipad, and phone. It took a few minutes for me to understand the situation.

She was having some minor skin rashes and she wanted to consult a dermatologist at PAMF prior to our Tuesday Covid shots. The best PAMF can do for her was a televideo consult at 3:45 today. So far so good; but the dermatologist would need some pictures of the rash, please take some and upload those using the following full page of detailed instructions.

Well, she had take 6 pictures with her phone, but hadn’t been able to work her way through maze of the Sutter Health website to upload them. She had moved the pics to her MacBook Pro, but the first problem seemed to be they were in the wrong format. She had mistakenly had the phone set for video so what she had was six, one-second video clips.

OK, I can handle this. I just opened each one in QuickTime Player and did command-shift-4 to take a screen grab of the contents of the Player window. Now I had six .png files. What next? She showed me the very dense wall-of-text instructions from Sutter Health and I quickly noticed that the first instruction was, open our Sutter Health app; but the second instruction was, you must do this on a phone or iPad, you cannot use the Desktop or Laptop version.

I cannot find words sufficient to express my contempt for Sutter Health. But OK, we have usable pics on the laptop. How do I get them to the iPad sitting here? I google syncing photos and find out I can do it over wifi but first you have to connect the iPad to the laptop by USB and tell the iPad it is ok to trust that computer. Do I have a USB cord that will connect an old iPad to a very new MacBook with its goddam thunderbolt ports? I do not.

OK, let’s do it the stupid way: I’ll use Mail on her laptop and send the pics to herself, and open it in Mail on the iPad. Here ensues some comedy. I send the mail twice addressed to drmargaret, and it doesn’t show up. What? Then I send a test message to myself with CC drmargaret, and the CC appears instantly on both machines. I have no idea why, but ok.

On the iPad I figure out how to move the pics from the email into the Photos app. Now then, let’s get this uploaded. I open the Sutter Health app on the iPad and look for what I’m supposed to see, a “Questionnaires” button or tab. There are 16 buttons on the first page, all similar in size and color, and it literally takes me four tries before I spot the one with the little text label “Questionnaires” (and no it is not the button with the “?” icon). OK, the directions say to tap that, and then tap “Add Documents” and then tap “Photos from library”. Should be all downhill now! I tap Questionnaires. The iPad shows a spinner for a few seconds and then says,

Error at server. Please try again later.

And again. And again. Dr. Margaret (who before she retired, was a GP at PAMF for many years) is getting impatient; she calls the dermatology department and is rather scathing to a nice young lady who says their computers are very busy with all these calls about the vaccine. By now it is after 12. I take the iPad back to my room and proceed with some other work, every minute or so tapping the Questionnaires button on the iPad. About 1pm it goes through! I go to Dr. Margaret’s door so she can watch as I tap Add Documents, and Photos and bingo, there are the six photos, I select them, I click upload and whatever else to finish the session, and and give the iPad back to her.

Later, around six, I stop by her door and ask, and yes, she had a very productive telephone consult with the doctor who could see the pictures.

The work I was doing in the middle of the day was starting to collect input to my 2020 tax return. I made up a spreadsheet of charitable contributions. Then I was going to download 1099 forms from Schwab, but when I logged in, they only had a form ready for one account. The other five said “expected by 2/22”. Well then, I guess I’m off the hook for a month, eh?

I also sprayed clear-coat on two small pieces of the MG. One I screwed up, putting it on too heavy and getting a run. The other baffles me; the paint coat is good except a number of little pinholes opened up in it. I had washed these parts in mild soap, rinsed and dried them. So I don’t know what happened. I have to sand them down and try again.

At the right moment in the afternoon I took a picture of that poinsettia again, with the Nikon. Compare to the iPhone picture of yesterday.

In the evening I watched the US Figure Skating Championships, Lady’s Free Skate. Local star Alyssa Liu got bumped down to fourth.

Friday 01/15/2021

After I did the three-mile walk, I tidied up a bit, carrying my recycles and trash to the dump station on our floor.

At lunch time, 12:30, it was time to watch Stanford take on Utah. Stanford pulled out a lead of a dozen early and pretty well cruised to a win.

Later I took a short second walk, during which I spotted a nice poinsettia(?) with the sun on it.

The iPhone camera was not really up to handling the extremes of brightness in this picture. I may go back with the Nikon tomorrow, if I remember.

At Rhonda’s Friday meeting, there wasn’t much news. There was a lot of discussion about the upcoming second vaccine clinic, what we needed to bring and so on. Rhonda herself and others on the staff had fever and fatigue after their second shot, so they were at pains to warn us all. (On the other hand, Santa Clara County says older people have had lesser reactions.)

Anyway if we have any symptoms we are to report them and isolate. “If you have a fever, it is probably a reaction to the shot, but it might be Covid. So you isolate until (probably) the symptoms resolve in a day” said Rhonda. They are suspending housekeeping for Tuesday-Friday next week, anticipating they will have a number of people isolating with symptoms.

I have signed up to volunteer for the first day. The second, Tuesday, is the day I get my shot.

Thursday 01/14/2021

Did the morning cardio class. At 11am I met with Eva to continue sorting out her new Macbook Air. I had hoped I would be able to install the driver for her HP printer, but unfortunately I couldn’t do that from the lounge. I would have had to go into her room which is not allowed, virus rules. So she will have to get an IT person from the staff, who can get permission to enter her room.

I helped her sort out most of her problems with Mail. I really don’t like Apple’s Mail app, and use it as little as possible. Unfortunately a lot of people here use it. She has a problem that stumped me until later: she has two email accounts, one at GMail which she prefers, and one at SomeOtherISP I forget which, and the latter is the address that many of her friends know.

Mail presents these accounts as two separate in-boxes. So she has to click on each inbox in turn. Surely there must be a way to have all mail come to one inbox? But I couldn’t find it while sitting with her. Later I found out the only way, is to log into SomeOtherISP (and what are the odds she remembers that password?) and use its web interface to make it forward all mail to her GMail account. Then anything sent to eva@SomeOtherISP.com will still show up in GMail. Maybe someday I will try to get that set up for her.

That was about it. I took two walks during the day. The weather has warmed; it is over 60 on my deck. Which means that I can spray clear-coat on the MG model parts. I think I will do that Saturday when the forecast is for warmer still. I am very nervous about that.

Wednesday 01/13/2021

Did The Walk first thing. Felt fine. Then started cleaning up my files for this year’s taxes. First up was to go through the medical expenses folder, pull out everything from 2020. In fact I have had only modest medical expenses in 2020. I have quite a wad of Medicare EOBs for the period 9/28-10/15 when I was in and out of Stanford Hospital with my aortic dissection. But in fact I’ve only had one bill from that period.

That was a $2500 bill from the City of Palo Alto for transporting me to Stanford Emergency. This came in promptly in October, but it had a printed note, if you have insurance coverage, return the bill with your insurance information. Which I did, and nothing more had come from them.

Also, all the EOBs say, after the claim number for each separate procedure, “Medicare paid $XXX” followed by “You may be billed at most $YYY”. The $YYYs could add up to, just eye-balling it, maybe a few thousand. (Medicare paid $98,000 for my two hospitalizations, and at least another $10K in various procedures.) But I’ve received no bill from Stanford Health for my part of it.

So I followed up on these. I logged in to MyHealth.Stanford.edu and clicked “Billing” and it showed Balance:$0. There was a button for “Message to Billing” so I sent a polite note wondering when I might expect to be billed for those days.

Then I went to a URL listed on the ambulance bill. There after entering an account number from the bill, I found a statement:

• Charges: $2500
• Credit: $-2500
• Balance: $0

So apparently, either they just waived the whole fee, or … what? If one of my insurance carriers had paid it, surely they would have shown “Payment: $2500” (or less). But no, they just credited the amount charged leaving a zero balance. Nice. I could grump about why didn’t they tell me? But you know, I think I’ll let it slide.

Now it was time to do my laundry. (The excitement just keeps building.) In between loads, an email with the opportunity to volunteer on the next Vaccine Days, the 18th and 19th. Turns out, if I volunteer to help, I can get vaccinated early, 4pm on the 18th, instead of waiting for the 6th floor window of 11am the 19th. Hey, why not.

After a nap it was time to zoom in to the monthly 6th floor meeting. No news there, just an hour of chat among neighbors.

In the evening COVID email, was the note that several staff members who had received their 2nd dose from the county clinic reported soreness, low fever, and fatigue, more than with the 1st dose. We all get our 2nd doses next week.

Tuesday 01/12/2021

Did the aerobics class. Killed time to 11am for the writers’ group. I hadn’t written anything. The topic was to be either, current political events, or your relation to BLM, whichever. It produced a couple of good memoirs from a couple of members. Prudence, who was from England and visiting the USA as a graduate student in 1964, wrote about hanging out in Selma and other Southern towns. Saw a sign at a gas station, “White Toilet” and was confused, what was special about a toilet painted white? Being warned by a reporter from the NYT that she should leave town because her car had California plates. Margaret wrote about being an innocent military bride following her husband to Charlotte SC and learning what a segregated town was really like.

Next was to help Eva with her brand new Macbook Air. I had boned up on how to do this. The first thing was to get the lovely new machine to connect to our house wi-fi, on the same subnet as her other devices. Then run Migration Assistant on both the old computer and the new one, and get it started on transferring files. That process went on for several hours, from 2pm until almost 9:30. Two reasons: the old Mac was just dog-slow; and second, it turned out there were over 500,000 files to transfer. Eva has had some problems with duplicated photos, to say the least.

In between checking on the progress of the migration down in the floor lounge, I attended the monthly “behind the bench” meeting with Tara Vanderveer. It wasn’t as interesting as the first one. But still, the team, and its support staff, are living on the road and have been for many weeks. Tara answered a question about how they created a “training table” on the road; she agreed it was difficult to nourish athletes properly using DoorDash. But “flexibility is our middle name”. When asked when she knew that a game would be played, she said she never knew until the ball was tipped up. In fact, she said, her sister Heidi’s team had a game canceled at half-time for covid exposure.

Anyway the new Mac was ready at 9:30 and booted up just fine and looked like the old one. Eva went off to play with it.

Monday 01/11/2021

During the morning news I picked up that today was a “king tide” day, extra high. It was on the news because it (coincidentally?) combined with unusually high onshore waves, and quite a few beachcombers had been caught by these.

Anyway, I recalled going to the Baylands on high tides before and decided I would again. Fortunately on a whim I called Patty to ask if she wanted to go, and she said, “after the 10:30 meeting, right?”. Oh holy fuck, the 10:30 Residents’ Association meeting. At which as RA Treasurer I would be expected to report. And I was ready to bop off for a walk exactly then. This is the kind of mistake I’m supposed to prevent by checking my Google Calendar. Anyway, I said, uh, sure, right after that, and went off to compile my Treasurer’s report. That took all of 5 minutes to do.

Nothing dramatic at the meeting, except that, during the Administration section — the staff, usually CEO Rhonda, is always given the final agenda spot for any announcements they want to make — Yadira (the hero of the vaccine story I told a few days back, remember?) announced that of the three Lee Center residents who were being treated in our Covid isolation wing, one had passed away of the virus or its complications. She went “peacefully, surrounded by relatives and friends, on Zoom,” Yadira said. So that’s now I think 5 deaths we’ve had over the two instances where staff brought the virus into our AL/SNF wing. And another 4 recovered, two in progress.

Now I’m trying to imagine “sitting” at a relative’s bedside via Zoom. I guess the nurse arranges the laptop to show the dying person’s face? Kind of… well, attending a death is never pleasant but this seems kind of weird.

So I left that meeting and we went for a pleasant stroll looking at high water. Not dramatic high water, not overflowing the banks or anything; just that channels through the reeds which are normally little muddy creeks with a trickle of water at the bottom, were today full, no mud showing.

In the afternoon I went over to CVS because they had texted that I had a prescription ready. And here begins a complicated story.

After Dr. Watkins braced my aorta with stents, she gave 3 post-op directions. One, I’m to not lift anything over 20 pounds. Two, use whatever it takes to keep your stool soft and avoid straining on the toilet. And three, get your (systolic) blood pressure under 120. All of these are really aimed at not breaking an aneurysm. I don’t have any aneurysms (swellings off the aortic wall) but if one should form in between annual CT scans, these measures lower the chances of it breaking.

At the hospital I was given a prescription for Metoprolol, 25mg, take 2/day. Soon after my cardiologist Dr. Dibiase (dee bee ah-say) changed it to Metoprolol succinate 50mg, and I thought, also 2/day. Which is what I was taking, one tab morning and night, until I picked up a refill at CVS around Christmas, and noticed that the label clearly read, one per day by mouth.

Well fuckety-doo, I had been doubling the dosage, silly me. So I changed to 1/day in the morning. Over the next couple of weeks I was not pleased with my BP. I was taking it 4 times a day (8am, 1pm after lunch, 6pm after supper, 10pm going to bed) and it was running from an occasional 121 to an occasional 151, average around 135 roughly. (That’s an eyeball average, I haven’t done the arithmetic.)

So I sent a message to the doctor using the Sutter Health website, in it giving a table of about 5 days readings. I received no direct reply. However yesterday I got a text from CVS saying my prescription for “MET” (they only show the first three letters of the drug) was ready, come pick it up. Huh? I have enough Metoprolol for a couple of weeks yet, so this can’t be an automatic refill.

When I picked up the drug at CVS this afternoon I noticed that the bottle was bigger than before, and that the prescription printed on it says, “Take two per day by mouth”. So is this the reply to my message, doubling the dose because of the numbers I reported? Or was the prior prescription in error, and I was right to be taking two per day? Should I inquire about this when I see Dr. Dibiase in a couple of weeks? Or should I just let it go?

To further confuse things, looking back at my spreadsheet, the BP numbers when I was taking 2/day are not a whole lot lower than while I’ve been taking one. Definitely not consistently under 120.

On the bright side, I am not having any side-effects from this beta-blocker. I’ve had a problem with a beta-blocker in the past, made me feel listless and low-energy. Not this one, that I notice. Whether I take 50mg or 100mg.

Sunday 01/10/2021

(I just realized that day 3.001 is also going to be a palindrome, 12/02/2021. But that’s 11 months away.)

After the Sunday paper and watering the plants and the crossword it was only 9:20 and I decided to go for a Baylands walk. But I got to the basement and realized I had another chore to do, setting up the volunteer sign-up sheet for next week’s package reception task. So back to the room and do that and then out again 15 minutes later. Walked about 3 miles feeling nominal, so that’s good.

I called the kitchen and canceled my tray lunch, and for lunch had instead the rest of the very good chili from Willies, and one rib. There’s still 4 ribs to consume.

Then I worked on a minor project that I’ve had in mind for some time. The Channing House Xfinity system a plethora of channels and I find myself using the search function often to find them, because the printed channel list that came with the X1 receiver is badly organized and hard to read. I want the channels in a spreadsheet form where I can sort the rows by number or by channel name. But there are several hundred (I can say now, definitively, 454 total) and that’s a lot of tedious data entry.

So I used my OCR software and the scanner in my printer to OCR the Xfinity pamphlet. That got me the list as text, still in a badly organized format. But a little editing to clean it up and then… how to make it a CSV so I could load it in Numbers? I wrote a tiny program in Python to do the job. Nobody cares but I’m going to put the code right here.

"""
Quick and dirty program to convert a file like this (made by OCR of an Xfinity pamphlet)
    LIMITED BASIC
    2 KTVU (FOX)
    3 KNTV (NBC)
    ...
    25,1068 KTLN (INR)
    26,29,1074,1076 Government Access
    ...
into a file like this:
    2,"KTVU (FOX)","LIMITED BASIC"
    3,"KNTV (NBC)","LIMITED BASIC"
    ...
    25,"KTLN (INR)","LIMITED BASIC"
    1068,"KTLN (INR)","LIMITED BASIC"
    26,"Government Access","LIMITED BASIC"
    29,"Government Access","LIMITED BASIC"
    1074,"Government Access","LIMITED BASIC"
    1076,"Government Access","LIMITED BASIC"
    ...
that is, a CSV file in which the first column is a single channel number,
the second is the station name/description, and the third is the package.

A sufficient file path must be the first argument. The output goes to
"output.csv" in the current directory.
"""
import sys
file_path = sys.argv[1]
the_file = open(file_path,mode='r',encoding='Latin 1')
the_data = the_file.read() # slurp it all in
lines = the_data.split('\n') # make a list of the lines
# print(len(lines)) answer was 454
package = ""
output = [] # list of output lines
for line in lines:
    if len(line)==0 : continue # ignore blank line
    if line[0].isalpha():
        # new package name e.g. "PREMIUM CHANNELS"
        package = line
    else:
        # a line with channel numbers and name e.g. "25,1068 KTLN (INR)"
        number_group = line.split(' ')[0] # "25,1068"
        channel = line[len(number_group):].strip() # "KTLN (INR)"
        numbers = number_group.split(',') # ["25","1068"]
        for number in numbers: # "1068"
            output.append(
                f'"{number}","{channel}","{package}"\n'
            )
csv_file = open('output.csv',mode='w',encoding='Latin 1')
csv_file.writelines(output) # splurt all the output

(Goodness the WordPress “code” format block is crap.) That’s pretty crude but it did the job, and all 454 rows loaded into Numbers just fine. Next to fiddle with it in spreadsheet land to make it easier to sort.

I wrote about the 500mm telephoto lens on day 2.031. I mentioned that its leather case was dry dirty and cracked. Over the last couple of days I’ve been working “Leather Honey” into it, and putting black shoe polish on the worst of the places where the black has chipped off.

It ain’t great but it’s better than it was. I have the lens on the camera, on the tripod, on the deck waiting for something in the sky to shoot. The moon or something.