Sunday 11/29/2020

Determined to get out and have a scenic walk, and mindful that scenic walk places fill up early on weekends, I left at 8:30am and found an open parking space at the Dish Walk. Since the last time I was there (sometime in April? I can’t be bothered to look it up) it has been reorganized for one-way traffic, anti-clock-wise. So where my habit would be to walk straight up the hill and around to the dish, now I have to walk North and then East and then South past the Dish. Which is fine; and there is certainly a lot less exposure when you don’t have a flow of people coming toward you, breathing.

The Dish walk has a lot of elevation change; at least five times you go steeply down 100 feet or so, and then climb up 150, and again and again. But my body did it all and although I was definitely slowest, being passed by many other people, I felt like a healthy person all the way.

I was back home by 11:30, with 4.1 miles for the day. Mid-day I got an email from Channing House with this paragraph,

We are sad to report that we have another Covid-positive staff member. Persons with direct contact to this staff member have been, or are being, notified. If you do not receive a notification, you have had no known contact with this staff member. This case is not related to our current 4 positive staff members. This is a separate exposure that occurred outside of Channing House.

For the first time these past few days the pandemic has seemed more real, more personally threatening, than before. Coming back from the Dish walk I was tempted to stop at the California Avenue Farmer’s Market, just for fun, just to get some kind of pastry and stock up on grapes. But no; even the small risk of exposure there is not justified by those transient pleasures.

The rest of the day was the usual quiet activities. About 4pm, while talking to Dennis on the phone, I noticed a near-full moon rising and grabbed a picture.

Saturday 11/28/2020

About 10am I head out in the car, intending to walk in the Baylands. However many others, on a brilliantly clear holiday weekend, had started earlier, and there was nowhere to park. I drove around a bit in an unfocused fashion but couldn’t settle on anyplace I wanted to walk, so finally headed home, having had a drive, not a walk.

I worked on the model a little, and that was about it for the day.

Tomorrow I must do better for myself.

Friday 11/27/2020

Something was not right with the numbers. Very not-right.

This blog starts (click the link “It started here”, above) on 2 December, 2019, the day my wife Marian died. For the first year I headed each post with “Day n“. But that wouldn’t be sustainable for the second year; who wants to read “Day 492” and so on? So I started the second year heading each post with a year and a day, like 1.361.

But now I was closing in on 2 December, and the day number should have been around 359, 360, and it wasn’t. I had screwed up somewhere. I went back and found that I had dropped ten days out after my ten-day hospital hiatus. Also I had two consecutive day numbers 331. And maybe other mistakes. So I just finished the tedious task of renumbering all the posts from 1.310. Now they are accurate, and 1.365 will fall on December 1st.

Nobody cares, except me.

On the jogging route this morning I jogged maybe 1/4 of the total distance? Quite a bit, and it felt fine. I’m just screwing around; Monday maybe I will start jogging and keep jogging either to the end or until my body says “enough”.

I put in some time on the MG model. In the afternoon, the package of clear gloss spray cans arrived so tomorrow I will experiment with them. Unfortunately they say two things: not recommended under 50ºF, and use in a well-ventilated space. I can certainly vouch for the second one; I sprayed a patch of paper just to verify it was gloss clear paint and I can still smell the fruity volatile chemicals an hour later. Tomorrow’s outdoor temperature should get above 50ºF, but I won’t try spraying until it is at least 60ºF.

Rhonda’s Friday meeting was similar to last week’s. The pandemic is raging, the news is grim, and we are restricting everything. Besides four staff people who are tested positive and are quarantining at home (all with symptoms), we have “at least three” who are in 14-day isolation because someone in their household was exposed. So, we are short of staff. Nevertheless, we have no residents with COVID.

To keep it that way, if anybody attends an indoor gathering of any kind, or an outdoor gathering with three or more households, or travels by train, plane, or bus — they isolate for 14 days. (I wonder does “travel” include local, like if I were to take CalTrain to the city.)

Most staff have taken a pledge to not attend multi-family gatherings this holiday season. There is an unusual tree sculpture celebrating this, which I had not properly appreciated. I will take a picture of it tomorrow.

Thursday 11/26/2020

For the first time ever, I got a breakfast tray, which was ok. It did not as I thought, include mimosa makings. Sparkling cider did come with lunch, though. I called a few relatives, then went for a medium walk. Lunch was pretty decent, for a tray eaten alone.

About 3pm my evening sack supper was dropped off, and the most impressive thing was in it.

Every sack, apparently, contained a card hand-signed by all the dining staff! That’s 200-odd cards; they must have been signing for a week. Very touching and impressive.

I put in a couple of half-hour sessions on the MG, completing its fully articulated front steering linkage. I put on a couple of the wheels I’ve been chrome-plating, loosely, just for show.

Wednesday 10/25/2020

Went for a walk around the jogging route, a brisk walk but did not actually jog any part of it. Can’t say why, exactly; just not motivated.

At 11am it was time for the first Stanford Women’s Basketball Game of the season. They provided a decent video stream. The team looked excellent, including a couple of freshmen who were just awesome. Next day their second game of the season was canceled, when UOP found they had a positive test.

Speaking of positive tests, about 2pm I received a CH email saying,

we have two additional staff members who have tested positive for Covid-19. We have not identified any residents who have had close contact with these individuals. This brings our total Covid-positive staff members to 4. We currently have no Covid-positive residents.

The virus is knocking at our doors.

Tuesday 11/24/2020

After the aerobics class I killed a bit of time and then left for a PAMF office in Sunnyvale. Pre-pandemic, if your doctor had ordered blood tests, you just picked a time and waltzed off to the downtown Palo Alto office, or (in our case preferably) the smaller Los Altos office, off El Camino just south of San Antonio.

No more. Now you make an appointment for your lab work, and despite my entering my zip code insistently, the only choices it gave me were the Sunnyvale office, 9 miles away, or San Jose, 20 miles. So I had opted for Sunnyvale and off I went.

I was standing in line waiting to check in and I hear the receptionists asking people “Are you fasting?” Oh hell. I bet one of the tests requires fasting. I debate whether to lie or not. I tell the truth, so only two of the three ordered tests can be done. The one that requires fasting is the blood lipids one and I really don’t give a damn about it. I may or may not make another appointment.

Anyway, they were operating very smoothly and rapidly, and although there were 6 or 7 people in line ahead of me, I was out and on my way home in 20 minutes, max.

About the only thing I did the rest of the day, aside from a little work on the model, was to shorten my belt. I favor these Perry Ellis reversible belts. The blank end of the belt fits into the swiveling end of the buckle with a couple of set screws. With my new weight, which hasn’t changed by more than 0.4 pounds in a month, I had been cinching the belt up to like the 9th or 10th hole. So now I pulled it apart and cut 4 inches out of the blind end, and fitted it back into the buckle. Now it is snug in the 3rd hole.

Monday 10/23/2020

I went out in regular clothes, but wearing my sneakers. I went the jogging route, alternating one block of easy jogging, with two blocks of brisk walking. It felt fine. This is major progress, I feel.

On the other hand, several times today when I got up from sitting, my right hip was very painful, enough that I had to walk very carefully for several steps, until it would settle down. It didn’t hurt at all during the run/walk, nor on yesterday’s strenuous walk. So, WTF, hip?

I did a little work on the MG model. At 2pm I was invited to a Zoom meeting by the volunteers who want to re-start the gift shop. The Channing House gift shop used to be open a couple hours a day most days, selling notions, computer paper, and consignment clothes and art objects donated by residents. It was closed early in the pandemic.

Now some volunteers want to restart it, as a weekly “pop-up” market. There is apparently a backlog of merchandise, much of it good for Christmas sales. Mary Beth, who is spearheading this, pictures setting up two or three rolling carts of stuff and moving them to the auditorium. People would be allowed in, appropriately spaced out, to look (but not touch) and select things to buy. After discussion she is preparing a proposal to submit to Rhonda and Angela.

The only reason I was invited was that they figure to use a Slottr sign-up sheet such as I make for the other volunteer activities, to schedule volunteers to run the pop-up store.

In pandemic news, the upgrade process is just at a key point, where people who were displaced from the Fifth floor back in February are moving back. Regular readers will remember that I moved back to the refurbished Sixth floor in January; immediately after, all Fifth floor residents moved out to vacant apartments so it could be refurbished. Now it’s done, and they should be moved back, but as noted a couple of days ago: employees of the moving subcontractors are calling in sick because they have heard that we had two staff members test positive. Rhonda wrote in an email today,

We continuously advise them of the protocols that we have in place for their safety. And, that the General Contact Advisories mean that these people were in the same building but unlikely to be in the same vicinity. But, the teams are scared. As a result, we are severely short-staffed on the moving teams.

The result is that CH staff is now doubling as movers and move managers, in order to get the Fifth floor residents back home on schedule. This means that

Facilities team’s plate is especially full right now. Perhaps more full than it’s ever been. They are move managers, movers, and maintenance people. Please hold any requests that are not a safety issue.

The staff has really been stressed for nearly a year and they have rolled with a lot of punches, but this… I don’t know. We might get some burnout happening.

Sunday 11/22/2020

So by a little after 9 I had drunk my coffee, read the paper, watered the plants, and done the NYT crossword. And remembered my determination to go walk someplace different. A couple of minutes with the computer and I decided to go walk the Sneath Lane trail to Sweeney Ridge. (Easy to find on Google Maps.) Having in mind how fast recreational things fill up on a Sunday, I hustled away the 25 miles up I280, and got the last good parking spot at the trailhead.

I had no idea of the topography of this trail, although I realized it was going to be mostly climbing going up, as it ends up on the crest of the Coast Range, near where, supposedly, Gaspar de Portola and his gang, who were lost and looking for Monterey Bay, first caught sight of San Francisco Bay.

Later I worked out that it was almost exactly 600 feet of elevation gain, from the low end of the parking lot to the top. At the time I just knew I was trudging uphill, sometimes steeply and sometimes less so. At the start you get a look down the length of San Francisco’s water supply, Crystal Springs reservoir.

Higher up you can look back and see where you were before.

Near the top the Bay Area Fog was starting to blow in, making me glad I had my jacket.

It took just over an hour for me to climb 600 feet up and 1.7 miles along. I was pleased however that although I often paused to rest, it felt like all my body parts were working correctly.

Also this gave a useful check on the pedometer or “Health” app in the iPhone. For the 1.7 mile return trip it only counted 1.5 miles. So it is a bit more than 10% short.

I pretty much couched the rest of the day.

Saturday 11/21/2020

Took a walk both morning and afternoon, for a tolerable daily distance of 2.9 miles. I’m getting quite bored with walking Palo Alto streets, despite it being the time of year when all the pepper trees and japanese maples are in full color. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll drive to another walking venue.

I spent an hour and a half chrome-plating the spokes of the rest of the wheels of the MG. I tried to take a picture of this process, but I have no good way to get really close to the work. I tried, with the Nikon on the tripod, but I have to reach with one hand to trigger it, or else use the 10-second self-timer, and the results weren’t good enough to put in here.

I have a small tripod which would be perfect to set on the work surface, but it can’t support the weight of the Nikon. It would support the iPhone, but I have no way to attach the iPhone to a tripod. In the evening I searched Amazon for “iPhone holder tripod” and of course there is the exact right thing, a clamp for the phone with a 1/4-inch threaded hole to attach to a tripod. So I ordered that.

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I am running low on my favorite dental floss, “Listerine Gentle Gum Care Woven Floss”. I’ve used it for years; it is fuzzy and works well for the large gaps between my molars. So I tried to order some and found it was only to be had on eBay at $50 and up. A little more searching and I learned that Johnson & Johnson had dropped the product a year ago. Why would they do that?

A little more searching and I found multiple places on the web where people were listing “the 10 best replacements for Listerine Gentler Gum Care Floss”. I ordered some that sounded possible.

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A year and a half ago, while I was making the Tasso house sellable, I had to install a new smoke detector. The one I picked up turned out to have a very confusing setup process. After I had sorted it out I thought, “I bet other people have this problem”, so I made a little 2:33 video explaining what I’d learned. This has become my most successful video! Forget all the meal replacement reviews, etc. The First Alert Location Reset video has had 6,800 views, and gained 98 likes and 23 comments, most of them just “Thank You!”. I got another comment tonight; they come every few weeks. So strange to think that nearly 7,000 people have been motivated to search YouTube for “First Alert PC1210”, which is the only way to find this video, and then played it.

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In pandemic news, one additional staff person has tested positive. The official email says “We have not identified any residents who had close contact with this staff person… This brings our total Covid-positive staff members to 2. We currently have no Covid-positive residents.”

Just went back and edited the day numbers for the last few posts. Somehow I had gone from 339 to 140, instead of 340.

Friday 11/20/2020

I had set up an InstaCart order for delivery between 9-11. The shopper was at it by 8:30 and by shortly was on his way, estimated arrival 9:05. So I hung around until he came, put my few things away (stuff I’d forgotten in my Piazza’s run earlier, like laundry bleach), and then went for the full walk of the jogging route. I actually jogged about 30 feet this time, just to pass a lady with a couple of dogs who was slowing me down. It felt ok. Going to wear sneakers next time and try jogging a few blocks.

What else did I do? Somehow the day went by. I did go out for a shorter walk after lunch, so at least didn’t rot away in my recliner all day. Rhonda’s 4pm meeting was about how fast the pandemic is changing.

We are helplessly watching a perfect storm developing. The number of positive cases have spiked. The number of hospitalizations have spiked. The weather is colder encouraging people to the indoors. All at a time when there is a very strong desire to travel and gather.

She went on to say she had canceled her own family Thanksgiving (“causing some anger”) and was asking the staff to join her in a pledge not to attend any indoor gatherings this holiday season. Implicitly asking us to pledge, as well, although she didn’t say so.

Per the latest guidance from the county — which has just moved into the Purple tier — if we attend an indoor gathering, or travel on a plane, it’s 14 days of isolation on return. There’s a dis-incentive for gathering with the family. The limited program of allowing in-room visits is off again, as is the limited allowance of meeting in the floor lounge or dining area.

When we had one staff person test positive in the Lee center early in the week, the people with the contractor who were doing the moving of fifth floor campers back to their new apartments? Quit. Well, not quit, but called in sick. Out of fear of contagion. Moves that had been in progress were completed by our own staff, and we are talking to the movers trying to make them understand how contagion works. Meanwhile the schedule of the remaining move-ins is in jeopardy. (Later: back on track.)