Friday 8/21/2020

This morning I scraped out the very last grains of my coffee. Peets’ has completely screwed up my subscription. Supposedly they send me a pound of Gaia Organic Blend every three weeks, with the last shipment to have been on 8/14. That order stayed in “processing” status for 3 days until I called. The lady said they had had a computer problem, very sorry, she would start a new order with a 20% discount. They refunded the cost of the lost order; and yesterday they charged my card for a new order, but it also has not shipped, and now I’m out.

Since the blood center yesterday said “no strenuous activity for 24 hours” I decided to have a walk instead of a run, and in fact, to walk to Peets’ at Town and Country and get me some coffee. Which I did, a half pound of Gaia Organic ground the way I like it. (They don’t offer my preferred grind on their subscription scheme.) I was in the store for a very brief time; everyone was in masks and distancing like mad. Cleaned my hands with alcohol on exit.

I made some progress on the Ford model and should finish it this weekend. Fussy stuff, attaching tiny bits of chrome and clear to finish the exterior, and attaching wheels.

Mid-day, Prudence, the CH Newsletter editor, asked for a story on the volunteer thing. So I wrote a 300 word piece for her.

At Rhonda’s open meeting, there was as usual good news and bad. Good: the second round of testing of dining and office staff had all come back negative, and restrictions were lifted. The dining staff is now able to put away wearing face shields over their masks, and allowed to come out of the kitchen. Which means, they will be able to resume delivering meal carts! Not sure if that is good or bad news. We have volunteers booked to do that through next week. Also unclear at this point whether the other volunteer tasks are to continue. Marcia and I will confer tomorrow and then try to get some clarity from H.R. person Kim.

In other news, owing to forest fires not that far away, just the other side of the Coast Range — Big Basin Redwoods park was destroyed yesterday, the oldest California park; I’ve been there several times; it’s a 30-minute drive, about — anyway, while it is highly unlikely that Palo Alto would ever be under evacuation order, the management have been updating their crisis plans again. If anyone feels nervous and wants to go and spend time with friends or relatives in another area, they may, and they won’t be required to do a 14-day isolation on return, assuming no symptoms. There was some amusing discussion of how to choose a refuge. Rhonda said, approximately, “If you have a choice between a healthy friend with a small house with no AC, or an aunt with a big house but she is coughing and has a fever, well, I know which I’d pick.”

Rhonda said their first response to evacuation would be to shelter in place; our building is made of concrete and steel and not in the middle of a forest. If they do have to evacuate, they have plans to bring in buses and plans for places to go. And everybody is to find that “go bag” we were all gifted last year and make sure it contains what you would need for a stay away.

2020 just keeps getting better and better, you know?

Thursday 8/20/2020

Thursday washday. Well, not wash, but the day a bag of linens and towels shows up outside my door. Make up the bed, clean the bathroom and kitchen, sweep, swiff, vacuum. All done by 10.

Spent a bit of time on the Ford model, and almost threw it in the bin. Yesterday I had attached the incredibly small and delicate outside mirrors. Today, trying to insert the interior/chassis unit into the body, I managed to break both, and knock a tiny chrome bit off the counter. I went looking for it but was muttering how if I didn’t find it, I would write off the whole project. I’ve learned a lot from this model, mostly by very painful trial and error. Anyway at the last minute I found it, and so continued.

After lunch I went and got the car and headed out to the Stanford Blood Center donation site a mile away in Menlo Park. Many many times before I had done whole-blood donations, but this time I had booked an appointment to do plasma apheresis. Why ever for? Oh, just for a change. Of plasma.

Fifteen years ago some researchers made some headlines by showing that if they transfused the blood of young mice into old mice, it reversed some of the effects of aging. Nothing much followed on those headlines until recently, when the same researchers, who’d been plugging away all these years, issued new research showing that the rejuvenating effects did not come from an infusion of young plasma, but simply from replacing the plasma, period. So I’m thinking, hey, I know of a free procedure in which they take away a couple pints of your plasma, and you get to replace it. Why not donate plasma, thereby doing a good deed for someone, and find out if replacing one’s plasma a fraction every four weeks, has any effect like replacing half of it in an old mouse.

Maybe I’ll turn into a mouse?

Wednesday 8/19/2020

When I stepped into the living room at 6:10 I immediately could smell smoke. There are numerous fires burning to the west, across the Coast Range. The air looking East was thick; I couldn’t see any hills. At that point I scratched the idea of taking my usual Wednesday run. No need to inhale a lot of smoke. (Setting aside that for a couple of decades in my middle years I was smoking over a pack a day of Pall Malls. Ah, good times. Which brings to mind that when we quit smoking — I’m sorry to say I don’t remember the exact year, sometime in the 1980s — I promised myself that when I turned 80, I would take it up again, smoking cigars. Not allowed at Channing House. Still, come the end of 2022, I might go out to a park and smoke one cigar, just for the heck of it. But I digress.)

All I did of a practical nature was to move everything back into my new closets, which about half filled them. Lots of open shelf space. The rest of the day I alternated between reading (a fun little SF book, book one of the Murderbot Diaries series) and working on the 1953 Ford model. That was quite frustrating.

The model suffered an irreparable loss, I’m afraid: the passenger side door handle. The door handles were chrome bits. Each one was about, well, when you next clip your fingernails, look at the paring from your little finger. That’s the size of the little chrome-plated plastic door handle. There were two, left and right, and while I was applying the driver’s side one, the passenger side one… took a walk. I have no bleepin’ idea where. I spent half an hour carefully taking everything off the work area, shaking out my clothing, down on the carpet with a flashlight. Just not to be found. I seriously thought about chucking the whole project; even more so when a few minutes later I found that the tiny little chrome spotlight doesn’t fit where it’s supposed to go. Well, spotlights were an option, along with the continental kit. I definitely won’t install the parts for the continental kit; I disdained those when they were a real thing and I wouldn’t tart up a model with one now.

I managed to fit one of the side mirrors, which comes as two tiny chrome pieces, and put the thing away for the day.

I’m giving many side-long glances at the tractor model Laurel sent. It’s on the media stand by the TV. It’s quite large, as models go, roughly 1/16 scale. I spent some time at online hobby shops trying to see if there were materials to make a trailer for it to tow, like the one that I, Dennis and Laurel remember so clearly. However it requires the rear axle of a dual-tire truck. So, buy a truck model and take the rear axle? Well, problem is, all the truck models are 1/25th scale, too small. So maybe no trailer. I can see my way to scratch-building the bed of the trailer, which was just 1×10 planks laid crosswise and bolted to a couple of squared-off tree trunks. I can remember how there was a pair of rusty carriage bolt heads at each end of each plank. Well, such things are available, scale model lumber and rivet heads and so forth, from the model railway suppliers. But I don’t see much chance of getting proper size wheels.

For entertainment I tried watching the movie La La Land, which is a cheerful musical set in Hollywood. I bailed on it in about 8 minutes. Just did not resonate with me at all. Very glad I did not pay to see it in a theater, which I seem to remember thinking of doing, back when it was in first release and being highly praised by critics.

So I watched the first episode of The Expanse and then one of Travels in a Narrowboat.

Tomorrow, something completely different!

Tuesday, 8/18/2020

Up at 4:45am to dress and make a cup of coffee before the scheduled meeting of volunteers who are willing to deliver newspapers! About 95 newspapers arrive every morning at 5:30am: SJ Mercury, WSJ, NYT, Chronicle. The distributor has marked them with the subscriber’s room number. They have to be sorted by floor and put in a cart and delivered, slipped under the room door. I’ve always been pleased that about the time my coffee water is hot, around 6:15, the paper magically appears.

This is one more of the jobs that staff said, could be handled by resident volunteers, freeing up an hour of staff time. It took a while to find enough volunteers but I finally had five, and we were all to meet this morning and try out the job. Well, not me; I am the coordinator and I have no plans to be up and dressed and in the lobby at 5:30 on any regular basis.

Today, I got one sip of my coffee and then realized that, owing to mask regulations, I couldn’t take the cup with me. Unless I wanted to suck coffee through the mask. Rats.

Anyway, it all went well. The morning staff guy, whose name is Beethoven, has decided he will keep the sorting job. But he will turn over a cart full of nicely-ordered papers to a volunteer at 5:45 each day, to be distributed to all nine floors. The five volunteers organized themselves into a schedule, two of them taking two days so we have seven day coverage, and we’re off.

Back to my room to drink cold coffee and skim the paper, then back down to check on the start of the breakfast meal delivery. Staff still is worried about power outages, so all meal carts have to take the freight elevator, and I wanted to make sure those volunteers got that word. And back to my room again to await the crew from Valet custom cabinets to build my new closets.

Here’s the deal on the closets. Two big closets in my bedroom, which date from the late 60s when the building went up.

The doors are heavy, and they always seem to be in your way no matter which side you want. The drawers are crude by any woodworking standards. When I moved in they had a nasty sour mildewy smell. Last July I spent some time in the basement workshop, sanding the insides of the drawers and coating them with Varathane. That got rid of most of the smell and the splintery bits but they still were heavy to slide. So that was then.

The new doors, which are not fully installed because they ran out of track? Or something? Anyway they are 1/3 width, triple-tracked, so you can expose 2/3 of the closet. And they are light and roll smoothly. And the drawers have handsome bronze handles and are soft-close, just a little push and they swooosh themselves shut.

I have to move a bunch of those shelves from the default spacing the installers left them at. But after I do there will be a nice array of bankers’ boxes in the hall closet, and a couple of shelves for model building supplies, and so on. That’s all for tomorrow.

Monday 8/17/2020

After my run, I waited around until at 9am I was called for the monthly COVID screening test. The procedure seems to be improving; I don’t think the swab got past my eyeballs this time. Before it went back past my ears, I think.

Then I tackled what I thought would be a big job: emptying my closets. Well, two of the four closets in this apartment. These are the bedroom closets, two large (but not walk-in) closets that have all my clothes plus a number of banker’s boxes of stuff.

The reason for the clean-out is that tomorrow at 8am, the crew from Valet is coming to start work on the closet remodel that I contracted for back in February. Remember February? I barely do. Anyway, everything had to come out. It really only took half an hour to move stuff out and pile it, clothes and shoes on the bedroom floor and the boxes on the balcony. It will take a bit longer to put it all back, but that will be fun: deciding how to organize stuff in my new remodeled closets.

The rest of the day was refreshingly free of meetings or other external responsibilities. I spent a couple of hours putting the chrome onto the Ford model.

I had been looking forward to this for some time. It had to wait until the paint was completely done. The “chrome” is a very thin foil that came in a single sheet (underneath the car in the picture). Remember how in high school you would pop a stick of Wrigley’s and then spend ten minutes carefully peeling the silver foil off the wax paper backing? This is the same stuff. Well, not really. It is “real metal” according to the maker. With a very sharp X-acto knife you cut around a strip of it, lift the incredibly delicate foil off the backing, and place it over a piece of the model. Then you carefully but firmly emboss and burnish it down onto the plastic, using a fingernail or a wooden toothpick. It forms nicely around every detail and with sufficient care you can get it looking pretty much like real chrome. Don’t do it carefully enough and it tears, or the toothpick makes a tiny hole, and you get to scrape that piece off and do it again. Which I did, frequently.

Tonight I prepared sign-up sheets for next week’s meal delivery and package reception and passed them to Marcia to fill in the people who have requested consistent gigs. Tomorrow I will publicize them so the eager volunteers can jump on the remaining slots.

I also set up an Instacart order for tomorrow, with a few things for me and a couple items for the Allens. Nobody else on the floor wants to participate in group grocery buys any more. I suspect that some people are going directly to the stores on their own, trusting in their masks. I can’t judge; I’ve gone into two drugstores recently myself.

Sunday 8/16/2020

I was awakened a 5:25 by a very loud clap of thunder. I got up and stood out on my balcony in my bathrobe watching the show. I wondered if I could photograph it, but how? Flashes were coming at one or two minute intervals but what are the chances of clicking the shutter at the right time? Then it occurred to me that the phone does video (now in hindsight, I realized that so does the Nikon, and at higher res). I shot several segments of video that contained lightning strokes. Later in the morning I edited them into a little video, and was able to pull out some nice still frames. Here’s the best.

Three volunteer meetings were scheduled for today. At 11, those who were interested in watering and tending indoor plants were to meet with the head of Housekeeping, who has been minding them. Previously we had a contractor who maintained the plants in the lobby and the penthouse on the 11th floor. With COVID, contractors are not permitted in the building. Housekeeping has been doing it; now Marcia led 6 volunteers to organize themselves to do the job.

Meanwhile, Facilities manager Chris B. met with the small group who wanted to do outdoor gardening. Neither of these meetings required me, but I went to the lobby to kibitz. While I was there at about 11, I got an email from Elizabeth on the staff, saying that owing to the lightning storm (which was completely over by then) they were worried about power outages, so the lunch meal carts would again need to use the freight elevator. I moved over to meeting the lunch volunteers and pass this message before climbing the 90+ steps to the sixth floor to wait for my own lunch.

At three I went down again for a meeting I’d called: the trash pick-up volunteers, again with Chris B. Except Marcia, who was there marshalling another set of volunteers, said, “Didn’t Chris call you? He canceled to next Sunday.” No he didn’t. He apparently called four of the five volunteers, but not the fifth nor me. Humph. Climbed the stairs again (well, I didn’t do any walking today, otherwise).

Went down again before dinner to make sure those volunteers were OK. Also at this time, I picked up a package: the John Deere tractor model from Laurel had arrived. I’ll have pictures of it later. It’s not exactly a scale model, more an elaborate antique stamped-tin toy. It is recognizable as a tractor of the same type we had on the Ranch in our childhoods, but needs lots of detail. Talking to Dennis later, he said to make it complete I really need to also model the trailer my father cobbled up from a truck rear axle and some fir logs. Hmmm. I said, sure, and I should also make a nice diorama for it, with a scale model barnyard with scale model cow-pies.

Saturday 8/15/2020

Morning of a heat wave. For the first time ever I took my coffee and paper out onto the balcony. Very pleasant.

At 9am I walked over to the bank to deposit a check; then to the CVS on University. I was braving an enclosed space because I wanted a bottle of isopropyl alcohol, a simple thing that is useful cleaning up paints and stuff on the model. They didn’t have any. Apparently it’s a COVID casualty?

From there to the Farmers’ Market, where all I bought was a single packet of raspberries. Back home I considered. I could eat the raspberries right now, but I’d really like to have a little sugar on them. I don’t have any sugar… and my eye fell on the bottle of hummingbird food.

Story here: The number of hummingbirds that populate the artificial cliff-face of Channing House East side is growing. One might almost call it a swarm. Any time you are on the balcony or near a window your eye will be caught every few seconds by the darting motion of a hummingbird, usually chasing another hummingbird. Last month they were emptying my feeder in six days; now it is more like three.

I’m not complaining, but the problem is keeping the food in stock. Back on Tasso street we mixed our own, one cup white sugar to four cups water. I don’t want to stock sugar, don’t have the big 1Qt pyrex measuring cup, etc. So I am buying it, in 64 oz plastic bottles. Initially from Amazon but last time they were only offering like 3-week delivery times, so I ordered from PetSmart. They said “we shipped!” on the 10th but now are predicting delivery on the 17th. Meanwhile my 64oz jug has been drained except for dregs. Dregs that I poured over the raspberries in a bowl and they were delicious.

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On the way back from the market I saw another resident sitting in the driveway, trying to make his new garage clicker work with no success. I shared with him that was my experience, too. He was more adventurous than I, though. He got out of the car and stepped further down the curving ramp to where he had a clear view of the entry gate. From there, the clicker worked! The problem had been that, if you stopped where you previously stopped to wait for the gate to open, you were out of line with the receiver. You just had to roll another car-length down the ramp.

I went inside and retrieved my clicker from the front desk where I left it last night, took it outside, and verified that from the correct angle it worked.

So after eating lunch, I went down and got the car off the street, drove to Midtown, got a bottle of isopropyl from the CVS there, drove back and put the car away in the garage.

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While my two loads of laundry were running, I got in a couple of hours work on the model, lots of little bits of detail painting, also sanding and polishing the body paint.

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The way we are scheduling the meal delivery, the package reception, and the market cart operations is with online sign-up sheets. I put up a new sheet, announce it on the BB list, people can grab the times they want to work. Some people are not happy with this. They want the certainty of knowing they will be working every Tuesday Lunch, or whatever. Marcia ran an opinion poll and got about 20 responses from people with this desire.

She and I were to meet at 5 to talk about this and orient two new delivery volunteers. But then everything got crazy. There’s a heat wave, and the utilities are predicting possible periodic outages. So Kim Krebs wrote us at 4pm that for the evening meal, dining services would be putting two bottles of water on each tray, and the delivery people need to point these out to each resident, explaining that they are for drinking water in the event of a power outage. Our pumps are not on the emergency power system, so in an outage, there’s no water to floors above the 2nd: no drinking, and no flushing. (Well, you get one flush, as Kim pointed out.)

So Marcia and I met in the lobby and talked over the scheduling thing. She is willing to keep track of the people with fixed time preferences. Each time I make a new sign-up sheet I am to send her the URL. She will fill in the desired times of those people before we make the sheet public for other signups.

Then we were getting ready to explain about the bottles when Kim emerged from her office with new news: deliveries are to use the freight elevator, not the normal ones. Because the freight elevator is on the emergency power system, and they don’t want to risk a meal delivery person being caught between floors when power cuts off. That meant that we would be wheeling carts to the south end of the first floor, which is normally off limits to residents, to separate us from staff. And using the big, slow freight elevator, and coming into each floor through a very stiff door.

The first cart, for the second floor, had to be brought back, because some kind of fire door was closed across the 2nd floor elevator access. Facilities manager Chris H to the rescue; he went up and released all the fire doors, and put hinge blockers up to hold the stiff entry doors open.

So that was all settled down and operating by quarter to six and I came back to my unit, just in time to realize that this was the night when I’d canceled my dinner request, figuring I would order pizza or something. Now it was 6pm and I was hungry and tired. So I had a wonderful supper of sandwiches, a cheese with mayo and mustard, and a PBJ. And a beer.

I tried watching the highly rated A Star Is Born remake from 2018. I enjoyed the first 30 minutes of it but then I could see it was going in a dark direction with the girl’s career going up and the drunken cowboy’s career headed down. I don’t like dark. So I paused it and peeked at the Wikipedia entry.

First surprise there was, oh, that’s Lady Gaga, doing a terrific job of acting like a perfectly normal looking person. Then I got to the spoiler section, AKA the plot summary, and, yup. Not going there. So I watched another episode of Travels in a Narrowboat to cleanse my palate and went to bed.

Friday 8/14/2020

On the way out to my run I checked in on the meal delivery people who were doing just fine. Normal run. Then I checked in with Selma, who was to shadow the paper delivery person this early morning. She had, and told me all about it. I think this may work with only the few volunteers we have. So I sent an email telling them to meet on Tuesday morning at 5:15 to organize themselves. I suppose I’ll have to be there also.

Following which I had a pleasantly un-booked morning. Did some work on the model. Then it was noon and I went down to check. I had to do something but darned if I remember what.

Four o’clock and time for Rhonda’s weekly meeting. The second round of weekly testing of all staff has come back negative. One more week of negative tests and the staff will be able to stop wearing masks even when alone in their offices. The on-going survey testing will reach my 6th floor this coming Monday; that’ll be my third time tested.

In other news, the garages are once again open, we are free to come and go to them any time. However we have to remove the old windshield dongle and use a new, larger remote. It’s basically a normal garage door clicker, a box with a button that clips to your visor.

It was now 5pm and the meeting was continuing, but I Left the Meeting (much easier with Zoom than a physical conference) and went down to the lobby. First to check on my evening delivery crew, one of whom hadn’t done the job before. And second to pick up my new garage remote.

After getting the delivery crew squared away, I headed down to the garage by the new, simplified route (same as the old pre-quarantine route, through the basement) and got the car out for the first time in a couple of weeks. The clicker worked to open the garage for exit. I drove around for ten minutes to let the 12V battery charge, and then headed back. And the new clicker did not work to open the door for entry. I parked on the street and went in to report the problem. Left my clicker at the front desk to be debugged by Facilities.

What should I watch tonight?

Thursday 8/13/2020

By the time I finished the 7:30 aerobics, showered and dressed, it was time to start walking to meet Harriet for coffee at Midtown, and to return a book she loaned me weeks ago. What with that 3-mile round trip and other activity, I see that I now have 4.6 miles on the day. Which understates it, because the times I have remembered to have the phone in the pocket of my shorts during the aerobics class, it has registered almost half a mile in that half hour. So, a 5-mile day. I am impressed with myself.

On return I addressed two open issues with volunteer coordination: the newspaper delivery and trash pickup. For the newspapers, I only have four names, and I expect that is not enough to cover a demanding, 7-day 5:30am round. Of course we could do fewer than 7 days. But key is to know what the job actually entails. I lucked into info on this. One of the four is Selma, who is in a way an oddity: she has no computer (other than in iPhone) and doesn’t do email. I have not yet learned whether that is a philosophical stance or what. Anyway, I had to call her up to chat and she said she likes to be up by 5am, and had talked to the staff person who does the newspaper round. We agreed that tomorrow she will shadow that person on their complete round, and report back on how it’s done and long it takes, etc.

I went down to the lobby at 12 to make sure the meal delivery was alright, there was one newbie to orient. While there I talked to Marcia, who is charging ahead organizing the gardening volunteers. She has scheduled Facilities Manager Chris B (there are two managers, both named Chris, but this is Chris B not Chris H) to meet with the garden volunteers on Sunday (Chris B works Wed-Sun, overlapping Chris H), to learn where the gardening tools are kept, and what he wants them to do and to avoid.

Well, Chris B is also the keeper of the trash pickup tools, and I happened to be standing there when he came by to pick up his lunch tray, so I was able to arrange with him to orient the trash volunteers on Sunday afternoon.

So that was those two categories settled for now. One of the lunch volunteers was late, but did arrive and I showed him the ropes and sent him off with a cart. With the lunch delivery in full operation I could return to my room and wait for my lunch. After lunch I had a short nap and then set to work on cleaning the unit. Change the bed, wipe down the bathroom, sweep and swiff and vacuum.

Which almost brought us to dinner time. I went down again and fortunate that I did, as the first cart came out of the kitchen early, at 5:05 instead of 5:15. I took it around, and by the time I got back, the other vols were there, so I could retire again and put my feet up. Thus, a 5-mile day.

Maybe I’ll watch one of those movies that have stacked up.

Wednesday 8/12/2020

There were new volunteers to orient for breakfast, so I dressed in regular clothes and went down and did that. Once they were all off moving carts ok, I went back upstairs, changed into shorts and t-shirt, and went for a run.

I had a good part of the middle of the day to work on the model car. I got the cockpit mostly complete.

I had a tragic loss, though. They had provided a tiny decal for the dashboard clock face. Which is just over 1/8 inch in diameter. With my X-acto I carefully cut it out. Then I was trying to pick up this little 1/8 inch circle of paper with my sharp tweezers, to dunk it in water and slide it off onto the clock, and… somehow I flipped it up and it vanished in the general direction of my lap. I searched and searched. Maybe it’s in my clothes, I dunno, but it is not to be found. The decal for the speedometer was slightly easier.

It’s really silly to put so much work into these bits because once this is inside the body of the car, you would need a dental mirror to actually see them ever again.

At 4, Rhonda had a special meeting to announce changes in the plans for the upgrade project. By moving both 3rd and 4th floor residents together, which they have vacancies to do, they will be able to do both floors at once and complete the entire project just a year from now.

Also announced was a tentative plan to take half of the independent living units on the 3rd and convert that wing into assisted living units for “high functioning” people who nevertheless need help with ADL. This would relieve some log-jams in demand for both skilled nursing and AL, and enable using the present AL units in the other building for people who need more care, short of SN. It doesn’t really affect me, so I am neutral on the point.

Immediately after that meeting I went downstairs to orient two new meal delivery volunteers. And so it goes. Lots of emails to help people sign up for volunteer work, or get un-signed up when they can’t make it.

But things are running pretty well and I think will need less hands-on attention now.