Friday, 3/6/2020

I started the day with a run, which went well. I am pretty much back to where I was before taking a month off from exercise for the London trip. Next week I will try in a small way to pick up the pace, maybe actually timing myself to see what my baseline is.

Channing House has also hired a new fitness director, and it is in my mind to arrange a meeting and talk about resistance exercises, which has been an open issue since I dropped the YMCA back in July last year.

After the run I sat down to finish up my tax return, which I did. Happy to have uploaded all the PDFs and finalized the workbook. No doubt Katie at Wheeler CPA will have questions. Two unusual items for this (2019) tax year: one, about 25% of the initial fee I paid to join Channing House can be credited as a medical expense for continuing care. On the other hand: two, I sold 2340 Tasso for approximately $200K over the appraised value. I am very curious to see how those two offset, or don’t.

I had a delicious lunch of pizza. I didn’t mention that Wednesday evening I just felt like pizza, and walked out to a New York Pizza place on Hamilton avenue. I only ate half of a 12-inch pie, and brought the other half home. Today I pulled it from the fridge, nuked it, and had it for lunch. It was excellent.

Afternoon, I canceled two things and had more canceled on me. I love this XKCD cartoon. C’est moi, baby.

Some time ago I had bought a ticket to an SFJazz-sponsored concert with blues master Buddy Guy. It was to be this night, at the Paramount Theater in Oakland. Later I had accepted an e-vite from Suzanne and Chuck to a house concert at their place for tonight.

Realizing this conflict on Monday, I immediately decided, I don’t want the hassle of driving to Fremont, taking BART to Oakland, and return. Just… no. I had meant to just eat the ticket cost but today, SFJazz sent an email reminding everyone that (a) they are still holding concerts, just taking pains to disinfect all seats after every show; (b) but if you don’t feel well or don’t want to attend, you can turn back your tickets on our website. So I did that. I was too late to get a credit for the Buddy Guy show, but I will get an email showing its value as a tax-deductible contribution to SFJazz.

Which left the house concert. I’ve been to concerts at Suzanne’s place. She had commented on the Evite page yesterday that the concert was sold out. I pictured her living room packed with people, and thought to myself, no. Just… no.

Nobody there will have the virus, probably. But I do have some responsibility to my fellow Channing Housians. Somebody might have a cold, and if I get any cold symptoms, the CH instructions are to call the wellness nurse and self-isolate until you can be tested. Well screw that. I think I won’t take the chance. So I put my regrets on the Evite. And I’ll be staying in tonight.

Then, I had been booked to lead a tour at the Museum tomorrow, but today came the email: all public tours and demonstrations canceled until further notice. So my Saturday is suddenly open as well. Oh, and I was to meet Scott for a History Society thing on Sunday; that’s canceled as well. Kind of amazing how fast this is snow-balling.

 

 

Thursday, 3/5/2020

In the morning as scheduled, Ward from Valet arrived at 8:45. We talked at length about what he could and couldn’t do for my two main closets. He took a lot of measurements. We are to meet at the Valet showroom next Monday to see his design. Valet, and Ward himself, do a lot of work at Channing House, in fact his next appointment after me, was at room 612, just down the hall.

Oh, and there was a coincidence moment. When I led him back to the bathroom hallway he said, “Oh, you’ve been to Design Concepts!” Huh, said I. He pointed to the tall rosewood cabinet that was one of the pieces I brought from Tasso Street. He said he recognized it instantly as one that he had sold when he owned the Design Concepts store. Could have fooled me; all I know is we had that cabinet a good long time and loved it, and I still use it for all sorts of miscellaneous stuff.

Wait a sec. Checking the old home inventory file… wow! We bought that in 1994, it was custom-made, and we paid then over $3000 for it. No wonder I like it…

Anyway, Ward was done and gone at 9:30 and I drove right away to the Yosemite warehouse, arriving only a couple of minutes after the 10am start time. Spent the day continuing to open box after box on the hunt for the missing Ferrante plug-board. Saw some neat things in the boxes, including a huge (by which I mean like 3 foot by 2 foot) core plane. Zillions of tiny doughnuts on copper wire, just huge. Most core planes are relatively small and stacked in a module.

Back home to join an email discussion among the tech squad on whether, and how, to do video conferencing in place of things like floor meetings and events.

 

 

At 1am I woke up. Did the shuffle to the urinal, had a drink. Didn’t go back to sleep; instead came up with a new worry to gnaw on. I want to hang my big Carol Aust painting in the hallway, so it can be seen by others. Either outside my room, where only I and the lady across the hall would see it, or down by the lounge, where anybody going to/from the elevator can see it. That’s pending approval from everyone at the next floor meeting.

But then, my 2am brain realized, it would be so easy for anybody to steal it. Just lift it down, and down the elevator. To another floor perhaps. It might be a bit awkward to get a 5-foot by 2-foot framed painting out the front door, but it could be done. If the painting is outside my unit, theft is even easier; it’s only five steps to the freight elevator.

So I’m lying in bed, alternately wondering if I’d published a Tuesday blog post (I had written it but not hit “publish”) and wondering if there was such a thing as a theft alarm for paintings.

So I’m up looking into that. (clicky clicky) Surprisingly, there doesn’t seem to be any online info about how to secure a painting against theft, or any clever noise making alarms to prevent art theft. I can visualize something like a car alarm that is screwed to the inside of a frame, and triggered if the work is lifted off the wall. “STOP THIS PAINTING IS BEING STOLEN BEEP BEEP” and so on. But I don’t see that.

I believe I will consult at the frame shop where I had a print reframed last month.

Wednesday, 3/4/2020

So the actual day, when it came, was quiet. In the morning I worked taxes for a couple of hours and am at least half way through the workbook. Should be able to finish up on Friday.

Today, our new 6th floor rep, Jerry (who took over last month from Craig) announced the cancellation of the upcoming floor meeting. Shit being canceled everywhere. I should describe the Channing House virus actions, which are primarily in the Dining room. No more place mats (they are apparently hard to sterilize). No more salt/peppers on the tables (because they could pass virus from one person to the next). No more water carafes on the tables, ditto. No more self-serve salads or desserts; everything has to be served to you by a server, and once you have accepted your plate from them, you can’t hand it back for something else (because then their vinyl glove might touch your fingerprint and then be passed on to the next customer). All activities have been canceled, including two musical events that I was going to be the A/V person for.

After lunch I drove to FOPAL (yes, again) and did sorting until 4pm. Then back home and chill for the evening.

 

 

 

Tuesday, 3/3/2020

Shall I mention trivia? Fourteen months ago, specifically, Day 28, I mentioned having to buy a new belt. Well, over the past month, that same belt has developed cracks in the leather. Friday, I think it was, I ordered a near duplicate belt from Amazon, and it arrived yesterday by mail, only the mail wasn’t delivered at 6pm when I came out of supper, so I got it from my mailbox this morning. New belt.

First scheduled thing today was the annual meeting with my financial advisors. This was fairly short, quite sweet. I have enough money to support me in comfort the rest of my life. In fact, my rate of expenditure is less than the rate of growth of my investments, using quite conservative numbers. So barring a worldwide financial melt-down I will likely leave a pretty decent estate to my heirs. So that’s nice.

From there, about 11am, I drove to FOPAL and worked until 2:15 clearing out that other, stealth pile of computer books, that Frank had emailed about yesterday. I now have six boxes of “computer:priced” books, marked with prices, ready to shelve. Two weeks from now, I will shelve all I can, and then have several remaining boxes moved to our storage room.

Back at CH, Peter brought the scanner up and when attached to my computer — it failed the same as on his. We poked at it and speculated a while, then he left to price out a scanner of his own; and I worried at it some more. I figured out one problem was that both of us clever guys (and Peter is at least as clever as I am) had failed to notice that the flatbed-scanning piece was still in place. That’s a nice white piece of plastic that is the backdrop for opaque documents lying on the glass, while the light shines up from below. For transparencies, it is removed, exposing a moving light inside the lid that shines down through the slides on the glass. Removing it and restarting the scanner and the scanner app, may have made the difference. Something made the difference. By 4:30 I called Peter to bring his test slides back, and we successfully scanned one. He took the scanner back to continue working.

I had dinner with Craig, Diane, Margaret and Leon. People are watching TV obsessively to get early Super Tuesday election returns.

 

Monday, 3/2/2020

Went for a run, out the door at 7:30 on a morning almost warm enough to not need a jacket. This time I was able to maintain (my pathetic excuse for) a running pace the whole time. The first segment is hard, but then I get warmed up and things are better.

Then off to FOPAL right away where there was a big pile of books — unboxed books, just stacked loose — in front of the computer section. I complained about that to Frank; then got to work and processed the lot, which took 2-1/2 hours. Then did sorting until nearly 2.

During this period I got a phone call from a salesperson at Valet, the closet company. We set a date for him to stop by on Thursday at 8:45.

Back home I killed another item of the post-London to-do list: calling Road Scholar about my upcoming Switzerland trip. First I wanted to make sure they applied my $3000 credit (from the mix-up when I had to reschedule the Greek trip last fall) to this trip. OK, done. Second, to make sure that I had in fact bought trip insurance; I had. Third, to verify that if the trip could not be executed due to COVID-19 travel restrictions, the trip insurance would apply. It would. Done.

Before London, I loaned Peter my scanner so he could begin scanning his 35mm slides. He’s a smart and competent Mac user, but as of a couple days ago when I got around to asking him, he had not been able to make the scanner work for transparencies. So I called him and said the right thing is to bring the scanner back to my system where it was working 8 months ago. Then we’d know if the problem was the scanner or his setup. He said he had thought of one more thing to try, but will get back to me if that doesn’t work.

Late in the day, I got an email from Frank with a picture of a different pile of 9 or 10 boxes of computer books, stacked in a different part of the main room. Oh dear or dear.

 

Sunday, 3/1/2019

Slightly varying my hallowed Sunday routine, I did the NYT puzzle at home, with a cup of my own coffee. Mainly I wanted to really use my round “kitchen” table, on which I have a nice LED lamp which, it turns out, is perfect for doing a crossword puzzle under.

Then I strolled up University to Verve to read the rest of the paper.

On return I decided that an unscheduled Sunday was the right time to finally dig in to the tax return. There are two parts to this: one, gathering all the relevant documents, most of whose names start with “1099”, and scanning them into PDFs for uploading to the preparer’s site; and two, filling out the blanks in the preparer’s workbook. I completed step one today. I was able to use the contents of last year’s “Uploads” folder to make sure I had all the same stuff, and a little more (“1099S” is the report of proceeds from sale of property). Figure to do, or at least start, phase two on Tuesday.

Had lunch in my room watching the Stanford women winning at ASU. Friday night they lost to UA; today they had no trouble at all with ASU. This is the reverse of the usual pattern. Prior years, UA has been a push-over, and their arena has been very lightly attended, while ASU in Tempe is always hard to beat and their arena is packed, so if you wanted to attend, you needed to order tickets ahead. This year we are in upside-down world: UA’s arena was (as seen on the TV) full and they won, and ASU looked weak and their crowd, not so great.

Next I decided to begin implementing my plan to improve my “garden”, the collection of pots on the balcony. I’d put that off until after the upgrade; well, that’s now. I went to Summerwinds Nursery and bought four more pots, and two fuscias and a coral bells plant, and some potting soil, and a hummingbird feeder.

Came back, schlepped all that upstairs, potted out my new plants. Then there’s the Oxalis. I must post a picture of this. I spotted this nice prolific-looking plant outside a bank on Hamilton ave a few months ago. Small purple-bronze leaves, small bright yellow flowers, and it spills out of its container. I leaned over and snapped off a couple of shoots, took them home, rooted them. Fast-forward a few months, I have a foot-diameter bush of what Jean identified as an Oxalis variety, and growing very vigorously. So today I repotted it into my largest pot, and set it on its own wrought-iron pot stand. I expect it will turn into a fire-plug-size purple mound by fall.

Anyway, I now have something over 10 plants. I expect the fuscias will do very well here on the East side of the building. If they do, I’ll get more.

 

Saturday, 2/29/2020

Relaxed around the house until time to leave for the Museum to lead the Saturday noon tour. While relaxing, made the first move in getting my closets remodeled, by requesting a consultation with Valet Custom Cabinets, the closet contractor that I know is approved by Angela for work at Channing House. Also selected a smog test station.

Went to the Museum, led a tour for 15 people. Got a nice round of applause, and a “That was a great tour!” from a couple of younger guys. Nice.

Drove back up El Camino to the chosen smog test place, where I was in and out in about 30 minutes (one car ahead of me). So that’s done, except for paying the DMV license fee.

In the email, a note that the lobby art committee would be taking art on the theme of “World Wide Getaways: art found or made on some island” in March. I decided that my Pyrgos Doorway picture might qualify, so I printed that 11×14 and put it in a frame.

Feeling I’d accomplished enough for a Saturday, I chilled out for the rest of the day.

Friday, 2/28/2020

I went for a run this morning, the first time in almost a month, what with the London trip and all. Listening to my body, I slowed to a walk a couple of times in the first part; but after I warmed up it was alright and I jogged to the end.

At 10:30, one of the Facilities guys came by as scheduled to hang my pictures. I now have art on various walls and the place looks quite lived-in. The two big oils are waiting, propped up in the bedroom, until I can get approval at a floor meeting to hang them in more public places. Or not, and I’ll hang them on my own hallway wall.

At 11am, SFJAZZ summer tickets went on member sale, and I bought tickets for Marcia Ball for me, and Charley Musselwhite to share with Scott and June. At 12:30 I headed off to meet Scott for lunch.

From there, I went down to FOPAL, suspecting that the onslaught of computer books might have continued. It had, there were 11 boxes waiting. However, three of them turned out to contain boxes of software products, which go straight to the bargain room. I processed the remaining 8 boxes, ending up with a half box of good stuff I want to shelve for the next sale, and a box of saleable books priced, to add to the stack of “priced” boxes that will go in future sales.

I ran up past 4pm doing this, and had to hurry home to change and go straight out again for dinner at Don and Kate’s place. We all being SWBB fans, we watched their game at UA, and they lost by a couple of points in overtime. Very nice dinner, though.

 

Thursday, 2/27/2020

Oh dear oh dear, I seem to have missed a whole 2 days. First time.

This Thursday I started by driving to my clinic’s lab at 7:00, “NPO”, to give up a sample for a routine blood test. From there I took myself to a Starbuck’s for breakfast. Then I killed an hour sitting in the car in the Museum parking lot until 10am when I went in to lead a custom tour for “35 PayPal employees”. Chuck Rhino was the second docent. We split the group, and after ascertaining my half were all technical people, I took them into the 1401 lab and gave them an overview of software development, circa 1960, to give Chuck time to get started. Then the rest of my usual tour. They seemed to enjoy it.

It was now 11:30 and I headed off to join the other volunteers at the Yosemite site, actually joining them at an Una Mas where they were lunching. Except I didn’t get there until they had pretty well finished, so I got a burrito to go, which I ate half of while driving back to the warehouse. There Toni and I did cataloging, registering a set of blower fans from a 7094 (?probably?) from the Pierce collection that somehow hadn’t been cataloged along with the rest of the collection.

 

Wednesday, 2/26/2020

Off at 9am for a haircut. Another CH resident, whose name I should know and can’t recall, was just finishing up in Chris’s chair. “Oh, hi!” um, you.

Haircut done, I drove down to Menlo Park to the Stanford Blood Center and donated a pint of my best. My 81st donation, the nurse told me.

With time in hand I drove the length of El Camino to get the car washed; the first wash it’s had in months. Discovered a forgotten energy bar in the center console, so that was lunch. Then off to the dentist to take care of the broken molar.

Dr. Kono explained that the broken off piece was “porcelain” from a crown. The main biting surface of the crown is the gold face of it. This piece, sort of like a fender, doesn’t take a lot of chewing pressure. The exposed surface is a bit rough but not important. So one of three things. One, leave it alone. I don’t like that, my tongue finds the rough edge. Two, replace it, cut off the old crown, take an impression, have a new one made, etc. Or three, glue this piece back on, polish the face a bit so it has less biting surface, and hope it sticks. “50-50 chance,” he said. OK, let’s go with that. So in a 15-minute process he glued the piece back on.

I thanked him and went out to pay the bill. $399. Pretty decent pay for a total of less than 30 minutes work.

Now, an odd thing here. I felt quite comfortable reclined in the chair with my head tilted far back, but as soon as I got up, I felt vertigo, the first in some weeks. Walking the five blocks back home, if I didn’t keep a solid visual horizon, I reeled like a drunk. By the time I was in my room I was getting actively nauseated, seasick. Not good!

But I reclined carefully sitting up on my bed with my head propped forward, and read a bit on the Kindle and napped for an hour and — all better!

Later, I filled out my California primary ballot. I went down to the dining room, looked at the menu, and didn’t like any of the selections. So I went back up and got the ballot, put on a hat, and walked out. Dropped off the ballot in front of City Hall, and had a hamburger and shake at Walburger’s.