1.022 Tax, Marian’s tree, decorations

Tuesday, 12/24/2019

This morning brought an email from Angela the Empress of Upgrades (seriously, she does a royally fine job) with the word that my personal move-back date is 31 January. I have been to a couple of upgraded floors lately and my golly the difference is amazing; the hallways are so bright with new LED lighting and paint and carpet that it makes this fourth floor look like a dungeon.

I picked up yesterday’s mail after breakfast. It included a fat package from the Tax People, the official return on Marian’s estate. Bottom line, I am the recipient of 11 million dollars (settle down!) of exemption from estate tax. Since I presumably had a comparable exemption already, I can leave as much as $20 mil to my heirs tax free. Seems excessive. Earlier in the week I had paid their invoice for preparing this form, $1500. Now I have the form, it almost justifies the fee, it is about 5/8 of an inch thick and weighs at least a pound. Oh, wait, when I look at it, the great bulk of it is “exhibits” consisting of forms I already gave them, like Marian’s will, the old Trust document, etc. Well, whatever.

I went out to run a couple of errands and went by the tree we planted for Marian in Bol Park. It has one little green leaf at the top, all others are brown. I hope this is just winter time and it will start coming back in a few months.

In the afternoon I spent some time sitting at the keyboard facing my novel and deciding what to do next. Which will probably tearing up and rewriting the last 3 chapters I wrote.

 

 

 

1.021, FOPAL, game, rug

Monday, 12/23/2019

Went for a run in 50º chill. Felt ok. Then to FOPAL for four hours of work. And then home feeling a bit sore, promising myself “Two ibuprofen and a nap”. Treatment applied as directed, and I felt much better.

Did a couple more tutorials in the game. It begins to get hella complex; as the “commander” of the nascent mars colony you are to simultaneously manage robots extracting minerals, robots doing maintenance on machinery that continually breaks down, personnel assignments in the dome, keeping colonists happy so they don’t go back to Earth, building new facilities, earning money by shipping minerals back to Earth, and on and on.

All of which brought this thought up. We used to worry about violent video games teaching violence, Grand Theft Auto teaching disrespect for the law, etc. Well, Surviving Mars is just one of a whole genre of games where the player has to administer something, balancing complex nets of resources. Stellaris is another, and all the Civilization series where you have to build a nation from scratch. So, do these games teach management skills? Are players who excel at them, good at allocating personnel and resources in real life?

Late in the afternoon, a call from the desk, you have a package. I went down to get it and it was (ta-daaa) the rug I ordered from Amazon. It came as a roll 8 foot long and about 10 inches in diameter. So, not a thick luxurious rug, but I didn’t expect that. I left it rolled up and stowed against the wall. I won’t see it until move-back day.

I should mention that I checked in with Dennis on Thursday and again this evening. Toni had an operation on her foot earlier last week. As of Thursday, Dennis was a bit troubled because she was invalided more than they’d hoped. Today things were a bit better; she was getting around and beginning to work at home.

Day 21 a year ago, I started cleaning out the pantry of jars and boxes of staple foods I would never use; then attended the movie Bohemian Rhapsody.

1.020 wasted impulse, SWBB, game

Sunday, 12/22/2019

Coffee, newspaper, puzzle at the old stand, the P.A. Cafe, driving there in light rain. Coffee over, I was thinking about what to do with the rest of the day, and I really must learn to control this urgent feeling of needing to do something with my Sundays. This time I thought about a story in the paper about a Christmas market in the Ferry Building. I’ve walked through the Ferry Building market before, it was pleasant; what the heck, let’s drive to the city and do that.

As I went North on 101 the rain became heavier, and was torrential when I reached The Embarcadero. There were no obvious places to park and it was miserable out. This is really stupid, I thought, and decided to, as the GPS likes to say sometimes, “Make a legal U-turn…” and headed back the way I came. The rain continued very heavy, wipers on high and big puddles extending into the freeway traffic lanes at several points. Nasty driving.

Back home, I began to play the SWBB game at Texas, that started recording at 10am. Texas although unranked, seemed to have an excellent defensive plan. At any rate, Stanford shot terribly, 19% in the first half, trailed most of the game, got within 2 points several times in the final minutes, but lost. Their first loss of the season. Actually, it might be a good thing. They won’t be burdened with a #1 ranking next week, and they’ve had some weaknesses exposed they can work on.

For lunch I didn’t like the look of the menu at CH, and walked up University to Wahlburger’s (the rain had vanished) and had a very nice “burger bowl,” basically a salad bowl topped with guacamole, a burger patty, and bacon.

In the afternoon I started exploring a new computer game, Surviving Mars. I got it as part of one of the Humble Bundle discount packages. I worked through two of the early tutorials and it looks like it could be fun.

 

1.019 solstice, blood, phone, lunch, dinner

Saturday, 12/21/2019

The winter solstice, huzzah. One memory I retain from childhood was that my mother always noted the solstices. “December 21st, the days will start getting longer,” she’d say, with the clear suggestion of warmth, light, spring, to come. Of course, it’s a more meaningful turnover at the latitude of Tacoma, where winter days are significantly (and depressingly) shorter than here at the latitude of SF.

Post-breakfast the next scheduled thing was lunch with Scott at 1pm. What to do in the meantime? Well, I’d recently had an email from the Stanford Blood Center, my O+ type was in short supply. So I drove around to the donation center and donated. It’s actually close enough, only a couple of blocks off the route of my usual run, that I could walk there. But then I’d have to walk back while short a pint of red cells. I don’t think so.

I was pleased by my vitals: BP 105/63, pulse 60, hemoglobin 15.3, temp 97.79.

From there I came around to the T-Mobile store on University. Here’s an oddity: when I checked before departure, using Google maps on the laptop, it assured me there was a T-Mobile store there. But when I looked on the phone using Apple maps as I walked up University, Apple Maps didn’t know about it. Fortunately Google was right this time.

My desire was to switch the account so that the phone I always carry, ending in 1986, would be the primary, and the -3645 number, which I loaned to Jean, the secondary. When I first created the account (about ten years ago?), -3645 was my only cell phone, and -1986 was the land-line to our house. Two years ago I killed the land-line and moved the number to a cell, which was added as the second line on the account.

Problem is, when I try to log in to my T-Mobile account, it wants to send a TFA text to -3645, which is useless because that phone is at Jean’s house. The chap at the store said he could fix that, went away to the back, came back to verify which number should be which, went away, came back and said it was alright, I’d just have to “enter my PIN” when I logged in next, by which I assumed he meant the code sent by text.

So I just tried it; it says “there’s no primary account holder, enter the PIN you got at the store.” Fortunately it also was willing to take the last four digits of my SSN. And it still shows -3645 as primary and -1986 as “other line”. And it still doesn’t send a text to -1986. I assume a text showed up on -3645 causing Jean to wonder, if she even notices. (Later I got a text with a number I assume was the PIN. Later still, I tried logging in again; there’s no change. Looks like I’m stuck with -3645 as the main.)

Lunch with Scott was fun as always, and we tried Georgian food. I had a monster cheese boat, which the waiter should have advised was really meant as a shared dish.

Dinner was the Webster Street Grille reservation organized by Patty, featuring me, David and Helen Golden, and David and Mary Sue (I think?) Thornton. Three Davids. Lots of pleasant conversation, except that I was depressed to find that almost everyone at the table believed that Saunders and Warren are unelectable and only Biden could beat Trump. Post-traumatic stress of the Boris Johnson win in the UK.

 

1.018 Laundry, Docent

Friday, 12/20/2019

I had booked a slot in the laundry calendar for 7am, so I could start my first load right after I got up, at 6:30. By 9am I had it all done and folded, and my red CHM Docent shirt ironed and ready to put on.

Left at 11am for the museum where my 12 o’clock tour had about 18 people to start, and most, say 14, stuck with me to the end. It’s interesting how some people are just hanging on my every word and enjoying my little witticisms, and others are listening but orbiting around, looking at the exhibits and circling back. I think as a guest, I tend to be that type.

I did something the afternoon but can’t recall it now, next morning. Alas, a significant act lost to history. Oh, one thing was, I wrote up how I’d replaced Chrome with the Brave browser, and sent it to two other tech gurus, Craig and Bert.

1.017 Shustek, Concert

Thursday, 12/19/2019

Drove to the Shustek center in Fremont to spend the day cataloging new acquisitions with Sherman. Nothing of any great significance. A Palm Pre from 2010, Palm’s attempt at matching the iPhone, which would have been two years old when this came out. For fun we plugged this one into a USB port on a laptop and Windows 10 quickly mounted it as a drive, and we explored the pictures the donor had left on it. Nothing exciting, but Gretta emailed the donor right away, asking if they minded or would want it wiped.

The evening’s plan was to attend a Voices of Music concert. The venue was new to me, the Community School of Music and Arts, a nice and new-looking institution tucked into the San Antonio Circle cul-de-sac. My ticket said 8pm, so I left at 7:15. The CSMA parking lot was full, but I followed signs to “more parking” which led to an alley that was also full, with a harried attendant directing a line of cars to “make a u-turn and leave” because this lot also was full.

Glad I allowed extra time, I drove further along San Antonio and then a side street where I found a legal spot, and walked back to the venue, where I found that the concert had just started. Huh? “Did you not get our email with the 7:30 start time?” the nice lady asked. I guess not. Later I checked and it was in the spam folder.

Anyway it was some Handel and some Vivaldi. Two artists were featured in front of a dozen local violins and celli. One was Christopher Lowrey, a counter-tenor, singing several arias from 16-century operas written to be sung by castrati, men castrated early so their voices wouldn’t change. In modern times we don’t do that. Lowrey was very good and got a justified standing-O. The other was violinist Alana Youssefian who played the lead in a very complicated, virtuosic concerto.

One year ago I was just starting the downsizing process and learning what widowerhood meant. In hindsight I’m kind of amazed I was already throwing stuff out only two weeks in. But on the other hand, why not, and what else did I have to do?

 

1.016 FOPAL, SWBB

Wednesday, 12/17/2019

Out the door for a run at 7:30 to find, whoopsie!, it is raining. I knew showers were in the forecast but could I be bothered to go lean over the balcony railing, or to look for green pixels on the weather radar? Oh no… but what the heck, it’s just sprinkling, carry on. So I did, and while my jacket got damp, it wasn’t bad at all.

I hung around the room doing I do not recall what until lunch time. Today was the day the CH publication, Scribble & Sketch, was to come out and go on sale at 12:30. So my plan in the morning was to have lunch, buy a copy, check how prominently they displayed the poem I had contributed, and then go on to FOPAL. But coming out of lunch I completely forgot about buying an S&S, just headed down to the garage and out.

In the evening I learned that they had completely sold out their (obviously inadequate) “print” (local copy shop) run and were taking orders for later. Anyway I got four useful hours in at FOPAL.

When I returned to CH I discovered that there was a local power outage and the building was dark! Well, not entirely; they have a generator which, among other things, keeps the automatic garage doors working, and lights on in the garage, the basement hallways, the lobby and dining room, stairwells. It also runs the freight elevators but not the regular elevators. So I walked up from the basement to the 4th floor, which like all floors above the first, was dark.

Apparently the power problem started at 4:28, which was just about the moment I left the FOPAL parking lot. Now, residents gathered in their floor lounges by flashlight to listen to announcements on the house emergency radios. Every floor had somebody manning the hand-held walkie-talkie for the floor, and everybody observed orderly radio procedure. The front desk made brief announcements, including that supper would go ahead as scheduled.

In the lobby I talked to the head chef and he explained that they had partial power in the kitchen, and their ranges and ovens were gas, so they could finish preparing the main entrees. However the heating on the serving line is induction plates which were not on the emergency power system, so they’d had to dig out the catering trays with the bottled gas flames. Also the dish washers are not on the emergency power, so they’d had to switch over to all paper.

When I got into the dining room I found that they had, indeed, in the hour between the outage and serving time, re-laid all the tables with plastic utensils, paper napkins, and little plastic bottles of water. The serving lines were filling paper plates from catering trays, and everybody got fed.

About 6:10 the three people who were riding with me to the game finished eating and we all trooped down to the garage and drove to Maples in my car. Probably another 10 from CH also went. (Why don’t we have the CH bus available for these games, there’s enough people to fill it? was a topic at dinner.)

Anyway, Stanford romped over Tennessee, leading by 10 at the half and winning by more than 20. Wally had attended the pre-game chalk talk and said the coach’s emphasis for the game was “box out” and rebound. Tennessee has no players under 6 feet, and more than one 6’5″, so it was important to work extra hard for rebounds. Stanford apparently took this advice to heart, as they ended up with 10 more rebounds, quite an achievement against average-taller players.

 

1.015 coffee, deskwork, movie

Tuesday, 12/17/2019

Met with Harriet at the PA Cafe to chat, mostly to hear about her trip in the Hurtigruten up the coast of Norway to Tromso to see Northern Lights.

Back home I tackled a stack of stuff on my desk. Paid a couple of bills. Called the bill-pay outfit to ask about Anthem (see 1.012). That service rep had no clue, “Call Anthem”. The Anthem rep couldn’t say what Bill Pay might be expecting, but said she uses a like service to pay her insurance, and notes that there is an option to simply define the name and address of the payee. She was right, and I recalled doing that at one time. So I did that, defined Anthem’s payment address to Bill Pay and ordered it to pay this payment of $20 right away. Hopefully it will go through.

Cleaned up several other minor paperwork items as well. After lunch, I actually did some writing on the novel. Not adding a lot, but expanding one key conversation to set up a plot point. Well, not nothing.

I had a ticket for Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old, in 3D at the Century in San Mateo. Figured I would have supper somewhere near the theater, and so should leave about 5. When will I ever learn? Of course it took an hour to go the 10 miles from Palo Alto up 101 to San Mateo, so by the time I was at the theater it was 6:15 and no time for a restaurant meal. Fortunately the theater actually had fresh Pizza Hut pizzas, so that’s what I ate, sitting in the fine reclining lounge seat. As this was a “special event” there were no previews to watch, either. Not that I missed them.

I respected the movie for the fine technical work that went into it, converting shaky old 1915-era film to watchable, color, 3D images. And if you didn’t know a lot about the Great War, it would have provided a good historical intro, with a lot of realism of life in the muddy trenches, surrounded by corpses and rats. They had a voice-over script of the actual voices of veterans, describing their experiences, and selected the images to illustrate what the men were saying.

For my taste, it was a shallow introduction, mostly because I’ve been steeped in the week-by-week review of all fronts of the war in the Great War YouTube series. The movie was limited strictly to the British experience — reasonable, since the source material was all from the British War Museum — in France. Also, for narrative structure, they talked about joining up, then training, then life in the trenches, then one long sequence describing a typical battle, then the end of the war and going home.

What was lost compared to the video series was the understanding that the war was fought on multiple fronts, east, west, and south, by soldiers from a dozen nations; and that the British (and every other country’s men) didn’t fight just one great battle, but multiple battles large and small, back and forth over the same terrain over the span of the four years. Well. Not sure what they could have actually shown, and stayed in a two-hour film.

One silly little thing that stood out in all the lingering close-ups of the British soldiers? My gosh but the common Brit of that era had awful teeth! It was so noticeable that their teeth were in really bad shape, showed in every smile and grin.

 

1.014 FOPAL, tech call

It turned out in hindsight that the Cardinal did something special beating Ohio State last night. A week earlier, Ohio State had won over the #2 ranked team, Louisville, behind a breakout performance by a highly touted freshman player. In last night’s game, said phenom had zero (0) points. So Stanford (i.e. Tara) had prepared a perfect game plan for this threat and the team executed it, and easily won over a team that had beaten #2. So maybe we deserve our current #1 ranking in the polls.

Monday, 12/16/2019

Went for a run in 50º weather and felt good. That was a pleasure because last week I hadn’t felt all that great, just a bit off, but now all was fine.

Drove to FOPAL for the post-sale cleanup. Counted my section, 406 books before, 330 after, so 76 sold. Purged about 4 boxes of books that had been sitting around for 3 sales or more. Only one box of new donations waiting, shelved three books. Did sorting for two hours.

Back at CH I took on a tech squad call. Judy, like a lot of people around here, gets her email “@yahoo.com”, but actually reads the mail in the Mail app on her iMac. For some reason recently, Mail could no longer pull mail from Yahoo, and Judy was cut off. Mail (which I don’t use) apparently calls on the “Internet Accounts” panel of the Settings app. I’d never paid any attention to that panel, either. Anyway, what Judy sees is, the Settings app popped up in front of the Mail app, asking for her Yahoo password, which she had, it seems, forgotten. Peter worked on this the day before and got nowhere. Craig asked me to look at it, suggesting that I try to work through Yahoo instead of Mail.

That was a good suggestion. As soon as I went to yahoo.com in her Safari browser and clicked Log In, Safari happily offered to fill in her user id, and then offered to fill in the password for that user. Perfect. So we still didn’t know the password, but we were logged in. Go to “account management” and change the password to a new one. Fortunately Yahoo, unlike some sites, did not ask for the old password when taking a new one! With a new password set and tested, I could go back to Settings and put it into Internet Accounts. When I restarted Mail it immediately pulled in several days of mail. Yay!

Ate dinner at a table with one of the several other Davids in this place, and Colin and two guys whose names I should know but don’t.

 

 

1.013 Sunday, play, SWBB

Stanford volleyball started slow, behind as much as 6 in the first set, and I’m thinking, oh dear, this is going to be another five-set marathon if that. Then suddenly, with the score Stanford 14 Penn State 20, they woke up and ran off a bunch of points and finished the set 25-22. And just dominated the next two sets to win in a sweep. So they are off to the final four.

Sunday, 12/15/2019

Coffee and paper at the PA Cafe. Then drop in on the FOPAL sale room before anyone was there, to tidy up my section after Saturday’s sale traffic. Move books back to their proper sections (why do books from the adjacent Business section get shelved with mine?), neaten the rows, etc.

Showering this morning I noticed that my last bar of Pear’s Soap is diminishing. After breakfast I checked the shelves of CVS and Walgreens. No bar soap of any kind. Hmmm. I seem to have missed a general social transition to liquid bath soaps. I don’t care to use a bath gel, I’d rather rub a bar on my bod. Well, a repeating theme lately. I try for a product in the local stores. Then, 30 seconds at amazon reveals exactly what I want at a reasonable price with free shipping. It is so easy to fulfill any wish…

I don’t think I mentioned that among all my other activities yesterday I ordered the 8×10 area rug I want. A week ago I spoke to Angela the Upgrade Honcho and she said of buying a rug, just be sure to have it in house before January 10th, when the freight elevators are restricted to the move. Store it in your temp room and we’ll install it on the move. So I looked it up again on Amazon and it was in stock with free Prime shipping — which actually means something for a package that size, about half a cubic yard and heavy.

Then I headed out to see You/Emma at the Pear theater. This is a one-woman show in which the actress rehearses the plot of Madame Bovary, alternating between, one, the persona of Emma Bovary, two, a modern woman reflecting on how Emma’s life might have been in this century instead of 1840, and three, Gustave Flaubert (the same actress wearing a black wig and giant moustache, on a TV screen at the side of the stage). At some point in the past, Flaubert was quoted as saying “I am Emma Bovary”. In the play, Emma argues with him over his treatment of her, and his lack of insight into her plight and circumstances. It was quite clever and well done.

The play ran from 2pm to 3:30pm. Then I had an hour to kill before a SWBB game at Maples, my third time at Maples in three days. Stanford played Ohio State, which I had thought was ranked, but checking now it isn’t in the top 25 in any poll. They looked big and athletic in warm-ups. And Stanford had four players in street clothes, including two sometime starters, so I expected a competitive game. Stanford quickly took a lead and widened it steadily to the end. Six players scored, three of them freshmen. This is one solid team.