Day 297, en route to Athens

Wednesday, 9/25/2019

Of course I couldn’t manage to stay asleep until the alarm went off. I got up at 2:40. At 2:55 I got a text saying the Uber I’d scheduled for 3:15 was five minutes away. So I headed out — and then immediately headed back, because I was briskly walking to the elevator without my bag. Sheesh.

Uber

driver was clearly a refugee from the 1960s, long hair and mumbled to himself all the way to the airport. Well, not mumbled, but talked a monologue about politics most of which I couldn’t get over the road noise. At SFO, surprise, the

doors to the security line

and gates don’t even open until 4am! So much for being two hours early for flights. Mine nominally boards at 5:40. And nobody manning any of the Delta, or other, desks.

A few dozen people around the security entrance were occupying every available seating space. I found part of a bench down a hall, and had time to pull out the Chromebook and try it using, for the first time, a different wifi. Seems fine if a little slower than normal. (Chromebooks seriously need an internet link to be fully usable.)

I’m not TSA precheck for this trip. Although both Road Scholar and KLM know my number, that somehow didn’t get passed to Delta for my online check-in. So I had to do the full thing, take off shoes and belt and put laptop in a tray. I didn’t care on this trip, since it would only have saved me time on this one boarding. For the return flight, I would need Global Whatsis, the international version, which I only just learned about this month.

The first leg,

SFO-JFK, was as nominal and routine as a flight can be. Boarded on time. I’d deliberately selected a seat at the way-way-back, row 42, because I didn’t care how long it took to get off the plane and two, I thought they would board the back rows earlier than the front ones. Nope. I can’t figure out what Delta’s algorithm was, but the biggest group (after three different classes of Privileged Folk) was Main 1, and they mostly sat in the middle. I was Main 3, last group. So I was a tiny bit apprehensive that my bag would not actually fit under the seat. But it did, just. We had a tail-wind and the pilot proudly announced we were 25 minutes ahead of schedule on arrival.

I won’t say the five hours flew by but at least they passed quietly. I had a couple of short naps, even. And listened to a lot of podcasts and music. After landing I had to go from C65 to B38, nominally all the international terminal, but in actuality requiring a shuttle bus ride. As I was striding along from the bus into the B-gates terminal it occurred to me that I was striding, carrying my bag, moving right along. Marian and I took several flights in 2016-17 when her mobility was increasingly impaired, and using wheelchair assists to get from gate to gate, and always trying to plot the shortest walking route. Today I consciously savored the feeling of being freely mobile, realizing that it is not a given, wondering how long I’ll have it.

Anyway that got me to B38 with a bottle of OJ and two hours to kill before the

flight to Athens.

Which is a bit delayed. The Aux power unit (APU) on the aircraft needs service, with the result that the plane has no air conditioning and “it’s about 95 degrees on board” according to the flight officer who came up to the desk to explain the delay. 15-30 minute delay in boarding — they say. So not an on time departure. Wonder when it will go?

Answer: it pushed back an hour late.

And that was Wednesday.

Day 296, meetings, waiting

Tuesday, 9/24/2019

Today was the special kind of day, the getting-ready-for-a-trip day. Or as it usually works out for me, the already-set-to-go-burning-down-time day.

First thing, 6:20, 24 hours before departure, I went through the KLM info page to check in for my flight. Ooops, it says, online check-in not available, use a kiosk at the airport. Oh well. Ten minutes later, I get an email from Delta, “Hello, David, time to check in for your flight.” I use that link and no problem, print boarding passes, good to go.

Rechecked my bag, reviewed my plans, done. Took the car out and had it washed. Killed some time. At 3pm it was the monthly meeting of the Tech Squad. Some issues with the new style of house phones that are being given to residents who request a wireless, carry-around handset. Some issues with coverage for wifi in the refurbished floors and what they will do about weak spots. This was of interest to me because when I move back to #621, which is in the corner of the building, coverage may be weak.

At 4:30 it was time for the monthly A/V committee meeting. Assignments for events in October were passed out, none to me. I’m to pick a couple and shadow the operator, which I will do after the trip.

Finally I requested a wake-up call from the desk, picked up my mail, and left my mailbox key for Craig who will check the box from time to time for me. And went to bed early, anticipating a 3:00 alarm.

(Edited at SFO because I couldn’t be bothered to do a post last night.)

Day 295, FOPAL, singing, packing

Monday, 9/23/2019

Went for a run in the morning, the first one in a week, also the last one for two weeks, because I don’t plan to go jogging out of a hotel in Athens or Heraklion or wherever.

Went to FOPAL at 10 and worked until 2. There were 8 boxes of computer books waiting. Chuck, the guy who trained me in managing the computer section, joined me at 11 for a refresher in pricing, and we did the last four together. Then I sorted donations for two hours, bringing a great deal of order to the chaos of the donation room, which was satisfying. Grabbed a couple of protein bars at the grocery for lunch and headed back.

Napped, and almost overslept the time for the singing group meeting, which I’d been recruited for back on the activity expo day. My voice is… I can still carry a tune, I don’t think I sang any sour notes, but my range is about |that| wide, so I’m forever having to drop an octave for the highest notes or go up an octave for the lowest.

Had supper sitting alone. Afterward, despite my best intentions to put off packing to tomorrow, I couldn’t resist, and packed up. Everything indeed fits easily into a carry bag. It’s one piece of a three-piece set of Victorinox luggage from way back. There was a big suitcase, a small roller bag, and this carry bag, or carpet bag, or gym bag: like a giant purse. I’m pretty sure it fits under an airline seat, even full. We sold the big bag several years ago. I still have the roller bag and had thought about using it for this trip, but I wanted to try using the little one.

Everything I need for two weeks, on the assumption that I do hand-laundry every third night, fits. Including a nice adapter that converts a Euro two-prong plug into a US three-prong plug PLUS two USB charging ports. The chromebook and its power supply slips right in, and I have nice noise-canceling ear-buds to plug into the phone or the airplane audio; and speaking of the phone, I have a power brick that will charge the phone at least three times over. All in the bag, which weighs out at 16 pounds.

Day 294, lunch, book

Sunday, 9/22/2019

Did the NYT puzzle then went out to coffee at Mme. Collette’s. From there, walked up to Walgreen’s on University and bought a travel-size deoderant stick. I’m just about equipped for my upcoming trip.

During the morning and again in the afternoon I put in a couple of hours on the novel. I’ve just about finished the light edit I’ve been doing and getting to the part where I need to make big readjustments to fit the ending I plotted, and to once again start producing actual new prose. That will all really happen when I get back. Having a two-week trip blocked out makes all planning split in three: things that have to get done before the trip, and things to be put off until after the trip, and the various meetings and stuff that I can’t do because I’ll be away then, sorry.

At noon I went to join Ian and Jean who had invited me to lunch, which also included Ann, Michelle, whom I hadn’t met before, and Mildred, ditto, who just moved in this month. Mildred took unit #521, directly below my proper place. Michelle just lost her husband this February. She shared that with me but we didn’t chat about bereavement after.

Everybody has such interesting back-stories. Ann did research in the use of lasers for opthalmology at NYU and at SRI; sold medical lasers for Spectra-Physics; then did a career turn and trained in Transpersonal Psychology and geriatrics. More notably to me, she told me she had gotten my book from the library and was enjoying it very much.

Ian was a theoretical physicist and lecturer at Oxford for decades. (Which well-qualified him to introduce me to the A/V equipment this week, I guess.) He met Jean at a physics conference at Brookhaven lab where she was doing research in optical coatings, which she turned into a business importing optical coating materials and crystals for lasers from China. From Oxford and London they ended up at Channing House because this is where Jean’s mother lived her last decades. Michelle was born in France, met her husband Alex at Harvard, and in Palo Alto taught for years at the prestigious Castilleja school. Alex (recently deceased) taught physics at Stanford and among other things, created the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve and was its director for 20 years.

At 4pm I went down to the Auditorium where Lily (who had invited me to dinner on Day 275) presented a showing of one of the cooking shows she produced and starred in, back in the 90s. It was quite charming, “Healthy Wok-ing with Lily”; her bubbly personality and cute Chinese accent, and her evident knife skills, could have stood comparison to any of the other cooking shows on PBS in that era. Unfortunately she had a grant sufficient to produce only four, half-hour episodes, which were bought and are still being shown on a local cable system in Carlsbad, CA. It’s a pity; with proper promotion and representation it could have been a bigger success. Well, she got a cookbook out of it.

From that, not wanting to go to the dining room again, and also not feeling particularly hungry, I got in the car and wandered over to midtown, thinking maybe I would have my favorite Red Curry Duck at Indochine. But Indochine didn’t look open, or if it was open nobody was there. I didn’t feel like Mike’s. I wandered over to the other side of the street thinking I might have something at the P.A. Cafe, and I finally ended up having nothing for supper except an ice-cream sundae at Baskin-Robbins. Well, it was all I wanted.

Day 293, docent, quiet afternoon

Saturday, 9/21/2019

Today I was scheduled to lead a private tour, that is, one requested by some group, not a regularly-scheduled one. The group was from the Buddhist temple of Palo Alto. The leader was disappointed there was only the one docent. I signed up for this some time ago, because I like private tours: I can go slower and run over the 1-hour limit on the scheduled tours. But the leader complained, with justice, that he had phoned Poppy the person who schedules these a week ago, to warn her that he would have a full group of 38 people, and requested two docents. Somehow that message wasn’t effective, or at least, Poppy didn’t do anything to recruit another docent, like sending out an email, that I recall.

Wait, let me check. Yes, in an email on Monday the 16th, she requested a docent for a private tour on Wednesday. In that email, she also listed three other private tours, Thursday, Friday, and then this one on Saturday with the note, “1 more docent needed.” But that didn’t draw any response, not surprisingly since it was the fourth request down in a long email. Pretty clearly the Museum is either short of docents, or long on private tours. And they have recently reduced the paid staff, including the woman who was in charge of recruiting docents.

Anyway, we proceeded, and I held the attention of most of them, there were still at least 30 with me at the end. So it worked out.

Back home I ate lunch in the dining room, and later supper, and this may be the first time ever I ate all three meals there. I’ll note that the chef is really trying. The entrees tonight were 1, Salmon Teriyaki, 2, Duck meat (breasts and thighs, your choice) in gravy, and Pepper Steak. There was a vegetarian dish as well, and green beans and bok choi. The salmon was perfect; the duck was nice, I passed on the steak. And Saturdays are do-it-yourself Sundae days, two drums of ice cream with scoops and ad-lib toppings on the side.

After lunch I spent an hour working in my Lisp textbook; otherwise I pretty well wasted the afternoon.

Oh. On the “should contact Katie” issue. Actually not just Katie but I’ve not contacted her mother or sister either. So yesterday I sent a cheerful email giving my updated postal address, to anybody in my contacts list I thought might ever want to send me a card or something. I was careful to include Katie’s mother, sister, and friend/caretaker Michelle. Figuring that, maybe they’d take the excuse to write back. But so far, a couple of other people did, but not any of them.

Day 292, goodby Safari, art, lunch

Friday, 9/20/2019

First thing this morning, while sipping coffee and waiting for the newspaper to slide under the door, my Macbook said, you have updates. Fine, what? Oh, just a new version of

Safari.

OK, install that.

When I set up Godot, I had opted not to use Chrome. For years I’ve had the habit of using two browsers: Firefox always open with my Gmail and some other routine tabs, and the other browser–which on the big iMac is Chrome–for general and ad-hoc browsing. On Godot I thought I’d use Safari for the ad-hoc browser. That worked more or less well but there were some problems.

One was that Lastpass is essential to my browsing, filling in passwords and credit card numbers as required. Lastpass doesn’t work super-well with Safari. Unlike with other browsers, where it is simply a browser extension, with Safari Lastpass needs its app open all the time, and the app window often pops up annoyingly when it is trying to fill in fields in a Safari page. But I coped.

Another was that WordPress, where I post to this blog daily, had some issues with Safari, and would occasionally forget posts if I forgot to refresh its page carefully before starting a new post. But I coped.

This morning, when Safari restarted in its updated version 13.0, it put up a message: “Ublock Origin is not compatible with this version of Safari.” Nope. Nope nope nope. Ublock Origin is the best ad blocker, I have it everywhere. I will not try to use any alternative. Goodby, Safari. Chrome come back! All is forgiven! Google, track my every click, I don’t care. (Although I see that Chrome intends to restrict its API the same way, making UBlock Origin impossible there as well. At which time I will switch to Firefox for everything.)

So, at 9 I headed off to join Darlene and Jessea to view some

art

by Carol Aust. As I wrote before, I had originally planned to buy a painting, but it had been sold last week. We walked from D&J’s house to Carol’s which by pure coincidence was just four blocks away. It was a 1920’s Oakland place on a block were every other old home showed signs of remodeling. Definitely a neighborhood on the way up. Carol welcomed us in, and Darlene immediately engaged her in house-talk, comparing the ages of their homes and the details. Jessea and I walked around looking at the dozen or so large paintings she’d set out. Some of them had elements of the “Eight Pelicans” that I liked so much, but none resonated the way that had. So we chatted for a while and I gave her as many clues as I could about what I was hoping for, and we agreed she’d keep in touch. I think that by spring when the Hunter’s Point Open Studio event comes around again, she’ll have something I like.

From there we drove to the The Wolf for lunch. Formerly the Bay Wolf, and coincidentally, according to Darlene, just a few doors from where the Lacrampe family had a French Laundry back at the turn of the 20th century, where Marian’s parents worked a while early on.

Back home I did my laundry, taking two heavy naps while the first and second loads ran, the result of a heavy lunch and a beer.

Day 291, Shustek, dinner

Thursday, 9/19/2019

Drove across the Bay to the Shustek center where I and the other Dave spent the day cataloging part of a large donation of Teletext equipment that, in the 90s, was used by WTBS in Atlanta.

Back home, I met with Lynn and Florence for a supper date organized by Patty. Patty, who’s a fairly strong-minded person, had us each tell our life story, high school through our first job. Interesting people. Florence’s father was Bruno Rossi, a well-known physicist. Her family fled Italy in 1939, just ahead of WWII, ending up at Cornell U. where she was born. Some of her education involved a year at the Sorbonne. And so on. All much more interesting than my life. Anyway, good practice in listening.

Day 290, haircut, book, FOPAL, A/V

Wednesday, 9/18/2019

This morning I was scheduled for a haircut at 9am, so, as with the prior morning’s 9am flu shot, I wasn’t able to go for a run and instead did exercises in my room. Then out to have Chris cut my hair as she’s been doing since the 1970s (when I had a lot more hair to cut). Back to C.H. for an hour working on the novel. Then to FOPAL where I found seven or eight boxes of books waiting for the Computer section, and spent three hours in total culling, pricing and shelving.

Got back to C.H. just in time for a 4:15 appointment with Ian to be shown the A/V equipment, which is quite extensive. I learned where pretty much everything is. Since there was a lecture at 7, I ate a quick supper then joined Bert, who was doing the A/V for the lecture, and shadowed him — learning several things about the systems that Ian hadn’t thought to tell me.

In fact we the A/V team had a fairly public screw-up. The speaker, a very affable and easy-going (fortunately) Stanford history prof, wanted to start his show with a short video from Vimeo. The prof was supposed to have arrived well in advance of the 7pm start so we could set him up. You need to get the lapel mic and transmitter on him, and you need to connect his laptop to our video projector, and get it ready to show the video, followed by a smooth transition to his power-point slides. On a laptop you’ve not seen before.

He didn’t arrive until 6:55, when a fair number of people had already filtered in and sat down. So we had to set up his stuff with lots of people watching and under time pressure. We set up the video easily enough, although this was one of the new Macbooks that has no old-school USB, and no HDMI, just a selection of identical USB-3s (“lightning” connectors). Bert had a dongle for this that broke out an HDMI and an old-style USB from a lightning port. Right away the Mac found the HDMI, and here my experience with Macs was a help, Bert is a Windows guy and didn’t know how to make the Mac mirror the displays instead of treating the external projector as a second screen. That set, we verified the power point (actual Power Point, not Mac Keynote) worked. And cued up the video full-screen ready to start.

UN-fortunately in the rush, neither Bert nor I thought to check whether we were getting any audio. And we weren’t. Without audio, the video wasn’t much help, so the speaker just said, forget it, let’s go to the slides. I still don’t know what the problem was, although I’m pretty sure we could have worked it out had the guy actually showed up when asked.

I think Friday I’ll take my laptop down and see if I can make things work.

Day 289, grief, flu shot, more

Tuesday, 9/17/2019

Last night I had a bit of grief flashback, which is lingering into the morning. It started when it came to mind how I’ve ghosted Katie. Backstory. Marian’s brother Emile had two sons, Paul and Mark. Mark is currently head of a radiology group at a Seattle hospital. Paul married Katie around 1998, and they opted to start a farm on San Juan Island, in Puget Sound. Marian and I visited them in 1999 while they were still camping out on the land — we helped construct a roof over the latrine in the woods! We visited the farm again and again over the years as they built a very nice house and developed a thriving organic produce farm. Marian loved the place and loved Paul and Katie, who returned the affection. She took great delight in helping them organize things, and in just doing routine household and garden work, and loved to interact with their son, Quinn.

20070824_2874-m — Marian spent many hours tidying the flower garden in front of the house.

g903p02020over20the20stile-l — In 1999 Marian and Paul celebrate finishing the fencing around the property with this stile.

In 2015, Paul died of brain cancer, leaving Katie and Quinn to carry on. Quinn has since graduated high school and begun attending a small college in Southern California.

A year later, Katie was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimers. We last visited in 2017, when Katie’s deficits were starting to show. Fortunately she and Paul had built up enough savings that Quinn is assured of money to finish school and, when the farm is eventually sold, Katie’s care will be secured for as long as she needs it.

Just after Marian’s death I got a very nice card from Katie, heartfelt but also showing deficits in spelling and limited word choice that made clear that her alzheimer’s was advancing.

So the thought that intruded on me last night, not for the first time of course, was that “I really should communicate with Katie.” Or at least, check in with her friend Michelle who, last I knew, had shouldered the job of managing Katie’s affairs, hiring attendants to mind her and watching her finances. But when I really thought about doing that — I got a wave of emotion such as I haven’t had for months. And now while I write this. Marian loved that place and those people so much… I can’t ever go back there, I don’t want to think about it or them… but I feel a duty to make some kind of contact…

Well there were other things today. At 9am I went to the auditorium where a flu shot clinic had been set up, and got my flu shot. At 11am the Creative Writing group met. I’d been urged to participate. The exercise this was was to write something based on a list of words, which I did. Each of the eight attendees read out their creation. It was interesting to see how different people spun different paragraphs from the same words.

After that I spent an hour working on my YA novel. Then it was time to meet Scott for lunch, except he emailed to say that today President Trump was speaking just up the road from the Alpine Inn where we were to meet. He couldn’t exit 280 there, and I was stuck in stopped traffic on Alpine road. Via cell phone, after struggling with poor reception, we managed to redirect to another place.

In the afternoon I got an email saying that the new Schwab accounts were now set up, and when I log in to Schwab, I am now the proud owner of six (6) accounts. So I sat down and set up a new spreadsheet for tracking these. I had kept Marian’s spreadsheet updated for a few months (starting on Day 68, I see), but there would be such a massive change in the structure when the house closed, I stopped updating it. Now I’ll begin again, with initial values today and then when Schwab’s monthly statement intervals come around.

In the evening I watched the end of SYTYCD and a couple of other recorded items. The Ken Burns series on country music is piling up and I haven’t started it yet.

Day 288, FOPAL mostly

Monday, 9/16/2019

The weather guy on the TV news talked about light rain, and when I headed out the door at 7am for a run, indeed the ground was damp. By the time I’d finished the running part and was walking back down Homer street there was a nice light shower getting me wet. The temperature was nearly 70 regardless and it was quite comfortable and fun.

A bit before 10 I drove to FOPAL for the post-sale cleanup. This time I had been asked to do pre- and post-sale counts of my section, so I counted the books as well as inspecting each and deciding to keep it at the current price, reduce the price, or give up and send it to the bargain room. Bottom line, of the 366 books in the section before the sale, 86 were now gone and presumably sold. Don’t know if that’s good or bad. With an average marked price of about $3, that’s over $200 for the library, anyway.

That took two hours, then I spent another two hours sorting. By then I was a bit tired, so I bought a few groceries and headed home. Had a nap; went downstairs for a light supper; then back for a quiet evening. Feel a bit sub-par and weary. Hmm: over 10,000 steps today.