Day 257, drawers, lisp

Friday, 8/16/2019

Started again with an early run. Then I went out in the car to the hardware store. I wanted supplies for two projects.

The first is cleaning my carpet. I had a little coffee disaster Thursday morning: set a fresh cup down without looking, and it caught the edge of the table and tilted onto the floor. I wiped and sponged it up with many paper towels but it left a pale brown mark in the carpet.

This is not a major issue because I move out in two weeks, and when I come back in January, the floor in the living room will be wood-grain vinyl laminate, not carpet (and the carpet in the bedroom will be new). It’s a minor issue because I’ve got visitors coming Sunday and would like to not be embarrassed by a coffee stain on my carpet.

Thursday is cleaning day and Wanda, my housekeeper, worked on it and improved it some. But today I wanted to get some stain-removing carpet product and do some more cleaning. The reason I took the car is that I didn’t think the hardware store would have that, and wanted the option of going on to another store. In fact they had a spray that promises to remove “…coffee…” and many other stains. On return I applied it and it had some effect. I’ll do some more tomorrow.

The other project is the drawer project. I bought some 220 sandpaper, a couple of cheap sponge brushes, and a can of clear satin finish Varathane. I took two drawers, one shallow and one deep, down to the residents’ workshop. I dug around and found a nice little orbital sander and it took half an hour to sand the insides of the two drawers and vacuum up the sawdust neatly. Then I applied one coat of Varathane to the insides. This was the first time I’ve used the type of disposable brush that is basically a gray sponge on a stick. It works pretty well. It holds and releases paint differently from a hair brush but it did the job.

Later in the day I went back and brought the two drawers up. The varnish is hard to the touch but a little soft to a fingernail, so I don’t dare put anything in the drawer until it has dried further. But they look better and smell better than before for sure.

In the afternoon I spent two hours working through a couple of chapters of the Lisp tutorial. The basics of Lisp are radically simple; it is famous for having brutally simple syntax. But there are many subtle surprises and the tutorial I’m using (as I said, the least bad of the ones I’ve sampled) does nothing to help the beginner. It’s quite annoying, to a person who has written tutorials, to be the victim of these pedagogical oversights. They’ll drop in some item that they haven’t defined and don’t explain, and I’m saying, “Wait, what? Where did that come from?” and then I go and google around and check the couple of other references I have open in browser tabs, and work out what is going on. And say, “Why did you drop that on me now, and why didn’t you explain it when you did?” OK, example. Lisp syntax is simple and regular. Everything is expressed as open-paren, function, arguments, close-paren. Add: (+ 3 5) evaluates to 8. Compare: (> 9 1) evaluates to T. Divide: (/ 5.5 2) evaluates to 2.75. There is no expression syntax like in other languages — I thought. Then I meet this in the section on comparisons, where they tell me to try

(= 3/1 6/2)
T

Wait, what? What the hell is that? Lisp doesn’t do expressions with infix operators! It took me 45 minutes of searching different sources to work out that an “atom” of the form two integers with a slash (no spaces) is a special class of number called a “ratio”. It makes excellent sense once you understand it; it allows Lisp to retain values like 10/3 with full accuracy, where in other languages it would be evaluated to a floating point 3.33333… with the inevitable loss of accuracy that entails.

But the tutorial just started using these ratio numbers without introducing them, with no discussion or explanation. They had talked about “basic data types” early on and never even hinted there was anything beyond numbers, strings, and lists of those. Just terrible pedagogy.

Day 256, docent, Yosemite, supper

Thursday, 8/15/2019

Starting a long busy day I didn’t exercise, but had breakfast in the dining room. On Monday I had seen an email from the museum about a private tour Thursday morning that needed covering. On Tuesday I had checked and it still wasn’t covered, so I reluctantly decided to do that tour and join the archival crew after lunch. So I left at quarter to ten for the museum where I met with a nice group of a dozen high school students in some kind of Stanford summer program. They paid attention pretty well, and Pat came in entirely of his own volition and gave them a 1401 demo, which they loved, as everyone does.

Drove to Yosemite where Aurora was trying to get people trained in her grand plan (see Day 242). Unfortunately there were not enough laptops to get everyone working, and I and Toni ended up sitting around at loose ends. So I left early.

In today’s mail: the replacement checks from Schwab, that I only ordered two days ago. Way to go, Schwab!

I had been invited to supper by a couple, Mary and Andrew. Turned out they had also invited Lily and her sister (name forgotten), both residents but living on different floors, and Michael, the “newer new guy” who came in last month. Lily is vivacious and talkative, and promoting her harmonica playing group and wants me to help her get her book of daily meditations online as an ebook. She’ll be my neighbor when I move to the 4th floor. There was some talk also of my book, in which people expressed interest.

Michael indicated although not in any detail that he was a recent widower; some remark about “this last year has been such turmoil” or such words. And there was some talk about how hard it is for everyone when they are trying to downsize. I didn’t contribute to that although I certainly agree.

In the evening I joined an audience of 50 or so in the auditorium to view a documentary on the life of Judy Garland.

Day 255, lost to posterity almost

Wednesday, 8/14/2019

This was the first day so far where I completely failed to do a blog post. Not even remembering to do one in the morning of the next day, as I’ve sometimes done. Well, now it was 30. hours ago, what did I do?

Went for a run, I remember that, starting early, around 7:30, because the forecast was for heat and indeed it was already warm by the time I returned. About 10am I left for my haircut, the appointment I had flaked out on last Wednesday. From there to FOPAL to cull and price and shelve computer books, and then to sort for three hours.

At some point along there, I got a text from Chuck saying the buyers had indeed opened an escrow with that $81K nonrefundable deposit. Back home I found my new key to the workshop in my mailbox. I’ll put that to use on Friday, I think.

I believe I ate supper at Rosina’s table. There we go, timeline patched up.

Day 254, quiet day

Tuesday, 8/13/2019

Started by driving to the Y for a little exercise. On the way back I stopped at Tasso street, where I found the cleaning crew at work. My only reason was to check on the oval mirrors. Back when we remodeled the bathroom in 1974, the wash basin was built into a custom triangular vanity in the corner. Rather that putting up conventional sheet mirrors making a right-angled box of mirrored wall, we (with some trouble) managed to find large oval mirrors for the two walls above the basin. g901p20220marian201989-m

Here’s a picture from 1989, showing the mirror on the right. There’s a matching one on the left. So during the current work the painters had taken the mirrors down, and I wanted to reassure myself they were still around. They are, stored in the walk-in closet in the back. However the painters removed the hooks they were hung on, and patched the wall. So new hooks have to be put up to re-hang them.

I let Chuck know about this, in case the buyers asked, how are we supposed to comb our hair, then?

The rest of the day was pretty quiet. I spent about three hours collecting links to a variety of online Lisp based ebooks. I sat down with my Lisp IDE and worked through the first chapter of one tutorial, and then of another, trying to judge which was the better. Neither is good, but the worse one, unfortunately, is by a fellow author on the Leanpub platform. Ya know, I’ve written a few user manuals, including tutorials, plus done a little bit of programming, so I can tell when I’m in the hands of somebody who understands the material and knows how to present it. I haven’t found a really good Lisp intro book yet, but so far the Lisp Primer by Colin Allen and Maneesh Dhagat is the least bad one I’ve found.

I also ordered replacement checks from Schwab; their reorder function was back and worked smoothly. And paid a bill and watched some TV. For supper I looked at the offerings in the dining room and decided they were boring, so had a meal replacement shake in my room, capping off a quite hermit-like day.

Day 253, FOPAL, drawer, finance, HOUSE SOLD

Monday, 8/12/2019

Started the day with a run. Then by 9:30 I was at FOPAL to do the post-sale cleanup of my Computer section. This involves looking at every book in the section. If it has been up for three or more sale days, and its last price was $2 or $3, I give up on it and send it to the bargain room. Otherwise I consider reducing the price, pencil in the new price, and reshelve it back to its proper section. I sent three boxes of books away. This took a couple of hours.

I headed back and actually parked in the garage when I remembered that I had meant to go to the house and mark some things so when the guy came to haul the trash away, they wouldn’t go. Oh sigh. Back into the car and started back for Tasso street, when I got a call from Chuck. We talked about the details of prepping for the open house. Everything was going well. I told him about wanting to save a few items and how I would put them in the back of the garage. He said, maybe save the valances, too. All the windows had somewhat old-fashioned wooden valances. The painters had taken them down and tossed them, with the drapes still attached, in the garage. OK.

So I went to the house and moved the valances (but not the drapes; the fabric is old and not worth saving) plus a few other things a new owner might find useful, back of the green tape line in the garage that I had put down to protect stuff I didn’t want sold, a few weeks ago. Eric the painter was just finishing up the job of power-washing the brick walkway.

Back home I had lunch and killed a little time, and then met with Bert to be initiated into the ways of the

Residents’ Shop.

There are actually two shop rooms. One is very well equipped with a band saw, table saw, planer, and lots of other tools. The second, used for messier work, also has tools and a large bench. I had to sign a couple of waivers, so if I cut off a finger, it’s on me not Channing House. The point of all this was so that I can begin the process of refinishing those drawers. Bert has to have a copy of the shop key made for me. When I get it, I will start on that, probably Friday.

Next was to sit down with Terri in

Accounting.

We went over the rather puzzling and confusing sequence of payments from me to Channing House over the prior four months. At times they had drawn money by electronic funds transfer (EFT) from the Schwab account from which they’d drawn my initial buy-in. Other times, I had sent them checks via the SFCU bill-pay mechanism. With the result that we were both out of sync, and sometimes I was ahead by a credit and sometimes behind.

We agreed that in future, they would always draw the full monthly bill by EFT, and I would ensure that there were funds in the Schwab account to cover that. They do the EFT draw on the 10th of the month, and I will plan on that going forward.

In prior days I’d been noticing my

front door

was binding, and not wanting to close. I thought casually that it was just the frame warping or a hinge loose, but today it wouldn’t close at all and I realized the cause was the the hasp (or whatever you call the sticky-outy part of the lock that engages the frame) was jammed half-way and wouldn’t retract. And the knob wouldn’t turn either way. So I notified Facilities and a guy came up around 3 to work on it. He replaced the mechanism so it works, but he also noticed that the hasp didn’t properly engage the striker plate. It was a little too high, and you could see where some prior facilities guy had cut away metal to make the hole taller. He just removed the striker plate. The hasp now engages with the square hole in the metal door frame.

The door will be completely replaced as part of the upgrade, so that temporary fix is good enough.

About 5pm I got a call from Chuck. The agent who had been bugging him to say what our asking price was, wanted to present

a firm offer,

that is, one with no contingencies. Chuck said it was odd that there would be no contingencies since, a, they hadn’t seen the house, and b, they hadn’t received all the 50 pages of disclosure documents (inspections, termite report, seller’s declarations). We discussed the options. I could decline to look at it, saying just come on Friday and present it then. Ended up, Chuck called her back and insisted that he would send her the disclosures and she would return the standard form saying her client had indeed seen them all.

He called back a bit later to say, the buyer (a couple, the husband works at Facebook) had indeed seen the house: they had come to the estate sale last month, and looked it over very carefully then! (Later I texted Deborah about it, and she said, oh yes, I remember, I gave them Chuck’s number.) And now they have seen all the disclosures, they still want to go ahead with no contingencies, they are pre-approved for financing, and they want to close escrow in 15 days (unusually short). And the offer is $2.7M, which is $0.2M above the asking and just about enough that I will come out of escrow with my target net proceeds, or nearly.

Let’s do it! This was 5:30pm. We agreed I’d come to Chuck’s office at 6:15, which I did. We sat around waiting for papers to arrive by email and be printed. The offer had a clerical error and he had to call the other agent and have her send a corrected page. Then I initialed all the pages of the offer (it’s a very lengthy document) and sign it, and that got sent back to the other agent. When she texted that she had received it, we had a contract.

The buyer is obligated to purchase with no contingencies (no additional inspections, no hold-backs for work to be done), and if for any reason they don’t close escrow in the promised 15 days, their initial $81,000 deposit is mine to keep. So that’s a serious deal.

We’re going to go ahead with the cleaning (Chuck has a cleaning company already scheduled for tomorrow) and with the garbage-hauling; and I will let Richard come as scheduled to finish the mulch and tidy the plants on Thursday. But Chuck texted Amy to let her know, do NOT load up your truck with furniture tomorrow as scheduled, the staging is off!

I’d already paid Amy’s company in advance for the staging. Presumably I’ll get that money back, or at least most of it. I can imagine them wanting to keep some for their trouble and time spent planning.

But wow. House is sold! Probably. I won’t actually celebrate until the escrow actually closes. That would be on or before the 28th of this month.

Day 252, desk work, Lamplighters, Lisp

Sunday, 8/11/2019

Walked up to Verve for coffee. On return, I made a list of things that had been kicking around in the back of my mind as needing-to-do. Note this is something of a change from the first few months. From Day 1 to around Day 200, I was making detailed to-do lists almost compulsively. I knew I was being a little bit compulsive about them; see remarks earlier, on anxiety owing to not having Marian as my co-pilot. On the other hand, there was actually a metric shit-ton of stuff that I needed to do back then. For the last month-plus, I’ve been able to rely on the Google calendar to keep track of where I need to be and when; and I’ve been able to handle the routine busy-work of life pretty much ad-hoc.

But things had stacked up a bit and would come to mind when I awoke at 3am or 4am, and make it hard to go back to sleep. So I made the list and tackled it.

One item, which I should have thought of much, much earlier, was to order new checks. The current checkbooks, one from the credit union and for Schwab, have Marian’s name and the Tasso address. In the “stationery and postage” drawer I found boxes with about ten books of checks for each account. I got online with SFCU; their site makes it easy, even pleasant, to order new checks, customizing the names and addresses simply. Schwab should have been as easy, and may actually be, however it was a “service temporarily unavailable, try again” from them. C.H. very conveniently provides a box for documents to be shredded on each floor, so I put the extra checkbooks in there.

Another was to follow up on the travel insurance for the canceled Road Scholar trip. Remember how I realized too late that I wanted to reschedule that trip, so it had to be treated as a cancellation and a rebooking, and RoadScholar kept half the fee as a penalty. I’d bought travel insurance, and submitted a claim to get that $3500 back, weeks ago. What has happened? I didn’t know, and this would inevitably pop up in my mind at the afore-mentioned 3am awakenings. So. Follow the link from the email, and… my claim is “being processed”. At least it hasn’t been rejected.

I paid a couple of bills. Later, in the afternoon, I made a small spreadsheet listing all the charges shown on the Channing House invoices I’ve received so far, and all the payments I’ve made. I’m scheduled to talk to Terri in accounting about this tomorrow, and now I have my numbers all lined up so I can explain what bothers me. More on that after I see her.

Another item is my drawers. No, not my drawers, my closets’ drawers. They are old, they are of wood which is unlined, unsealed, and unfinished, and they have a persistent musty odor of oldness. I’ve been pondering what to do about this, and I finally figured out that what I might do is to access the C.H. Resident’s workshop, and use a power sander to sand the interiors (hopefully removing the odor) and spray them with either a sealer or a varnish. To get access, one calls Bert, the guy who seems to be in charge of everything technical around here. So I did and we have a date to meet Monday. I guess he’ll evaluate whether I’m safe with power tools?

At 12:30 I headed out. I stopped first at the FOPAL sale for five minutes, just to make sure my section was still in order, and it was. Then I continued down to the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts to see the Lamplighters’ production of

HMS Pinafore.

I had bought two tickets for this a week ago, and invited Dennis to join me, but he wasn’t free. So then I asked sister-in-law Jean to join me and she was happy to.

Must say, HMS Pinafore is a very very silly play. I mean seriously. The resolution at the end, which gets everybody married happily, also implies that all three of the happy couples have an age difference of at least 18 years, more like 20. But the production was smooth and the soprano playing Josephine was especially good. The MVCPA auditorium is a handsome place but I didn’t think the acoustics were good, at least, not at the back of the balcony where we were. The orchestra seemed thin and distant. It was a very good thing that they projected the song lyrics above the stage. When you knew what the singers were saying, it was perfectly clear, but a couple of times I deliberately did not read the lyrics ahead and I could not follow all the words. (Worth noting that the Lamplighters are old-school, they don’t use mics or amplification for voices.)

Jean then was pleased to treat me to pizza at a local restaurant; we exchanged stories of our aches and pains, and that was the afternoon.

Yesterday and today I worked at getting set up to learn me some

Lisp.

It’s a different programming language, second oldest only to Fortran, and a different paradigm from the procedural languages in which I’ve written so many KLoC (thousand lines of code). What started this was linking to a list of influential books for programmers by the great Alan Kay. The first book he praised was the Lisp 1.5 Programmer’s Guide, which was formative in his education. That book, although still in print from MIT Press, is out of date for the current form of the language, but I thought, ok, how about I get into this a little bit, read an online tutorial, do a little fun programming.

Which of course, was the opening of a deep, dark internet rabbit-hole. Over several hours of browsing I’ve located some good resources, skimmed some tutorials, and installed three different Lisp implementations. One thing I can conclude is that, unlike Python, Ruby, C or practically any other modern language, the available Lisp implementations are absolutely shit-awful as learning environments. Gracious, but they are beginner-hostile. I’ve used many interpreters (helped write one), and never saw such an impenetrable thicket for the starting user. I have now found a just-tolerable interactive development environment (the free version of LispWorks), but its Mac OS version is so out of date, it makes Mac OS pop up that dialog about “won’t work with future versions, contact the developer” — which tells you they haven’t built a new version in over five years.

Anyway, after several hours of very testy and frustrating hours of exploring I believe I am set up to start walking through a tutorial (of which I’ve found several decent ones) and executing code.

Day 251, clothes, docent, realty

Saturday, 8/10/2019

Wrote the check to pay off Paul the floor guy and mailed it.. Drove next to the Target across the freeway. Why? Because according to the Rogue Brewing website, I can get their Dead Guy Ale (nominated by me as the best beer made on the West Coast) at that store. I’ve found it before at my usual grocery, but the last half-dozen times I’ve looked, they didn’t have it. I don’t drink but about one beer a week, so I wanted to stock the good stuff, and by golly they did have it.

Then went to Jacquie’s Sew and Sew to pick up my modified blazer and trousers. See below for pics. On to the Museum to lead the 12pm tour. From there I drove to the grocery to pick up some no-cal drinks. From that parking lot I could walk to the FOPAL building to see how the sale was going. Quite a few books were already gone from the Computer section. Strangely, somebody had taken it upon themselves to move some books to different areas. I have the section arranged by topics, and somebody had shuffled books from one topic to another shelf. And inserted a bunch of books that were not at all computer-related. Why? No idea.

Back home, I got a call from Bill, who wanted to take a picture of me for the newsletter article that Helene wrote. I said sure, come on up; and then spent the next three minutes rapidly changing my shirt, picking up and tidying the living room, etc. Bill is clearly an experienced photographer (later somebody told me he was formerly a photog for a newspaper) and took a number of shots against different backgrounds and different lighting.

Sat at supper with Craig, Diane, and the other David. Then upstairs to finally try on my new clothes. They look ok. I definitely look best in a turtleneck (to hide my turtle neck) and I really should buy a white or cream-colored one, all my present ones are dark. Anyway here is my new wardrobe extension.

Casual white trousers. Not great, and pants need to be ironed.

Brownish trousers. OK look. They also need ironing. Surprised Jacquie’s didn’t press them before delivery.

Brown trou. with cream-colored shirt. Definitely need a cream or ivory turtleneck.

Blue-gray trousers, open button. Definitely the best combo. The jacket fits fine buttoned, but it still looks better this way.

Day 250, mulch, walk

Friday, 8/9/2019

Went for a run to start the day. It felt fine. I wound it up at the Prolific Oven. I suspect that fine old coffee place is on the way out. 8:30am on a Friday and there were only a few customers. Three old guys at the outside table. One college-student (or, given my poor age-guessing ability, more likely a college instructor) and me, inside.

Having a good run is always good news. I don’t think I mentioned a few days back that the results of my echocardiogram came in. Modern medical care; I get my results as an email telling me I have a new message at my Sutter Health account. Wait, “modern”? Welcome to the millennium, we’ve been waiting for you… Anyway, it includes “Aortic valve: normally functioning prosthetic.”

I drove to the nursery and bought three bags of mini-fir-bark mulch, and took them to the Tasso house and left them behind the back steps for Richard to spread when he comes next week. I thought briefly of spreading it myself, which is a no-brainer task, but realized I had no garden tools, not even a rake. The sale cleared everything out.

Looking through the windows, it’s clear that Paul is finished with the flooring. All that’s left to do is for the painters to re-install the cabinet doors and paint the exterior trim, and it will be ready for staging. Later in the day I got an invoice for the flooring and tomorrow I’ll mail the check for that.

Also later I got a text from Chuck, indicating that he’d been in contact with some number of foundation contractors and will let me know what comes of that. If he can make that happen in the coming week, my hat will be off to him.

After an hour of fooling around on the computer… OK, I was watching YT videos. Two episodes of the amazing Project Binky (those guys are truly insane, but in a good way) and then, trying to make up my mind if I want to play the game Kenshi, I watched two episodes of a walk-through of it… and a brief nap, I decided to Get Outdoors.

I drove up to Crystal Springs reservoir and walked two miles, one out and one back, on the Sawyer Camp trail, giving me a massive 12,869 steps, 5.7 miles, for the day. It was a sparkly day.

We’ve had just a beautiful summer, never too hot, clear air… I have been intentionally and consciously appreciative of it, almost every day. The walk was an emotional experience. I had forgotten my ear-buds, so I couldn’t listen to a podcast, as is my usual wont when walking. So I had to think, and my thoughts turned to the last weeks of Marian’s life, some of the good moments, like when on her final visit to her doctor, the doctor told her how much she admired Marian, and said, “You’re such a bad-ass!” and they parted with a hug. So it was a rather emotional walk. And no tissues in my pocket.

Day 249, Shustek, real estate

Thursday, 8/8/2019

I headed out to Shustek for a day of cataloging. Steve and I cataloged a NeXT system that was supposed to be “fully functional” according to the donation record. So of course after cataloging the pieces (system unit, monitor, keyboard, mouse) we hooked them all together and powered it up. We could hear fans spinning, and the monitor showed a very dim raster. In which I could read messages about system test complete, booting from SCSI drive 1, waiting for drive to come online… and that was it. The internal drive never came up. Unfortunately this unit was intended for the “study collection” meaning it was meant to be actually used in education classes, could be touched, and so forth. But without some work it isn’t going to fulfill that role.

After lunch we unwrapped something completely different.

It’s basically a tape cassette, kind of like an audio cassette but blown up to the size of a boom-box, and loaded with tape more than an inch wide. It’s made by IBM, with a big IBM logo on one end. What in the heck could it be? We would have been wondering still, except that volunteer Alan, whose mind is a wonderland of computer trivia, said, “Wait wait wait. Wait a minute. Look up ‘Harvest’.” A quick trip to Wikipedia and we found the IBM 7950 “Harvest” system, once a top-secret addition to the early “Stretch” supercomputer, which from 1962 to 1975 did cryptanalysis for the NSA. A major feature of it was a special tape subsystem called “Tractor” which managed a library of these tape cassettes. And here was one of the cassettes! No doubt it has never been erased, and that reel of wide mag tape probably contains all sorts of once-classified data. Which nobody on earth has the equipment to read now.

While this was going on I was exchanging texts with Chuck. An issue hanging on from last month is the foundation inspection that Lawyer Lady had done on one of her last visits. We have been trying to get some info on what this inspection revealed, apparently there were some small(?) issues, although not enough to bother L.L. Chuck suddenly thinks we should get them fixed and have a new inspection done. He spoke to the previous inspector but stopped short of asking for a copy of the report because, he says, if we have it, we must show it to buyers, and if it is “phrased negatively” it could harm the sale. So he is apparently in a delicate dance to get some details and a recommendation of a contractor suitable to do a repair, without actually obtaining a paper that we would be required to disclose.

I am all for doing this repair, which I expect to be in the low thousands, but I am very reluctant to hold off the open house to do it. I asked Chuck to please expedite contacting a contractor and getting an estimate. We’ll see. I can imagine this pushing the open house date back weeks, grrrr.

Came home to do laundry.

Day 248, real estate, FOPAL, lecture

Wednesday, 8/7/2019

Started the day with a drive to the gym for exercises. Then I headed over to Tasso street. There I gave Paul a check for part-payment of the flooring, and folded up the big tarp from which Richard had removed all the mulch. He’d come up just a bit short on mulch. I figure to buy a couple of bags of the stuff and he can finish the last little corner next week.

Then I went to Chuck’s office because I wanted to discuss the disclosure forms that his office guy, Andrew (also his son), had sent yesterday. Chuck and I had a long and productive discussion on the marketing of the house, and about pricing. I am very much letting him handle this, as he has the depth of experience with real estate in this market. His approach is to set the initial asking price a bit low, and count on the charm of the place to inspire enough competitive bidding to raise it. So we will be asking $2.49M, and feeling pretty confident that it will be bid to something over that.

On the way to his office I got a call from Chris the hairdresser. I’d blown it, my appointment was for today. I knew it was today; it was in the calendar for today. Well, now it is for next Wednesday. Insert head-bang gif here.

From there I went to FOPAL and tidied up the Computer section ready for this weekend’s sale days. Then I started sorting, and when I quit at 4pm, I was very pleased and surprised that we sorters had actually sorted “everything”. Well, every box of donations that were in the Sorting room today, and the dozen boxes and bags that came through the door between 2 and 4pm. Of course, Frank reminded me that there are a couple hundred boxes of donations in the other building. But clearing out the Sorting room is an achievement anyway.

Back home, I got a call from Helene; she has a couple more questions for the piece on me for the newsletter. We agreed to meet for supper at 6. The questions didn’t amount to much but I got to talk about myself, always a pleasure. We talked about her, as well. Compared notes on grieving. She lost her husband at age 58, so she’s been a long time widowed, but still gets occasional bouts of grief.

At 7pm there was a talk by Palo Alto’s relatively new Chief of Police, describing the changes he’s initiating in the department. He seemed a very genial, but highly competent person. They just started the body-cam program. Each patrol car has a total of five cameras mounted on it, three outside and two inside. Then when the officer steps out of the car, his body camera is automatically triggered. No more forgetting to turn it on in the heat of the moment.

Chief Jonson initiated a citizen advisory board, and their first priority message to him was the need for traffic enforcement. At that point, mid-2018, the PAPD didn’t have a traffic “unit”; they just relied on patrolling officers to enforce traffic laws. But he has set up a three-officer unit that is dedicated to traffic enforcement (two motorcycles, one car) and doing “strategic” enforcement. Which seems to mean, focusing on specific streets? Anyway Alma and Embarcadero were mentioned specifically.