Day 247, more mulch, meeting, papers

Tuesday, 8/6/2019

Started with a run, since I didn’t get one yesterday. Spent some time doing classifications at Zooniverse. Tried out yet another game, and didn’t like it. Then an email arrived from Richard the gardener: our big green garden-waste bin was full. I replied he should use the paper leaf bags that are in the garage. Then I decided to zip over there and see what was going on.

Indeed, some gardener unknown had filled our large garden-waste rolling bin to the top with garden waste. That bin was empty yesterday morning. I had left it out Sunday night, so that nobody would park on the tarp I laid down to receive the mulch. When I rolled it away just before the mulch truck arrived yesterday morning, it was empty. So somebody had filled it during the day or, perhaps, in the night. Da Noive!

I checked on Paul; he has the color down on the two floors he sanded yesterday and they look great. He expects to spray varnish today. He raved at length about the wide oak planks and how you can’t get wood like that any more.

I put gas in the car for the first time in five weeks. 740 miles, 94.1 miles per gallon. The Prius plug-in is the perfect car for the retiree. Then I got it washed.

Back at C.H. I grabbed some lunch, took a nap, and it was time for the Upgrade Status meeting, or, as a lady named Florence commented in the elevator going down, the Upheaval Update. Dates haven’t changed for the 7th floor moving in or for my 6th floor moving out. Most of the meeting was to explain the new lighting being installed. This is something they did not include when remodeling the 10th, 9th and 8th floors. Beginning with the 7th, they are re-doing all the overhead lighting. A 1BR unit like mine gets two flush-mount ceiling fixtures in the entryway, two in the bathroom hallway, and six each in living room and bedroom, those groups of six being on dimmers. In addition, all the outlets and outlet plates are replaced.

Why the late decision? They had wanted to do overhead lighting from the start because they observe lots of floor lamps in use, and floor lamps are in general a tripping hazard. However, there is only 2-½ inch clearance between the bottom of the cement beams that support the floor above, and the plaster of the ceiling of the room below. Only recently have they found fixtures that will work. And prices have come down and they were able to get a good deal on a whole floor installation. And the use of all-LED lights will mean significant reduction in building electricity use.

Late in the day I got emails from Chuck’s office with some earthquake disclosure forms to sign. However, I recognize them as things I had signed previously I’m sure; and anyway one of them still had the Buyer name filled in as Daphne Higgs (the Lawyer Lady). So that isn’t right. I replied that I should come by Chuck’s office tomorrow and sign in physical person.

 

Day 246, mulch, FOPAL, drawers

Monday, 8/5/2019

Yesterday Lyngso said 9-11am. Today as I was getting out of the shower at 7:05, the phone rang. It was the Lyngso driver telling me he was “just pulling out of the yard, I’ll be at your place in 15 minutes or so.”

Boy oh boy did I feel smart that I’d gone over and spread the tarp last night! In fact I got there just before the truck, but I’d have been really sprinting to get the tarp out and spread for him. After the friendly driver left, I drove back to C.H. and had breakfast. Then I went down to FOPAL, arriving about 9am. I worked on the Computer section for an hour, and then did sorting until 1pm.

Chuck had texted asking whether the mulch would be finished today or tomorrow, and I wanted to check in anyway, so I stopped at Tasso St. Richard was working in the back yard. He explained that he couldn’t spread mulch until he had done his normal weekly cleanup. He didn’t want to spread mulch over dead leaves, etc. So he would definitely still be working on it tomorrow.

The flooring guy, who turned out to be named Paul, was also hard at work. He had already finished sanding the living room and dining room. We talked about the job and he reassured me he was qualified to remove and replace the hot water heater.

Back home I tried a new game; it was boring. Well, it was only $5.99. Ate supper at Rosina’s table.

OK, let me get some things down about

meal replacements.

Before moving to C.H. I was feeding myself about two meals in three from meal replacements, primarily Keto Chow. That showed that the low-carb diet suits me; I felt strong and healthy and lost weight gradually. (I’ll check my weight tomorrow, but for the past week it has been oscillating around 171.)

Nominally I shouldn’t need meal replacements at Channing House; after all, three meals a day are laid on in the dining room. However, as I’ve complained before, there are many days where I want breakfast earlier. I want to go on my run, or go to the Y, during the breakfast service hours, eating something earlier and perhaps a bit more later. Also there are many occasions when it isn’t convenient to be here for lunch: working at FOPAL or the museum. Those times, I’ve been grabbing snack food, protein bars and such, from grocery stores. (Thursdays, the artifact crew always go to a casual restaurant like Eric’s Deli Cafe; those are reasonably healthy meals.)

A few weeks ago I laid in some Saturo from Amazon. These 300-calorie packages are quite convenient, and do nicely as an early breakfast, and I like the flavor better than the Soylent ready-to-drink (RTD). But Saturo (and Soylent) are not low-carb meals. I really wish that there was a “Keto” RTD, but there isn’t. One, Sated, has been promising “real soon now” for over a year. Keto Chow’s owner, Chris Bair, did an experimental run of an RTD, but couldn’t continue because he can’t find a co-packer that can meet his requirements.

I had assumed I needed a RTD product because it’s too much trouble to mix powdered products in my little kitchenette, and my 2-liter pitcher doesn’t fit my little refrigerator. But wait! I was watching a video by Chris Bair, in which he was showing how to mix individual Keto Chow shakes in blender bottles, and does it quickly and neatly. Well, I have a couple of blender bottles and a bag of Keto Chow left over, why not try it? And it is actually quite easy. It takes less than five minutes to mix up two shakes, and they fit in the fridge. I did that, and consumed one for lunch yesterday, and one for lunch today. It was great. So I’ve ordered a couple more blender bottles and I will mix them up four at a time.

Day 245, vintage computers, mulch prep

I went to the concert at Rinconada, but left fairly quickly. The opening was “Business Casual”, a local a cappella group. They do covers of well-known songs, with percussion by a pretty talented beat-boxer. The main act was I Forget Their Name because they weren’t very good. Trying to do Eagles and other 70s bands and not good at all.

Back home by 7:30 I watched half of the RiffTrax version of  Cat Women of the Moon.

Sunday, 8/4/2019

Had coffee at Mlle. Collette. Then went down to the Museum to attend the Vintage Computer Fest. One of the features this year was a meeting of an Apple I user’s group, touted as the largest assemblage of Apple I ever, or at least for a while. There were at least half a dozen on display. Steve and Steve sold about 200 of them. The user group’s registry lists about 75 known to exist now. One of the ones on display included the original shipping box, with a return address of, not Apple, but Steve Jobs’ own house.

I was disappointed by one exhibit that initially intrigued me. In the past few years there have been some amazing small computers released, the Raspberry Pi, the Arduino, and so on. Complete systems with video out, USB in, competent CPUs and for a file system, a 16GB SD card. (Note the G, it still boggles me that you can get a 16 or 32 gigabyte “disk” in a chip the size of your little fingernail.) Well, one exhibitor here was the founder (and sole proprietor) of MakerLisp, a credit-card sized system with a Lisp interpreter in ROM. With the Pi, the Arduino, the BeagleBone, you write code on a PC in a dialect of C++, compile it, and download the binary to the little system. That makes the development cycle somewhat tedious, and the C dialect is not a pretty or friendly language. So the idea of a card computer with an interpreter for a (sort of) high-level language on board is attractive. So I eagerly opened the MakerLisp website and was quite disappointed at the very shallow support and documentation level. Basically if you aren’t already a Lisp maven, you can forget it. There’s no help here. To call the docs (which I downloaded and looked through) “minimal” is to flatter them. The only people who could buy this pretty little machine and put it to work are people with the same depth of experience as the designer himself.

(Hmmm…  I wonder how hard it would be to implement APL on a RasPi…? You know, that is not as silly as it sounds; there already exists GNU APL, free, runs on Linux; and there is an Ubuntu port for the Pi. Use an APL shared variable to map to the I/O pins on the Pi….)

Another educational effort is the 1620 Jr. project, for which I can’t find a website although I’m sure they have one. A real 1620 was restored and sometimes demonstrated in the old exhibit space ten years ago, but has since been put into storage, partly because it was too hard to maintain its typebar-typewriter output device. Some of the guys who did that restoration have obtained the console of a 1620 and backed it with a cycle-accurate simulator and a modern typewriter for output. Their aim is to offer a course in which students will learn how to program the 1620, practicing lessons on simulators on regular laptops, then bringing their debugged programs to the realistic console to run. But the Museum is in the throes of personnel changes, so it’s on hold.

I headed home for the afternoon. At 3pm I remembered to call Lyngso Garden Supply and get the delivery time for the 3 cubic yards of mulch tomorrow. 9am-11am. I emailed that info to Richard the gardener, saying I would go and spread out the tarp in the morning. Then I got anxious, worried that the big tarp that I had carefully stowed at the back of the garage might have been tossed out by a contractor. So I drove over to Tasso street. The tarp was fine, so I spread it out at the end of the driveway, weighted it down with bricks, and just to make sure no contractor decided to drive into the driveway and park on it, move the garbage cans out onto it as a barrier.

Back to C.H. for supper and a quiet evening.

 

Day 244, interview, docent, concert

Saturday, 8/3/2019

In the morning I went to check out the Farmer’s Market. Remember I looked for it last Sunday and found only an empty parking lot? That’s because I had the downtown market confused with the one on California Avenue, which does happen on Sundays. This one is on Saturdays, duh. I bought one basket of cherries. Actually these cherries were not as nice as the ones I’ve been getting at the grocery store. But they are more… farmer-y?

Then it was time to meet with Helene, who has been assigned by the C.H. newsletter editor to interview me and write up something for the newsletter. We chatted for half an hour. We’ll see what she writes up; I get to look at it before it is published.

Off to the Museum for the 12pm tour. About 25 people. Today and tomorrow are the Vintage Computer Fest in the upstairs event space, so the parking lot was full but not a lot of actual museum visitors downstairs. I mean to go poke around the VCF tomorrow.

On the way home I stopped at the grocery store and bought a few things. Then I stopped at the Tasso house to see what was happening. What was happening was that Clarence, Chuck’s handyman contractor, was installing faucets and light fixtures. No sign of the painters.

I had on the Google Calendar a concert at 8pm at Dinkelspiel. I thought to check the Stanford jazz site to verify the time and discovered, darn it, the concert was last night. I put it in the calendar wrong. The only concert on 8/3 is at Bing and not a performer I would have gone out of my way to buy a ticket for.headbang The one in their calendar for 8/2 is the one I remember signing up for.

There’s a free concert in Rinconada park at 6:30, maybe I’ll go that that.

Day 243, book, party, movies

Friday, 8/2/2019

OK, what the heck did I do yesterday? This is Saturday and that day has gone from memory. There’s nothing in my Google calendar, so I didn’t have external obligations.

I remember I went for a run in the morning. Then… at some point I put in an hour on Zooniverse, classifying stuff in a couple of projects. Oh, wait. Right. I uploaded a MOBI version of the book to Amazon and “published” a Kindle version to go with the paperback. I’m amused that Amazon accepted this because the file was generated by LeanPub and clearly says on the half-title page, “This is a LeanPub book…”.

Also, this was party day, Channing House held a party at 2:30 to celebrate the 7th floor beginning to move back and 6th floor getting ready to move out. Rhonda (CEO) commented from the stage that when the 7th move-back is complete, the renovation project will be half-done, two years down and two to go, and they are only a few weeks off of the originally planned target dates.

The party theme was black and white movies. I wore white pants, a black turtleneck, and my formal black fedora. I sat in a back corner, and Bert came and sat next to me. He’s the tech squad and A/V team leader and he asked if I wanted to be on the A/V team, and I do. He said they have a contract out for a full replacement/upgrade of the auditorium A/V equipment, so in a few weeks there would be a training session to learn the new gear.

I didn’t do much in the afternoon. Something I saw online reminded me of the classic anime film, Ghost in the Shell and just for giggles I did a search on the XFinity box and yup, it’s there on the “Tubi” app and free. I started it streaming and got bored with it 20 minutes in. But after stopping it and backing up to the main “Tubi” page there was a display of available movies and I spotted Rango, an animated feature from a few years ago that I’d always kind of wanted to see, so I ran that, all the way through.

So that was Friday. I better get started on Saturday before I forget.

Day 242, contractors, Yosemite, realty

Thursday, 8/1/2019

First thing after breakfast I sent an email to Mark, the sales guy for Davey Tree service. I’d heard nothing from them since accepting their estimate for trimming several days ago. I get a response in half an hour, “We’re coming today.” Gee, thanks for the warning. Later I confirmed with Chuck that they hadn’t contacted him either. The problem was, there is a flooring contractor scheduled to start on the kitchen floor today, and the painters aren’t quite done either.

So I drove over to the house on my way to a day of museum work across the bay. The Davey team were already at work, a huge truck in the driveway supporting a cherry picker, and a guy up among the oak branches. Mark was just driving away, and we conferred, and then talked to the second tree guy who was on the ground. He didn’t see any problem and would keep an eye out for contractors. When I said “flooring contractor” he said, “what kind, laminate or what?” I said, “laminate” and he said, “Oh no problem, my cousin does laminate floors, and I know he won’t have much stuff to bring in.”

So I went off to Yosemite. Today I and Steve spent the day beginning the implementation of Aurora’s grand plan to check every box. We fetched down a cart load of boxes. I was running the computer and Steve was handling stuff. I would do a search on the box number, and tell Steve how many objects were returned by the search. He would count to make sure there were that many objects in the box. Only once was the count wrong. It was one too high. We had to go through the objects and check their numbers against the search results. Yup, there was one object not listed as being in that box. So we searched on its number, and found it was recorded as being in a different box on a different shelf. So we went and found that box and shoved the item (an unpopulated PCB) into that box. Problem solved.

Then I’d check whether each object had a photograph in the database. A few did not, and Steve would mark them with a “photo needed” tag and that box would go on the “to be photographed” shelf. Otherwise it was all good and went on the “return to storage” shelf.

We ripped through a dozen boxes in the day, at the end of which Steve commented, “Well, I said this was going to be a ten-year project. Now I think it might only be eight.”

I came home by way of Tasso street. The tree guys were gone and the trees looked fine. The oak branches are well clear of the house now. The big Pittisporums are not touching the house roof either, and there’s quite a bit more light in the back yard.

Inside I found that nothing had been done with the floor, apparently that guy didn’t come. The painters were pretty nearly done. I was distressed to find that they had sealed the butcher-block counter tops in the kitchen with something hard, that looks almost like varnish. That’s not right at all.

I texted Chuck with these observations. Later in the evening he called me up. He’d talked to the flooring guy who had said, well, some materials didn’t come in, so he can’t come until Monday. That pretty well messes up the time-line for opening the house on Friday week. So Chuck says now we’ll slip it a week to 8/16, and I have to agree. He’ll discuss the kitchen counters with Eric the painter.

Day 241, FOPAL, tour, realty, play

Wednesday, 7/31/2019

Started with a run; it felt fine.

Paid a couple of bills. Yesterday I got an email from Amy wanting the signed contract for the staging, so I did that routine: print out the contract PDF, sign it, scan the signed page, and email the scan back to her. About 11am I left for FOPAL where I found four boxes waiting at the computer section, but they only yielded a dozen books to shelve. Lots of immense paperback tomes, Everything about Windows 95, The Complete Red Hat Linux Version 3, and so forth. Fifteen-hundred page doorstops, now of no interest to anyone. However, the haul did include several high-value books, little specialist books that people are paying $35-70 for.

Then I spent a couple hours sorting, before leaving at 1:30. I had received a text from Chuck telling me how much the painter’s estimate was. I had intended to bring my checkbook along so when I got that text, I could write a check and take it to Tasso street. However I had not brought the checkbook, so now I had to go back to C.H. and get it; write the check; and go deliver it.

Now I had an hour before I was scheduled to give a tour to a private group. I had meant to spend it sitting quietly, possibly napping, in the car. However at this point I started exchanging texts with Chuck and that led to realizing that still hanging is the issue of getting fresh mulch spread on the landscaping. What day will it be ok to block the driveway with a pile of mulch, what day will Richard the gardener be available to spread said mulch, I need to order the mulch to be delivered, aaaaagggghhhh!

Flurry of texts and emails (Richard doesn’t do texts) and settled on a date of Monday. Also got an email from Amy, fine you signed, but can you send the check, also? Then into the museum to wait for the tour group to arrive, which they didn’t, so I spent the time calling Lyngso Garden Supply and scheduling the delivery. But they couldn’t give me a time, “call back on Sunday afternoon and we can tell you what your 2-hour window will be.”

Compounded by: I had signed up to lead a tour of 25 people, but the document waiting at the counter specified 50. No way can one docent lead that big a tour. But when they finally showed up they were a reasonable group of 25 after all. And pretty independent, a core group of 10 or so stuck close to me, the others kind of wandered around us on cometary orbits. Which is fine with me.

After the tour I could email Richard about the uncertain start time on Monday. Back to C.H. where I wrote Amy’s check and mailed it, fortunately the usual mail delivery hadn’t happened on time so it went out tonight.

For supper I spotted an Open table with one other person, who turned out to be Beverly, and we were later joined by Cathy. I like the Open table concept. By sitting at one you are saying, I’m unaccompanied and open to anybody’s company. There are smaller tables where you can sit by yourself and nobody will bother you, or tables where people who know each other arrive in a group.A couple of nights back, I sat at an empty Open one, and nobody joined me, which was dampening. So I saw Beverley (who I didn’t know) sitting alone at an Open table I joined her and that was Ok.

This evening I had a ticket for a TheaterWorks presentation, The Language Archive. I didn’t like it much, and left at the intermission.

Day 240, echo, alterations, brass polish

Tuesday, 7/30/2019

First thing today was to go to PAMF to have a cardiac echo test. This is preparation for a routine exam by my cardiologist in a couple of weeks. I had opted for an 8am appointment. The Encina street office of PAMF is nominally 20 minutes’ walk and my first plan was to do that.

However, yesterday afternoon my box of new clothes arrived from Bonobos. As expected, the blazer is a good fit in the arms and shoulders, but too tight around the waist. Two of the three pairs of pants are also juuuuust a bit too tight for comfort. Those two are from one line, the pair for a different line are exactly right, despite all having the same nominal size. Anyway, I wanted to drop off the jacket and pants for alterations at Jacquie’s Sew and Sew, a tailoring shop I’ve used before with good results. Jacquie’s opens at 9am. There were other options but I chose instead to toss the clothes into the car and drive.

The echocardiogram was a short routine operation. I’ve had them before, and from what I could see on the screen, it looked the same as before. The technician of course wouldn’t offer any opinion. “Your doctor will tell you about it.” Which is only sensible.

So to the Prolific Oven for breakfast, and then to Jacquie’s, where they took my instructions and clothes and said, August 9th.

From there, on to Tasso street. Here may aim was to polish the brass door and window handles. They were more than ten years from their last polish, and the window handles especially were more the color of a briar pipe than brass. There were two painters there, working away. I didn’t monitor them in any detail, strictly not my job. I set myself up on the front porch with my cardboard box of polish and cleaners and my cordless drill with brush and buffing attachments.

The painters had already removed all the brass door handles into a bucket. I started with those and they polished up very nicely and quickly, using only “Mr. Metal,” a product that I’d picked up at the hardware store that promised “shine without rubbing or buffing” and doggone if it didn’t pretty much do that. When there was no heavy layer of dirt or corrosion, it was a wipe-on, let-dry, wipe-off operation and the hardware looked shiny and good.

The window handles had, I”m not sure how, picked up a layer of gummy crud, like a thin layer of brown crayon. To get that off took soaking in cleaner and whizzing with the abrasive brush. Then I used Mr. Metal and followed with Brasso on a polishing pad.

Each window handle is held in place by three short brass screws. In order to reattach them, you have to start the screw while holding the window open. And of course, I twice dropped a screw trying to start it. Dropped into the bark mulch on the ground under the window. One time I found it. One I couldn’t find.

I was already short one screw, as I discovered when removing the backmost handle from the laundry room. The handles are acceptable with only two screws; clearly I’d lost one back at the turn of the millennium. So I drove to the hardware store and went through their quite good screw and bolt shelves. I found what I thought might be a replacement but in fact, it was just too large and a tighter thread. Who knows what thread standards they were using in 1930? So now I (or actually, the future owner) is short two screws, two handles held on by two screws. I’m going to have one more try at the hardware store later on.

I finished up around 1pm and headed home. When I checked the mail that evening, I found the Amazon package with three copies of To Thrive Beyond Belief. One for my bookshelf, one for the house library. What to do with the third?

 

Day 239, FOPAL, lunch, realty

Monday, 7/29/2019

Started with a run. Got mentally immersed in the podcast I was listening to and forgot to turn across the creek, so the route ended up a little shorter than usual. After showering I headed out to FOPAL, arriving around 9:30. I cleared the Computer section pile, pricing and shelving another 30 books or so. Somebody had donated several books about Perl, so I assembled a whole little section of books on Perl.

At 11am I switched over to sorting, all by myself. I cleared the table. Donors brought another 5 or 6 boxes, out of the normal hours for that, but whatever; and I took them in and sorted them. So when the regular sorting crew arrived, they found a nice tidy sorting room with a clear table.

At 12:15 I headed off to meet Scott for lunch. From there headed home. Sitting around, I got a text from Chuck. He has been scheduling various operations, and has hopes of showing the house for the first time a week from Friday, August 9th. That’s excellent news. He has a floor person he has used before, who quotes $2300 to put new vinyl in the kitchen and utility room, and another $2000 to refinish the “rest of the flooring”. I commented that seemed low, was it just a coat of varathane? No, this guy is good, Chuck has used him before, he’ll sand and varnish.

I ok’d both jobs, and said I appreciated the depth of his contact list. He replied that he got contractors to work for him because he pays them promptly, and by the way could I give the painter a check for his work on Wednesday? Back of the envelope calculation, I’m committed to about $20K of work, including the tree work, the painting, the flooring, the staging, and some misc. handiwork not yet scheduled. So I wrote to Cindy at the financial managers asking that she have the brokers get me another glob of liquid funds I can transfer from the managed Schwab account to the unmanaged one, which I can write checks against.

Looking at tomorrow’s schedule, I had planned to do laundry in the morning, but there are a couple of other things I want to do then also. Checked the house laundry room schedule and met Diane there. She’s running laundry until about 8. Fine. I’ll do laundry starting at 8. I want to sit up for SYTYCD anyway.

 

Day 238, slow Sunday

Sunday, 7/28/2019

Doing this entry rather late on Monday — the first time I’ve let a blog post slip so far.

Sunday morning I had coffee and read the paper at Verve, which I was surprised to find opened at 6AM. I got there at 7:15. Pleasant enough, although the inside seating, which looks very comfortable, is somewhat spoiled by just-too-loud music. Outside seating has plenty of sitting space in the form of benches, and is shaded from morning glare, but lacks tables.

On the way back, around 8am, I looked for the Sunday Farmer’s Market. I found the right parking lot, clearly marked as reserved for Farmer’s Market, but it was completely empty. Not a sign of a farm stand being set up. What time does it start? I’d think there would be people setting up an hour ahead, so maybe it doesn’t open until after 9am?

At noon I had been invited to lunch by Ann. I was a little uncertain when I accepted, what I was accepting for. Was this to be a tete-a-tete, and if so, was I to be propositioned? I’ve had more than one person tell me with great certainty that live males in a retirement community will be very popular, nudge-nudge,  with the women who outnumber them. This always from people who are too young for a retirement community, not from any actual retirees.

So far I’d encountered nothing of the kind. OK, here’s a fact: since this blog is public, I’ll say right now, that if anything even minutely romantic happens, it will not show up here! But in this case, it turned out that Ann had very kindly set up a luncheon to let me get to know her, Marian, Robin, Ed (whom I’d dined with before) and Dirk. And very pleasant it was.

In the evening I finished watching a movie on Amazon Prime. I had been interested in the actress Melanie Stone since she starred in a commercial for a product I was writing about, Keto Chow. I watched her first feature appearance, Mythica: A Quest for Heros. It wasn’t bad, and she did as well as the rather disjointed script would allow her to do.

After that, I noticed Amazon suggesting a free movie, one of the Rifftrax series. These are really bad, cheesy movies with sarcastic voice-overs by two guys. This one was really funny. Normally “funny” TV gets a smile from me; this one had me laughing out loud at least twice. And so to bed.