Day 365, errands, Anthem, A/V, Jean

Well. One year ago I was visiting the Neptune Society offices to make arrangements, and writing about my first experiences of grief. Quite a lot has changed in that year, and over the next few days I plan to assemble some kind of retrospective essay, summarizing what I’ve experienced, what I’ve done, and what I’ve learned. But for now, I will just carry on with daily posts.

However, going forward, shall I keep the Day number headings? Once we are past 365, they stop being meaningful. Maybe change the numbering system to a year and a day, e.g. supposing this has been year zero, then tomorrow could be Day 1.1, and so on to 2021 when Day 1.365 changes to Day 2.1. Or maybe drop the “Day” and just use a number, 1.15.

Tuesday, 12/3/2019

Over the past few days I’ve accumulated a lot of mental “should-do” items and finally made myself write a list, which proved quite lengthy, so devoted this morning to doing these things. Some bills. Paid up the Apple Card and then had another unsatisfactory exchange with the Apple help text system. The Apple Card just does not want to do things in ways I would like. I’ve mentioned how I can’t schedule a payment through my usual SFCU Bill Pay system. There’s no reason they can’t support that. Today I asked if there was any way I could view my balance or statement or make a payment using my iMac instead of the little iPhone screen. Nope. They do not support such a thing. There’s no support for the Apple Wallet on the bigger systems.

And that decided me: I am going to cancel the Apple Card, and not the BofA card.  Which is a bit of a close shave for the latter, because I was going to close it after its balance was zero, which I thought it would be when my payment cleared. However in the interim I took an Uber (Sunday, to the Dish walk) and I had forgotten that I had that card as the payment option for Uber. So now it had a new, $9 balance and I put off closing it to next month, and now it will survive.

Recall how a few days back (Day 353 actually) I was unable to get into the Anthem system to investigate my new drug insurance. Try again within 30 days of the start of your coverage, was the advice. So, today I tried again. The symptoms were different, another vague error message, “We can’t seem to complete your log-in” and offering three possibilities: wrong username or password, not yet registered, or account is locked. So I called the help line, and once again got a minimum-wage person with a heavy accent (Philipino?) who offered to reset the account password. Well, I had already been through resetting the password, but ok, and of course that didn’t help. She suggested I should wait until coverage actually starts. Sigh.

I went out, stopping first at Bed Bath and Beyond because I was thinking maybe I want a duvet. I was kind of chilly a few nights, but that was when the bedroom radiator wasn’t working. But maybe a not-too-arctic duvet with a colorful cover would be nice. They didn’t have any. They had duvets, but only boring gray or beige covers, and anyway a Queen/Full set would be over $300 and… nah. fuggedaboudit.

On to Target where I hoped to stock up on some Ranitidine. I had gotten that there before (day 229) and remembered exactly where they should be. But they weren’t. Name-brand (Zantac) but no generic. I also looked for note pads. Simple, 4×6, pads of white paper such as I want one of by the phone and one on my desk. Nope.

Crossed the street to Walmart. They, also, had no Ranitidine, although they at least had posted a “temporarily out of stock” note on that bit of shelf. Later, shopping online, I still can’t find it. What, is there a global shortage of the Ranitidine plant or something? No paper pads, either, plenty of spiral books and legal pads but no plain small ones.

Palo Alto once had not one but two complete stationery stores, one on University and one on California Ave. Both closed earlier this century. I stopped at a paper store in Town and Country, but they were all about wrapping and place cards and note cards, nothing so plebian as a pad of white paper. So guess what? Amazon Prime. Stack of 10, 4×6 note pads, on its way to me, $11, free shipping. Wonder why all those stationery stores closed?

After lunch I remembered that I am running A/V for a big Canopy do on our 11th floor tomorrow, and I have never touched the 11th floor mic equipment, only the stuff in the auditorium. So I went up there and fumbled around and couldn’t work it out. But eventually I unearthed the instruction sheet under a bunch of other stuff, and got squared away, so am prepared. The contact person for the event is Maika Horjus, who is a person at Canopy that Marian loved to work with when she did volunteer stuff in the Canopy office. She will no doubt be surprised to see me.

Jean had invited me to supper. We talked about various things for an hour. I had wanted to assure her of financial support if she couldn’t live independently. Turns out, she’s already worked out where to move if needed, and figures she will have enough money, but was glad I would be able to help with any shortfall.

 

Day 364, men’s group, FOPAL

Monday, 12/2/2019

Started the day with a run. Felt fine. At 10am the Channing House Men’s Group had a meeting, to welcome and introduce a new resident, David Thornton. That makes a total of five Daves in the house, me, Dave Torin, David Morrison, David Golden, and this guy. Who has the mild manner of a minister, which he was for a few years out of Yale Divinity School. Then for three decades he had various positions with the YMCA, including the last 15 years as CEO of the Santa Clara Valley group of Y’s.

From there I went to FOPAL where there was only a couple of boxes of computer books and, even more astonishing, a vast reduction in the mountain of boxes waiting to be sorted. Somebody (notably I believe, Frank McConnel) has been doing a heroic amount of sorting. I took it on myself to pull out and sort all remaining non-standard boxes, i.e. moving boxes and shopping bags and such, leaving only firmly-packed (hence stackable) banker’s boxes. Those, I stacked neatly in 3, 5-high stacks, or 15 boxes. I estimate there is room now for about 45 boxes which would bring the mountain back to where it was a month ago. Then I got out the house vacuum and vacuumed the carpet. The whole sorting room looked neater than I have ever seen it in a year.

Coming in, I bumped into Chris of the facilities group in the hallway and asked him to take a look at the radiator in the bedroom of my temp unit, which doesn’t produce any heat. Later that evening Luis came by and worked on it, replacing the thermostat for that room. The thermostats in these un-upgraded units are interesting antiques. There is an air compressor in the basement, and an air feed to the thermostat. The thermostat unit itself has several cams and levers that operate a small valve that controls the amount of air being sent through the wall to the valve on the radiator. The radiator valve controls the hot water flow based on air pressure from the thermostat. Real antiques. I can see why the floor by floor upgrade includes a complete replacement of the HVAC system.

 

Day 363, Movie, plant stand, mess

Sunday, 12/1/2019

I’m confused with my day numbering. But no, today is the 363rd day since Marian died. I numbered the day following, Day 1. Tomorrow is the 364th complete day since she died, and the anniversary of her death.

Coincidentally, it will be my birthday. A coincidence I’ve not drawn attention to. We never made much of birthdays anyway, but if I needed a reason to not celebrate mine, there we are.

Today I went for coffee at the old spot, the Palo Alto Cafe, still the nicest venue for sitting and sipping.

At 11 I headed out to meet Dennis at the Pruneyard for a movie, Ford v. Ferrari. Generally it was pretty good. The in-car racing sequences would be more effective in an iMax theater (I’m not sure there is an iMax version, but there should be). And there were a couple of times when drivers going 200mph down the Mulsanne straight turned to glare at each other, and I was annoyed. Driving 200mph you do not turn your head and look sideways to lock eyes with a competitor, not for a second. But, OK in all.

In the afternoon, I went to the resident shop and brought up the plant stand, and put it on my balcony and put a couple of pots on it. It’s going to do very well. After I move back to #621 in February I overhaul of plant collection, repot a couple of them, maybe add a couple, organized around the plant stand.

After moving the stand I observed that the tile floor of the shop was a bit sticky and although the color wasn’t noticeable, there was an obvious ring where the bottom had been. I had taken some care while spraying, holding newspaper behind to catch the overspray, but the green mist of paint had settled out on the floor. Well, I had a can of Goof-Off and a roll of paper towels, so I got down and started cleaning.

The Goof-Off (a pungent liquid in a squeeze can) produced an odd, and embarrassing, effect. I say the green mist wasn’t obvious, but as soon as a towel dampened with solvent hit the tile, all the microscopic mist dots melted and ran together to make a very visible light green smear, which quickly dried, so it had to be wiped. So I ended up using up most of the can and the roll of towels. In hindsight, I should have laid newspaper all over the floor. Of course. Duh.

I spent yet more time going through previous posts, tagging them and sometimes extracting paragraphs of text to use in the wrap-up I plan to do. Later in the week, I guess.

Day 362, Docent, plant stand, SWBB

Saturday, 11/30/2019

Had breakfast in the dining room. Two of three central elevators are still out, so I’m getting lots of stairsteps. The plant stand that I’ve been working on is still on the balcony waiting to have the top half primed and painted, but the weather has turned cold. Too cold, really, for spray painting. Well, heck I have access to the resident workshop. So I carry the stand, and my paint cans and some latex gloves, down to the basement via the freight elevator. I prime the top half and leave it to dry.

At 11 I leave for the museum. Steve is not overjoyed to see me; for some reason he likes to not split docent duties, he says, but then he graciously concedes there are quite a few people and we should. At 5 to the hour there is a group of 15 or so already, so he starts out. I wait, chatting to the gathering crowd, until 5 after, but even with that delay my group keeps catching up to Steve’s. I have to fill and stall, and then finally I leapfrog him; and then I have to rush so I don’t slow his group down. It’s a mess, and I don’t feel I did a good job at all. I apologize to Steve, who is very nice about everything. But I don’t think my group of 20+ got the best experience.

At supper I sit alone at a table for four; then Helene comes to join me and we talk a bit. At 7:30 I settle down to listen to SWBB, the championship game of their tournament in Victoria, against Mississipi State. I’ve seen the MS Bulldogs play, in fact I remember a couple of years ago cheering for them at the Final Four in Knoxville, when they upset UConn in semi. They are known for rebounding, but tonight Stanford out-rebounds them by a lot, takes a good lead, gives most of it up, but holds on to win by a few. A very exciting game to listen to.

Day 361, Docent, SWBB, rug

Friday, 11/29/2019

Went for a run in the morning. The outside temp was 45F (the two thermometers were only a degree apart, 44 vs. 45) so I wore a knitted watch cap as well as a sweatshirt (my classic SGI employee freebie sweatshirt from about 1997) and it was fine.

I spent a couple of hours then continuing the review of blog posts for this year. At 11, I drove to the museum and led the noon tour. I had expected that on a holiday weekend Friday, there would be a lot of people, but in fact I had a group of only about 12 to start. But a bunch more joined on the way, so at one point it was a crowed of 30 or more, which thinned out at the end to 20 again. One older lady told me afterward “You were great!” Awww.

Before leaving I had checked my personal schedule and tomorrow is basically open, except for maybe listening to a SWBB game from their tournament in Victoria, BC. I also checked the volunteer schedule to make sure today’s shot was the noon tour, and noticed that only Steve is signed up for noon Saturday. Which, again, will probably be heavy. So I signed up for that as well. I’ll go down there, if there isn’t a big crowd, I’ll come home.

In Channing House news, the third elevator is again on the blink. One supposes they are having trouble getting service on the holiday weekend? Anyway, there’s only one elevator in the central bank, although we are allowed to use the freight elevators at either end of the building. I’ve been taking the stairs always when going down from 4, and tonight after supper I climbed up as well.

I listened to the SWBB game (as I did last night after coming home). Last night they had a hard time just edging out a win from California Baptist (who?), who shouldn’t have caused such a problem. Tonight they played Syracuse, a matchup of The Orange against The Cardinal (and I love “autumn” colors), and won much more easily. Wins do come more easy when a freshman, Hannah Jump, goes unconscious and hits eight threes in the game. It turns out she is not the first to do that, and in fact Bonny Samuelson once hit nine in a game. During the postgame interview it emerged that the Samuelson sisters, Bonnie and Carlie, had been special idols for Hannah when she was growing up. Awwww.

3137947_image_1010I talked about rug shopping Day 355. Yesterday at Denise’s, I admired their area rug and Denise said, oh yeah, we got that on Amazon. Huh. So today I did some rug shopping on Amazon and… I would say things look bad for local rug shops. There are just a ton of nice looking area rugs at very reasonable prices on Amazon. With free shipping for Prime. I noted several that would do me nicely, would give just the needed patch of color on my new dark gray-brown floor. So I noted URLs to those, to be revisited in January after I move back to my proper unit. And now I can stop shopping and thinking about rugs. Nice!

Day 360, Thanksgiving

Thursday, 11/28/2019

Showered shaved and put on nicer than usual clothes. Had breakfast downstairs, then was faced with quite a long gap of time until 4pm when I should leave for Denise and Jason’s for dinner. So I thought, heck, I’ll take the Dish Walk. Been a while (Day 167) since I did that. I assumed that many people would have the same idea, so the tiny parking area at the trailhead would have been full since 7am, so I took a Lyft there. There were a whole lot of people on the trail, from family groups ambling, to gorgeous sweaty athletes racing along in running shorts. I did the full 3 mile loop and now it was 11am.

What to do for some lunch, I wondered. I had the notion that the CH dining room was going to be closed. I was sure that we had instructions that, if we needed supper we should pick up a bag lunch between 8 and 10am. So I had myself Lyfted down to California avenue, thinking I’d lunch at one of the many restaurants along there. Hah! Not one was open, it was a ghost town. I knew there was a MacD’s not too far along El Camino, but really. So I took a Lyft home.

And found that not only was the CH dining room open for lunch, it was a full Thanksgiving menu with choices of sliced ham, turkey, something else, pumpkin or pecan pie for dessert, etc. And the place was jammed; apparently a lot of residents were having their relatives in for this fancy lunch. I had completely misunderstood the schedule; the staff will indeed be off, but only for the evening. So I had some turkey and gravy for lunch.

At 4pm I drove to Denise’s place (the bride and groom of two weeks ago) where they had cooked a turkey for Dennis and Toni (her father and mother) and very kindly included Uncle Dave. That was nice.

 

 

Day 359, rain, FOPAL, groceries

Wednesday, 11/27/2019

The first rain of the year arrived yesterday afternoon, first as a drizzle, then a quite heavy shower around 8pm, and another very heavy shower about 4am that woke me up.

At 7am I looked at the weather radar online and debated with myself whether a gap between two bands of green pixels meant it would be dry long enough for me to run. Then I leaned out from the balcony looking at the hills to the west and realized, “that’s a rain shower right there,” and decided no, I would get rained on. But what to do for exercise? I could wait around for the 9:15 strength and balance class, but (a) I like to get exercise out of the way earlier than that, and (b) there’s no aerobic component to it. So for the first time I went down to the gym in the basement and ran on one of the Channing House treadmills. Which are quite new, state of the art ones. I ran for approximately the same duration and speed as I would run on the street.

About 11am I went to FOPAL. Lyft had given me 25% off my next ten rides, so I used Lyft there and back again around 4:30. Both times I elected to use the “shared” option. On the way down, as typical, I had the car to myself, but on the way back at 4:30, the car stopped at two locations to pick up other people.

On Monday or Tuesday, somebody had delivered a very large donation of computer books. The donor appears to have been a practicing developer from 2000 to 2005, using, or at least interested in, the whole Microsoft world of .NET, Visual C#, Access, SQL Server, and more. Box after box of books, many the style I call “tombstones”, big heavy 1000-page paperbacks, mostly in mint or near-mint condition. Only a few showed signs of heavy use, post-its and dog-eared corners.

Sadly they were not really saleable. The most recent was from 2007, that’s twelve years ago, which is a glacial age in software time. I checked the version numbers of the software they documented and none were within even 2 or 3 levels of the current version. So the books can’t be used with the current software; and someone who for some crazy reason has to work with version 1.0 of the .NET framework, surely has any manuals they need. I ended up sending fifteen (15!) boxes to the bargain room. I priced and shelved maybe twenty books from the whole donation.

On return to CH I found a second elevator out. One of our three elevators stopped working on Friday, I think it was, and the latest word from management is that a part needs to be fabricated for it and it will be out 1-2 weeks more. Now today, a second one is “temporarily out of service”. I think I will be using the stairs. Fortunately I am currently on the 4th floor, so going down to meals is easy and coming back isn’t too bad. Leave the one elevator to people on 7 to 10.

In fact I decided to eat a simple PBJ supper in my room and went to bed early.

 

Day 358, laundry, plant stand, meeting

Tuesday, 11/26/2019

First thing in the morning I ran my laundry. While that was working, I unpacked and tasted a new low-carb meal replacement product that had come in the mail yesterday. Then I wrote a review of it on Reddit.

I’ve been following this little niche industry of meal replacements since Soylent was first introduced back in 2015. For quite a while, they were all distributed as powders to which you add water, sometimes also oil. To make a meal you mix up a scoop of powder, maybe a drizzle of oil, and water in a shaker. About 2017 if I recall right, Soylent introduced a “ready to drink” (RTD) product, a premixed liquid meal in a bottle. Some others have since added RTD lines.

A niche within a niche is the “Keto” meal replacements. These are extremely low-carb, one or two grams of net (i.e. non-fiber) carbohydrates per meal. If such foods comprise your entire nutrition, your metabolism enters a state of “nutritional ketosis” in which your cells extract energy from ketones rather than glucose. This is a medical treatment for some types of seizure disorders, and a dietary fad among some people. There are three companies doing keto meal replacements, and until now all had shipped only powders. But one, Sated.com, has been working on an RTD product forever, a lengthy kickstarter campaign which I’d subscribed to, and finally they shipped. So I was pleased to try the stuff and report on it.

That done, I walked to the hardware store and bought a can of green Rustoleum paint, and painted the bottom half of the iron plant stand. The next step is to put it back right way up and finish priming and painting the top half, which I had thought to do today. However, the green paint was still a bit tacky after lunch so I just left it to harden.

I spent a couple of hours after lunch working through this blog from day 1. I’m up to about day 90 now, and rather astonished at how much I got done this past spring. What I’m doing is adding “Tags” to each post, “Grief”, “Movie”, etc etc, so in principle I could quickly find various topics. However it is mostly a disciplined re-read and review of the year. I’m also copying out what seem like significant paragraphs. Somehow I’ll use all this to compose a year-end statement of some sort. This weekend, hopefully.

At 4:30 it was time of the monthly A/V committee meeting, where we review the requests for events for the next month, and assign people to run the sound and video. There is an official “event request form” where anybody putting on an event specifies the date and time and what kind of mics and so on they will need. Ian makes it all into a spreadsheet, typically 25 events or so; there’s a talk or a concert or a movie every other day or more. I ended up signed up to run A/V or three events toward the end of the month.

 

Day 357, mostly FOPAL, some blogging

Monday, 11/25/2019

Started with a run, which felt good. Then to FOPAL where I had just culled the computer books and was about to sit down at the computer to price 50 or so of them, when there was a rap at the door.

It was a high-school age young woman who introduced herself as Kai and said she was a volunteer and had been told she’d be sorting. As she was saying this, another young woman walked up. I forget her name, but it developed they were both doing High School public service hours. At noon when they knocked off, the second one had me sign a sheet where she was recording her volunteer hours. Over the past couple of weeks she’d done hours at, it looked like, 10 or more different service organizations. Awesome!

They hadn’t done sorting before. Somebody told them to show up at 10am to do that — why? There is not normally any sort of senior person or other sorter there at 10am on a Monday. Well, no problem; I gave them a quick training session in sorting and they dove right in energetically. Smart, hard-working girls, they did a lot of sorting in two hours.

I finished up my pricing, then did sorting along with the girls and continued after they left until the 2pm sorters showed up. I was pretty tired by then. Hey, I’ve got 11,300 steps, 4.3 miles on my phone today. A bit more than half would be my morning run. So I walked about 1.5-2.0 miles back and forth around the FOPAL book rooms — a lot of those steps I was carrying boxes of books. No wonder my back was a little sore and I felt tired. Had a good nap, did an hour on Zooniverse, then sat down to blog.

Before supper I spent an hour going through the first month of this blog. My main goal was to add “tags” to each post, so I can pull categories like Grief, Transition, Movies etc. But it also meant reading the posts. My life has certainly changed in these twelve months. From living in my house on Tasso, just beginning the downsizing project and not sure of where to live, to being settled at Channing House and pretty much everything stabilized and comfortable. I intend to write a longish essay summarizing the experience of this year of transition. It probably won’t be ready on Day 366, the start of the second year, but soon.

 

 

Day 356, coffee, market, SWBB

Sunday, 11/24/2019

For coffee this morning, I drove to Menlo Park to try the home store of Mme. Collette, the little coffee shop three blocks from CH where the pastries are better and more interesting than anywhere else, but there isn’t room for comfortable reading. The other shop has even nicer pastries, but very little more room. For just comfy sittin’ and readin’ it is hard to beat the old PA Cafe in Midtown, you know?

Well, I was out in the car, where to go? I thought I’d go and stroll the California Ave. farmer’s market, maybe shoot a couple of pictures. This market has been a success ever since it started more than a decade ago. I know, because this afternoon when I was saving the best shots from today in the folder named “farmer’s markets”, I noticed the last time I shot pictures there it was 2009.

20191124 squash!

This was the best pic I got today. Something about that sign on top of the avalanche of zucchini just tickles me.

At 1pm I went downstairs and met with Patty and Florrie to ride in Patty’s new Honda Fit to the SWBB game. Like other newer cars I’ve ridden in, it has the side-view feature: when you flip the turn signal lever, the screen on the dash shows a view of the road to that side behind the car. I’m fortunate in that my neck is still flexible enough that I can turn my head to look behind before changing lanes. For people who can’t, this is a lifesaver. And if I had it I’d probably use it. Along with other neat gadgets, it’s an argument for replacing a perfectly good Prius. (Against that, by the way, is the fact that Toyota sided with the Trump administration in the suit against California’s emissions law, which I have heard mentioned more than once among CH residents as reason not to buy a Toyota. We are a hotbed of liberalism here in the old professors’ and doctors’ home, ya know.)

Anyway, Stanford played the Buffalo (NY) Bulldogs, another team that, like Gonzaga, has a very active and pestiferous defense. Stanford had a hard time pulling away and the score was pretty even at the half. Then in the fourth quarter, the Bulldogs ran out of gas. Stanford was rotating all their players (every available player had minutes and almost all had some points), and they just ran the legs off the team in blue. The fourth quarter was a rout, ending in a 20-point win.