Day 139, planting Marian’s tree

Saturday, 4/20/2019

For some reason I’ve been anxious about this day for days, and woke up repeatedly in the night before. Well, part of that was that I expected to need to “say something” and had been working up a cute little 3- or 4-minute eulogy, practicing it as I walked various places (and while tossing in the night), trying to get where I wouldn’t completely break down while delivering it. Part of the anxiety was being a host, feeling responsible for the success of an event or the pleasure of the attendees. Marian used to suffer that feeling to an extreme degree, so maybe I was channeling her (joke).

In the end (and of course) it all went off fine, and I didn’t have to say a thing. Catherine Martineau, head of Canopy, did a nice, and brief, talk about the three people who were having memorial trees planted today. Then we set to work.

Denise, Scott, June, me, Jean, Darlene, Dennis, Liz, and the tree

The site was alongside a very popular bike path, one I’ve ridden many times. The tree is out in the clear but somewhat sheltered from wind, and should grow well. I look forward to checking it over the years.

We adjourned to brunch and then everyone scattered, satisfied with a job well done. My only “host” role in the end was to have chosen a restaurant that was easy to get to and had good parking, yay me.

In the afternoon I did a bit of sorting of folders. One job is to collect pend-a-flex folders from a couple of different drawers, get rid of unneeded stuff, and organize the remainder into folders that I can remember. The present folder tabs have evolved over a long time (like every other damn thing I have) and are redundant and contradictory.

One folder had various documents about the purchase of the house, the original mortgage (long paid-off), etc. I moved those to the “brown binder”, the estate documents binder that is kept in a fireproof box. One folder was “Appliances” and contained the user manuals, and receipts, for pretty much every major purchase: stove, bedroom set, washer/dryer, etc. etc. And some things we don’t have any more.

I’ll keep working on this task tomorrow and Monday. I have ordered a small file cabinet to use at C.H. and it has shipped, so I’ll put the newly-organized folders into that, their future home.

Spent an hour finishing a book I’ve enjoyed reading. It’s a treat to find fiction that I can actually get into and enjoy reading, in this case the works of Becky Chambers. There’s a sub-genre of Mystery called “cozy mystery” (“in which sex and violence are downplayed … and the crime and detection take place in a small, socially intimate community” — Wikipedia). Chamber writes what I can only call “cozy sci-fi” and I love it.

Day 138, signing at Channing House

Friday, 4/19/2019

Showered, shaved, dressed as formally as my wardrobe allows (slacks, sport coat, gray turtleneck) and at 10:15 drove to C.H. where I sat down with Rhonda Bekkedahl, currently COO, also incoming CEO, to sign all the various contracts involved in becoming a member of a Continuous Care operation. Done! Well, it will be done when they have successfully tapped my Schwab account for the six-figure entry fee. Let’s see… nope, hasn’t happened yet. Not my problem.

Got my room key; got shown my mailbox and my storage locker. The latter is a large (roughly 3×4 feet and 8 foot tall) wire cage in the basement.

Got a parking sticker for the car, however it is not clear yet whether there is an available slot in the underground garages. In any case I need to get a Palo Alto resident’s parking permit; with that I will be able to park anywhere on the surrounding streets and ignore the 2-hour limit signs. But I seriously don’t want to leave the car on the street all the time. We’ll see.

Declined the opportunity to have lunch there. I am now able to eat any and all meals there but I won’t start doing that before next week. This is a stressful weekend and I’d like to not start on that whole new to-do list until later. Right now I am going to sit down and read through all the bumf I’ve been handed.

Well, there is a lot to know. It’s going to be like living in a nice resort hotel. I’ve got lots to do, starting next week, to begin moving in, emotionally if not yet physically. Today I ate a simple supper at home, but tomorrow, or Sunday for sure, I need to go have supper over there.

One piece of furniture I didn’t secure yesterday is a desk. This afternoon I spent a lot of time searching the web for an L-shaped desk — because I want an L-shaped desk, damn it, for the corner of the bedroom — that had a keyboard tray — because I want my keyboard lower than the standard 30-inch desk height — and also a file drawer and a drawer for stuff. This is a combination of features that is not common. There are stark, modernist L-shaped desks that have keyboard trays but no drawers, and L-shaped desks that have pedestals with drawers but no keyboard tray. And then filter those by color, didn’t want black or dark brown or white. Finally found one, sold both at Walmart and Amazon for $100 more. But Walmart’s web page said, sorry, we can’t ship that to your Walmart. So I ordered it from Amazon; the box of knocked-down parts should arrive next week.

Big day. Vegging out with a book.

Day 137, Furniture shopping

Thursday, 4/18/2019

Began the day by going to the Yosemite warehouse for museum work. Unfortunately the work got hung up on trying to make a camera work. Museum IT staff had loaded a donated laptop with Windows 10, and the camera utility that they use to drive a Canon SLR to take pictures of artifacts, wasn’t compatible. So time was being wasted trying to download a new utility. Then we all went to lunch. After lunch there was little more progress, so I bailed early.

I wanted to visit Living Spaces, a large furniture store recommended by Amy. It is on that side of the bay, convenient to the warehouse. I’d planned to visit it at the normal quitting time of 4pm, but took the opportunity to go early.

Amy recommended another place too, West Elm, and I’d seen several attractive pieces on their website, but all with extended delivery times. So maybe Living Spaces would have something.

It’s a vast place but had little to attract me. The had a couple of L-shaped desks, but they were in a faux-rustic style, deliberately crude finishes. Ditto the media centers. No bistro tables, no love seats. One fairly attractive accent chair, but upholstered in a strong autumn-brown which would stand out, or else force me to buy everything else in a matching color.

So I drove back to my side of the bay and went to West Elm. There I arranged to buy the things I want. Two items I could have immediately from stock: a chair and a bistro table. A media center will come in a week, so it will be delivered here. Two chairs to go with the table won’t come until the first week of June, so will have to be delivered to me at C.H. (and in the meantime I won’t be able to sit at my bistro table). The very nice love seat, really a short couch, will come after that. So on moving in I’ll have only two chairs, the new one and my recliner, and a box to set the TV on. Well, and a bed and a coffee table and some plants and pictures from here.

In between these, I was trying to buy tickets to concerts during the Stanford Jazz Festival in July. Supposedly members could begin to buy tickets today, but I couldn’t. Email to support got sympathy but no improvement. At the end of the day I’d bought one of the five events I want to attend. Unless their website magically starts working over the weekend, I think I’ll try to buy in person at the Stanford ticket window.

But that’s for next week. The next few days are busy. Tomorrow is a big day, I go to C.H. and sign the contracts and become an official resident. Not able to move in, but at least I could eat meals there.

Saturday is a tree planting for Marian. I’ve been practicing a 3-minute talk.

Day 136, realtor, sale manager

Wednesday, 4/17/2019

First item was a run. Started early, 8:15, so as to be back in time for the 10:30 arrival of Chuck the realtor, Vassily his contractor, and Amy the stager. Before they arrived I had a talk with Richard the gardener about adding new bark mulch to the landscaping. We’d done that twice in the seven years since the 2012 landscape makeover, and the mulch was again looking thin and gray. He reminded me how I’d set down a big tarp in the driveway so the truck could dump two yards of mulch and he could get it up clean. Oh, yeah, it comes back to me now. And that big tarp is still in the garage.

So I priced bark mini-mulch at local garden centers and we decided to do it a week from Friday.

Then the realty crew arrived, and I introduced Richard to Chuck as a reliable gardener, and then Amy said, about the mulch, hold off on that until you know when the house will be on the market and do it just before so it looks its best.

There were extensive discussions between the three of them about how to re-do the kitchen and the bath. I tried to keep my mouth shut, with mixed success. Vassily wants drawings to work from. I was surprised that Amy said, “I don’t do drawings”, so that is something that somebody (not me!) will have to organize somehow. Anyway it was left that Vassily will get Chuck “some numbers” next week. So at least we’ll have an idea of how much renovations will cost, which Chuck can balance against an expected higher price for the house.

Possibly the most significant conversation happened in the driveway, after Amy and Vassily had left. I pointed out how good the garden was looking, with the iris all in bloom, and if we could just let people see the house it might sell as-is. Chuck said, well we can do that. And we agreed he would put up a local ad, without enough detail that people could find the house on their own but would have to go through him. And he would coordinate with me to let selected people, if any were interested (Hah! thinks I), see the house as-is.

Coincidentally that afternoon I got my monthly email from Zillow.com, giving their “Zestimate” on the house of 2.9 million. I am only hoping for 2.5 clear, or about 2.7 going into escrow. So. I have hopes this will all happen without the need for fussing around with construction mess and delay.

At 1:30 Deborah the estate sale lady arrived with Thor her son, to take some pictures. She shot pics and took measurements of the major furniture items.

Two items I still vacillate about: the bed, and the big room divider that is my media stand. Of the bed, Amy emphasized to me that my queen-size is about 6 inches longer than a “full” which I had planned to buy. In the night, I stretched out and my toes touched the footboard and there was about a hands-width between my head and the headboard. Hmmm. I’m just not sure. The queen width is much more than I need; I still sleep on exactly half of it, from long habit, and the other half is unused. Maybe if it was in the new location, turned a different way, I could get used to sleeping more in the middle. Fret fret fret. If I keep it, I am spared the hassle of trying to buy a bed, mattress and new linens.

After Deborah left I headed out to FOPAL and spent 2 and a half hours finishing the cleanup and reorganization of the Computer section.

Day 135, History SJ, FOPAL

Tuesday, 4/16/2019

First order of business was to transport our San Jose Lasers relics to History San Jose. Long story here. Back on Day 38 I mentioned sorting our memorabilia of the San Jose Lasers, a professional women’s team in the short-lived American Basketball League. The ABL folded in its second year. On day 60 I mentioned being astonished to find that, besides the team shirts and framed pictures, Marian had carefully curated two fat binders of paper items. One was from the first two seasons: ticket stubs, trading cards, press clippings and more. The other was from the last months, when the fans came together on the internet (in 1998!) to organize a final game, called HoopSalute.

I twice used the donation page on the History San Jose website to offer these items and received no reply of any kind. Fortuitously, last Thursday Dan, one of the curators at HSJ, stopped by the Shustek center for an unrelated matter. I accosted him with my tale and he said “email me your list”. Long story short, they did want the items, we set up a time, and today is the day to take the stuff to them. I drove to the HSJ office on Senter Road in the south end of San Jose, and went over everything with them. They were happy to get everything and thanked me. I’m delighted that these things are out of the house and into safe hands.

Back home I killed time laundering the bed linens until the cleaning lady arrived. I told her that I hoped she’d come just twice more. Also I gave her a little gold chain and medallion from Marian’s collection. She’d said last time she wished she had something to remember Marian by, so there.

Then I headed down to FOPAL to do post-sale-day cleanup of the Computer section. I got some advice from a couple of ladies who were doing the same for their sections. You can tell from the way we write prices, how many months, or sales, a book has been on the shelf. If it has been on the shelf unsold for two months, mark it down by half, and if that takes it below $2, send it to the Bargain Room.

I sent four boxes of books to the Bargain Room, and also found myself reorganizing the categories on the shelves. I didn’t finished, but left after 2 and a half hours. I’ll finish tomorrow.

After a short rest at home I went out to an early supper at Hobee’s. I talked to them about brunch for eight or so, around 11:30 Saturday, but they don’t do reservations. “Call a little while ahead and we can probably fit you in.” Well, I really didn’t like the atmosphere that well anyway. So, where? I want someplace close to Bol Park and easy to get to from there, i.e. no left turns across El Camino without a signal, or U-turns. I tried Cibo, a would-be upscale place in a good location, but it felt too upscale. I don’t want to host a fine meal, I just want a casual place for friends to stop by if they feel like it.

I finally settled on the decidedly down-scale Corner Bakery. It’s just a chain but it has plenty of space and parking and is dead easy to get to from the park.

During the evening, Deb the sale lady texted to see if she could come take pictures tomorrow at 1:30. Later, Chuck called to say he and Vasilly and Amy would come around tomorrow at 10:30 if that was OK. Sure.

Day 134, planning the unit

Monday, 4/15/2019

Started with a run, very comfortable. On return, showered and dressed, I spent time on the phone with Via Benefits. For the third month in a row they had ignored my information on direct deposit and had sent me a check. The phone rep said she would send me a paper form that I could return to request direct deposit. Hopefully that will be more effective than repeatedly putting the bank numbers into their web site and clicking “submit”; that hasn’t achieved anything.

Then spent an hour doing stuff–triage of the “shop”, the enclosed room in the garage building. That’s where the brown steel cabinets are that I emptied over the last two weeks. Now I worked on the cabinets up the right side, primarily paint and related chemicals (paint stripper, thinner…) and plant pots. Lots of plant pots. Those I left for the sale manager to price.

I spent some time with decorative pebbles. Back last summer, with Marian in the hospital, I tidied the three big “porch pots” of bedding plants by pulling the dying plants and, rather than replant, I put in rounds of green netting and covered them with the shiny decorative pebbles Marian used to discourage squirrels. In the winter, I moved the pots to the garage.

Now, cleaning out the shop cabinet, I found a half-bag of shiny pebbles and remembered the others, so I gathered all the pebbles together, and then noticed they were dirty and had leaves mixed in, so put them in a plastic tub and washed them.

Well, such fussing brought me to noon and shortly Amy the Decorator appeared right on time. We walked around the house and I pointed out the few bits of furniture I meant to take, or that we could take. She took pictures and noted dimension on her iPad.

Then we went to Channing House for a scheduled meeting with Angela the Upgrade Manager. She and Amy got along great and we all spent nearly two hours in unit 621. Much of the time was spent choosing materials from Angela’s stock of carpet and counter-top samples, paint chips, and photos of cabinetry and sinks.

One problem emerged: Angela just lost her in-house cabinet maker, and is not sure whether the bathroom cabinetry that I want can be done in the next few weeks. Possibly it will have to be delayed until the 6th-floor upgrade late this year. To be determined.

Amy dropped me off at home. After she left, I drove up to Bol Park where the tree planting for Marian is to happen Saturday. On the map it had looked unfamiliar, but in person it was “Doh! of course!”. I had ridden my bike along the edge of this park many many times; it’s the bike-path from Oregon Expressway over to Arastradero.

It was easy to identify the place for the tree planting; I could see the clear signs of Canopy having prepared the ground for one of their community plantings. It’s just in front of the pen where for years a donkey lived that everyone treated as a Palo Alto mascot.

From there I drove less than a mile to Hobee’s, where I am thinking people can have brunch after the planting. Unfortunately they close early on Mondays so I couldn’t get in. I’ll have supper there tomorrow and make a reservation if I can.

Day 133, hat store

Sunday, 4/14/2019

Opened the day with my customary walk to the local coffee shop to read the paper and do the big crossword. Problem: in a month or so, living at C.H., where will I take that pleasure? All right come on, that’s an opportunity not a problem.

On return, I was faced with a day in which I’d told myself I wouldn’t do any chores. But what to do instead?

I remembered that for some time I’ve thought of going to the Berkeley Hat Store, one of the best hat shops in the area, to look for a replacement for my favorite casual fedora which is showing some wear. Well, why not today?

Two minutes (at most) with the internet answered all questions: yes, the store was open today at noon; yes my clipper card works on BART; here’s the address of the BART station in Fremont; the next trains depart at 11:17 and 11:37; it will take a bit over 20 minutes to drive there. I try to get people on my docent tour to grasp how our lives have been changed by networked computers. As fish we have a hard time seeing the water we swim in.

So I drove to Fremont, had an hour’s ride on BART to Berkeley Downtown and a nice 20 minute walk to the store. A helpful clerk wasn’t able to find an exact duplicate of my pet hat, but he found one quite a bit like it that looks ok on me. And cheap, at $32. I had a slice of pizza for lunch, and reversed my journey, stage by stage.

To continue the theme of the computer revolution: I passed time on the ride reading a book on Kindle on my phone. It was the first volume of a science fiction trilogy and I really enjoyed it. That’s a change; the experience of really getting into a story and liking the characters and being interested in the events — has been rare of recent years. I’ve abandoned a lot of books (and even more movies on TV) because I just didn’t care what was going to happen, or actively disliked the people or events. (Case in point, last night I gave up on On the Road about one-fourth through. What a bunch of smug, obsessively self-focused, asocial losers.)

Anyway, having finished the science fiction book, I wanted to get the next two volumes and although I could see them on Kindle, I couldn’t quite figure out how to buy and download them on the phone. I’m sure it was possible, I just couldn’t see how to do it through Kindle’s interface. (Sure, blame the software.) But that would really have closed the loop. Reading a book on your phone would have sounded like science fiction already, fifteen years ago (the iPhone was announced in 2007), but to be able to buy and download another volume on your phone while riding a train… that would have been perfect.

Home for a quiet afternoon and evening reading and watching TV.

Day 132, cleanup, docent, FOPAL sale

Saturday, 4/12/2019

Today I continued to decimate the long merged to-do list I put together a couple days back. One item was just “clean camera”. I had noticed that the Nikon was really grubby and in fact, I’m shamed to admit, it still had traces of an unfortunate event back in spring 2017 when, in Italy, I had a small incident with a cappuccino and some foam got on the camera. So I cleaned it up and put a bit of armor-all on the rubber bits and looks good again. “Photo stuff” was another checklist item, and that was easy to deal with. One old camera was already in the sale box. The Nikon manual, battery charger, and extra battery, and the tripod, were the only remaining items, so I put those in an appropriate “keep” location.

Eventually I went off to the CHM to lead a tour. On the way back I stopped first at Summerwinds Nursery on Middlefield. On this first warm weekend of spring it was bustling with people buying plants and fertilizer etc. Marian would have been there I’m sure, picking out bedding plants for the “porch pots”, three large bowl-shaped pots that stood on our front porch. She would plant them with blooming things every spring. I retired those pots to the garage last fall when the then-current crop of bedding plants were dying down. I thought very briefly of bringing them back and planting them, but… no.

I was only at the nursery to buy plant supports for the two big dragon-wing begonias that live in pots on the porch. I do intend to keep them for my deck at C.H., and for that they have to have saucers, so water doesn’t drip down to the next floor’s deck. I thought they’d be better off with casters as well, so I got little wheeled supports for them that incorporate saucers. That was another to-do item.

From the nursery it was just a few blocks to FOPAL where the monthly sale was going on. I went in to see how the Computer shelf was doing. Quite a few gaps in the shelving showed that some books had been bought. I was disappointed though, because I had set up a short section labeled “classics and nostalgia” and stocked it with blasts from the past, like “Using your TRS-80 in the home” and a book by Larry Yourdon on “Structured COBOL”. Maybe people had gotten a kick out of it, but nobody had bought anything. I also took a look around the Bargain Room, which is quite remarkable, really three large rooms where all books are $1 and the high stacks are just stuffed with thousands of volumes.

At home I sat down to do something about the file of “letters to us” that Marian had carefully collated, and which had sat in the closet unexamined for over thirty years. Going through it I found that almost all the letters were from the period 1975-1979, around the time we were living in London. We wrote regular letters describing our adventures, duplicated them and sent them to half a dozen friends and relations. Said friends and relations often replied, and these replies are the bulk of the file. It’s nice to know that we had people who were complimenting us on our travel narratives.

One particularly good correspondent was Marian’s sister Jean. I set the thick packet of letters from her aside and emailed her to see if she wants them. The rest I put in the recycle.

One last item: two dresser drawers of Christmas wrapping material. Rolls of paper, boxes of tags, a shoebox of ribbon spools. Bagged the complete rolls in a big white garbage bag to be sold (maybe). Plain paper and plain boxes into the recycle. Scraps of foil and shiny stuff into the trash. Two more empty drawers!

And that is bloody well that for the weekend. Sunday is a day of rest from downsizing.

Day 131, more tidy, Chabot

Friday, 4/12/2019

Should have gone for a run but decided instead to do more — I need a word for, sorting through possessions, deciding what to keep, putting those bits in one place, the other bits in the trash or a different place — downsizing. I went through the sewing bits, collected a little kit that would handle buttons and simple repairs; put the rest in a nice basket to go in the sale. Stayed busy until 10am, time to leave for Oakland where I had a date with Darlene and Jessea. They’d invited me to go with them to Chabot space and science center, up top of the ridge above Oakland, for the planetarium show, and then lunch.

Chabot was rather busy with several busloads of kids. We checked out the exhibits, then watched the show, which was not a planetarium display but an iMax-style movie about the search for dark matter. Watching the kids boisterously bouncing around the displays, and watching the filmmakers trying to get across a fairly difficult concept, reminded me of how hard museum people work to produce relevant displays, and how often they fail, in my opinion. The software exhibit at the Computer History Museum is like that. They tried really hard, but it ended up more about the things people do with software, and conveys almost nothing about what it is, or the process, difficulty, fascination of trying to make it.

Nice lunch with two cheerful people. Got to talk about myself and my adventures, which is always enjoyable, so grateful for that.

Back at home I spent a couple of hours getting one our better images to print properly, and made something of a breakthrough controlling the printer. I think following images will be much easier to print with good color.

And only now I realize, I had a baseball game I could have gone to. Oh well.

Day 130, Shustek and taxes and legal

Thursday, 4/11/2019

My tax return is ready at the accountant’s in south San Jose. Their office is open at 8, and I need to be at the Shustek center in Milpitas at 10. OK. At 8:15 I leave for the first stop. I pick up my tax form, which includes addressed envelopes and forms for,

Federal tax return
State tax return
Federal estimated tax returns for four quarterly payments
State estimated tax returns for three (I get to skip September) quarters

The amount I need to pay immediately is rather large. Unfortunately my financial advisors, or rather the brokers they rely on, realized a lot of gains this year. Due to this misfortune of making a lot of money, I need to pay a bunch of tax. I put the papers in the car and proceed to Shustek, arriving just before ten.

The usual gang, Toni, Don, Steve, Dave, and Greta work on cataloging a bunch of stuff and chatting. I leave for home at 4.

At home I sit down for serious check signing. Marian established the tradition of writing tax checks against our unmanaged Schwab account. I log in and check; oops, there isn’t enough cash in it to cover all the taxes. Well, this is the account whose mutual-fund assets I intend to liquidate to pay the C.H. entry fee. So I place an order to sell one of the mutual funds. Good practice for selling the others next week.

Then I write four tax checks (return plus first-quarter estimate, federal and state) and triple check that the right check is with the right form in the correct envelope. Then look for stamps, and oh dear, only one stamp left in the desk. Well, I wanted to get this properly posted anyway. I drive to the California Ave. P.O., buy stamps, re-re-check that every check and form is properly addressed, seal the envelopes, stamp them, and post them.

Back at the house, I work my way through nine (9!) pages of realtor disclosure forms, signing and initialing. So that’s ready for Chuck when he next stops by. Next up, the forms needed by my attorney. Yesterday I got a statement from her listing what documents she needs to properly handle the details of Marian’s death, and oh yes, how much it will cost. So I assemble the documents and write that check.

One of the documents she needs is a copy of a recent property-tax bill. I’ve been fretting about that all day, where would that be? Finally realize it will, or should, be part of the wad of supporting documents in the 2018 tax return folder. Out to the garage where the box of tax forms went yesterday. Yup, there it is!

Then I try to fit the documents into the attorney’s post-paid return envelope and they don’t fit. So I supply my own return envelope and two stamps.

I call Darlene to confirm I’m joining them for lunch tomorrow. Somehow one or the other of us gets the call into FaceTime mode (except I can only see my face) and then neither of us can figure out how to end the call. I think I’m tired. A little TV and bed.