Day 129, cleanup, forms, FOPAL

Wednesday, 4/10/2019

I woke up with a lot of anxiety, based I think in the general level of upheaval going on. Going through all the memorabilia yesterday, and scheduling the estate sale with Deborah, left me feeling that I’ve got a big, vague, mass of things to do in order to get my possessions in order, and the “keeps” separated from the “sells”.

Then there was the realization that Deborah had suggested a sale the weekend of 12 May, while my (still tentative) move-in date for C.H. is 18 May. Where will I be in the meantime?

Then, in the middle of the night, I woke up and fussed for half an hour about how both the entry price and the monthly fee that I’ve been quoted to enter C.H. is around 20% higher than I’d anticipated. I eventually worked out that, even without the sale of the house, I have enough assets to pay that monthly fee for… about 40 years. But still it was a worry.

So I was fussed. I deliberately went to bed early, and got up early, so I could get a jump on … something. I pulled together two or three to-do lists and made a merged one that encompassed all the shit I need to get done. Then I went for a run, which improved my mood.

Back home I tackled the number one item: to set up a clear “sequester area” in the back of the garage where I can store boxes and objects that I am definitely taking to C.H. I moved some things into it; and moved sellable things (garden tools, etc.) out of it.  This alone, getting some definite physical sorting done, had a calming effect on my mood. In the rear of the garage is a big shelf where I’ve always stored the original boxes for products we bought. Most are now irrelevant, and I spent an hour breaking them down and putting them in the recycle. Boxes for things I’m keeping, like the scanner and the iMac, I dusted off and set aside.

While doing all this, Richard the gardener was working, and I gave him the update, the news that his services will be needed through May but probably no longer. In the course of this it emerged that he wasn’t aware that Marian had died! I’m embarrassed that I hadn’t thought to tell him. Anyway, we agreed he would be adding a new layer of bark mulch, as he has in years past.

I boxed up the scanner (don’t plan to do any scanning for a while, but I mean to keep it) and put it in the sequester area. Now I really felt like I was getting on top of stuff, so I took a break. Shortly after, Chuck arrived with lots of realtor documents for me to sign. There’s an amazing number of disclosure statements that realtors use for legal CYA. We talked further about possible dates for staging and selling the house. It will probably get pushed into June.

While we were chatting, Deborah called. She was worried about the sale date she’d set. “I’m thinking, I’m going to sell your bed, where are you gonna sleep?” I said I’d been having the same thoughts, and we agreed to push the sale date to a week after 18 May, the 25th. This took another load off my mind!

The most interesting thing Chuck had to say was a very intriguing fact: he has had a casual discussion with a woman who’s getting divorced. She and her soon-to-be-ex live in a 5-bedroom house about seven blocks away from mine, which they’ll sell. The woman wants to find somewhere smaller to live, but would like to stay in Palo Alto. Helloooo! He let her know he might have something that would suit. It would be fabulous to have a private sale, possibly with minimum remodeling. But this is still just a vague chance, not least because the divorce proceeding complicates the financing.

After Chuck left I took a box full of empty three-ring binders (from yesterday’s memorabilia triage) to FOPAL and did two hours of sorting.

Back home I worked a while on a more fun project. I have a stack of nice color prints I’d made over the years from our best photos. On impulse I ordered a pack of simple frames from Amazon and they came today. I had in mind making a matched set of nice pictures to decorate a wall at C.H. I quickly found that I’d have to reprint them to get them to look right in these frames. Or buy different, smaller, frames. Easier to reprint the pictures — or is it? Because as usual, it’s a struggle to get Photoshop and the printer to agree on color values. But a fun challenge. I got one picture printed the right size and good color, in a frame by supper time.

And now, in the evening, I feel remarkably less anxious, more comfortable, than in the morning.

Day 128, unit walk-thru, more history

Tuesday, 4/9/2019

First item today was to meet with Angela Lamothe, the “upgrade manager” at C.H. We viewed my

unit #621

in detail and talked about what they would do standard, and what they would do that would cost me extra (but no numbers yet).

We decided that the kitchenette area will be remodeled with a new microwave, new fridge (both the extra-cost stainless steel instead of the standard white) and changed cabinetry. The existing cabinetry is not exactly crude, but not elegant and the paint is somewhat worn and chipped.

I decided to have the bathroom vanity redone. This isn’t part of the standard move-in upgrade. However I thought the present cabinetry was ugly and outdated, and it will be well worth some money to make it nice.

In both cases there will be several choices to be made of finishes and materials. I said I want to have my decorator along for that conference. Later we settled on Monday afternoon, and I talked to Amy on the phone and that works for her. So next Monday I will finally get a decorator really involved. (By the way, last I heard from Chris’s niece Tyra was a vague, “not sure this will work with my schedule” and no follow-up since, so I’ve basically written her off.)

There will be more work done, specifically new floor covering and paint on all surfaces. I elected to postpone that work until after the major sixth-floor remodel that will happen beginning in August. They would normally re-do the floor covering then because they pull out the floor-mounted heating/cooling units, replacing them with ducts in the ceiling. That leaves holes in the floor covering. I decided that I would have a hard floor (faux wood) in the living half of the unit, and new carpet in the bedroom half. In the meantime I will live with the beige carpet that exists. They will do a thorough clean of it hoping to get out a few of the dents and stains from the prior tenant’s furniture.

Paint is also re-done after the big remodel, so I will also live with the existing beige paint until then. However, I will have Amy select the colors to be used now, along with the flooring choices.

So, home to start doing more

memorabilia triage.

I’m trying to empty the bottom two shelves of the last cabinet. First up was a box of Marian’s memorabilia from her school years. I swear she never looked in this box all the years we were married. (Maybe she went out and looked in it when I wasn’t around? But I doubt it.) There was the Oakland High School annual from her graduation year, and mementos of proms, and a whole pack of report cards from middle school. (Somewhat to my surprise, she didn’t get all-As. There was a fair sprinkling of B and B+ grades as well.) I winnowed out documents showing her high school and college graduations and saved them. There was the 1952 Cal Blue and Gold in which she appears as a postage-stamp sized headshot in the hundreds of graduates in the school of Arts and Letters, but there was only that one tiny picture in a volume an inch and a half thick, so I didn’t keep it.

A box labeled “Work Misc” had assorted memos and–I cannot fathom the reason for this–desk calendar pages. Marian had a calendar with month-pages on her desk where she noted all her meetings and to-dos; and she saved them. Here were the 12 months of each of several years from 1990 through 1996, her final work year. If anyone had ever wanted to know, they could learn when we went to Chris for haircuts or she had meetings or work deadlines. To the recycle.

Also in this box, though, was perhaps the only extant copy of the manual she wrote, Introduction to IBM Direct Access Storage Devices. She wrote it while working for IBM in Honolulu in 1965-8. She was running customer training classes for the new IBM 360 line, and many customer programmers had never been exposed to disk drives, so she wrote this manual explaining their principles and how to write code to use them. It was widely praised, and here were letters to Marian from IBM managers and from customers praising the manual, saying how clear and helpful it had been. I kept the manual and tucked the letters inside it.

Next up, a stack of fat three-ring binders that contain software manuals she contributed to. Hundreds of pages of detailed software reference and usage info for systems that nobody uses or even remembers now, like OSI/CS or the EDX Communication Facility. Oh, and APL for VSPC, a product we both worked on for several years here and in England. All computer industry veterans suffer from this irony, looking back on the hard, diligent work they poured into brilliant projects that after only a decade or two are completely forgotten and irrelevant. All these pages go in the recycle. The three-ring binders I can take to FOPAL where they have a special spot for binders that people can take free.

But there was another binder, with a nice padded cover. Not containing manuals, but containing all the letters she had received from various IBM managers and co-workers on the occasion of her 30th anniversary, in 1991, and on her retirement in 1996. I’m pulling the letters out of the clear plastic sheet protectors. I’ll put them in a single envelope and keep them.

Delving further, I found two boxes containing all our credit card statements from about 1987 to some recent year. In the desk I keep the statements for the past 12 months. Each time I pay a credit card bill, I put it on the top of the stack, and throw away the matching one from the bottom of the stack. I suppose I knew we had these historic records. I think I recall once in the late 90s I got out a year’s worth and did a summary of our annual spending, just to reassure myself. After that, nobody touched them. They would have nicely filled the gap between the end of the hundreds of cancelled checks I threw away last week, and the present day. Keep? Nope nope nope. Out.

Final box on the bottom shelf: old tax records! The bundles of tax-related documents for each year from about 1979 through 2013. In the closet in the house is a small box where we have kept the most recent five years’ returns. I’m writing to my financial advisor now to ask, how much of this is really necessary. I’m guessing, none of it, but we’ll see what he says. Later: the advice is to keep the last 7 years complete, i.e. the return and the fat envelope of 1099s, supporting receipts etc.; but keep just  the actual return document for prior years. On examination of the box, it appears that Marian was doing that; the returns up to 2010 had been stripped of the supporting docs.

I managed to get all the tax returns from now back, into the one banker’s box. Next year may overflow. Or next year I will accidentally lose (“oopsie!”) say 1970-1980. While working on that, got an email saying this year’s tax return is ready. I’ll have to go pick it up and pay the preparer tomorrow or Friday. Then came

Deborah

and this day is getting crazy long. Deborah is the woman I tried to contact to run an estate sale, and hadn’t returned my message. Now she did, and came over at 3pm to look the house over. Like every other person who sees the house for the first time, she loved it. She was complimentary on how far I had gotten at de-cluttering and organizing. She looked the goods over, opined that the sale might generate $3000, and we would do a 50-50 split. She’s going to come around Monday afternoon to start pricing. Which means I’ve got to move on with finishing the garage triage and as much as possible, get the things I mean to keep sequestered into one marked-off area.

 

 

 

Day 127, history triage

Monday, 4/9/2019

Began with a run, 37 minutes, felt good. At home, suddenly wondered, all those paper manuscripts from the 80s — don’t I have those on disk? Sure, I must do. They were computer files right from the start, typed into Word Perfect under CP/M and saved on 8-inch floppy disks. At some time in the 90s, I remember getting ready to shut down my CP/M system for the last time, and cobbling up a serial connection from it to my then-new Mac, and moving the files across. I must still have these files.

And of course, I do, or most of them. They are sitting quietly in the Documents folder on the Mac. One story appears to be missing, and one major fragment. I’ll key those in today. Then I can recycle all the paper. I plan to keep paper only of the two stories that sold to a major magazine, along with the copies of the magazine itself.

Next project: dumping the slides. I decided to take some pictures of this process. Concentrating on that helped avoid excess emotion.

pics_dump

The slides more than filled the can and the slides from the last boxes went into bags.

pics_in_canSo that’s done. Major check-mark on the to-do list. Major milestone in The Transition.

There remains a large shelf of saved memorabilia that I need to triage but I think I will wait on that until tomorrow. I am really close to being done with clean-outs; close to the point where I could walk through the house filling a few boxes and pointing to a few bits of furniture to be packed, and know that everything else is for the sale.

Today I am going to type in two stories that I want to preserve digitally, and then go have a look at FOPAL, make sure the Computer section is squared away for the sale this weekend.

Later: I did type in one of the stories. Of course as I was entering it, I couldn’t help myself improving it with lots of little tweaks. So I made the copyright line, “Copyright 1986, 2019 David E. Cortesi” which is kind of cool.

 

Day 126, quiet Sunday

Sunday, 4/7/2019

Breakfast and newspaper as usual. Spent a couple hours looking through the last of the 1985-6 science fiction manuscripts. I was surprised to find that I had during that time worked out in great detail a mostly-water world I called Pelajis. Twenty-five years later I restarted a book based on that world and as best I recall, I did not refer back to the prior notes at that time. That half-finished novel is still an open project, one of two I mean to return to when my living arrangements are stabilized later this year.

Went to a Stanford Baseball game. Here I very foolishly completely misjudged the weather. I had worn a long-sleeved pullover and a sweater going to and from the coffee shop at 8am. Now I kept the long-sleeved shirt on, put on a straw hat, and went to the game where, sitting in full sun, I was pouring sweat after two innings. I got up and moved to stand at the back in minimal shade but that wasn’t comfortable, so after another two innings, I left. I am just not invested in this Stanford team yet to be interested in their efforts for their own sakes. Since I’ve paid for the season pass I’ll keep attending.

Back home, I finished fiddling with the scanned slides on the computer. I made sure they were all properly keyworded, meaning that for instance, the names of the people and places in them appear in the keyword meta-data of the JPG file. I moved them to their appropriate folders by group name. I forced a backup of the disk. I went on to our SmugMug online gallery and uploaded the new images that hadn’t been uploaded before. That completes the effort to capture and digitize our photographic history.

Tomorrow the physical slides go.

 

 

Day 125, old stuff, museum, tools

Saturday, 4/6/2019

To kill time before going to the museum for the 12:00 tour, I read some more of my saved

work from 1985.

Parts are good; really good in fact. Unfortunately what I was good at, was working out the details of story backgrounds, the speculative technology and economy of some future time. I had worked out in detail what it might be like if there were human colonies on multiple nearby stars, with communications by laser, but physical transport only at small fractions of light-speed. Why would anyone travel, when a trip might mean being in a suspended animation pod for 40 years? I thought out a lot of unusual consequences.

Or, what’s a practical technology that allows regular passenger travel around our solar system? What would travel times be like; what would a passenger ship be like? I came up with some (I think) quite original ideas, worked them out in detail, and actually started what might be a young-adult story centering on such a trip. I’m keeping these notes, not tossing them.

Another folder is labeled “Fragments!” These were a writing exercise, to write the opening paragraphs of a story you’d like to read. Here’s one, a conventional story set in my birth-land of wet fir trees and tidal inlets:

The carcass of a frozen salmon made an awkward club; even so, Leslie managed three good swings with it before she lost her footing on the wet  dock and fell sprawling amidst the shiny black shoes of the Sheriff and two deputies.

As I raced out toward them — the dock was linked floats that plunged and sloshed under my feet — I could see flashes of Leslie, a rubber boot, an arm in a maroon sweatshirt, behind a cage of khaki trouser-legs. Sheriff Townes was closing the second handcuff on her wrist as I reached the group.

“Tricky, they’re taking my boat!” she wailed as the deputies hauled her to her feet.

Would you like to read the rest of that story? So would I! but I had, and still have, absolutely no idea where it could go from there.

I tried fantasy as well. This one shows a strong influence of Samuel R. Delaney’s Return to Nevèrÿon series, which was new at the time:

Across a sodden field, a scrawl in black ink against a sky of plum and smoke, was a bare tree full of doves. The distant flock of them suddenly leapt into the air; their flutter caught Franla’s eye. As he turned to watch it, the spring wind threw a net of raindrops to patter on his leather hood and sting his bare calves. A line of riders was entering the field below the whirling doves. Some wore armor.

I carried that one on for another thousand words: Franla has just sold a flock of cattle to a dealer; he turns back to the village to warn the dealer and help hide the flock from being requisitioned for army rations. Hijinks ensue — or would have, could I have thought of any. But plot, actions, just came extremely hard for me. I hated sitting at the keyboard, cudgeling my wits trying to think up what happens next. Scenery? No problem. Future tech, future economies, even interesting people, all came easily and I could describe them in readable prose. But what those people would do in those settings — nunh-unh. And that’s what fiction requires.

So off to the museum to lead the

noon tour.

Yesterday I had a group of four; today it was over 30, although as usual with a big group, some peeled off early so I ended up with about 25 at the end, and they seemed appreciative.

Back home I found

a letter from Bernadine,

who had been looking through her mother Lolly’s photo collection and found several that featured Marian, from times in the 60s (probably) when she went camping with Lolly and her family in Yosemite. I had seen one of these in a tweet, and asked to see more. Bern enclosed the pics with a SASE.

I sat down at my computer and scanned them, touched them up, put them in the big folder of scans from last week (which I need to deal with shortly, so I can trash the slides). While the scanner was buzzing away I read another story from my 1985 work. I had completely forgotten that I placed two stories with Amazing Science Fiction magazine. I re-read the second one right from the pages of that issue of the magazine and damn, it was good. I re-read the manuscript of another, which was also very promising but unfortunately, was never finished. I still don’t know how to end it.

I copied the scans onto an SD card and included it in the return envelope with the pictures. Then I turned to another job,

triaging my tool collection

and putting the ones to keep into the new toolbox. This only took a couple of hours. Where I had duplicates, I put the more worn or rusty one in the old toolbox. Also there, tools for jobs I expect never to do again, like a plumber’s wrench, or an automotive 12-volt continuity checker.

Everything remaining is items I can imagine using when volunteering at a Repair Café or fixing some small item of my own. The new toolbox with everything in it weighs 38.4 pounds. I can schlep it but I wouldn’t want to schlep it far.

Somewhere in there I refilled the hummingbird feeders. Just about 1 cup of sugar remains in the canister, so the next refill will be the last.

 

Day 124, finances, docent, cleanup

Friday, 4/6/2019

Began with a run, which makes this the first week in a long time when I’ve actually run three times, M-W-F, which is my nominal goal. I cut the route a little short because of impending rain, but still, over 30 minutes of jogging.

Spent a little more time going through the box of old notes and files from my career as a free-lancer in the 1980s. Most significant were the notes and other items from my attendance at Clarion West, a six-week residential science fiction writer’s workshop. I took some very nice pictures of my classmates, who I now barely remember. I had saved notes from talks by several visiting lecturers, established authors like Norman Spinrad and Suzy McKee Charnas. The primary thing I now remember from that intense six-week immersion in writing and critiquing is that it ruined me for reading for enjoyment for a long time. It was more than a decade before I could pick up a science fiction book, or any fiction book really, and just read it. Well, it also taught me that I didn’t have what it takes to write fiction, although that didn’t stop me trying (and hasn’t yet).

Next up, I sat down with my laptop and updated the Portfolio spreadsheet I created on Day 31. This meant opening the Schwab month-end statements for the four remaining accounts (two accounts for Marian’s IRA now having been merged into mine), and copying figures from them into the spreadsheet.

This was the final thing that I had been using Marian’s iMac for. I have demonstrated that I can use Godot to open all financial websites and update the portfolio info, so the machine on Marian’s desk is now superfluous. The obvious next steps are to format its disk, and  put it into the nice Apple return box that’s waiting on the floor by the desk. I stuck the Mac OS boot USB stick into a USB port on the back of it and then stopped. I was starting to cry, and damn it I have to go and do a Docent tour in an hour.

This shit is not getting easier with time and practice. Bleagh.

I went to the museum and led the noon tour. Attendance was light and my tour group had just four people!

On return I spent some time reading more of my writing from that mid-80s period when I tried to be a science fiction writer. I did some good thinking then, and came up with some interesting ideas. What I didn’t produce was any good characters or plots. Nor do I like the prose style I was using to describe my ideas, stuffy, pseudo-academic.

Driving to and from the museum I was recalling how Marian would have felt about my sentimental regard for her computer. I believe she would have said, “That’s pretty silly.” So, channeling her pragmatic personality, I booted the iMac from an install USB stick and formatted its drive. Then I packed it up. The Apple return program provides very nicely designed packaging with a clear instruction sheet. It took five minutes to have the machine securely boxed up and ready to go.

I got an email from Channing House: my walk-through and meeting with Angela, the manager for upgrades, will happen at 10am Tuesday. After that I should know for sure when I can start moving in.

I planned to go to a Stanford Baseball game starting at 6pm, leaving at 5:15. To pass the time I read the first three chapters of On the Road and for fun, read it aloud, which suits Kerouac’s prose. Then I left, stopping at the FedEx office to drop off the iMac.

I stayed at the game to the seventh-inning stretch, but the Candlestick-like chill had me shivering and yawning so I left with Stanford ahead 1-0, listening to the game on KZSU going home and at home. The rubberized drawer liner I ordered was on the porch, so I lined the drawers of the new toolbox while Stanford got ahead 2-0, and then UCLA tied the game in the top of the ninth. Now it’s after 9pm, and the bottom of the ninth, and I’m so glad I left early… ok, it’s a tie game, bottom of the ninth, two on, two out, full count. Here’s your live play by play: foul… ball four. Bases loaded, winning run at third. Ball. Ball. 2-0 count, hit into left, it drops! Stanford wins, 3-2.

Still glad I left.

Day 123, trash, Yosemite, trash

Thursday, 4/4/2019

In the hour before it was time to leave for a day at the Yosemite warehouse, I completed clearing those two shelves from the shop. Carted 50 copies of Secular Wholeness to the blue bin along with some other books, and wheeled it to the curb. That book was my first effort at self-publishing, and I ordered 50 copies. I had some notion that I’d be asked to give talks and could sell books at those talks. I did give one talk and sold a couple of copies. That was it; and the rest sat on the shelf for fifteen years.

Also cleared out about 50 CD-ROMs of old pictures. In the years after 2004 or so, when our photography was fully digital, I’d load the images on my computer. Then we’d cull them jointly, on the screen. Marian, always practical, assumed that the rejected pictures would be dragged to the trash can. Me, I was always worried I’d want to go back and recover something. So after the group of images was all organized into a folder, I would burn all the rejected image files onto a CD-ROM and save it in the shop. All those discs of rejected images went in the black can. I saved the jewel cases, thinking a pile of jewel cases might sell in the estate sale.

After I dragged the roller cans to the curb for pickup tomorrow morning, I went in the house and had a few minutes of emotion. Actual crying, sobs and sniffles and all. Crying over “shards of the old life, going away,” in the phrase I came up with back on Day 15.

All those saved checks, saved pay stubs, saved books, saved image files — records that we never once referred to over the years — what was the point of curating that collection? I think now we were (unconsciously) trying to make a monument to our lives, something that proved we were here, we were competent, we behaved in a laudable way. That nonverbal message was the only possible value for that stuff.

Now, throwing it all away, I was grieving for a life that is over. Not Marian’s life, although her death precipitated this clean-out, but the comfortable, stable, quiet, mediocre life that we crafted for ourselves for forty-odd years. The life’s gone, and the evidence of it, that we had so carefully organized and hoarded, is on the way to the landfill. And that reveals just how pathetically sad and futile it was to save it in the first place, which is another good reason for crying.

Well. That’s a lot of navel-gazing for 8:30am. Off to Yosemite for a day of cataloging and other museum scut-work. On the way home I detoured to Lowes in Sunnyvale, because last night I found they carried a toolbox that is about 30% bigger than the one I have now. Brought that home,unboxed it, looked at it. It’s ok but the metal drawers need lining. Ordered rubberized drawer liner from Amazon Prime, to be delivered tomorrow. We live in a wonderful world in some ways.

Then I started going through a big old box of files from my days as a free-lance writer in the 1980s. Found some reviews of, and ads for, my early books. I tucked those under the covers of the single copies of the books that I set aside yesterday.

I found a program that I’d designed, coded, and documented in 1978, while working in England. That was a fun read.

 

Day 122, anxiety, discards, cardio

Wednesday, 4/3/2019

Woke up to some anxiety this morning. Odd, because I had a very good night’s sleep, up once about 2am then slept to 6:30, eight hours total. Six-thirty is unusually late; all through the winter I woke up when the furnace fired up. The thermostat is set to start heating at 6:15. Yesterday and today, the furnace never started. Why? Because for the first time in months, the internal house temperature at 6:15 was 69º, the set-point for 6:15am. This is the true mark of the changing seasons, that no heating is needed in the morning. Another month and it’ll be time to switch over to cooling.

Oh, wait… another month and I won’t be here, probably.

So I arose to anxiety,

a vague feeling of wrongness that I think is associated with yesterday’s final acceptance at C.H. That’s a big commitment to a whole new mode of living. Am I doing the right thing?

To “not be a home-owner” was, as I’ve written before, probably the first decision I made when I began thinking about becoming a widower, a year ago, when Marian was first diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. My thoughts then were theoretical, speculative, but this stood out as a firm conclusion: if she goes, and I’m a widower, I won’t stay in this house. Researching ILFs and choosing Channing House is all the natural consequence of that decision.

I didn’t analyze it at the time; it just seemed right. I’ve explained it to other people since as not wanting the responsibility of a house, tired of worrying about maintenance and insurance and property taxes. That’s all true, but not complete. Analyzing it now, as the coffee water heated this morning, what came to mind was that I really wanted to break with the past. I don’t want to occupy a truncated partnership was the sentence that bubbled up out of my subconscious. (Whoa! Go my subconscious!) To unpack that sentence, I don’t want to continue to live as half a couple, alone in the shell once occupied by the tight little corporation of Dave’n’Marian. The house is the physical representation of that shell.

There are other life styles I could have picked. I could live in a regular apartment. I could become a world traveler, flitting from hotel to hotel with the seasons. I could buy a nice RV and become a “snowbird”, traveling to Alaska in the spring and Arizona in the winter. But C.H. has many practical advantages: it is comfortable; it offers a new community in which I’m pretty sure I can come to be an influential and helpful member; and the continuing medical care means I will not have to be a burden on any of my relatives as I age. The one time I talked with Marian about my “being a bachelor” notions, her only concern was to urge me to keep in mind that I wouldn’t have someone to take care of me the way I was taking care of her. C.H. answers to that issue.

Mulling all that I went for a run, which felt excellent. After a shower and shave, I did some

more cleanup.

I tackled two more shelves of the big steel cabinets in the shop. Here’s what I saw first.

check_boxesThat’s right, two nice banker’s boxes labeled in Marian’s neat hand as you see. Seriously, we have been saving cancelled checks from 1965??? Oh yeah; and old IBM pay stubs, too:old_pay_stubI was getting $405.95 each pay period, which I think was bi-weekly, so over $800/month, not bad for 1965! (Plus, I see, $25 for “local travel”, i.e. mileage for driving around SF.)

Ignoring the wails of imaginary historians appalled at losing all that good data on the spending habits of mid-century Yuppies, the whole thing went into the recycle bin.in_the_boxThat exposed two shelves of my published books, multiple copies of each.my_booksI won’t throw all of them out, but I fetched a box and put one copy of each book in it. The rest will go into the blue bin tomorrow.

About 1pm I went off to do three hours of sorting at FOPAL. One perk of that job is getting first look at all the donations. I pocketed a copy of On the Road, which I’ve been meaning to re-read, and one of Vonnegut’s Mother Night. I’ll read them (or anyway sample them, I’m not sure I’ll want to read all of Kerouac) and put them back in the stream another day.

At home I found an email containing the standard

Channing House contract,

a 51pp PDF. Sent copies to the financial guys and also to Chuck, who was curious about it. Need to read it carefully myself! Here’s the meat of it, from article I:

In consideration of the Entrance Fee, Monthly Fee and other fees payable by you under this Agreement, Channing House will provide you with residence, care and services at the Community for the rest of your life, subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement.

Also got a notification that my

Ziopatch results

were back, and: no Afib detected. I have rare PVC’s (pre-ventricular contractions, which I’ve had since the 1980s) as well as rare “premature atrial complexes”. But these little blips of irregularity I notice are not of concern. That’s a relief.

 

 

Day 121, life is just packed

Tuesday, 4/2/2019

I am four months along as a widower. Yesterday I had a mailing from Pathways, the company that handled Marian’s Hospice period. They have sent several supportive post-mortem mailings over the months. This one had a particularly accurate section, headed “Grief Bursts”:

Grief bursts strike like a lightening bolt. You are driving, listening to the radio when a song comes on that you both liked, grief grips your heart, tears sting your eyes, and you wonder what hit you. Grief bursts may be more disorienting to those who have gone back to their normal round of activities and who feel “okay” some of the time… By acknowledging these feelings as normal you can recognize the progress you have made…

Case in point: Today was walking back from the gym and for no particular reason started deleting unwanted photos from my phone as I walked along. Lots of casual pointless pics over the past few months, delete, delete, … and then I hit the last couple I took of Marian, and choked up. And a few minutes later I walked in the front door and noticed the big box that is the Apple return box for her iMac.

Yesterday I carefully used Godot to visit the sites that I’ve been using her iMac to visit these past months: Chase credit card, Schwab, and the credit union. It’s been very convenient to just go to her desk and use her machine which “knew” all the passwords and filled them in. But now I’ve got all the passwords on LastPass on Godot, and have verified Godot to those sites (they all wanted two-factor authentication for a visit from an unfamiliar machine). That makes the iMac now superfluous. I can box it up and send it back and soon will receive an Apple gift card worth $250.

Between those two things, seeing those last pictures, and the prospect of disposing of her iMac, I am now an emotional wreck, quivering lip, sniffles, the works.

I’ll be fine. Onward.

Got an email from designer

Tyra;

she can’t join me Friday to look over the C.H. unit, which is probably just as well because I wasn’t positive I could make that happen anyway. Replied asking if she would have time next week.

Got an email from Chuck; his retired office manager has recommended a woman,

Debra,

who might be willing to manage an estate sale for me. I called Debra’s number and had to leave a message.

Got a reply from

the Attorney,

who didn’t seem to have read the details attached to my message, just asked “who is your accountant” and what number to call me on. Since she has received (1) an email from my accountant and (2) an email from me mentioning said accountant and including the text of their first email, I kind of wonder at her reading skills. But anyway, I replied politely with my phone number.

All this before 11am, such a life I lead.

Suli arrived about 12:30 and we talked about how she will probably come one more time, maybe two. Then I packed up two laptops in the Apple return boxes (but not the iMac yet) and headed out for a round of errands. Errand one was to drop off the two MacBooks at FedEx.

Errand two was to stop at the local hardware store and see what they had in the way of

tool chests.

I need a somewhat bigger tool chest. I have a small three-drawer chest that I’ve owned for decades, which holds the essential fixing stuff; I schlep it to the Repair Cafe sessions. But there are some more tools that won’t fit into it. For The Transition to Smaller Quarters (does that work as an acronym? TTSQ?) I want to, one, triage my tools, and two, fit them into one portable chest. The current chest, which is 19x9x8, is just too small, as well as having a broken latch. So I spent time on Amazon last night shopping. Finally thought I’d see what the one remaining local hardware store has (damn, but I miss Orchard Supply). They had basically nothing, some cheap plastic thing. So back to the internet for that.

Errand three was to run down to

Jean’s place

and drop off a thumb drive with a selection of the pictures from the recent slide-scanning orgy, pictures that I thought she’d want in her collection. Her news was that she’d received the printed and bound copies of volume 3 of the history of St. Joseph’s Parish in Mountain View. This is the church she and Bill attended for decades. Bill initiated the project of producing a parish history back in 2006 and did the first two volumes. He had a lot of material toward the third at his death in 2016. Jean’s been working on it ever since, and is very happy and proud to have it finished and done with.

Back home another email arrived: congratulations, you have been

officially approved

for residence at Channing House! Please make an appointment to walk through unit 621 with our Renovation Coordinator, Angela. All right! I reply promptly with my availability,  which is tomorrow and Friday.

I think I’ll close this entry now; that’s quite enough news for one day.

 

Day 120, day of doing stuff

Monday, 4/1/2019

Monday tends to be a “day of doin’ stuff” because I think of things I need or want to do over the weekend, and write them down on a list on the kitchen windowsill to tackle on Monday. I think I will just describe all those things.

First up, a run. That went and felt well, which was good news. The slight arrhythmias that I’d noticed, and were the reason for wearing a Zio-patch last week, were more noticeable over the weekend. As usual, I don’t feel them at all when exercising, and in fact didn’t notice them anytime today. But it is a relief that a heart symptom is not exercise-related.

Next, started

laundering

the towel and bed linen. It’s been two weeks (which I know because tomorrow is the day for the cleaning lady) so it’s time for that. With the bed stripped, decided to rotate the mattress. Funny story here. When Sheri the estate sale lady was here, she and I and Chuck were talking about estate sales, and she mentioned that you could sell a bed, but by law you can’t sell a used mattress. “So you strip the bed and leave your McCroskey mattress on it and say, well, you can have that with the bed if you want it.”

I goggled at her and said, “How did you know?” Chuck was puzzled; he’d never heard of McCroskey mattresses. Sheri laughed and said she hadn’t known, it was just the kind of expensive mattress people in Palo Alto often had. Guilty as charged, I guess.

Anyway, that conversation reminded me that you are supposed to turn your McCroskey every three months, which Marian had marked on the calendar and insisted on. I’d skipped the last turn, which came up in December, on the general principal of ISMISEP. But if it was a sales asset, I might as well take care of it, so I heaved the heavy thing around 180 degrees. This might have been the turn interval at which you are supposed to flip it over, but that’s way too much work.

With the laundry in process I watered the plants. That takes only a few minutes; so I turned to the first real task, working out the IBM

SHAP issue.

One problem is the number of agencies involved. My pension is paid out of Via Benefits, who administer the IBM benefits program. But the SHAP is administered and paid out of Acclaris, who apparently manage that particular piece of IBM’s benefits. But I needed first to know if I was in fact eligible. I called Via customer support; the very pleasant rep put me on hold for several minutes while she consulted, and finally said I had to call IBM directly, and gave me that number.

So I called IBM and that customer service rep looked up my and Marian’s accounts and said yes, as a survivor I was eligible for SHAP. But she couldn’t advise on how to fill out the SHAP form, which I some questions about. So now I called the Acclaris help line and that person (again, very sympathetic and helpful) talked me through it. I must say that the phone reps for all three agencies came across very well.

Now I filled out the SHAP form, and made a copy of the completed form to use for reference next year, assuming this one is accepted (we’ve had them bounced before for some minor omission), and put it in an envelope with stamp and address. Phew.

By now the bed linen was dry so I made the bed, then turned to two more items,

two “nudges”.

I sent a short, polite email to Kim at C.H. asking how the process was going. She replied a couple of hours later that she should have an update “in a couple of days”. I sent a ditto to Howard at the financial advisors. They had advised a meeting with the attorney who prepared our Trust documents, and had sent an email to said attorney on March 20th, and I’d heard nothing since. Howard replied later suggesting that I contact her directly, so I sent an email to the attorney.

Now it was early afternoon and everything on the to-do list had a line through it, so I drove down to FOPAL and spent an hour culling and pricing books for the Computer section. Came home and made some supper and sat down to watch

Stanford playing Notre Dame

in the Elite Eight game.

Very much against my expectations, Stanford started well, stifling the Irish offense and holding a small lead in the first half. Alas, Notre Dame found how to break through the Stanford defense in the third quarter and went on a run to take a ten-point lead that Stanford couldn’t close. So Alanna Smith’s college career ends (as does Shannon Coffee’s). Next year’s SWBB team will be quite different but likely even more exciting with a great recruiting class.

It pleases me that I remain interested in the team. Following SWBB turns out not to be one of the things, like TV cooking shows, that I enjoyed primarily because Marian liked them and I enjoyed sharing her enjoyment. My emotional involvement in the Cardinal is not as deep as hers, but I do still like watching them.