Day 265, Docent, Lisp

Saturday, 8/24/2019

I was chillin’ and killin’ time before my 11am departure for the museum when I remembered, oh, I should check the plants, maybe they need water. Stepped out on the deck and discovered that the plant stand holding the hanging pot for one of the wax plants had at some time fallen over, the pot shattered, and the plant, now a naked root ball, was looking water-stressed, not surprisingly.

Fortunately I had a spare pot and a bag of soil, so in a rather frantic ten minutes I got the plant re-established in a pot with dirt and water. All this while successfully keeping my white slacks clean. (This morning I noticed the plant was looking ok, and also that both the wax plants were putting out buds, they’re going to bloom again. They already bloomed prolifically back in — May? I remember they had just finished blooming before I moved to Channing House in June.)

Anyway I arrived at the Museum in plenty of time for my docent tour. I had a good sized group, 25 or so at the start, at least 15 still with me at the end.

There was an annoyance: I don’t recall if I mentioned about this dude who runs private tours. He’s big, looks Irish (sparse reddish hair, florid complexion), and appears to do a decent job of guiding small parties of 2-4 people through the museum. Unfortunately he seems to always be starting his tours just before 12 when I start my Saturday tour. So I catch up with him, lead my group through his, then he catches up and is there talking to his group on the fringes of my group. Today I twice turned up my little amp and deliberately talked over him. I’ve previously complained to Jesse, the floor manager, who said he would speak to the guy. We have no problem with people leading private tours. But it’s no bleepin’ secret that the official tours start at 12 and 2. If he’d just schedule for half an hour before or after, there’d be no problem. I sent an email to Jesse complaining. We’ll see.

Back home I spent some time with Lisp. I have finally found a decent tutorial book! It is Common Lisp: A gentle introduction to symbolic computation by David Touretzky. I’m using the free online version; an updated version is available on Amazon. This guy knows how to introduce a complex subject! He takes it from the most basic fundamentals and builds concepts step by logical step, at every step showing the why of each idea, not just the what. It’s a model of good pedagogy, and I say that as a professional writer of manuals.

Part of the fun of Lisp is seeing the ancient roots of the language. It was first implemented on an IBM 704, a vacuum-tube computer, and features of that first implementation are still fundamental to the semantics of the language. Touretzky makes that clear, where none of the other tutorials I’ve seen did. None of the others made the very important connection between the way lists are laid out in memory and the way the language primitives work, and so forth.

Day 262, escrow, focus group

Wednesday, 8/21/2019

Started the day with a run; routine. At 10am the Drapery Lady came, as planned, to offer me a choice of materials. I don’t know her name; but she’s the contractor for all the drapery replacements that happen during the upgrade (which must be a fairly juicy contract for her). The point of discussion was my side window, which currently has a rather tatty and partly broken venetian blind and also drapes. She suggested, and I agreed, that both be done away with, and instead I will have a pull-down roller blind made of a beige fabric that allows 10% light penetration. It’s a modern version of the old roller blind. The works are in a neat case at the top of the window, and I think there’s a track down the sides.

I went down to the shop to collect the three drawers I’d varnished, but I decided that the inside bottom surfaces needed one more coat, which I applied, and then left them there.

At 12 I went down and ate a quick lunch, then drove to the Chicago Title office, on El Camino in San Carlos. There I met with Chuck and Andrew, and a very pleasant lady named Victoria walked me through signing about 15 different documents, the key one being my authorizing a transfer of the property deed. Well, the most interesting one was a detailed breakdown of the costs in escrow, with the bottom line of how much will be transferred into my Schwab account on, probably, the 27th.

Back at C.H. I participated in a Fitness Focus Group, a group of residents who’d volunteered to help the staff decide what to do about the gym and the various exercise programs. There was a lot of discussion and the staff people got some useful and constructive ideas. One from me, but I mostly kept quiet. There will be upgrades to the gym and some new equipment purchased. What, exactly, remains to be seen.

A lot of the cost of these things comes from the Heritage Circle, which is a voluntary fund raised and managed by residents. Building improvements, like better windows, new flooring, lighting, cabinets, etc., are paid by Channing House. But apparently things like a new stationary bike are bought with Heritage Circle funds. I haven’t been asked to donate into the Heritage fund but I imagine I will have that opportunity.

Ate supper alone. Back upstairs to research workout tutorials. I am going to begin developing a morning strength routine on my own.

Day 261, dumping the Y, drawers, docent, dinner, laundry

Tuesday, 8/20/2019

First thing, I drove to the YMCA and did my few exercises. But while doing them, something crystallized in my mind: surely I can achieve these same effects one way or another with simpler exercises. I’d been putting off doing anything until C.H. gets a new fitness director but that’s dumb. I’m done with this place. So on the way out I filled out a cancellation form to terminate my Y membership.

Back home I took out the three drawers from the kitchen area, which have a particularly strong fusty odor, and took them down to the shop. I sanded them and put on a coat of Varathane. That took less than two hours all told. I left them to dry. I changed into docent clothes, my red Computer History docent shirt and slacks, and after lunch I went to the museum to do the 2pm tour. Mike, who had answered the last-minute appeal for a docent to cover the noon tour, said his group was over 20 people. My group was only five, and only two of those stayed close to hear my golden prose. The other three orbited at various distances. Whatever.

Back home I changed back to regular clothes and had supper, along with Craig, Diane, Sue and Kent. I ran my other (non-bleach) load of laundry after supper.

Day 257, drawers, lisp

Friday, 8/16/2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(= 3/1 6/2)
T

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

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

Day 253, FOPAL, drawer, finance, HOUSE SOLD

Monday, 8/12/2019

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

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

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

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

Residents’ Shop.

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

Next was to sit down with Terri in

Accounting.

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

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

In prior days I’d been noticing my

front door

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

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

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

a firm offer,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Day 222, house, book, dinner

Friday, 7/12/2019

Started with a run; it was fine. Then I drove to the Tasso street house just to see it cleaned out. Sean was there, and I gave him permission to sleep there through Sunday. Everything is gone from the house except the dryer, and that is supposed to be picked up this afternoon. Some of the cabinets from the shop in the garage should also go today, according to Sean.

I drove to Summerwinds Nursery and picked up a bag of planting mix and a small pot. A week ago, walking down Lytton avenue at the end of my run, I was struck by a plant that was spilling out of a planter in front of an office building. Dark coppery-red leaves and small bright yellow flowers. I pulled a small cutting from it and stuck it in water when I got home. Now, after a week in water, it is showing roots, so I want to pot it.

I didn’t do that now, but instead worked on the book. I was trying to solve a formatting problem with a two-page appendix which was formatted using a table. The Leanpub code just couldn’t get it right. I kept changing one thing or another and re-generating the PDF over and over. Each generation took several minutes. Finally I realized that the software just wouldn’t do what I thought it did (spanning a cell across multiple columns) and I revised the data into nested lists instead. That worked so I now had a satisfactory print-ready PDF.

Then I downloaded the Kindle Direct cover template and turned to making cover PDFs. Problem: my lovely cover is not in the 6×9 ratio of the required book size. It’s a bit wider. As-is, bits of the title are cropped on the right, and there’s a gap top and bottom. If I drag it to the needed aspect ratio it looks wrong. I spent an hour trying to find a solution, then set it aside for tomorrow.

Dinner arranged by Patti with Craig, whose wife is off vacationing with their daughter in Cambridge, England, David, and Jean, neither of whom I’d met. Nice conversation.

Day 210, coffee, FOPAL, supper

Sunday 6/30/2019

For Sunday morning coffee I went to Mlle. Collette. The coffee and pastry selections are top-notch. I snagged a pleasant seat at a table outside that was partly shaded by a tree. The other outdoor tables were in full sun and I don’t think would be very nice for reading the paper.

Back home I spent an hour repotting the two big plants for which I bought pots last week. When I watered them, however, water from the bottom crept toward the edge of my deck. None actually spilled over, but definitely I need saucers to match the pots.

During this process I realized how it was really more convenient to do my plant-watering on Sunday. I’d been upholding Marian’s decades-long tradition of Monday watering since her death, but… it would actually be more convenient to do it on Sundays. (Actually, the plants on the deck, with more wind and sun, need another shot of water mid-week too.)

Next, I was replying to an email from Frank, another volunteer at FOPAL who I’ve been chatting with, when something in his note reminded me of PGDP, the site that applies crowd-sourcing to the job of proof-reading and formatting old books for Project Gutenberg. From roughly 2005 to 2015 I put in thousands of hours there, helping to create free online versions of dozens of books. Then, for various reasons, I fell out of love with it and hadn’t given it a thought for several years. Did it still exist? Did my old ID still work? Yes and yes. There went an hour down the internet drain…

Meanwhile a text came from Deborah; the washing machine buyer planned for this afternoon had canceled. That opened up the rest of the day.

OK, what else to do with a Sunday? For a couple of weeks I’ve had a goal of taking another train trip to the City, to see the Andy Warhol exhibit at SFMOMA. Should I do that today? I was just about ready to do this, using Google Maps to decide whether I would walk from the station or take a Lyft, when I noticed that Google had helpfully colored Market Street with a rainbow to remind people that today was the Pride Parade. Oh. That could make the streets, and the train either way, a bit crowded. OK, put that off again, to maybe Tuesday or Friday.

Now what? Well, I feel some pressure to get down to FOPAL and tidy my section. Normally I’d do it on Monday, but Monday’s schedule is chopped up with obligations at noon and 2:30. So, how about doing FOPAL today, freeing up Monday? So that’s what I did: drove to FOPAL and spent two hours tidying up the computer book section.

From there I stopped by the local nursery to buy those saucers, then stopped at Tasso street for another small kitchen item. To my surprise, Deborah was at the house, busily pricing and arranging goods. We talked about the used McCroskey mattress. She’d asked its age, and I’d managed to find when we bought it by searching old credit card statements online: November 2013. She’s selling it for $90. I didn’t tell her how much we paid for it. Well, actually, I don’t know, because we bought multiple items on the one transaction. But it was at least 20x the sale price.

Something about remembering the purchase of the mattress, and/or seeing our goods being priced for sale, or both, gave me a solid grief-spasm on the drive home. I want to write about grief and anxiety, which I’ve not mentioned for some time, but this post is too long.

At supper time I was again disappointed with the dining room’s offering. The food has been adequately attractive so far, not great cuisine but ok, until Saturday lunch and again tonight. Chicken wrap for Sunday dinner? And a veggie dish with a lot of carrots, something I dislike. I served myself, took a couple of bites, and left. Went up University in the car and took the first open parking space, which was right in front of Walburger’s, which I took as a sign, and ate there. Not sure what I will do if the food continues to annoy. I’m not a fussy eater; I’m more a “fuel up and go” person. We’ll see.

Day 203, wood, furniture

Sunday, 6/23/2019

The sun, like a stage spotlight, shines into the room at 6 and works its way around the edges of my nose under the sleep mask. Need a better one.

Walked to Paris Baguette for Sunday morning coffee, and they immediately lost my favor. One, their plain croissants, although properly shaped and a good texture, have a sugar glaze. Come on, people! I’ve eaten croissants on a Sunday morning still warm from a neighborhood bakery in Paris. I don’t mind you selling a croissant-shaped sweet roll, but label it as such. And two, although I say “a cappuccino for here”, I get what can best be described as a small latte in a paper cup. That’s it, says the grumpy customer; I’ll be having Sunday breakfast elsewhere.

I extend my walk up to Alma and the hardware store where I get another kind of wood treatment for the coffee table. And two metric screws. For why? Boring story.

Sometime Friday I noticed that I have an old-fashioned aluminum framed window that opens, or should open. This is the kind of horizontally-hinged window with two levers you turn and then pull to swing it open; and it is regulated and stabilized by two side-levers that slide in the frame, or should slide. (I’d take a picture but it’s dark now.) I tried to open it and it wouldn’t. One of the two handles was dangling on a loose screw. The handle is secured by two screws, but one was missing and the other was half-out.

I turned the other handle and by heaving and yanking, got the window to grudgingly open. It clearly had not been opened in many years; the slide mechanism was balky and when I got it open, there were festoons of spiderwebs around the edge which was black with grime. Friday I had taken the one remaining screw in my pocket and when I stopped at the hardware store, I bought a mate for it. Feeling all clever, I brought it back and tried securing the loose handle. Hah! It turns out that both the screw holes for that handle had been stripped. Steel screws in an aluminum frame, too much muscle, the threads disappear.

Those screws were #10 machine screws. Today, just for fun, I bought the nearest metric size machine screw, which is juuust a bit wider. And brought it home. On the way in, I stopped at my car in the garage and got out the cane deck chair I’d bought at Cost Plus yesterday and brought that up.

So it was now about 9am, gotta love the early start on a Sunday. I tried the metric screws and danged if their little threads didn’t bite into the aluminum and snug up nice. So that handle is once again secure. I spent a while with cleaner and paper towels getting all the spiderwebs and general schmutz off the window frame. I also discovered I had a blind I could lower in that window. Well, it had been there, up at the top, now I found the string that raises and lowers it. The rod that you twirl to change the angle of the slats? Broken off. (Note that this window, being single-pane glass, will be replaced during the upgrade. Hopefully with a better style of window mechanism and blind.)

I assembled the deck chair and put it out on the deck, and fussed with the position of the chair, the little table I brought from the back yard at Tasso street, and the various plants, trying to find a nice arrangement. And failing. Not happy with what I have there.

I applied the new wood treatment to the coffee table and it is looking better. It hadn’t been oiled or waxed or anything for going on 40 years. The first application produced quite a bit of yellowish color on the rag, which I think was old nicotine coming off.

Killed a bit of time doing Zooniverse classifications and finally it was lunchtime. I went down to the first floor and discovered a traffic jam of hungry oldsters. This is actually the first time I’d come to the dining room for lunch. I didn’t want to stand in line so I sat in the lobby and did a sudoku, and then another, and it was 12:45 and still there was a jam-up at the food counter. I was aiming to walk to University to shop for furniture after eating, so I just started walking now. Had a sandwich and smoothie on the Ave.

Visited Design Within Reach and Restoration Hardware and didn’t see a good bookcase. So I took a Lyft over to Santa Cruz Avenue in Menlo Park where I’d noted another furniture place. Didn’t like anything there, so I took another Lyft to Crate and Barrel at Stanford Shopping Center. Here I found something that is pretty darn close to what I want.

austin

It’s the right size, about, and won’t clash with anything else I’ve bought. I’m letting it ripen in a browser window for a day or so before I pull the trigger on it. For one thing, for a 5-foot by 3-foot bookcase, $999 seems a little steep. All right, it is real walnut, not veneer on chipboard. But the one at Cost Plus, see previous day, was about a third of that. I can maybe live with veneer on chipboard.

Had supper. Then sat down with Amazon and selected a better sleep mask, one that specifically says, it blocks light coming in around one’s nose. It’ll be here Tuesday. First time I’ve had an Amazon Prime order shipped to this address! And so, as Mister Pepys liked to say, to bed.

Day 190, early bird gobbles worms left, right

Monday, 6/10/2019

This is the first day of the week leading up to my move to Channing House. Also the second day of a heatwave. Yesterday the A/C started up for the first time this year. I was pleased it seems to be working fine. I worry about something expensive breaking before I can get the place transferred to its new owner.

Due to the promised heat I started my run at 7:30, and was back in the house about 8:40, which is the hour when I usually set out, in cooler weather. Showered and shaved I started into a to-do list. Item one was to plant out the Bathroom Plant. Long boring story here. For decades we’ve had some kind of green plant in a nice pot behind the basin in the bathroom. There’s a triangular space just right for one. For the last, oh, decade? it has been a single plant, some kind of a thing that grew up in a single stem putting out radial shoots with pretty finger leaves, kind of like a miniature cannabis. Every couple of years it would get too big. Marian would ruthlessly whack off the top six inches, throw out the bottom, stick the cut-off top in fresh potting mix, and it would grow up again, a single stalk with pretty leaves. Last time she did this, I took the bottom with its root ball and planted it out in the back garden.

OK, I’m moving out, the new owner will likely demolish and rebuild the bathroom (at least, that’s what Chuck would have done as part of “staging” the house, had we got to that), so the plant needs to go. I took it out of its pretty pot; put that with the other pretty pots to be sold for two bits each, if that, in The Sale; dug a wee hole next to its previous incarnation, which is thriving in the back yard, and stuck it in. Good luck, little plant.

Next up, the wax plants. These are sentimental favorites of mine. They started from a single cutting that Marian’s long-time friend Lolly gave her. They’ve been hanging in two windows for at least a decade, surviving on a single, weekly watering, putting out copious blooms of their tiny amethyst and white flowers a couple times a year. I want to take them with me to CH, just for nostalgia’s sake, but how? It is possible to have pot hangers put up but it requires scheduling a facilities person, and also knowing where you want the bracket to go. No way to set that up prior to the move. So I bought the wrought-iron hangars in the picture on Amazon. They aren’t tall enough to handle the existing pots, which were suspended by two-foot-long wires. So I bought the nice hanging pots shown, also on Amazon (although I did shop three local nurseries first). Now it was time to transplant them.

The one in the kitchen window was growing in a round pot smaller than a tennis ball. I knew that inside that pot would be a solid sphere of roots and I would have to break the pot to get it out. I did, and it was. I cut it back quite a bit first, then broke the pot and moved it, pulling and tucking the branches to pass through the strings. And soaked it good.

The one from the dining room window was easier to get at, sitting in a 5-inch plastic dish. Again a solid root ball, actually a disk, which just fit the mouth of the new pot. This one I didn’t cut back, but that meant I had to do a lot of violence to the limbs to get them between the strings of the pot. Yeah, I could have untied the strings and re-tied them. But I didn’t. Anyway there they are, and if they don’t just wither up and die from the abuse, they’ll do nicely on the deck of my apartment.

About now I called Chuck to get a status on the sale. He had talked to the agent, who hadn’t heard anything from her client, but thought they would want to bring a building inspector and perhaps an architect, sometime this week. The appraiser is scheduled to visit on Wednesday. I don’t need an appraisal for the sale, but I do need it to document the value “as of” December, so Katie the Tax can properly calculate the value of Marian’s estate. If by chance the appraiser comes in with a number higher than we’ve settled on with the buyer, I could possibly claim a tax loss on the sale. (Hmmm — if by chance he came in lower than the sale price, I would by the same logic have to pay for a capital gain!) I don’t care about either; I will only emphasize to the appraiser that I want a number that will be bulletproof under the gaze of an IRS agent.

To-do items continued to fall: I mopped the kitchen floor, which needed it; I swept the wood floors in the bedroom and living room; I got out a copy of my Health Care Directive (aka “living will”) and my Power of Attorney and set them aside to drop off at CH next time I’m there, which I should have done two weeks ago.

Then I did something I only conceived of in the middle of the night last night. I was imagining showing the new owner around, giving her the benefit of years of experience with the house. I’d like to do that IRL, although it probably won’t happen. But, in the depths of the night, I imagined she would want to see the attic, and I remembered that in the attic there were several rat traps I had placed the last time we had unwanted roof-rat tenants. And very possibly there would be a mummified dead rat in one of them. Not cool! So I got out the ladder and climbed up into the attic and cleaned out the rat traps. There was one mummified rat, but it was out on the floor, not in a trap. Odd. Then I climbed under the house, just far enough into the crawl space to grab the three rat traps that I had put under there two years back (no dead rats). All into the trash. Now, if Lawyer Lady wants to see the attic or crawl space, she won’t be shocked.

(I am assuming that a thirty-something partner in a law firm is not a handy-person, rather one whose only acquaintance with screwdrivers involves orange juice and vodka, and who’ll have only a remote intellectual interest in things like attics, drains, or irrigation. That might be totally unfair! It would be pleasant surprise to find she really was into home maintenance topics.)

Next item on the list was to order my Channing House TV service and DVR from Comcast. I called the number Craig game me and got an odd message, “the service you request is not available at this time, try again later.” (I did try later and got to a helpful customer service rep who set me up. I’m getting the fancy DVR that Craig recommended, and an upgraded channel selection, for a total of $25/month. Which is about $115 less than my current DirecTV subscription runs.)

And then I wrote all the above, and it is just 11:05. Let’s hear it for early starts! Next scheduled event is the 12-2pm window when my last two bits of furniture from West Elm are due. I think I’ll have a nap.

The furniture delivery arrived about 1pm, two very courteous guys unboxed and brought in my new settee and my media console. I am very pleased with the settee; it looks like quality, and the color and style of the woodwork exactly matches that of my 50 year old coffee table (it’s actual mid-century modern).

The media console looks good and its color and style coordinates well with the other items. There’s a bit of a problem in that my sound bar doesn’t fit very comfortably in it. From the web catalog page I had hoped it would. Actually, it might fit; if rotated up on its front edge it could tuck into the back, but I’d need to hold it in place with duct tape or something. Or it would fit nicely if I took a jig saw and cut out two, 4×6 rectangles from some uprights, heh. To be determined. Also the subwoofer box doesn’t go into it. I may look for a smaller subwoofer.

Once the delivery guys left, I went out into the heat (over 90 in the shade) and went down to FOPAL. On this day-after-sale weekend it is time to look at every book in the section. Ones that have been around for 3 months go the bargain room. Ones with prices over $4 get repriced lower. Then I culled the 5 boxes from the sorting room. These had a very high proportion of books over 10 (many over 20) years old. If they don’t cover some relatively timeless subject, they go. I ended up pricing and shelving only about 20 books from the five boxes.

I grabbed some bottles of soda from the grocery next door, and on impulse some Indian food from the deli counter, and headed home to relax in the glow of a day of accomplishments. Yay, me.

Day 166, grumpy, map, docent

Friday, 5/17/2019

Today’s main activity is to lead a docent tour at the museum at noon. Right after breakfast I decided to follow up on something I’d noted by chance yesterday, that the

Hillbarn theater

is doing Mama Mia, which I’d never seen and should be fun. So I went to their website and tried to buy a ticket. Mostly sold out but there are seats for next Wednesday, fine. Advantage of being a widower (look on the sunny side…) I want only a single seat, and there were some scattered around in the center. Nice. Try to check out. It wants me to sign in or register. Sigh. Register. Wants name, email, address, age(!?), telephone number and of course a password.

You know what? Just sell me a ****ing ticket already! It so irked me I just closed the window and went for my run. But now, writing about it — nose biting for purpose of face spiting? — I went back and filled out their ****ing form and gave them a ****ing password. Nicely they present a menu of emails you can opt out of. Good! Opting outoutoutoutout. So.

Did my run, 37 minutes of jogjogjog and felt good (who’s old? Moi?). Showered shaved dressed in my red docent shirt and sat down to do another little chore I’ve been meaning to do: work out an equivalent to my current

jogging route

but starting at 850 Webster. Go to Google maps and map my present route. It turns out to be 2.6 miles from home to the coffee shop where I usually stop. About 2.4 miles of actual jogging; the tenth mile at the start and the last tenth I usually walk.

Then worked out a route of exactly the same length, but quite different terrain. Well, all flat like the present route, but different scenery. North on Webster street to San Francisquito Creek; follow a curving street along the creek; cross a footbridge into Menlo Park for a loop up Willow Road; cross a different footbridge back into Palo Alto (passing El Palo Alto, the town’s eponymous redwood tree), and down a back street to a coffee shop on University Avenue. Exactly 2.6 miles.

Got an email from Chuck, a slew of

realty disclosure

statements. My goodness there are a lot of different disclosure statements. Lead paint. Carbon monoxide detectors. Earthquake hazards. Some of them I couldn’t see how to fill out. Chuck had sent them as e-signature files, where you try to write your signature using the mouse. Instead I print out all eleven pages, look them over. Sign some obvious ones. Send an email back, need some guidance on these.

Then at 10:30 another email from Andrew, they have only the first of the four-page form that I’ve given them now twice. I get my copy from the pendaflex folder box and stop by their office on the way to the museum to drop it off.

I give my tour to about 15 people, get a round of applause at the end. E-chat more with

Chuck.

Of the two prospects, the Lawyer Lady’s agent has submitted an offer of $2.5M. However that was a misunderstanding. L.L. has just changed agents and the new one was not up to speed, didn’t realize that the latest ad had specified an asking price of $2.9. When Chuck pointed this out, she said she would consult with her client but didn’t know how much higher she could go.

As to the other prospect, the woman who works at Apple, Chuck has not heard back despite leaving several texts and a voice mail to the agent. That agent is a long-time Palo Alto realtor and Chuck thinks it is unusual for her not to respond. However during the showing the other day, she had commented to Chuck about planning a knee replacement operation soon, so possibly there is some health issue. Anyway, we left it that Chuck and I would meet Monday afternoon to talk about the disclosure forms, and hopefully one or both agents would have come back with something by then.

In the evening I combined an errand with supper. Earlier in the day, the

Prius

had popped up a message “Key Fob Battery Low”. Oh! Now, how do I open up the Prius key fob? I’m pretty sure I’ve done it before but don’t remember how. Youtube to the rescue; just click in the search bar and start to type “Prius key…” and “…fob battery replacement” pops up, and there are a dozen videos.

Turns out it is stupidly simple; Toyota did a great job on this design. The key fob contains a physical key that pops out when you press a button. I knew about that and actually used the physical key once when the 12V battery went flat. Turns out, they designed the key blade itself as a tool that exactly fits a slot at the bottom of the plastic fob. You pull the key out, turn it around, and use it as a lever to pop open the case of the fob. And there’s the battery. Nice!

I noted the number and went to Midtown where I bought a pair of the CR1632s and had supper at the Thai restaurant.