Day 293, docent, quiet afternoon

Saturday, 9/21/2019

Today I was scheduled to lead a private tour, that is, one requested by some group, not a regularly-scheduled one. The group was from the Buddhist temple of Palo Alto. The leader was disappointed there was only the one docent. I signed up for this some time ago, because I like private tours: I can go slower and run over the 1-hour limit on the scheduled tours. But the leader complained, with justice, that he had phoned Poppy the person who schedules these a week ago, to warn her that he would have a full group of 38 people, and requested two docents. Somehow that message wasn’t effective, or at least, Poppy didn’t do anything to recruit another docent, like sending out an email, that I recall.

Wait, let me check. Yes, in an email on Monday the 16th, she requested a docent for a private tour on Wednesday. In that email, she also listed three other private tours, Thursday, Friday, and then this one on Saturday with the note, “1 more docent needed.” But that didn’t draw any response, not surprisingly since it was the fourth request down in a long email. Pretty clearly the Museum is either short of docents, or long on private tours. And they have recently reduced the paid staff, including the woman who was in charge of recruiting docents.

Anyway, we proceeded, and I held the attention of most of them, there were still at least 30 with me at the end. So it worked out.

Back home I ate lunch in the dining room, and later supper, and this may be the first time ever I ate all three meals there. I’ll note that the chef is really trying. The entrees tonight were 1, Salmon Teriyaki, 2, Duck meat (breasts and thighs, your choice) in gravy, and Pepper Steak. There was a vegetarian dish as well, and green beans and bok choi. The salmon was perfect; the duck was nice, I passed on the steak. And Saturdays are do-it-yourself Sundae days, two drums of ice cream with scoops and ad-lib toppings on the side.

After lunch I spent an hour working in my Lisp textbook; otherwise I pretty well wasted the afternoon.

Oh. On the “should contact Katie” issue. Actually not just Katie but I’ve not contacted her mother or sister either. So yesterday I sent a cheerful email giving my updated postal address, to anybody in my contacts list I thought might ever want to send me a card or something. I was careful to include Katie’s mother, sister, and friend/caretaker Michelle. Figuring that, maybe they’d take the excuse to write back. But so far, a couple of other people did, but not any of them.

Day 286, docent, FOPAL

Saturday, 9/14/2019

A leisurely morning before departing at 11am to lead the noon docent tour at the Museum. That went ok, although in hindsight I omitted some of my best points. I have given this tour maybe 30, 40? times and I swear I’ve never done it the same, or remembered every point, once.

On the way back I stopped at FOPAL, where the monthly sale weekend was on. I tidied up my Computer section–people make such a mess of it, come on, look at the book and if you aren’t buying it, just put it back where you got it already. Of course they don’t. Anyway, quite a few books gone.

In the middle of the day I got some disappointing news. Back on Day 154 I had seen the painting “Eight Pelicans” and really liked it. Since, I’d arranged to visit the artist’s studio next Friday with Darlene and Jessea and fully planned to buy the painting then. Today I got an email from Carol the artist, saying apologetically that some people had come by her studio that morning and bought “Eight Pelicans”. Well, crap! I shoulda coulda woulda given a deposit or something earlier. I had this stupid emotional thing where I didn’t want to do it until the house escrow had closed, and then that I wouldn’t do it until I could look at it again and… now it’s gone.

At supper the table conversation was about the new Stanford Hospital wing. Several people had been on an organized tour to the open house for the new facility. Very impressive, looks very expensive. “Did you go, Dave?” Um no, I said; I had spent entirely too much time at Stanford Hospital last year while my wife was sick. She was in there almost three weeks in total, plus a couple of other visits to the Emergency room. While I have no complaint with any of the staff, who were every one highly professional and humane, the environment was not pleasant long term, and having a shiny new building wouldn’t improve it. It wouldn’t fix the stress, the uncertainty of never knowing when your doctor or some specialist might pop in on rounds, never knowing how long you’ll wait to be taken for a test of some kind; and the bureaucracy that stifled all the staff and made the simplest things tedious.

Sooner or later I’ll no doubt need hospitalization and if there’s any choice about it, I’ll go to Sequoia or El Camino in preference to Stanford. No doubt they have the same problems but at least I won’t have to fight memories.

Day 279, docent, quiet

Saturday, 9/7/2019

Right, of course, do the blog post next day and… what did I do yesterday? Well, I did lead a tour, the 12oclock one, and had about 30 people to start, 25 or so stuck around to the end. In the morning I called Dennis and arranged our schedule for tomorrow. Afternoon? Read some from my Bridge Defense book, read some from the Lisp book. I remember that at supper, I was disappointed with the entree. The menu said “scallops in polenta” and I was picturing a couple of seared scallops on a nice bed of polenta, but the reality was more of a stew, small scallops stirred in with mush.

I settled in to the new room, which is perfectly adequate. One minor point of annoyance is the drawers in the bathroom vanity cabinet. They are originals, similar in make to the ones I started varnishing in #621. I’ve given up on that project for #621; I’m determined that in February or so, after I’ve moved back, I’ll have all the closets professionally rebuilt. But for here in #435, maybe I’ll sand and varnish these ugly little drawers. I’ll see the top one daily; it’s where I store my hairbrush and comb etc, and I open it at least once a day. The unfinished interior has been stained, and has the outline, the ghost as it were, of a pair of scissors that were put in wet and stained the wood.

Day 272, docent, vertigo

Saturday, 8/30/2019

When I got up this morning I had light, but definite, vertigo. A few years ago (well, sometime in this century) I had a severe spell of it, barely able to walk while keeping a hand on a wall, nauseated every time I changed posture — it was nasty. It took a week or so to wear off. I don’t welcome it back, even in this mild form. I really only feel it on major changes of posture, especially leaning over or sitting up. Walking is ok.

So I took it easy and was very mindful of my balance while taking a shower. (Some other resident, I saw on the house bulletin board, had fallen in the bathroom and broken a hip.)

The main activity of the day was to lead the noon tour at the Museum. I had a good crowd, 25 or so to start, and kept the attention of most of them to the end. One lady was really on my wavelength, she laughed out loud at every one of my little witticisms, the ones that usually get a smile or no reaction.

In the mail today, the final statement of the escrow. Also the refund from Amy and her staging company for part of the staging fee. Only part, because they did all the planning and loaded their truck before we called off the open house. So I only get back the installation and rental for all the furniture they were going to put in the empty house. I kinda sorta wish we had gone through with the open house because I’d like to have seen what Amy was going to do with it. But on the other hand… no.

Anyway, I have now all the data on the sale and the costs of the sale. Sometime next week I will put together a package on that to give to the tax people next spring. Meantime, the Tasso street house is definitively gone. I was thinking about that, early in the morning before I got up. What exactly is different, versus a month ago? Somehow, even when I had left, I had a mental vector, an internal compass pointing toward that house. Not surprising, having lived there 45 years, that no matter where I was, in the car, in a hotel in some other city, I had a sense of the house “over there”, accessible at need. Now it is unquestionably someone else’s house. I have the mental compass needle but where it points, I would not be welcome. Not a distressing feeling, exactly, but different.

Also in the mail, the final trip information for the upcoming Greek Islands tour, the one that I had to reschedule. And boy am I glad I did. It would have been horribly stressful to depart on that the same day as I’m moving to my temporary apartment. That trip starts with moderately stressful logistics. I’ll have to get a Lyft to SFO around 3am, and take two long flights to get to Athens the next day. Not really looking forward to that, but at least, I can approach it as a single problem, not layered with other concerns.

Day 269, docent disappointment, FOPAL, escrow closes

Wednesday, 8/28/2019

Went for a run in the morning. Initially told myself, “listen to your body”, bearing in mind I was not 100% yesterday. However when I got up, my temperature was 97.7, i.e. the Shingrex Fever is gone. Started easy and thought of cutting off one loop, but finally did the whole usual course and felt ok.

Around 10 I got a call from a lady at Chicago Title; she couldn’t figure out how to do a wire transfer to my Schwab account. I quickly gave her the number of Cindy, the knows-all does-all person at my financial advisor’s office. Shortly after I got copied on an email from Cindy, and soon after that, my Schwab account showed that my “personal value” (sum of all accounts) had increased by 112%. Not a bad gain for one day.

So I definitively am no longer a homeowner. That was one of the first firm decisions I made when, a bit more than a year ago, I started thinking about how I would order my life in the likely event that Marian did not survive. I formally started the process about seven months ago. Now it is finally achieved. I felt a brief flutter of uncertainty, almost a panic, realizing that now I have no other place than this one. The Tasso street house had not been my residence since I drove away from it June 15th. From the end of July, when the estate sale cleared everything out and emptied the place, returning was no longer even an unlikely fallback option. But now, it’s irrevocably gone.

The feeling didn’t last. Thinking about it several hours later, I don’t feel panic or uncertainty; just a bit of the familiar grief at having shed another piece of the old life.

I was scheduled to lead a tour at 11:30, a private tour of 30 Apple employees. Looking forward to talking to techies. And I had been told that semi-famous Apple guy Bud Tribble would be in the group. So I went to the Museum and waited, and waited, and they didn’t show. The desk guy called the contact number; someone answered and said, “I’ll check and call you back,” and didn’t call back. Huh. I left at 12.

I had not intended to go to FOPAL today, thinking a full tour would be enough exertion, but since there was no tour, I went back to CH, changed out of my red docent shirt and went to FOPAL. There I put up new shelf labels in the Computer section that I had made last weekend, using a bigger font so they are easier to read. Went through three boxes of books and kept almost half of them. Then did sorting for three hours. My steps for the day: 12,061, 5.4mi.

After supper there was a jazz concert in the auditorium, a local group, the leader and I think the pianist both friends of C.H. residents. They were ok but I didn’t stay for the whole show.

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 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 258, Docent, house concert

Saturday, 8/17/2019

In the morning I spritzed some more stain remover on the carpet. It will pass. My guests probably won’t be in the room very long anyway.

Speaking of the guests, I texted Joanne about 10 to check in. They’ll arrive sometime around noon. I told them not to stress about making it here in time to eat in the dining room; we can have lunch anywhere outside.

Then I left for the museum to lead a tour. Afterward I chilled in the room for a couple of hours before going out to Suzanne and Chuck’s place, where they hosted a recital by one of Chuck’s piano students. Hanna is just out of high school and will be going to UC Berkeley to study computer science this fall. She performed pieces by Chopin, Liszt, and the first movement of a Brahms concerto for piano and orchestra. Chuck played the orchestral part on a second piano (they have three grand pianos in their music room) and Hanna played the solo parts. It was rather awesome to hear these very complex pieces played with power and accuracy by a slip of a girl, but she did it.

I noshed on cheese and crackers afterward while talking with Suzanne and with Hanna’s parents. That was almost enough food so it didn’t matter that I wasn’t back in time for supper here. I had a PBJ in my room.

While watching some old Naked and Afraids with one eye, I spent a little time on Lisp. Strange language. Old, as I’ve said, and it kind of has the same relation to computer science that Latin had to the Catholic Church. And the 1989 standard for Common Lisp was presumably thought through and argued out by big brains. So, how did they manage to leave blatant inconsistencies in the design?

Case in point, the whole damn language revolves around lists; the list is a basic data type and there’s a bunch of operators for manipulating lists. Dandy. But there is a set of related standard functions, floor, truncate, ceiling etc., all of which can return two values. For example, (floor 25 4) evaluates to two numbers, 6 and 1, respectively the quotient and remainder of dividing 25 by 4. This is very useful. The comparable function in Python is called divmod, and divmod(25, 4) returns a tuple, (6, 1), a tuple being a standard data type in Python.

Does the Lisp function (floor 25 4) return a list of two items, (25 4)? It bloody well does not! At this point all I know is the documentation says it returns the “multiple values” of 25 and 4. You can’t access the second of the values (the remainder) in any normal way. The only way to get at it — and of course finding this out involved an internet search leading to an answer on Stack Overflow; it was of course not to be found in the index of any damn tutorial — is to use the multiple-value-bind function. This special function has the magic to trap the multiple values returned by floor and related functions and assign them to names you supply. So this old well-thought-out language, used in much AI and other cutting-edge research, ignores its own basic data types and has a magic special extension to handle the special magic values returned by several fundamental arithmetic functions. Great.

Day 256, docent, Yosemite, supper

Thursday, 8/15/2019

Starting a long busy day I didn’t exercise, but had breakfast in the dining room. On Monday I had seen an email from the museum about a private tour Thursday morning that needed covering. On Tuesday I had checked and it still wasn’t covered, so I reluctantly decided to do that tour and join the archival crew after lunch. So I left at quarter to ten for the museum where I met with a nice group of a dozen high school students in some kind of Stanford summer program. They paid attention pretty well, and Pat came in entirely of his own volition and gave them a 1401 demo, which they loved, as everyone does.

Drove to Yosemite where Aurora was trying to get people trained in her grand plan (see Day 242). Unfortunately there were not enough laptops to get everyone working, and I and Toni ended up sitting around at loose ends. So I left early.

In today’s mail: the replacement checks from Schwab, that I only ordered two days ago. Way to go, Schwab!

I had been invited to supper by a couple, Mary and Andrew. Turned out they had also invited Lily and her sister (name forgotten), both residents but living on different floors, and Michael, the “newer new guy” who came in last month. Lily is vivacious and talkative, and promoting her harmonica playing group and wants me to help her get her book of daily meditations online as an ebook. She’ll be my neighbor when I move to the 4th floor. There was some talk also of my book, in which people expressed interest.

Michael indicated although not in any detail that he was a recent widower; some remark about “this last year has been such turmoil” or such words. And there was some talk about how hard it is for everyone when they are trying to downsize. I didn’t contribute to that although I certainly agree.

In the evening I joined an audience of 50 or so in the auditorium to view a documentary on the life of Judy Garland.

Day 251, clothes, docent, realty

Saturday, 8/10/2019

Wrote the check to pay off Paul the floor guy and mailed it.. Drove next to the Target across the freeway. Why? Because according to the Rogue Brewing website, I can get their Dead Guy Ale (nominated by me as the best beer made on the West Coast) at that store. I’ve found it before at my usual grocery, but the last half-dozen times I’ve looked, they didn’t have it. I don’t drink but about one beer a week, so I wanted to stock the good stuff, and by golly they did have it.

Then went to Jacquie’s Sew and Sew to pick up my modified blazer and trousers. See below for pics. On to the Museum to lead the 12pm tour. From there I drove to the grocery to pick up some no-cal drinks. From that parking lot I could walk to the FOPAL building to see how the sale was going. Quite a few books were already gone from the Computer section. Strangely, somebody had taken it upon themselves to move some books to different areas. I have the section arranged by topics, and somebody had shuffled books from one topic to another shelf. And inserted a bunch of books that were not at all computer-related. Why? No idea.

Back home, I got a call from Bill, who wanted to take a picture of me for the newsletter article that Helene wrote. I said sure, come on up; and then spent the next three minutes rapidly changing my shirt, picking up and tidying the living room, etc. Bill is clearly an experienced photographer (later somebody told me he was formerly a photog for a newspaper) and took a number of shots against different backgrounds and different lighting.

Sat at supper with Craig, Diane, and the other David. Then upstairs to finally try on my new clothes. They look ok. I definitely look best in a turtleneck (to hide my turtle neck) and I really should buy a white or cream-colored one, all my present ones are dark. Anyway here is my new wardrobe extension.

Casual white trousers. Not great, and pants need to be ironed.

Brownish trousers. OK look. They also need ironing. Surprised Jacquie’s didn’t press them before delivery.

Brown trou. with cream-colored shirt. Definitely need a cream or ivory turtleneck.

Blue-gray trousers, open button. Definitely the best combo. The jacket fits fine buttoned, but it still looks better this way.