Day 244, interview, docent, concert

Saturday, 8/3/2019

In the morning I went to check out the Farmer’s Market. Remember I looked for it last Sunday and found only an empty parking lot? That’s because I had the downtown market confused with the one on California Avenue, which does happen on Sundays. This one is on Saturdays, duh. I bought one basket of cherries. Actually these cherries were not as nice as the ones I’ve been getting at the grocery store. But they are more… farmer-y?

Then it was time to meet with Helene, who has been assigned by the C.H. newsletter editor to interview me and write up something for the newsletter. We chatted for half an hour. We’ll see what she writes up; I get to look at it before it is published.

Off to the Museum for the 12pm tour. About 25 people. Today and tomorrow are the Vintage Computer Fest in the upstairs event space, so the parking lot was full but not a lot of actual museum visitors downstairs. I mean to go poke around the VCF tomorrow.

On the way home I stopped at the grocery store and bought a few things. Then I stopped at the Tasso house to see what was happening. What was happening was that Clarence, Chuck’s handyman contractor, was installing faucets and light fixtures. No sign of the painters.

I had on the Google Calendar a concert at 8pm at Dinkelspiel. I thought to check the Stanford jazz site to verify the time and discovered, darn it, the concert was last night. I put it in the calendar wrong. The only concert on 8/3 is at Bing and not a performer I would have gone out of my way to buy a ticket for. headbang The one in their calendar for 8/2 is the one I remember signing up for.

There’s a free concert in Rinconada park at 6:30, maybe I’ll go that that.

Day 241, FOPAL, tour, realty, play

Wednesday, 7/31/2019

Started with a run; it felt fine.

Paid a couple of bills. Yesterday I got an email from Amy wanting the signed contract for the staging, so I did that routine: print out the contract PDF, sign it, scan the signed page, and email the scan back to her. About 11am I left for FOPAL where I found four boxes waiting at the computer section, but they only yielded a dozen books to shelve. Lots of immense paperback tomes, Everything about Windows 95, The Complete Red Hat Linux Version 3, and so forth. Fifteen-hundred page doorstops, now of no interest to anyone. However, the haul did include several high-value books, little specialist books that people are paying $35-70 for.

Then I spent a couple hours sorting, before leaving at 1:30. I had received a text from Chuck telling me how much the painter’s estimate was. I had intended to bring my checkbook along so when I got that text, I could write a check and take it to Tasso street. However I had not brought the checkbook, so now I had to go back to C.H. and get it; write the check; and go deliver it.

Now I had an hour before I was scheduled to give a tour to a private group. I had meant to spend it sitting quietly, possibly napping, in the car. However at this point I started exchanging texts with Chuck and that led to realizing that still hanging is the issue of getting fresh mulch spread on the landscaping. What day will it be ok to block the driveway with a pile of mulch, what day will Richard the gardener be available to spread said mulch, I need to order the mulch to be delivered, aaaaagggghhhh!

Flurry of texts and emails (Richard doesn’t do texts) and settled on a date of Monday. Also got an email from Amy, fine you signed, but can you send the check, also? Then into the museum to wait for the tour group to arrive, which they didn’t, so I spent the time calling Lyngso Garden Supply and scheduling the delivery. But they couldn’t give me a time, “call back on Sunday afternoon and we can tell you what your 2-hour window will be.”

Compounded by: I had signed up to lead a tour of 25 people, but the document waiting at the counter specified 50. No way can one docent lead that big a tour. But when they finally showed up they were a reasonable group of 25 after all. And pretty independent, a core group of 10 or so stuck close to me, the others kind of wandered around us on cometary orbits. Which is fine with me.

After the tour I could email Richard about the uncertain start time on Monday. Back to C.H. where I wrote Amy’s check and mailed it, fortunately the usual mail delivery hadn’t happened on time so it went out tonight.

For supper I spotted an Open table with one other person, who turned out to be Beverly, and we were later joined by Cathy. I like the Open table concept. By sitting at one you are saying, I’m unaccompanied and open to anybody’s company. There are smaller tables where you can sit by yourself and nobody will bother you, or tables where people who know each other arrive in a group.A couple of nights back, I sat at an empty Open one, and nobody joined me, which was dampening. So I saw Beverley (who I didn’t know) sitting alone at an Open table I joined her and that was Ok.

This evening I had a ticket for a TheaterWorks presentation, The Language Archive. I didn’t like it much, and left at the intermission.

Day 237, docent, sonnet, book

Saturday, 7/27/2019

Did nothing much between breakfast and departing for the Museum at 11am. Did my docent round, people liked it.

This morning I remembered the window handles at Tasso street. They are brass, and I think three times over the 40+ years I lived there, I polished them. They come up with a lovely warm shine, then over a decade or so, turn dark brown again. Which they are now, and I really would like them shiny. It’s not that bad of a job, especially if I were to use some kind of power tool. I have a good cordless drill, but I don’t have a buffer attachment for it. That’s a rubber disk on a spindle; you chuck it into the end of the drill and tie a lambs-wool pad over the disk, and then you can whizz away with your tool.

So I stopped on the way home at the hardware store intending to pick up a buffer disk, and to my surprise they didn’t have them. So at home I opened up Amazon and ordered one. It will arrive Monday, but that means I can’t, as I’d sort of planned, go do any buffing of window handles tomorrow. Well, I can, but I’ll have to do it manually, no power assist. Looking ahead, I’m hoping that the house will be full of painters next week, and I might have a hard time working in around them. Well.

In the afternoon email is a notice from Amazon that my book is now available for sale. I ordered three copies, although I’m not sure on whom I will bestow the third.

Sitting around in the afternoon I recalled a thought that drifted through my mind a couple of times lately: recalling Emma Lazarus’ famous sonnet about the Statue or Liberty, The New Colossus, I wondered what kind of sonnet she might write about today’s immigration policy. Well, how about me, could I write a sonnet? And over about 90 minutes, I did, complete with proper sonnet rhyme scheme (mostly) and iambic pentameter (ok, ok, there’s one extra foot in one line, sue me).

(Removed, so as to meet the rules of most poetry magazines which don’t want anything published before, even in a personal blog.)

Since I’d never written a sonnet before, I think I’ll call this a day.

Day 230, painting, shopping, tour, concert

Saturday, 7/20/2019

At 5am I woke up and had a hard time going back to sleep from fretting about my painting. Where could it be? I finally got up at 5:30. Coffee. An hour later the paper comes. An hour later the dining room opens for breakfast. On my way down I decide to just have a wee peek into some of the common rooms which this past week were shut off so their renovation can start. I opened the door into the former 6th floor lounge, and found: a big empty room and a bunch of framed artwork leaning against the wall, some wrapped in paper as for storage. And my painting in the middle. This is a serious mix-up by somebody; that painting (and I think, some of the others) was marked with colored dot stickers indicating it was to remain hung until it could be moved to my new unit.

Well, all’s well that ends well; I picked up the painting and moved it back to my room.

I was scheduled for the 2pm tour at the Museum today so I had a couple of hours, and I went to Stanford Shopping Center to resume my search for trousers and a blazer. Last evening I had found what looked like a nice pair of pants on the Nordstrom website, on sale marked down from $200 to $130. Since a pair of Levi’s costs circa $90, I feel like $200 is more or less in line for a pair of wool trousers.

It took a while to find the right size of these; the very helpful clerk assured me that this brand tended to run large, so I started with 34″. Way too tight. 35″. Nope. Each time, going into the fitting room, taking off my pants, putting on the trial pair, taking them off, folding them, putting my own back on… The 36″ size was really too tight (so much for running large, since 36″ Levi’s are a bit loose on me) but close enough to a fit that I could close them and put on my belt and look in the mirror and… I didn’t like they way they draped. Bloused out to the side like jhodpurs almost. Nothing like the picture on the website. I snuck out past the very helpful clerk while he was on the phone so I wouldn’t have to endure any more suggestions.

I dropped in to Wilkes Bashford and was almost ready to try on a pair of their pants when I noticed the price tag, $475. Nope. I mentioned to the very helpful clerk that I was also interested in a blazer and he mentioned that their blazers started at $2200. “I’m sure they are lovely; thank you so much for your time.” “You have a nice day, sir.”

Nieman Marcus. Very helpful clerk. But I just can’t swallow $300 for a pair of slacks. Wondering if I was totally out of touch (it has been a long time since I shopped for clothes), I wandered on down the concourse. Took a look in Banana Republic (from the sublime to the ridiculous, right?) who actually have blazers but not in any color I wanted to try. Had a smoothie at Jamba Juice and thought it over. Yesterday at Nordstrom I had started with the Bonobo display. They had nice looking blazers, I might have bought one except they didn’t have the combination of size and color I wanted. But the Bonobo line is, if not exactly cheap, reasonable. Sucking my smoothie I opened their website on my phone and saw that they have their own store on Santana Row. I decided heck, I’m going there. Tomorrow.

Went to the Museum, led a tour, people liked it. Came home, ate a quick supper at 5:30, then walked the mile down Middlefield to Rinconada park where there was a free concert, part of Palo Alto’s summer series, at 6:30. A band that alternates Creedence Clearwater and Bob Seeger numbers. They weren’t that good but the songs were great (Stuck in Lodi Again, Born on the Bayou, etc.) and I listened for an hour and walked back.

Day 223, tour, book, concert

Saturday, 7/13/2019

In the morning I worked on creating a proper cover image for a print book. This involved a fair amount of frustration trying to use Affinity Pro, which has most of the features of PhotoShop but just enough interface differences that I frequently ran into roadblocks where I just didn’t understand what it had done, or did but couldn’t see why it did that. Joys of learning a new app.

At 11am I drove to the museum and led the noon tour. A group of 14 college students from Taiwan attached themselves to the tour, making quite a crowd. The leader told me he had brought a similar group through last year and I’d been the tour leader then. I don’t remember; but I wish this time he had booked a private tour instead of just joining the standard one. Anyway it went ok, the group as a whole gave me a nice applause round and the Taiwan students insisted on a group photo with me in the middle.

Back home I did a bit more on the book, including uploading my cover image and having Kindle Direct generate a preview version of the completed book. This process takes something like half an hour — the software warns you, “you might want to go have coffee, or perhaps make a sandwich” while it runs. At the end of the lengthy process it found two issues that I have to fix. One, the cover image is about 150 pixels too narrow; I don’t understand why as I built it on top of their template image. And it found one place in a 270pp book where the text bled past the margin, in effect, finding a small bug in the Leanpub PDF generation. I’ll work on fixing those another day. But print publication is a few hours’ work away.

After a quick (solitary) supper (lamb curry, which was quite good) I headed out on a Lyft to Dinkelspiel for the first of the Stanford Jazz Festival concerts I signed up for weeks ago. This was led by Andrew Motis, with whom I was very impressed. Just a slip of a girl but she plays a mean trumpet and sings brilliantly. Maybe most impressive when she did an Ella Fitzgerald scat number and nailed it. She started with a small five-piece combo including Ken Peplowski, a great clarinetist whom I’ve heard in prior SJF seasons. For the second half they brought in another ten musicians, “Stanford All-Stars,” I think mostly faculty, and did big-band numbers. There are few sounds finer than a tight big band. A very nice concert.

Day 216, Museum, FOPAL, stool

Saturday, 7/6/2019

Breakfasted in the dining room. Began editing a chapter of the book, which happened to be the chapter on death and bereavement. Since I last worked on it I have some personal experience in that line, and while the advice I’d written before has held up pretty well in the light of new experience, it needs a little tweaking.

I put on my fire-engine red Museum Docent shirt and headed out about 10, stopping first at FOPAL to clean up the computer section. I ran out of time for that, left it, and continued on to the Museum to lead the 12pm tour. About 20 people, it went well.

I changed shirts then, I’d brought another so as to preserve my red one and not have to wash it again before the next use, and returned to FOPAL to price the books I’d selected earlier. Then back home.

During all this the Estate Sale was happening at Tasso street. I’d emailed a neighbor and now he sent me a couple of pictures of people coming out of the house carrying things they’d bought.

I chilled in my recliner for part of the afternoon, and happened on a thread in a forum about choosing the best chair for long sessions in front of a computer. This is a subject I’ve been thinking about. The old chair I’ve used for years is still functional but unfortunately my new L-shaped desk is a bit higher than the old one. I sat on a pile of books to verify that I need something around 23-24 inches high, but the old chair doesn’t get to 20.

target_stool The internet thread pointed to a lot of different chairs, but then somebody pointed out that a simple bar-stool with a swiveling top is as good as anything. Hmmm. They actually linked to one sold at Target, and a little poking around there turned up this one. Not only is it just the height I want, it is a lovely match to all my other new furniture. I am determined to go and buy this at Target tomorrow.

I texted Deborah about 6pm, she said the sale was going well, most of the furniture gone. I said I’d decided not to keep my subwoofer and my desk chair, could I drop them by in the morning? She said, sure.

In the evening cleaned out my collection of DVDs; there are quite a few movies I don’t expect to watch again and I will give them either to the C.H. library or to FOPAL. Finishing up watching on Amazon Prime, a 1980 BBC production of The Taming of the Shrew with John Cleese as Petruchio. It’s the Shakespeare play I know best, having acted in a production of it at USF in the dark ages around 1968. In retrospect it’s a horrible play, wrong in so many ways. Cleese is perfect in the role; I do not like the Kate, one Sarah Badel. Anyway, that’s the evening.

Day 212, book, museum

Tuesday, 7/2/2019

I began the morning by driving to the Y for a small workout. I departed late enough that the dining room was open, and I picked up a bagel and banana to eat while I drove. However, I want to be able to do my workout here, and drop the YMCA membership. However, that will mean changing the workout, as two apparatus that I use, aren’t in the C.H. gym.

Right now, the fitness director has announced her departure, and a new one hasn’t been appointed. There is a buzz of email on the house list of people lobbying for the director’s assistant, Clark, to be promoted. He’s apparently very popular with the residents. I have no opinion; he seemed nice enough when he evaluated my fitness back on Day 152.

Anyway, when that is resolved I intend to get with whoever is director and ask for help in mapping out an exercise routine that will strengthen the particular muscle groups that I’m concerned about, and that I can do here.

That done, I edited another chapter of my book, and explored one of the websites where I might get hard-copy made. That would be Blurb, which I used to produce two photo books for the Cardinal WBB team back in 2012 and 2013. I still need to check out Kindle Direct, because why not be able to sell through Amazon?

During this I was getting emails from Chuck with documents to e-sign and return. We are finally and definitively separated from Lawyer Lady, and good riddance.

I had a quick lunch and headed off to the museum to lead that tour that I accepted yesterday. Stopped briefly at Tasso street to sign Deborah’s sales agreement. The tour were a dozen residents of The Terraces at Los Altos, another upscale senior residence. They could have been a random selection from C.H. Anyway I had fun with them and they seemed appreciative.

Back to C.H. in time for the monthly Upgrade Progress meeting held by Angela. She went over again the timeline for the 7th floor moving back and the 6th floor moving out. No changes but a little more detail. Our common areas, except for the laundry room, will be closed for renovation starting later this week.

Between 3:30 and supper time I began to explore a replacement for PhotoShop. I am a bit of a PhotoShop power user, very familiar with it, have used it to process hundreds of scanned slides etc. A couple of years ago, Adobe changed their pricing so that one no longer could own the latest PhotoShop (or Bridge or LightRoom, etc) but only leased them via an annual payment for Creative Cloud membership. I put up with this while finishing up my slide scanning, but did not renew when it came due this spring, and all that software has stopped working. Actually I still have a five-year-old PhotoShop that works, but it would be nice to have something current and supported.

There’s The Gimp, the open-source image editor. I picked up a book on it last week at FOPAL, so downloaded the program and checked it out. It lacks several features that I used heavily, as well as having a confusing UI (and the book wasn’t very good either). No.

For certain things, GraphicConverter is very useful and I have it on both computers, but it isn’t my favorite tool for image editing.

Some time ago I bought a copy of Pixelmator and it would probably do most of what I want. However I recently heard of Affinity Pro and decided to try their trial download. And Wow! am I impressed. For $39, here was a program with every feature of the latest PhotoShop, and more. I watched a couple of their tutorial videos, tried out a couple of things, and immediately bought it. Yes. Nice.

Day 211, book, museum, dinner

Monday, 7/1/2019

Began the day with a run. There was nothing more on the calendar until noon, when a person from facilities had made a date to take some kind of inventory of my Comcast equipment in preparation for the move.

I spent a couple of hours, then, on a light edit of my book, To Thrive Beyond Belief. I had declared it complete just a year ago. At supper with Betsy Young the other night, she had mentioned it: she’d googled me and knew the name of the prior book. Another guest, Bob, had expressed interest in it. He and Betsy said, can you put a copy in the library here?

I was a bit embarrassed to have to say no, the current version was an online e-text only. I investigated later and there are several ways to create bound copies of the book, and I think I’d like to do that. But before I do, it needs one more edit. I’m finding a number of minor typos and less-than-clear sentences. So there will be another version and I’ve started on it. This is one of the back-burner projects that I set aside last year when Marian got ill, and it is a pleasure to return to it. Writing and editing are really satisfying for me.

Right at 12, the facilities guy knocked on the door. All he ended up doing was to note the modem and DVR and put his own barcode label on each. It’s not clear to me why these need to be treated separately from my other furniture, but whatever.

At 2pm I started for the museum where I had signed up along with five other docents, to provide gallery support (which means, standing around in the exhibit area and answering questions) to a group of 120 students from a Stanford summer course. The students arrived with a scavenger hunt, a sheet of 20 rather vague riddle-like clues to objects they were supposed to find. So we gave them hints, when we could figure out the allusive clues ourselves.

Returning to C.H. on the freeway I thought I would stay on until the University Avenue exit. This proved to be a mistake. Apparently a lot of people want to exit to East Palo Alto at 5pm, and I spent about ten minutes in standing traffic before reaching the exit. Once on the exit, there was a clear lane for University Avenue west; all the traffic was going east. Note to self, in future take Embarcadero road and Middlefield.

I’d been invited by Patti and other sixth floorians to supper at 6, and barely made it. Pleasant conversation about C.H. politics and national politics. I’m living in a building full of raging liberals! Thank goodness!

In the middle of the day I’d had email from the new volunteer manager saying that they needed coverage for a tour of senior citizens tomorrow. The slot was still open after supper, so I took it. I can squeeze in a tour before I have to be back here for a meeting at three.

Late in the day I got an email from Chuck with and attached PDF of the cancellation paper we had been expecting the Lawyer Lady to sign. Thinking this was it, I texted him to ask, should I print, sign, scan and return it? Um, no, that’s the unsigned form. Wait until we get the actual one signed by her. Which we haven’t. This was just him, forwarding to me, the email from her agent, in which her agent said, Chuck, here is the form I sent Daphne to sign. I’ll let you know when she does.

Stranger and stranger. If it wasn’t for the fact that L.L. is in fact an attorney, I’d be asking, have we any legal recourse? Can we threaten to take her deposit? But you know, I don’t think I want to get into a legal pissing contest with a partner in a law firm.

Day 208, washer, docent, dinner, play

Friday, 6/28/2019

Started the day with a run, ending at yet another coffee shop: Mademoiselle Collette, which Harriet has praised a couple of times. Cappuccino: good. Pastries: legit. I had a Koign Amman, a pastry I first had on our French vacation several years ago. This one was pretty close to the real thing. The only drawback to the place is its small size; it is basically a 20×20 foot cube, about the size of my apartment, and noisy. There are pleasant seats outside, however, and I may try those for Sunday morning.

Next official thing on the calendar was a docent tour, but about 9 I got a phone call from “Tarla”, the person who was supposed to look at the washing machine at 2pm. Could she send George her handyman to look at it now? Oh, sigh, I suppose so. I drove over to Tasso street to meet George who came up in his pickup truck from San Jose. He was tasked by Tarla with making sure the washing machine functioned, and taking it away if so. However, Tarla and he appear not to be the greatest planners. She hadn’t told him it hadn’t been paid for. When I said, the price is $100, he was taken aback, then said, ok, he could pay me and get it from Tarla. Then he looked at the washer and while I was making it run through its cycles, I pointed out that it weighed well over 200 pounds, and he didn’t have a dolly, so how was he alone going to get it up my gravel driveway to his truck, and without a lift gate, how would he load it?

He talked at length to Tarla, who sounded like a confused drama queen on the phone and seemed to want to blame him and/or me for the mixup. Anyway, no sale, and George went off to try to get Tarla to pay him for his mileage and time. Best of luck with that, George.

My docent tour group was the smallest ever, just one couple. Very nice people but it was weird talking to just two. I am so used to projecting my voice to lecture to a dozen or more. I had to back off, and use a conversational voice, and generally lower the pitch of my presentation. But they enjoyed it.

Dinner was a date with Betsy and her husband George. She has the task of introducing new residents at the monthly Residents’ Meeting which is a week from Monday. She quizzed me at length on my work history etc. We were joined at table by Bob. Bob retired from running Stanford’s overseas campus in Germany for many years. All these people are over-achievers, I feel very… modest. Kind of like when I went from high school ace to being just an average one of the herd in college.

A little after 7pm I made the ten-minute walk to Lucy Stern center to see A man with two guv’ners by the Palo Alto Players. I saw a production of The servant of two masters, the classic by Golden, some years ago. This is a modern version, updated from medieval Venice to 1963 England, and played with lots of bravura slapstick physical comedy and bad British accents. It was pretty entertaining.

Day 202, docent, washing machine, dinner

Saturday, 6/22/2019

On the way down to breakfast about 8am I ran into Craig, who pointed out that my painting was now properly hung opposite the lounge door. Later I wrote to Dean Linsky and sent this picture. He wrote back later, appreciative of the note and that the painting wouldn’t be sold.

Today I am scheduled to lead the noon tour at the museum. I put on my red shirt and head out at 10:30. I stop at the post office, but it isn’t open for receiving packages on Saturday, so I can’t mail the DVR.

Scott showed up to take my tour. We started with over 20 people. At least 5 wandered away, but the rest seemed to enjoy it. Just after I finished up, Deborah called to say someone wanted to see the washing machine and dryer, could I show it at 3pm? Oh, yeah, sure. I drove back to C.H., changed clothes, picked up the house key, and drove to Tasso street. A very charming couple showed up; they are moving into a rental that, they think, doesn’t have a washer/dryer. They approve of mine, and went away to talk to their landlady. Later in the evening, Deborah texts that they won’t be taking the machines after all.

At this point it was 3:30. In the morning I’d used Google Maps to make a list of all the local furniture stores. I’m determined to find a pleasing, open bookcase to display some objects and my few books. I can exactly picture what, in college, I would have built out of glass blocks and planks. Now I decide to drive to the southernmost of my list, Cost Plus. I remember visiting Cost Plus with Marian several times, although I don’t recall what specifically we ever bought there.

55782_XXX_v1 This time, they have one that is almost exactly what I want. The only problem with it is the shelves are only about 10 inches high, and my taller books won’t fit. They could be on top, held by a heavy pair of bookends I have, but I am going to keep looking.

I headed back to C.H. where I’d been invited to join Patti and Craig for dinner. We sat for over an hour chatting, that was nice.