Day 111, basketball

Saturday, 3/23/2019

In the morning I started reviewing

one more group of slides.

Two days ago I scanned the last ones that I had set aside in the review of all un-scanned groups. Finishing that, and feeling quite emotional about the looming prospect of carrying out the dumping of all slides, I took a last look through the existing folders of scans. There I discovered that one group, group “501 Japan 2002”, 250-odd slides from a memorable ElderHostel tour of Osaka and Tokyo, had only a few scanned images, and they weren’t properly named with the group and picture numbers. Clearly that group had not been as carefully reviewed and scanned as other major trips. I speculate the few images in it were perhaps selected quickly to illustrate a blog post or something. I don’t remember the thought process applied back in 2003 or 4, but the existence of a folder named “gp501 Japan” suggested that the group had been done, and clearly it had not.

So I started to inspect the group 501 slides and got through 30 or so, selecting a few to be scanned. I’ll finish that tomorrow and probably have all the actual scanning done next week.

I took one more whack at trying to get

the sound bar

to accept input from the HDMI and the optical ports on the TV, but nope. The optical just doesn’t work, and I’ve tried two different optical cables. The HDMI works, but only if I feed the DVR cable into the sound bar and thence on to the TV, so the sound bar sits in the middle. That would be fine if the DVR was the only program source, but there is also a DVD/Blu-ray Player; and I anticipate adding a Roku box. So all sources have to feed into the TV so I can select among them with a remote; and TV audio out to the sound bar. What works is to feed the sound bar with the TV’s analog output. Stereo audio on a mini-jack, so primitive. Actually it sounds fine.

Meanwhile I pulled out all five speakers and the heavy receiver, and made a pile of them with the receiver’s remote and manual, in the spare room. Probably will end up in a landfill. Well, no; it’s too bulky; I’ll have to take it to Green Citizen or such for recycling. Which brought me to noon and time for

basketball,

the NCAA first round games at Maples Pavilion. I bought my tickets the only way I could, from Stanford’s website as soon as they were available, and the best I could get was front row of the upper level. At the game I found several friends and fellow season-ticket holders sitting in much better seats in lower levels. I think probably that when I was cleaning up all Marian’s email subscriptions, I un-subscribed to the season ticket holder list, with the result that I didn’t get notified of a better way to buy.

Then Dennis, who was on campus to see a water polo game earlier, texted that he was in the building, and I found him in a very nice seat in the middle where the chairs have padding and back support. How did he get that nice seat? He just walked up to the ticket window before game time and said, gimme what you got. Umph.

BYU beat Auburn fairly easily. Stanford romped over UC Davis, opening the game with a 17-2 run and ending 30 points up. The next game will be Monday evening. I expect Stanford will beat the BYU team I saw today, although not as easily as UC Davis.

Home again, I opened the windows to spring-like air. Now at 7:30 it is beginning to feel chilly.

Day 107, money money

Tuesday, 3/19/2019

Had the annual talk with the

Financial Advisors.

The firm is Sullivan and Serwitz, and for several years, we’ve met with only Bob Sullivan, but today his partner Marshall Serwitz sat in as well.

Bottom line, I’m financially fine. According to their conservative model, I can spend money at a generous annual rate (almost surely more than I’ll actually spend) and I still won’t be able to keep up with my principal’s growth, even at a conservative projected growth rate. So I will almost unavoidably die richer than I am now. Yay me; or rather, yay us, because it was the money we earned as DINKs, conserved by our naturally modest desires, that was the foundation.

As for what I had seen as a vexed question: In the event that C.H. offers a unit before the house is sold, how to finance the entry fee without incurring big capital gains and/or paying high interest? Not an issue at all! First, thanks to my being a recent widower, all of our investments have a new “basis” — not just the house, which is a huge benefit, but even the mutual funds that we bought into back in the 80s. So I can sell any amount of those shares, should I want to, and pay no capital gains. But, they pointed out, it would be equally simple to get a standard home loan through e.g. Quicken Loans, secured by the house. Almost surely at a lower rate than the 10% annual that C.H. offered.

Or, the advisors’ suggestion was to ignore C.H.’s timing; go ahead and sell the house as quickly as possible so as to have the liquid cash in hand whenever C.H. is ready to offer a unit. Well, that means moving twice, say I, like moving into another ILF with a monthly rate.

Not necessarily, they said. Look, you don’t want to keep much of your furniture anyway, right? True, I agree, about 5 or 6 pieces all told, and a few boxes worth of other stuff. OK, you put those in storage. Storage units are cheap. You pack your clothes and move into a long-stay hotel, or a vacation home rental. It would be cheaper than moving into any ILF.

This turns out to be true. They referred me to “Vacation Rentals by Owner”, VRBO.com (the link is a search for Palo Alto at under $150/night) and there are lots of cottages and apartments I can rent for extended periods around $100/night, which comes to $3000/month, which is substantially less than any local month-to-month ILF; the difference being, no food service. OK, given a kitchen I can feed myself for not much, just as I do now.

So the picture they proposed is that I (1) move out to a rental, (2) take my time saving whatever possessions I want to keep into a storage unit, (3) sell the house, (4) wait comfortably for the unit I want. The local housing market is showing signs of turning down, they said, so the sooner you sell, the better.

I took all this under advisement. A critical time will come tomorrow at 11 when I sit down with Kim Krebs at C.H. and find out what the actual prospects are. If she says, you can have X unit next month, that’s one thing. If she waffles, indicates it may be weeks to months, then I may implement the advisors’ plan.

There were other points. The house and everything else is part of a family trust. With the death of one of the joint trustees, the trust documents need to be revised. They will set up an appointment with the attorney who drew up the trust, probably for May. So there will be that to do. Also I had to sign and notarize several documents related to changing the ownership of the various Schwab accounts to me as sole trustee.

From there I did some

errands:

Got the car washed, first time since it was waxed, poor thing. Bought some groceries (like, $30 worth, see above). Got some cash from the ATM. Then home to

throw out more

… I want to say shit, but that’s not fair. I cleaned up a couple of shelves of things, and most of the things on the shelves went into the black landfill box. There were collected CD-ROMs and manuals for software. Photoshop CS2? Really? (Current version is 7 or so.) Also two or three versions of Windows, which I ran (still can run) in a virtual machine on the Mac. I used to do that when I was maintaining an app that a few other people used, and I had to test new versions on Windows as well as Mac.

Then more serious stuff: a fat binder which has all the historical receipts for house maintenance. This has been often used. When the hot water heater goes out, as it did a month ago, it’s handy to be able to look back and see who installed it. That’s where I could look up how much we paid to fumigate in 2005, but I disdain to do that. Anyway that has some value going forward, if only for the curiosity of a buyer.

Next to it was a fat binder that set me sniffling for the next half hour: Marian’s medical records. She kept every test result, every procedure, going back forever. Organized, with tabs for easy lookup. Anytime a doctor wanted to know, when did you have this or that, she could tell them, oh that was in ’93, or ’07 or whenever. So I looked at it and debated with myself. Under what possible circumstance could I ever imagine me or anyone else wanting to refer to this? None! For any reason? Certainly not for nostalgia’s sake; illnesses and medical procedures are not what I want to remember her by. And yet… it really hurt to put that in the trash. Another shard, falling away.

It’s 5:30; I’m going to feed myself and then watch something stupid on TV. Naked and Afraid should do it.

Day 106 – plants and books and termites

Went to the Creamery for a burger and coffee. Breaking with tradition I did not order a chocolate/chocolate shake. Just a burger with coleslaw (not fries) and coffee.

Walking from my car to the Creamery I noticed

Mac’s Smoke Shop

and remembered the many times Marian and I would browse the magazine racks there. It’s been a long time since I bought magazines on a regular basis; I stopped doing that even before I stopped buying physical books. But I remembered one of my favorite magazines for occasional purchase, WoodenBoat. I think I bought WoodenBoat for the first time in an airport gift shop, and bought occasional copies for years after, when traveling, or at Mac’s. I always found the highly detailed, loving accounts of boat restoration to be deeply relaxing. I could sink into (well, poor metaphor there) a copy of WoodenBoat for a couple of hours.

So for the heck of it I walked into Mac’s and scanned the magazine shelves. I wasn’t even certain the magazine still existed, but on about the fifth rack I checked, there it was, and in good health, too, a hefty perfect-bound block of pages, solid in the hand, full of ads for WoodenBoat classes and WoodenBoat boat plans and even WoodenBoat t-shirts and hoodies! It is clearly surviving in the Internet age. I bought a copy, and one article occupied the whole of my dinner.

On return home I found an email from Katie the

tax person

, saying that my submitted workbook and documents look good. Yay me!

Watched a documentary on the fall of Theranos, then took WoodenBoat to bed with me.

Monday, 3/18/2019

Up and about. Started the day with a run. Then wrote checks for the cleaning lady coming tomorrow, and while I had the checkbook out, one for the hairdresser I’ll see on Wednesday. (Now if I can just remember to take the check with me on the day.) Watered

the plants;

I’m happy to say all the remaining ones are doing well. On day 2 I threw out the bathroom ferns I’d never liked; and of course Beau and two philodendrons went to Liz’s place. Of the remaining eight, I’m pretty sure I will take at least four with me when I move.

Spent two hours

scanning

20 slides; only about 40 left to do. The slides in this part of the pile were from a trip we’d taken across Canada in our first RV back in 1989. That slide group had never been scanned, which surprises me; I had scanned the groups for all our major road trips, I thought. But not that one. Well, getting to it now. Somewhat emotional viewing this group; they were from a time when both of us were strong enough to go for reasonable-length hikes, something not true in the past decade.

After lunch I decided to drop down to

FOPAL

and see how the Computer section was doing. The sorters had delivered four boxes since I was last there, so I culled those and priced the better ones. Most of the 50 or so books I priced I marked for 3 or 4 or 7 dollars, but four were “high value”, meaning they had market prices over $25. These go on a special shelf to be sold separately. One little pocket-sized “reference book of graphic algorithms” has a going price over $75, who’d’a thunk it? With the — or, I guess it is now “my” — computer section tidied up I came on home.

There I boxed up all the remaining books from our collection of paperbacks. There is one tiny section of stuff I need to review, and a collection of Women’s Basketball books that I need to think about, and that will be it. All the, what, something like 1,000 volumes that we’d saved because we might want to re-read them “someday”? Gone.

I also cleaned out a drawer of computer-related stuff. Man, how many USB cables does one person need? Some items to trash; some for the sale; a few set aside to keep.

Termites.

About 3pm there was a knock at the door; a young man with not great English, and a car that had “Fumigator Services” on the side, said he needed to measure the house so that the termite inspection report could be completed. Uh? I said go ahead, then emailed Chuck. He replied quickly that yes, the termite inspection had found termites, and it was legitimate that an estimate for a fumigation would be in the report. He apologized for the lack of notice, said he’d tried to tell these services to contact him before going to the house.

Well, so there are termites. No huge surprise; we had a termites in 2005 and the house was tented then. Our first clue then of a serious infestation was when we noticed little crumbs of dark-brown sawdust piling up on the table beside Marian’s favorite chair. They were working in one of the exposed beams that make our living room ceiling so charming, and crapping down on the table.

Nothing so blatant now; I presume the inspector found their little tunnels running up the inside of the foundation, perhaps. However, this is a serious strike against the idea of selling the house to owner-occupiers, and greatly raises the odds of selling to a developer. The cost of a fumigation will surely be in 5 figures. I could look up the receipt from 2005 but you know? I don’t care. IThMISEP and they’re welcome to it.

Supper; a bit of television; now I think I’ll go to bed and relax myself by finishing that issue of WoodenBoat magazine. (Hey, better than alcohol.)

Day 105, Sunday drive

Sunday, 3/17/2019

Had a lovely sleep, waking only once around 5am and sleeping unusually late, 7:15. Began the day, as has recently become my wont, by walking to the coffee shop. Going and coming, as also usual, I was

pondering

the difference between the new life and the old one. We all live within constraints that bend our actions. Some constraints are imposed by the physical world and our bodies, some by society, but many constraints are voluntarily assumed. Marriage brings a thousand little constraints, so many things you wouldn’t do, or do differently, because your partner won’t or can’t do it thus; and all voluntary.

When the marriage is gone, those particular constraints are lifted, but it takes time to understand (in the gut, not just in the mind) that this is not a bad thing, not a loss, but only a change. So why are my eyes damp?

Walking into the yard I notice a little failed plant. Well, not a failure; it is still alive and in fact blooming. I don’t remember its name; it has the unusual feature of blooming direct from dormancy, little purple starbursts on straw-colored stems, without a leaf in sight. But the three of these have never thrived and even when in full leaf, look as if they are about to shrivel and blow away. So? Well, Marian selected these plants for those spots when the garden was remade in 2012, and she always watched them and worried about them. Now I am trying to resolve my feelings about the plants. How Marian felt about those plants is history. Does it have any relevance going forward? How should I feel about them, or, does it matter that I don’t particularly like them and don’t care if they live or die? I don’t have any resolution for these questions.

With time to kill I decided to

pull weeds.

In 2012 the reworked yard was mulched; no more lawn. And yards of mulch have been put on it since. Just the same, every winter the rains bring many little green shoots popping up. Pulling them is easy, and I used to regularly go out and spend an hour pulling them while listening to a podcast. This year until now I’d studiously ignored them on the basis of ISMISEP. Or as it should be by now, IFMISEP or even IThMISEP. However I realized that the sprinkle of little green things alongside the walk to the front door could make the place look neglected to potential buyers. So I spent an hour pulling up a couple hundred little green sprouts. During this a

neighbor

stopped by to chat. Steve, the doctor next door, and I hadn’t spoken in many months. He remarked how he used to see us sitting in the living room and wondered if Marian had had to move to some facility? He hadn’t heard she’d died. I thought all our neighbors knew, but I guess not. So we chatted a while about this and that; I think he was reassuring himself that his geezer neighbor was getting on OK.

At eleven, Suzanne’s pal

Louise

came to continue her evaluation of Marian’s jewelry. She is being incredibly generous with her time, putting many hours into this and promising to deliver a complete report on Friday, and not asking for payment. Louise has also remodeled her current house in Seattle, so we naturally ended up talking about the things Chuck thinks might be done to spiff up this house.

Like me, she doesn’t see any problem with having a door between the stove and refrigerator. But she had a great idea for the bedroom, where Chuck’s design consultant Amy wanted to put a tub and toilet. Louise agreed that people, as she put it, pay ridiculous sums in order they can go from the bed to the toilet in five steps. But she thought it would be better to make the current walk-in closet into a bathroom, with a European style shower, and then she remembered the right phrase, “a wet room”. A wet room (according to that link) is

a bathroom with an open shower… with a shower floor that is flush with the rest of the bathroom … generally completely tiled and water is handled through a drainage system that serves the entire space…

Such a room would fit nicely in the closet space, while the passage between the bedroom proper and the closet/wet-room — space I’ve used as my office for decades — could be furnished as an elegant his-n-hers closet area.

While Louise was working I started cleaning up my

MacBooks,

of which I have 4. I have fully moved my daily life to Godot, so there are two MacBook Airs, Marian’s old one that was getting flaky and the newer one we got for her a year ago, and my rather tired MacBook Pro that Godot replaced. So while Louise rated gems and tested gold, I created a bootable USB drive with Mac OS X “Mojave” on it, and did a disk erase and clean install of the OS on the newer Air and the Pro. There was a little qualm in finally erasing Marian’s machine, but I am confident I moved all significant files to the cloud weeks ago. I’ve needed to refer to nothing on it since December.

After Louise left I decided the weather was so nice — the second day of spring-like temperatures in a row — I should

get the hell out

of the house. I drove up Page Mill road to Skyline where there is a trailhead, and went for a mile and a half walk on Russian Ridge. I took a panorama from a hill but in fact, the best view came a little later, as I was driving North on Skyline. Behold the absolute essence of California coast springtime:

green_road

I don’t even know what that road is, or how to get to it. I was surprised to see a paved road when looking West from Skyline drive. (Edit: probably Rapley Ranch Road.)

Anyway I came down 84 through Woodside, enjoying how the Prius plug-in charged 6 or 7 miles-worth of power in its battery on the descent. Now home, I am thinking about going out again for supper somewhere.

Day 103, many little tasks

Friday, 3/15/2019

Didn’t mention yesterday, that while I had planned to do the laundry today, I decided to start it last night, for no particular reason. Continued with the second load before sitting down to breakfast. Then out for a run, which went OK. On return, folded the two dry laundry loads and started the third one.

Sat down to do some desk work. Paid a credit card bill. Then edited and started the upload of the video I shot on Wednesday (and didn’t even mention in that blog post, I was so taken up with describing the FOPAL process). Anyway, the video is up and within an hour I had a comment, “another great video”, from one of my 150 or so subscribers. Yay me.

Got into the tax accountant’s workbook and I think I have entered all the data and uploaded all the 1099’s and other documents. I’ll hold off on the final click of “send to accountant” until after Tuesday’s meeting with the financial people.

Yesterday I got the official letter of acceptance from C.H. So I sent an email to Kim the marketing person asking when we should meet, and shortly got an invite to come in next Wednesday, after talking to my financial advisors.

Went out to ship that box containing the brown pitcher to Laurel, mail a letter, and pick up a couple of food items. Just love ticking off items on my to-do list!

Continued a productive day by scanning another batch of slides. Something happened here, and I’m not sure what. There was a train of thought where I was initially patting myself on the back for a good picture, and then realized that no, I could not have taken that, it had to have been taken by Marian. And some of the other slides were of trips we had taken in 1989, and 1992, and so on. And suddenly I was sniffling and for half an hour was not-quite-crying, in the strongest grief spasm I’ve had for a week or more.

I have a ticket for a play at Palo Alto Players for 8pm. It’s now almost time to depart, so I’ll report on that tomorrow.

Day 101, new FOPAL job and a find

Wednesday, 3/13/2019

Went for a run, remembering to log the start and end in my ZIO patch log. There’s a paper log book in the box, but that’s for fogies. I had downloaded the ZIO app for the phone and do my logging there.

After the run I stopped at the UPS store and bought a box and some bubble wrap. At home, I boxed up the Buckeye Pottery pitcher (see Day 91) to send to my niece Laurel.

In the night, around 2am, I was having a wakeful spell and thought about all the things yet to be cleaned out and evaluated. One thing that looms like an ominous cloud is a pair of large metal cabinets out in what we called “the shop”, an enclosed room on the side of the garage. In the night I am thinking about having to clean empty those cabinets and throwing away un-sellable stuff — they were the place we put anything that we might want to use again sometime but don’t want in the house now — and it occurred to me that the cabinets themselves would sell in the estate sale. Fine metal locking cabinets. Then I wondered, where are the keys for those locking cabinets? And in order to get back to sleep I had to get up, find a note-pad, and write down the list of things I’d been thinking of: “pitcher, cab. keys, taxes”. Then I could go back to sleep.

So now, after wrapping the pitcher, I went out and opened the cabinet doors and there inside each door, were the keys to that cabinet hanging on a neat little hook made from a paperclip just to keep the keys handy. Right where you’d look for them, although nobody has looked for them since the cabinets went in, probably before 2000.

Then I spent an hour and a half on the tax workbook. That’s pretty close to done. I hope to polish it off on Friday, although I’m not sure I’ll actually hit the “send to CPA” button until after I’ve talked the financial guys next Tuesday.

I needed to be at FOPAL at 1pm for a meeting, and was just dropping off for a short nap at 12:15 when Chuck called. He has scheduled a termite inspection for tomorrow and now belatedly wanted to make sure I’d be here. I won’t; I’ll be at the museum. But we agreed he should have a key and can then give the inspector access. So he dropped by the house at 12:40 for a key. No numbers from a developer yet, although he’s talked to one.

Off then to FOPAL where I got trained on a new task: evaluating and pricing books for a section, in particular, the computer section. In my previous (and on-going) job of sorting, we separate newly-donated books to their section. If a book is somehow related to computers, it goes in a computer section box. Piles of boxes then stack up in front of the computer shelves.

Today, working with an experienced volunteer, I learned what happens next. We go through the boxes and do a cull of books that aren’t worth pricing. Almost all “–for Dummies”, all stuff for Windows 95 and other obsolete software, almost all books published before 2000 (some judgement needed here), get packed into new boxes and piled up for the “H2” people. H2 is the building where “bargain” books are displayed. Everything in H2 is $1, and things that don’t sell there, go to recycling.

About one in four of the books look salable. These we take back to the office where we enter their ISBNs into Book Scout Pro, which aggregates prices from all over the web. If a book is selling at $8 or more, we write a price on the flyleaf and put it in a box of priced books that will eventually be shelved for the sale. If it is selling at less than that, it goes in an H2 box.

So I put in 3 and a half hours on that, in the course of which I made a find: in the middle of a box, in among books on Java and C++, was an original, 1931 edition of the IBM Songbook! I grabbed that puppy and put it with my hat. That isn’t going in the book sale, that’s going with me to the museum tomorrow.

After work I bought a few groceries (FOPAL is next to my usual grocery store) and headed home. Forgetting to stop at UPS and ship that pitcher, which now will just ride in the back of the car until Friday.

When I was initially thinking about my life “when I’m a bachelor” I had assumed that I would eat supper in restaurants fairly often. In fact, I almost haven’t. I think I’ve been out twice for meals (aside from several restaurant meals in Las Vegas of course). So I think I will go out tonight. Report on that tomorrow.

Day 100, jewelry

Tuesday, 3/12/2019

Started by walking to the Y and doing a few exercises. Started early, back early so as to be in good time for the arrival of Suzanne and her friend Louise. Louise is a jeweler and gemologist who is volunteering to evaluate all Marian’s jewelry. She came equipped with three boxes of equipment including a binocular microscope and a gizmo that can tell gold from brass using electricity. I figure it must be a super-sensitive ohmmeter but she didn’t actually know the principle of it.

Louise spent more than two hours going over everything (maybe 100 items all told, but nothing with individual great value) and then took some away with her to look at where she is staying. She plans to come back Sunday with a full report. I am getting a whole lot of professional time gratis, with only the understanding that I’ll put a review on her website (which I haven’t seen yet).

I spent some of the time she was here, and after, scanning slides. Just a box to go, maybe 100.

At three pm I drove over to the Encina (street) office of PAMF to have a ZIO patch installed. This is because I reported to my PCP at my recent exam that sometimes I thought I felt short spells of a-fib. Back in the 90s, my then PCP had me wear a Holter monitor, which was a box the size of a pound of butter that hung from a shoulder strap, with leads to three or four sticky patches. I wore that for a week, during which I couldn’t shower.

The ZIO patch does the same job, recording my electrocardiogram, but it is a single sticky patch about 2 by 3 inches with a lump in the center about the size of a pat of butter. I can shower with it on, as long as I keep my back to the shower, and I am to wear it for 14 days, then peel it off and return it in its box. Installation took five minutes; the nurse just shaved a patch of hair above my left nipple, slapped the patch on, and verbally went over the use instructions.

Day 99, Home again

Monday, 3/11/2019

Up, dressed, brushed my teeth, out the back door of the Excalibur — avoiding yet another trek through the blinking noisy neon jungle of the casino floor — and a Lyft to the airport. At the entrance to the security gate a TSA woman was telling people to wait, “security is full except for pre-check”. But I have pre-check, so whizzed on up the stairs. There I found the regular security line backed up, a couple hundred people probably in a 5-fold snake, but only me and one other guy in the pre-check line and I was through in 30 seconds. Recent flights I’d been noticing the pre-check line was getting crowded, but not here. I guess most people who go to Vegas for a weekend, don’t travel enough to go through the pre-check registration rigmarole.

Routine flight home, but I noticed that miles of jumbled hills from I-5 west to the Bay were brilliant Irish green from a wet rainy season. I’ve noticed this wilderness before, hundreds of square miles, mostly roadless, that lies between US 101 on the west and I-5 on the east. But usually from the air it is mostly yellow with dry grass. Right now it is lush. If I was still a bike rider, I’d be planning a ride to Mt. Hamilton. Now I’m thinking, some kind of a weekend drive, in the next month before the green begins to fade. Down SR 25, maybe.

Once home I did a few useful things. I got out Marian’s jewelry box and the envelope of old receipts that show provenance. Tomorrow Suzanne’s friend Louise is going to come and practice appraisals on it. Then I paid a bill, filled out a survey questionnaire from the hospice company (all positive, they were great), and put in an hour filling out the tax accountant’s online workbook. Another couple of hours, probably, to finish the taxes.

A hobby I’ve had the last couple of years is doing video reviews of modern meal replacements. That’s going to end pretty soon, because when I move to an ILF, with all meals provided, I won’t have a reason to use these products. Right now I’m getting half of my calories from them. Recently I took delivery of a new one. It’s chocolate flavored, so I ordered bags of chocolate from two other, more established vendors. The second of those just came in today’s mail. So I shot stills and close-up video of the process of mixing a shake for each of these three. I put the shakes in the fridge to mature (they’re always better after chilling overnight). Tomorrow I’ll shoot myself doing a taste comparison.

I should have spent a couple hours scanning slides but I really wanted a nap, so I did that and then frittered away the time to supper on the computer.

Day 93, paperwork, real estate

Tuesday, 3/5/2019

Because of light rain I drove to the Y instead of walking. Did a while on a treadmill and a couple of exercises but it was crowded and every apparatus I wanted was in use, so left.

Filled out the questionnaire the financial manager sends in preparation for my annual consultation, which is on the 19th. Added a list of questions we need to discuss. Put it all in the return mail envelope. Wrote a check for my annual membership in FOPAL. When the cleaning lady arrived I took both, and my computer, and went to the local coffee shop for lunch, mailing the two envelopes. Isn’t this interesting?

Back home I spent a couple of hours scanning slides, and lost track of time and forgot I was to meet with Chuck at 2pm. He called to remind me at 2:15, very embarrassing. He came down to the house. We went over some comparables he had collected. He wants to come back tomorrow with his staging contractor to talk about redoing the kitchen. He’s convinced it would make a big difference in selling to an owner-occupier. I remind him he was going to talk to a developer to get an idea of what a developer might pay. He sends a text to one he knows. Maybe we’ll have that tomorrow.

I’m conflicted on the marketing of the house. I would emotionally prefer to sell it to people who would live in it and remodel it. But I don’t like the idea of spending money and time (tens of thousands, and weeks if not months) on remodeling, on speculation that it will raise the price.

Do more slide scanning; I’m more than half done with that. Filled three boxes with books to take to tomorrow afternoon’s book-sorting session. There’s no more than three boxes’ worth left on the shelf.

Last night I deleted the SYTYCD episodes.

Day 92, C.H. application in

3/4/2019

Started with a run, usual length, felt good. Drove to the Los Altos clinic and picked up the paperwork Dr. Marx had prepared. Put it in an envelope with the other 8 pages of the C.H. application packet, and then decided I wanted to make a copy of the whole thing before turning it in.

Drove home via the grocery store, picking up a few items. My grocery shopping is very easy these days. Well, except for one thing. I’m getting about half my calories from a meal replacement that you mix partly with heavy cream. Most stores only carry heavy cream in 8oz units, but my Safeway has been carrying it in quart sizes. Only today they didn’t have it.

Copied the whole application packet, put it back in the envelope, and drove on over to C.H. to turn it in. I was going to ask Ms. Krebs a couple of trivial questions, but she was just sitting down with other clients, so I left the packet with the receptionist. So that deed is done. I hope to hear something back from them soon, but it could well be weeks.

Headed home for a session scanning old slides. While the scanner whined away I worked with the new laptop, Godot, downloading the apps that I use on the old laptop. Pretty soon I’ll be able to switch entirely to the new one.