Day 93, forms, desk cleanout

Sunday 3/3/2019

Sunday morning. Up and out to the coffee shop by 7. Pleasant sit reading the paper and doing the puzzle. I’ve only patronized this place for 30 years or so, usually coming in wearing a hat, and they never seem to recognize me.

Home theater dreams

I walked home and then drove up to Fry’s to shop TV sound bars. I designed my present TV setup years ago. Every audio and video source (TV, Blu-Ray, VHS deck, laptop) feeds into a receiver by HDMI cables; the receiver drives five speakers around the room and a woofer. It worked, but it is over-complex. Looking ahead at an ILF unit, I figure to dump the receiver, connect the Blu-ray and computer into the TV itself, and generate audio with a nice subtle sound bar in front of the TV. I’d already confused myself mightily by looking for “best tv sound bars” online and thought I’d get some clarity looking at actual hardware at Fry’s. But no, they only had a couple of brands and no real info.

Paperwork

Last night I realized that I forgot to go by the PAMF office in Los Altos and pick up the medical forms that the doctor was going to prepare for me. She was to have them ready for pickup Friday and, I thought, was going to message me when I could pick them up. In which case I’d have had an email. But I should have checked Saturday. The office isn’t open Sunday.

OK then, so let’s get the rest of the Channing House (C.H.) questionnaire ready. I sat down at the desk and spent an hour carefully filling out about 10 pages of questions. I was pleased to find, checking my Schwab online accounts, that Marian’s IRA has finally been combined into my IRA. For a while there was a little matter of $360K that I couldn’t access, but it’s back now. I was pleased to see that I have more than enough assets to pass the C.H. requirements. So all the paperwork is done, except for adding the doctor’s statements. Tomorrow I will pick those up, put the whole thing in an envelope, and drop it off at C.H.

Office supplies

Since I was at the desk I started cleaning out its drawers. If we hoarded anything, it was pens. We each had our favorite type of pen, and to avoid the annoyance of one running dry or not being to hand, we tended to order them in boxes of 12 from Amazon. Plus years’ accumulation of paper clips and post-its and… It took a good 90 minutes to inventory all office supplies and neatly bag up the excess by category.

I emptied the shallow desk drawers, wiped them out with Pledge, and restocked them with a small selection of tools (stapler, staple remover, eraser…) and a modest supply of paperclips, rubber bands, and post-its. Put a lot of stuff in the trash. Set aside a box of neatly sorted surplus items for the eventual estate sale. Anyone want a bag containing 39 roller-ball pens in assorted colors? Or a bag containing about 15 Sharpies of various sizes and colors? Or one with a dozen highlighters?

So now the desk drawers are organized, and ten of the eleven drawers of the tall cabinet beside the desk are empty. One has a tidy assortment of other office stuff: mailing labels, a small paper cutter, scissors, rulers, etc.

Basketball

Stanford is at UW at 2pm. I streamed the audio as I edited this post. Stanford had another easy win by 20+ points. That ends the regular season. I will be attending the PAC-12 tournament next week in Las Vegas.

Day 91 getting stuff done

Friday 3/1/2019

Started the day with a run, which went well. Usual distance, felt good. Then began doin’ stuff. Started the laundry. Paid a couple of bills. Sorted the tax folder and made up a spreadsheet (based on last year’s spreadsheet) of charitable contributions.

Cleared out another shelf of things. One thing in particular is a large brown-glazed earthenware pitcher in what I believe is called “piecrust” style, a supposed family heirloom. I can just make out words on the bottom, “THE BUCKEYE POTTERY MACOMB ILL”. I will look this up and see if it has any value. Then see if either a nephew or a niece wants it. What it certainly was, was dirty, from sitting for years on a shelf beyond the reach of the cleaning lady who’s rather short. So I washed it. Also on that shelf, two brass-colored (pot metal) candlesticks of no value, threw them out. And two large pine-scented candles in tins which were last lit for Christmas… 2000? I think?

Then cleared off the spice racks. Back on Day 2 or 3 I realized, I’m never going to cook again. In fact I do cook but in a very casual way: fry up a couple strips of bacon and two eggs in the grease. Chop up some fruit for a compote. Height of sophistication: the other night I sliced up an apple and cooked it in a dish in the microwave, and sprinkled cinnamon on it.

But nothing that needs spices beyond salt, pepper, butter and, ok, the cinnamon was nice. But we had many many other spices. Here’s all the jars after I finished emptying them.

Note that one in the middle with a date on it? We would acquire spices for some particular recipe, and put the jar on the shelf until it was needed again. Every once in a while I’d get suspicious about the age of some spice and I’d mark the date it was refreshed. Here’s a couple I noticed. You can see how in 2016 I said, this allspice doesn’t smell of anything! (And no wonder, since it was then almost old enough to vote!) So we got some fresh and I updated the label. Anyway, that felt kind of good, to get all those aging spices out of there. I also dumped the canisters of flour and cornmeal and put them in the dishwasher. Only one full canister left, granulated sugar. I don’t eat it myself but I need it to keep filling the hummingbird feeders.

With the laundry all dried and folded I took a short nap, then went to work scanning old slides. I believe I said, somewhere back in the several days of nattering about slides, that I was only keeping the ones that were emotionally significant, or were excellent photographs on their own. Here’s one of the latter. g802p001 looking at faberge eggs in Gumps window christmas 1979

The story here is that around Christmas 1979 Marian remembered how when she was a child the family sometimes went into the City to look at the store window displays. So we did that, walked the streets of downtown SF in winter darkness, and saw a display of Fabergé eggs in the window of Gump’s. I looked down and saw this girl and grabbed this shot. I don’t claim any skill here, but that is one of those fortuitous compositions that just works, every angle is just right, the line of shadow, the angle of her gaze, the line of the hair ribbon — it just all fits. And it has been sitting unnoticed in the slide box in the closet since… 1980?

I got a bit sidetracked at that point, spending the better part of an hour trying to get my printer to produce something like the color tones of the digital image, on some quality paper I have. (Shit, I wonder when I bought that box of quality photo paper? This millenium, I’m sure.)

Now, coming up on 5pm, I have the option of staying home to stream the SWBB game at WSU, or going to a Stanford baseball game. Well, I can keep in touch with the progress of the basketball on my phone, at the baseball game. But what’s the weather going to do? Answer tomorrow.

Day 90, Shustek and old movies

Thursday, 2/28/2019

Toddled off to the Shustek center for a day of archival work. I and Toni worked together to photograph items that had been cataloged. Three years ago when we were doing this work the photo setup was a couple of (in my opinion) lousy little HP pocket cameras, and the day’s pictures had to be uploaded for later processing. Now we have a fairly decent Canon connected to a laptop so the pictures go directly into the database.

We caught up, clearing the shelves of a backlog of “To Photo” items. Like the FOPAL work this is good exercise: I was on my feet, moving items on and off the table and composing the images, for about five hours all told, and when I got home I could feel it. But before I ate I sat down and scanned old slides for an hour. Got to keep that project moving.

I’ve accumulated a bunch of famous movies on the DVR which is getting under 40% available. So tonight I swore to get rid of some. It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World lasted only ten minutes. I stuck with Casino Royale for nearly an hour but finally lost interest. Two down.

Got an email from SouthWest reminding me of my reservation for a flight to Vegas for the PAC-12 women’s basketball tournament. This will be my first solo travel in, practically, ever(*). I’m nervous! Which is nuts; traveling by myself has to be easier than the last half-dozen flights I’ve taken, when Marian’s mobility and stamina were greatly limited, having to book wheelchair assistance, always checking the location of the elevators so as to avoid stairs, always looking to minimize walking distance between gates. And I booked those flights, and we executed all those travel plans, with confidence and panache.

So here’s another difference in my new bachelor life. Planning and carrying out travel as a couple, was easier (at least in anticipation) than it is solo. I need to think about what the difference really is.

At least partly it’s that I had the confidence of knowing Marian agreed in the plans. It’s like what I wrote about on Day 83: having made plans as a couple, the plans feel solid. When I make the plan by myself, for myself, I get the feeling I’m over my head and probably messing it up. I don’t know any cure for this but experience: go out and do it and verify that I haven’t screwed it up.

(*) The last solo trip I can think of is when in 1980 I drove to Seattle to attend the Clarion West writer’s workshop. After the ten(?) day workshop Marian flew up to join me and we drove back together.

Day 88, ikea and slides

Tuesday, 2/26/2019

Rain threatened so I drove to the Y for a little workout. Yesterday evening and again this morning I played with little scraps of paper representing scale furniture, on the plan of the Channing studio. Amy’s basic idea was to use stand-alone shelving/media units to create a partial wall between one side with the bed, and the other with a comfy space to watch TV. She pointed out that the units can be different facing the bed versus facing the other way, and don’t all have to be the same height.

Further thoughts on that occurred as I pushed bits of paper around.

One, the unit has tons of storage space already: two full closets. I did not pay attention to these when I was there, but I’m pretty sure one or more of my existing dressers (very handsome danish style items) would push into one of the closets and still leave ample hanging space for my needs. I think but am not sure, that the closets have a shelf above the hanging rod, as well. Most closets do. Bottom line, there is no crying need to create a lot of new shelf or drawer capacity.

Two, another almost equally important space is a working/office area. I need to have a desk, at least one drawer for files, somewhere to put the printer, room to roll an office chair around.

With thoughts like these churning in my head — which is dumb, because I don’t know if that unit, or any unit, will be available when I finally complete my application paperwork — I headed off to walk the trail of IKEA in East Palo Alto, and then Scandinavian Design in San Mateo. If you want to have a quiet, meditative look at furniture, you can hardly do better than to arrive at 10am on a Tuesday. I don’t think I saw six other shoppers all morning.

My shopping was inconclusive. I did come to the conclusion that I liked the IKEA foam mattress line in its firmest model. Regardless of the destination unit, I will be buying a “full” size bed (a couple inches narrower than “queen” size), probably from IKEA. So that’s some decisions made. At home, I found those items online and noted their URLs.

I had an email from Catherine at Canopy saying they plan to plant a tree in Marian’s memory on April 20th, would I attend? I forwarded it to Jean, who promptly said she’d go. So I replied yes.

Then I worked on scanning slides. Between that email and scanning pictures of trips we took in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, I found myself getting quite sad. There’s no particular reason, just the multiple reminders of a life that is over piled up on me.

Day 84, slides and a game

Friday, 2/22/2019

Started the day with a run but had some foot pain so cut the distance short. Finished reviewing all the slide groups. I have selected perhaps 150 total out of… I am not going to try to estimate accurately, but several thousands. Today I looked at some I am sure have not been seen since they were filed in the box, shortly after they were taken in the 80s or 90s. One group, from the Oughts, is a series that Marian took of me, before and after the operation to replace my aortic valve. I don’t think I had ever seen them.

In the afternoon I spent a couple of hours actually scanning and processing slides. Over several years and hundreds of scans I have polished that work flow down to a smooth pattern. I won’t go into it now. But it appears I can finalize 10 slides an hour, so the whole pile that’s beside my desk now should take about 15-20 hours total. Two weeks max. And then, I expect, I will dump about a bushel basket of slides representing 46 years of photography (the earliest slide in the collection is from 1973) into the garbage.

While I was eating an early supper, Dennis called and suggested we see a movie Saturday evening, so we made that date. Then I was off to a SWBB game against the Arizona Wildcats.

The game was a whole lot closer than any Stanford fan would like. They trailed by four with two minutes to play. With 29 seconds left, Alanna hit a three to give Stanford a 2-point lead. On defense, Stanford committed a foul, but the Arizona player missed both free throws and Stanford controlled the rebound. All Stanford had to do was hang onto the ball and let Arizona foul them, but with 10 seconds to go, they turned it over. Now the Wildcats had the ball. With one second to go, their best player put up a three-point shot. It hit the inside of the rim, rolled around three-quarters of the inner circumference of the basket — and popped out. Buzzer; game over; Stanford wins.

Day 82, FOPAL, haircut, groceries

Wednesday, 2/21/2019

Pretty routine day. Started with a run. Reviewed a couple of big slide groups. Not many left, now.

Drove to our long-time hairdresser, Chris, to trim my increasingly thin hair. Really not a lot left, but what there is, looks better for being cut. Chris said she had been going over her recipe file and had noticed how many of her recipes she had gotten from Marian. Over the years the two of them swapped recipes often.

Down to FOPAL a bit early so started sorting at 1:30 and didn’t leave until 4:30. Bought some groceries and was surprised when the bill came to $70, probably the most I’ve spent on food since December. Well, some stock items like a big brick of cheddar at $15 which will last two or more weeks.

Relaxing in my chair, the doorbell announces a visit from neighbor Pat, just stopping by to see how I am. We chat for a few minutes about this and that.

The evening’s entertainment is watching an episode of “Brokenwood Mysteries“, not on the DVR but streamed on Amazon Prime. I like that series and am pleased to see from that Wikipedia link that it has been renewed for another season. But with me watching streamed stuff, TV is stacking up on the DVR; I noticed this morning it is 55% full. Must watch or delete something. Oh, the burdens of being a responsible consumer of media. (jk)

Day 81, real estate and baseball

Tuesday, 2/19/2019

For no reason I can fathom this has been a hard day emotionally. I started with a brisk walk (brisk because the air was chilly, but the sun was bright which makes all the difference) to the Y and a little workout. Then I reviewed some more slide groups while waiting for Chuck to arrive to talk about selling this house. Maybe something in the slides? No, even before that I was just awash with, I don’t know, call it grief. I’m sure the Norwegians have a very precise term for it. Walking around the outside of the house with Chuck, I was going to point out Marian’s favorite azalea in mad bloom, and I couldn’t get the words out, my throat just locked up. Oh well.

Chuck is an old friend and, as I think I wrote on Day 78? he was also our agent in two prior real estate transactions. Today he looked over the house and the neighborhood, considered the size of the lot, and so on. I have to say, looking over the house with a third-party’s eye, its age really shows. But no matter: ISMISEP, baby. That’s our mantra.

Chuck went away to research comparables and think about whether the house will most likely sell to a developer who’d scrape it (always my and Marian’s assumption), or someone who’d want to remodel it and live in it. What depends on this is whether, or to what degree, the house should be “staged” before being shown. If the owner/occupant option is what to aim for, “staging” might go as far as remodeling the kitchen and bath, expensive stuff. A developer, however, only cares about the size of the lot, the location, and any impediments to construction — take for example, the two protected oak trees that they would have to work around.

Chuck also mentioned he works with a designer who plans his staging. I sat up at that, because a designer is exactly who I’d like to consult with, in planning the layout of a hypothetical unit at Channing House. Later in the day I obtained the floor plan for the one available unit there, the jumbo studio, and emailed to Chuck with the request that his designer give a ballpark idea on whether it could be made a livable unit with spaces for working, reading, watching TV and sleeping. Maybe nothing will come of that, but.

I started scanning some slides and was surprised and disappointed with a couple of the ones I’d selected for their pictorial quality, as I saw it looking into a hand-held slide viewer. When actually scanned and on the big monitor, however, both these turned out to be soft, not properly focused. One is a lovely composition of a water bird (a male Smew, actually) moving through the water. The light was perfect, it made the water look like liquid glass and the bird is posed just right. Except, damn it, the bird’s head and eye are not in focus. The sharp focus was just past the bird, on his tail and the water. Looked fabulous in the hand viewer, but in detail it’s a complete miss. I’m sure when we projected that slide back in ’95 we jointly lamented the bad focus. But still we kept it. Sentiment.

In the afternoon something reminded me of baseball, which reminded me I’d been talking (to myself) about getting a Stanford Baseball season ticket. Well, why not now? And I did. It was only $220 for a 35-game season and what I know is a good seat at Sunken Diamond. I compared their schedule to mine and printed out the tickets for the games I think I’ll be able to attend (about half of them).

Then I sat down to watch Gene Kelly in An American in Paris.

Day 80, slides, tour

Monday, 2/18/2019

I started the day with a run, the first in a week, and felt pretty good for it. This is President’s day, a Monday holiday, and the Museum will be open — normally it is closed Mondays. I had signed up for the 2pm tour, and as of the morning, nobody else had, so I supposed I might have to deal with a big crowd as I did on Saturday. However the desk crew said attendance had been light so far; and just after I got there, Steve showed up as well. I started my tour at 1:59 with the 20-odd people who were ready, and Steve stayed back to pick up stragglers.

I must not have been as interesting as usual (though I didn’t do anything different) because half the 20 had dropped off by the end — although the ten remaining seemed really interested. Then I went back to sit in on the last stop of Steve’s tour. He had a group of a dozen who’d showed up after 2pm. I liked how he finished his tour, more formally and clearly than I do. I think I’ll shadow his tour sometime and see what else he does differently.

Back home I reviewed a couple more groups of slides. I should be able to wrap that review task up this weekend, and then it will be on to scanning and keywording the 150-odd slides I’ll have set aside by then. Keywording is adding keywords to the metadata of each image file so that I can do a search and turn up, for example, all the slides that relate to “Marian” or to “bridge” or “vehicle” or “London”. Or Boolean combinations of those, “Marian AND London” etc. This is an absolutely essential step in managing a collection of digital images. Without it, you just have a mass of hundreds (thousands?) of images and the only way to find anything is to scroll through a sea of thumbnails trying to spot what you want. (Which is exactly what I observed Jean doing yesterday when she was looking for a shot she wanted to show me.)

Anyway, scanning slides involves (1) the actual scan, which deposits the image as a file; (2) looking at it in Photoshop, possibly cropping, straightening, or adjusting color; (3) storing it in its appropriate folder (the folder for its group) with a correct filename (like g201p043 Mt Shasta from I5); (4) going over a group in Adobe Bridge or Lightroom and adding the keywords; (5) uploading the group to our online collection. Then it’s accessible and searchable. Here for example is the result of searching the collection for “Ireland Marian”.

And when that’s all done, hopefully before the end of March, there will be a day when all eleven boxes of slides get dumped into the black garbage can.

Day 79, game and geek stuff

Sunday, 2/17/2019

Yesterday I was so busy describing my busy Saturday that I forgot to mention, I also did three loads of laundry in between all the other stuff. Go, me. Today in domesticity, I changed the bed linens and washed them.

After reading the paper at the coffee shop, I completed scanning some old pictures that I promised to do for Jean. I like doing this; I use Photoshop to optimize and restore these faded old prints and it is a satisfying activity. I copied all the scans onto a thumb drive to take to her this afternoon.

Then I reviewed a few more groups of slides. The end of that activity is in sight. Then there’ll be maybe 200 cherry-picked slides to scan. That’ll be my background task for the next couple of weeks, I suppose.

At noon I sat down to listen to a SWBB game, streamed from USC. It was an agonizing game. Stanford trailed for 38 of the 40 minutes, turning the ball over a bunch of times, barely staying in the game thanks to offensive rebounds. They took their first lead with three or four minutes to play, were tied with a few seconds left, and won the game with a layup with three seconds left.

A week ago Diane, a long-time friend of Jean, emailed asking if I could help her get the data off the hard drive in a very old Mac, a 2002-era Power Mac G4. The old machine couldn’t be booted any more because she had no external monitor or keyboard for it. I said we could take the drive out of the old chassis and maybe mount it in an external drive enclosure, and plug that into something current. So this afternoon we tried that. I brought an external drive enclosure I had around, and Jean brought an old one from her late husband’s collection of hardware.

It was easy to remove the drive from the old chassis. Unfortunately it turned out to be an IDE drive, and both the enclosures, although old, were for SATA connectors. hdd-sata-ide I’m not sure what she can do. She’s going to ask the guys as We Fix Macs. I’m not sure they’ll be able to do anything.

Jean copied the scanned pics, and the three of us, at Jean’s suggestion, walked to a nearby pizza place for supper. Jean, Marian’s 90-year-old sister, leading the way.

Day 77, lunch and a game with friends

Friday, 2/15/2019

Spent the morning going through more groups of slides, still averaging about 1 in 50 to scan for permanent storage. I can understand why we took most of them: to document a moment or a place, or to try to capture something striking or beautiful, scenery or a flower or such. I can understand why we took the trouble to cull the slides and arrange them as a show, and project that once or twice for relatives or friends.

It is harder, now, to understand how we thought there was any point to cataloging and filing them for an indefinite future. It was just the spirit of the collector, I guess. OK, take Pioneer Day. In the 80s we bought a house for my parents to live in, in Paso Robles, near my sister. We often visited Paso Robles, and in particular in ’92 and ’93 we attended the Pioneer Day parade, when Paso Roblians parade their horses, cars, marching bands and old farm equipment down main street. OK, we shot 10 or 20 pics of the parade and us and our relatives each time. But when did we imagine we’d ever go back and look at them again, ten or twenty years along? I certainly don’t care now about some antique farm tractor, or some high school marching band, in Paso Robles 25 years ago.

Went to lunch with Scott and Bob Johansen (sp?). I didn’t known Bob well at IBM, and he I think didn’t remember me at all, but we had a pleasant lunch anyway.

At 5 I went around to basketball fan friend Harriet’s house where I watched Stanford vs. UCLA along with her and two friends of hers, and had a very nice dinner.