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 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 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 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 60, programming, museum, cleanout

Overnight I thought of some ways my living cost estimate could have gone so wrong. One, I had the taxes at 1/2, forgetting there’s another $1K payment to make (tomorrow!). I had not included TV and internet in the utilities, another $2K+ per year. Also it had not occurred to me to think about how our monthly bill on the main credit card is always over $1K, so we pay out at least $12K-$15K per year just via that route. Of course that includes almost all food, but it does not include the gardener, taxes, or utilities, which are paid directly via the bank bill-pay app. But the simplest approach was just to realize that our expenses had matched our income for years and years, so our income was a very good ballpark estimate of our cost of living. And that number is in the same ballpark as the monthly fee at many ILFs.

Tuesday, 1/29/2019

Walked to the Y, did my round, walked back. Did computer work: running virtual Windows and Linux machines to package my game for Windows 7, Ubuntu, and Mac. Here are the executables. The source is here. Tomorrow I’ll think of where to post to invite people to try it.

Decided to go visit the Hiller Aviation Museum. Spent a couple of hours there. I was nearly the only visitor so could play with a couple of simulators freely. In one, you are supposed to land a Boeing 737 at SFO. I was disappointed to find if I increased throttle and raised the nose, I couldn’t just fly around the Bay Area ad lib; the simulator got funny and stopped.

Two days ago on impulse I stopped at an “estate sale” sign on my way home. Browsed around a house where, I learned, nine siblings were trying to clear out the house their late mother had lived in and they’d all grown up in. There was stuff, stuff, stuff. Someday in the not too distant future I will have to clear this house out, and I won’t have the help of any siblings.

So on arrival back home, with this in mind I stepped into what we called the APR closet. (Because it is the closet that opens off the APR, i.e. the room whose purpose we could never settle on, so it was the all-purpose room or APR.) This is a closet I’ve been dreading because there is so much stuff there I need to decide what to do with. There are family memorabilia that I’m sure other relatives would want (heck, things I want: high school annual?) (On the other hand, Seriously? What is the possible point of keeping a high school annual that is fifty-fucking-nine years old? A good fraction of the Bethel High School graduating class of 1960 are dead, and the rest wouldn’t remember my name, nor I theirs without a program.) Memorabilia aside, there is a lot of stuff that is trash and needs to go.

Nerds that we were, we kept reference material — maps, brochures, guides — from every trip we took. After the trip, we’d used the material to organize the 35mm slide show for a trip. Then Marian would neatly (of course) organize it in folders by region. Here’s about 2/3 of them:

The only justification for this was that we might go back there someday, and we wouldn’t have to scrounge for maps and info. The only folders that ever got used that way were the first four. We often went back to Washington or Oregon, and could go into the APR closet and dig out a useful map before each trip.

Of course all of this is just so 1990s. Paper maps? Really? Beyond that, most of them are literally from the 1990s or earlier, and hence out of date. It took half an hour to sort all this out, pull the bear clips and paper clips out and put the paper in the recycling bin, and the plastic folders ditto. In a few of the folders I found real nostalgia-inducers. The Germany folder, for instance (about five folders off the right edge of the picture) had my complete trip plan, 20+ pages of detailed info on the stops we would make, with notes. The New Zealand folder had Marian’s trip plan, ditto. But we documented those trips with pictures and with blogs and I have all the images stored on the bigger Mac. None of this paper had been looked at since a week after the relevant trip ended, at least ten years ago and in some cases, twenty. Out! Just the same, it hurt.

I was astounded by one find: two fat binders in which Marian had collected a ton of memorabilia about the San Jose Lasers, the professional women’s basketball team that lasted only two years. I had no idea she’d done this: game programs, media guides, and pages and pages of news clippings, all organized by date. I don’t think she ever referred to the material after 1998; she certainly never mentioned it or shared it with me. It’s a potentially valuable historical collection and I set it with the other Lasers memorabilia that I already knew about. Which reminds me, that I’d submitted a donation form to History San Jose offering that material a week ago, and have had no reply. I need to follow up on that, even more now.

Also in the APR closet were some garments of mine I rarely wear. (The APR closet was to us what an attic might be to others.) Two pairs of Expedition-brand trousers, light, no-iron, can be washed out in a hotel sink and be dry the next morning. Last worn on the trip to Italy in 1999. I tried them on. They fit, but frankly look as unstylish as shit. I’m embarrassed I toured Italy in them. Put them in a pile for Goodwill.

Next up, my one sport coat. It’s OK, it fits, but it’s kind of tweedy and bulky. Probably a real fashionista could identify the decade I bought it. (I wouldn’t doubt it was the 80s.) Anyway, I am not throwing it out but have made a mental note to replace it.

Finally, my one suit. Quite a nice one, a Borcelino, but… it doesn’t fit me! I currently find a 38 waist a little bit loose, and I’ve been wondering if I couldn’t fit in 36 jeans. But this suit: no way, I could not possibly fasten that waistband. The jacket has a rather nipped waist and although I could button it, it was clear in the mirror that it wasn’t happy being buttoned. I’ve been my present weight and heavier for a long time. When did I buy this suit, that I fit a 36 or 34 waist? When might I possibly have worn it last? It’s a mystery. Well, it is possible that my body has changed shape, thickening at the waist with age. Maybe I could have worn it twenty years ago, weighing as much as I do now or more, but having younger, springier abs to hold it in?

I looked carefully at the pants and jacket, wondering if a seamstress could let it out. Looking at the pants seam, it might yield another half-inch maybe, no more. As for the jacket, you’d have to open up the lining and fiddle with curved seams. So, never mind; the suit has to go.

Day 53, Pasta and Chateau Cup.

Tuesday, 1/22/2019

A chilly morning by California standards, 42º at 8am, and I was pretty cold as I walked to the Y in my shorts and a light jacket. Did my round and walked back, not stopping at the coffee shop (for once).

Passed the time waiting for the cleaning lady to show, shopping for a dash cam for the Prius. This is in line with my decision of way back there, to keep the Prius indefinitely (it has 57K miles now, and I doubt very much I’ll ever see 100K; and many of these “gen 3” Prii go 150-200K before needing a battery). If I’m keeping it, I might as well upgrade it a bit. Hence the dash cam. Yelp seems to agree that the best shop for this is one in Belmont. Maybe Friday I’ll drive up there.

Once Suli arrived and started work, I headed out to do things. First a stop at Fedex on California to fax a signed paper requested by our broker. Then to a car wash to get the Prius cleaned up. And then down to Cupertino to do a drive-by of Chateau Cupertino, the low-price leader among the list Alan compiled for me. At $3500/month they are the least expensive of the month-to-month places. As such they deserve a look-see and maybe a proper tour if I like the outside.

Alas, I didn’t like the outside. They are pretty close to the corner of De Anza and Stevens Creek, in an area filled with fairly new, multi-story condos and offices. The building itself has no charm; while not ugly, it is not a place I’d be pleased to come home to or to bring a guest to. Although their website claims that “Residents enjoy local mall shopping and restaurants of every flavor” in fact it’s more than half a mile to the nearest restaurant (The Counter) or coffee shop (Philz). I drove around a bit but the ambience was not pleasant. It would be no fun to walk these streets, even the smaller ones, never mind 6-lane De Anza or Stevens Creek.

Back home, I refreshed the hummingbird feeders. The plastic flowers on the three feeders are getting tatty, petals falling off etc. If I was staying I’d buy new feeders, but ISMISEP.

Then I tackled the shelf full of canisters of assorted pastas and grains that I mentioned yesterday. The concept that I’ll probably never cook another meal is not one of the things I had realized before Marian’s death. I’d anticipated a lot of things, but that aspect came as a surprise. Yet it follows inexorably from being single. I am feeding myself properly (weight stable at 175, no beri-beri yet) but I spend at most ten minutes preparing food; that’s how long it takes to mix up a tuna salad, or to fry two strips of bacon and scramble an egg in the grease while peeling an orange. Or I go out. And of course in an ILF the food is made for you.

Which leaves me with a full set of cooking utensils and a big accumulation of ingredients. The dry foods shelf had a dozen canisters: barley, couscous, lentils, at least six kinds of pasta, dried potato flakes. Microwave popcorn. I cleaned it all out, dumped the food into green bio-bags and put them in the green bin. Put the canisters into the dishwasher and ran it. They’ll go in the Great Garage Sale that I anticipate will happen sometime later in the spring. There was some emotion at dropping yet another shard of the old life, but there was a kind of triumph in it, too. Cleaning out. Making space. Along the same lines, I think I’ll go pack up two boxes of books to take to FOPAL tomorrow.

Realized that it’s been more than a week since Day 46 when I spoke to the owner of the gallery in Carmel about selling my Linsky painting. And he hasn’t replied. I wonder how he stays in business? Because frankly, he behaves like a jerk. How could I trust somebody to handle the sale of (what I believe should be) a $6000 painting, when that person doesn’t reply to emails or return phone calls? So there is a second gallery mentioned on Linsky’s website. I check their site and see that one of the principals is named Simic. One supposes this is somehow connected to the now-departed Simic Gallery where we bought the painting in the first place. I emailed them.

Day 48, price of hot water

Friday, 1/18/2018

The Prius has been telling me it “needs maintenance soon” for a few weeks. It doesn’t, but earlier I scheduled it for an oil change today. Drove it to the Toyota place for its 8:30 am appointment, then walked the two miles back. Depending on what time they call that it’s ready, and on how I feel, I will either walk back to retrieve it or take a Lyft.

Meantime I put in an hour at my software project, adding another feature, which went in and functioned after only a few silly errors that took maybe 20 minutes to fix. Applied some time to another on-going project, starting a list of ILFs that I want to check out and scheduling time to go and do that. I’ll get a good inside look at Channing House on Saturday when I have dinner with Craig. But I want to take casual, outside looks at the some others, and make some notes, in order to decide which ones to request tours of. There are two on El Camino that I can easily eyeball on Sunday morning. I’ll be recording my reactions in this blog, of course.

About 1:30 the water heater guy arrived. After diagnosis, it’s the gas control unit. $415. OK, sure, do it.

Back on Day 38 I mentioned making an inventory of our basketball memorabilia, in particular items related to the San Jose Lasers professional team of 1996-98. Nobody I’ve talked to among the Stanford fans really wants any of it. I mentioned this to Greta, one of the CHM staff, and she suggested History San Jose. Great idea! So I took a few minutes to fill out their item-donation form with the particulars of the best items. Hope they want them.

I did walk back to Toyota, so with some other incidental walking later, I hoofed about 4.5 miles today. After a bit of supper I headed out to Maples to see the Stanford women play UW. It was a nice game, early lead, up by 30 in the third quarter, lots of minutes for the bench players.

Day 45, the case for the prosecution

Tuesday, 1/15/2019

Rainy day. Drove to the Y, walked briskly on a treadmill for 20 minutes, did my strength exercises. It’s “Suli day”, that is, the day I expect our housecleaner to make her biweekly visit, so as customary I wrote her check, and stripped the bed and put the sheets to wash. On return from the Y, I made up the bed, then sat down to talk to myself about

Three AM thoughts

That’s what this blog that has almost no readers is: me talking things out to myself. Partly, I’m keeping a diary, so the days don’t dissolve into a blur. For instance I know what day I went to the City to visit the deYoung museum because it’s in here; without this record I’d have no clue. Partly, I’m writing for an imaginary audience; maybe someday there will be a real audience and I hope my experience will help somebody. But a key function is working out what I actually think about things, and as it were, fact-checking myself. That’s important, as I don’t have a sensible partner to call BS on my wilder ideas.

So at 3am I woke because the garden sprinkler system had kicked in. Water flow in the old cast-iron plumbing makes a quiet noise which is ample to keep one awake in a silent house, even if you pull the duvet over your ears. Lying there I began to recall all the things I don’t like about this house. Yes, Marian loved it. Yes, it looks adorable from the street. Yes the interior is tidy, comfortable and well-maintained. But there’s a dark side, or actually two: top and bottom. At 3am I began going over all the things that made me coin ISMISEP back on Day 4: “in six months it’s someone else’s problem”.

The bill of indictment starts with that watering system that was part of an expensive, complete overhaul of the landscaping in 2012. Well, the drip piping is ok, it’s the controller I dislike. Horrible user interface. I’ve asked Richard, our gardener, to suggest an alternative but he hasn’t found one. Besides the controller, some of the plants that went in then have died, or are struggling, as well as some that Marian ordered and planted since. There is a line of trumpet vines along the fence, plants that flourish in tropical luxuriance four doors down the street, that are barely clinging to life here. I don’t have any interest in diving into the Sunset Garden Book to try to figure out replacements, or in trudging through nurseries picking out plants. It pleases me to think that ISM the whole landscape will be SEP.

The garage! When the house was built in 1925 it was OK to put a detached garage up against the property line in the corner of the lot. This building is heavily eaten by termites, but its most striking feature is the floor. It’s a 6-inch cement slab that was laid directly on adobe clay. Adobe moves, it swells in winter and shrinks in summer. The garage floor has broken into tectonic plates that lift and tilt to make enormous cracks with one- to two-inch breaks in level. There’s no practical repair; if I tried to take out a permit for any work on it, the city would make me demolish it and build one properly set back from the line. So it’s a storage space for now, but come the earthquake (or if the termites ever stop holding hands) it will collapse in a heap.

That’s outside; then there’s underneath. This nearly-100-year-old building is on a low cement foundation. Under the floors is a pitch-black space with barely 18″ between the joists and the damp adobe. That’s where the cast-iron drains and plumbing run, that make interesting water-hammer noises while the sprinklers are on. I last poked my head under there last year, reaching in to set a rat-trap, smelling the dampness. Decades back I crawled the whole length, running speaker wires to the corners of the living room so I could have surround-sound. Not again! I hate that space.

Topside is no better. Above the middle third of the house is an attic space that can be reached with difficulty by bringing a ladder into a closet. It’s hot in summer, cold in winter, and in the past has been invaded by roof rats, attested by fossilized droppings. A long time ago the City of Palo Alto subsidized anyone who’d get insulation blown into their attic space, and we did, so the space has what looks like a six-inch fall of gray snow. It’s quite effective as insulation, but it makes me nervous because it drifted over several runs of the original knob-and-tube electrical wiring. Just the antique wiring makes me nervous (and would cost a ton to replace), but having it covered in processed newsprint is not an improvement.

The stuff also makes cozy nesting for rats. I was last up there early last year, because we were hearing in the night the telltale chomping and scuttling sounds of rats settling in above us. I set out a bunch of traps, and renewed the steel wool chinking in the couple of holes in the foundation through which I think they gain entry. And it worked; I’ve not heard any rodent noises in months. But I hate that attic space. If I hear rats again, I’d have to go up there and retrieve the traps with (probably) mummified rat corpses in them, and clean and bait them and set them out again.

It pleases me to think that ISM the crawl space, the attic, the ancient wiring, and the rats could be SEP. Or more likely, bulldozed to make way for a new house. I’ve mentioned the appliances: the refrigerator, washer, dryer, dishwasher, and the A/C are all approaching the end of their expected life-spans. ISM they too can be SEP.

In years past, I gave serious thought to replacing this house myself: moving out to a rental and hiring an architect and a contractor to demolish the building and put up a new one that would recall the modest charm of the original but with modern construction and a bit more space. OK, that is not going to happen now. I have no interest in embarking on an 18- to 24-month home building project, let alone spending half or more of the old Nest Egg on it.

At the end of day 43 I asked myself, “Is it worth $25K a year for a fresh start?” or, what if I just stayed put and spent that much money here?

The answer is, no amount of piecemeal spending could relieve my 3am worries about the fabric of this place; and frankly I am not up for any amount of remodeling, which in my experience is always a vast amount of trouble and frustration.

So, yeah, if a fresh start in a pleasant place where I have zero worries about building maintenance, appliance repair, or landscaping — if that costs $25K extra a year, it’s probably worth it.

Day 38, Social Security

Tuesday 1/8/2019

I started the day with a brisk walk to the YMCA and my (short, perfunctory) round of strength exercises.

Today was the day for the long-anticipated appointment with the Social Security that I’d been given on Day 12. Then I’d been unable to complete the process because I hadn’t brought proof of marriage. I’d been worrying about whether the government shutdown would be affecting SS offices, but no, everything was operating normally. I only had to wait a few minutes, and in fact I think my name was called within a minute or so of 1pm, my scheduled appointment time.

I’d left early and stopped to pick up some kind of lunch at a Safeway store across from the SS office. When checking out there I had realized to my great chagrin, that I didn’t have my wallet with ID and credit cards. I had carried it on my exercise outing and neglected to transfer it from my shorts to my jeans when I dressed. Well, no biggie, I knew right where it was, on the dresser, and shouldn’t need it, right?

So what is the first thing the very nice and helpful SS clerk asked for when I sat down? My ID, of course! God damn I felt like a… like a forgetful old fart, is what. But he said smoothly, “No problem, I’ll just ask you some security questions,” and proceeded to grill me about where I was born, mother’s maiden name, and a few other things. After some more interrogation he told me that my Survivor Benefit would have the effect of raising my SS payment by about $400/month. Mentally I calculated that would mean I’d be getting about the same amount that Marian used to get, a bit over $1600/month.

In the end, the net effect of (a) the end of Marian’s IBM pension, (b) the end of her SS payment, offset by (c) the increase in my SS and (d) some reduction of monthly expenses (I’m paying way less for groceries than before, for example), is a drop of about $3500 in the monthly household income. In the past we lived comfortably off our combined pensions. Going forward, it is clear I will have to begin to dip into the nest egg on a regular basis. Fortunately the nest egg is pretty chunky and can survive many years of dipping. (Actually, now I think about it, just raising the “required minimum distribution” out of my IRA somewhat above the minimum will come close to covering the shortfall.)

Back home and with my wallet back in my pocket, I made out the check for the first quarter estimated tax payment and mailed that. When Marian did our taxes last spring, she had prepared the federal and state quarterly estimated tax vouchers, each with its mailing envelope and a big post-it note with the date by which it should be mailed. Today I mailed the federal one with the “1/15” post-it. One remains, the state one to mail before “2/1”. And that will be the end of Marian’s carefully prepared tax materials. I’ll have to step up for the next cycle. Me, the guy who walks out of the house without his wallet.

Suli, our cleaning lady, came today. I showed her the remaining items in Marian’s closet and she said she’d take them all, “for my mother”. OK, fine. And when I got back from the SS, that side of the closet was empty at last. I moved my collection of hats to the upper shelf on that side.

I spent some time inventorying our collection of basketball memorabilia. We had a number of items relating to the short-lived San Jose Lasers professional team: sweatshirts, signed team photos, etc. I emailed a friend, another Lasers fan, with the list. She’s very well-connected into that fan base and will forward the list. Hopefully somebody will want some of these things.

Day 32, the year actually starts

Yesterday afternoon I did something that wasn’t on any of my to-do lists except the vague one in the back of my head, the looming little thundercloud of “shit that gotta be done pretty soon but not yet.”

Specifically, I started to sort all our little decorative tchotchkes and identify the ones for which we saved some kind of provenance record. The source was a big envelope labeled “art and decorative”, into which we’d tossed receipts and artists’ cards and brochures over the years. I was able to pair up a lot of objects with their receipts or other info. I was left with a dozen bits of paper that I couldn’t match to an object. I’m particularly intrigued by a receipt for an Inuit “Raven Fetish” in “dyed walrus ivory”. I don’t remember any such object.

In the picture, the seagull statue is by Ken Shutt, a sculptor who worked most of his career in Hawaii. Marian bought that sculpture when she was working for IBM in Honolulu in the 1960s. A nearly identical statue can be seen on EBay priced at $395. That one differs in two ways: one, the upper bird was broken off and re-glued; and two, its birds are bright white, where mine are about the color of my teeth. Say “cream” to be polite. I assume the yellow color is the result of the birds living with first one, then two cigarette smokers for thirty years. I’ve made a couple of tentative efforts to lighten this color, first with warm water and dish soap, then with warm water and a little ammonia. No result.

Anyway, at the end I have a dozen items I could price fairly accurately, from $40 to $500, and maybe 30 more objects that I can’t — but which are probably worth $1 to $10 or so. When I started the project I had the vague notion that I’d sell the items singly on EBay myself.

Then I got real: do I really want the job of creating 20 or 30 EBay listings, and then packing and shipping 20 or 30 packages, plus re-listing the ones that didn’t sell with lower reserves, etc. etc.? Seriously? How many hours would I spend on that and, if I paid myself $15/hour, would those sales even cover my time plus the packing materials?Nunh-uhn, nope. So I left this project frustrated.

Wednesday 1/2/2019

Started the day with a run. Well, actually, started the morning with a few minutes of anxiety, the “something undone” thing that’s been coming and going occasionally. It’s not bad; when I recognize it I can deal with it by taking deep breaths and thinking through my schedule for the day. But it’s annoying. (No, I am not interested in any chemical treatments.) So then the run. And spent some time looking up comparables for my tchotchke collection, then looking up listings for estate appraisers on Yelp. I think I will consult with my friend the realtor for a reference on that.

And then off to do stuff. First off, drive over to Stanford hoping to buy good seats for the now four relatives who want to attend the UCLA game on Sunday. I swung by the ticket office at the stadium Monday, saw it was closed, and went away without looking closer. Today also it was closed; grumping, I walked close up to read the notice in the window: closed for winter break, back on the 7th, buy tickets on gostanford.com. Oh, sigh.

So I went back home and used gostanford to buy very ordinary seats in the upper sections because that was all the computer could sell. I am pretty sure that if I talked to a ticket agent directly, they’d have courtside and such that don’t show on the computer. So later in the day I sent an email to Amy Tucker, politely asking if she has any comps. Bet she comes through.

With the ticket issue tabled, I drove down to the Mountain View Community Center and found where they accept donated food. Left off my two bags of canned stuff from the pantry. Then on to FOPAL for 2-1/2 hours of sorting, and so home for a quiet evening.