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 92, Women of the IEEE and others

So last night I had misunderstood the Stanford baseball schedule; they were playing away this weekend. So I didn’t have to brave a cool and possibly rainy night outdoors. I stayed home and streamed the SWBB game. Stanford — as the audio announcer kept pointing out — has never lost to WSU, ever, they are something like 39-0. He had to keep saying that and I’m thinking, “shut up shut up, just shut up about it” but it didn’t matter. They romped over the Cougars, winning by 30 points at the end. And so to bed.

Saturday, 3/2/2019

Today I was scheduled to lead a custom tour for the Women of the IEEE, Women In Engineering, or #WIELEAD (“we lead”, get it?). It was supposed to get underway at 11am. I asked the guys doing the 1401 demo if they would mind staying around after their 11am run to do another demo for my group at 12:30, and they generously agreed to.

Then I found out the WIE had also asked for a brunch table. Now, if they are going to eat brunch in the lobby starting at 11, when can we start the tour? There’s the scheduled Family Tour supposed to go at 11:30, will we be stepping on their toes? \Sadik, the young woman leading that tour, tells me her first stop was the IBM 360, so they would be ahead of us all the way. Fine.

Then Susan, the WIE organizer, was disappointed that I was not one of the docents trained in the Women in Computing tour. This was their fourth year doing this and they’d always had one of those. There’d been a miscommunication in the scheduling app or an error by the event scheduler. I said I’d do the best I could, and quickly opened Wikipedia to bone up on Margaret Hamilton and Grace Hopper. (Later I hooked Susan up with my boss, Katherina, who placated her with free tickets to the scheduled Women in Computing tour days.)

I managed to get the dozen women started about 11:40, but now instead of doing a leisurely tour, inviting questions, I had to cut my usual stuff short in order to get done before 12:30. Plus adding a stop so I could talk about Hamilton, and ad-libbing a reference to Hopper later. Half-way around we caught up to the Family tour who were being video’d by a professional crew. So I took my tour past them. Then there was another big private tour that we passed, but they caught up with us again, so I had to rush another stop to get out of their way… it was just a zoo. But the 1401 demo was a hit, and they all thanked me and made me stand with them for a group photo. So they didn’t notice what a zoo it was.

Back home, I sat down to begin adapting Godot, the new laptop, to my preferences. Go through all the system preferences and check them. When I start up Safari … it seems to know what sites I visit often; they are all lined up on the blank page. How did it know? One clue, I had connected to iCloud when setting up preferences. But still spooky!

Install Dropbox and get it started syncing all the stuff from there. Install Firefox. Install LastPass in both Firefox and Safari browsers. Open Gmail and Google Calendar — looks ok! Ordinarily I’ve been using Firefox for mail and calendars, and Chrome for everything else. I decide to see if I can use Firefox and Safari only, and not install Chrome. So I start opening all the URLs that I normally have tabbed in Chrome. They look OK. (I’m posting this from Godot.)

On Day 79 I told about trying to recover the contents of a drive out of an old Mac for Diane, but couldn’t because it was an IDE drive and I had only SATA enclosures. Since then I’ve acquired a gizmo that should let me connect an IDE drive to a USB port. Tonight I will meet Diane and Jean and try again.

Later: well, it worked. I was able to read the two volumes on the old drive and copy them to another drive. The three of us went out for Chinese food on Castro street.

Day 89, medical exam, FOPAL, “potlatch”

Wednesday, 2/27/2019

Started with a thorough shave, shower, tooth-brush. One wants to be clean for a medical exam. At ten departed for the PAMF Los Altos clinic for a routine physical with our long-time physician, Dr. Marx. She was, as always, attentive and kind. My numbers are all good. She’ll have the form wanted by Channing House ready in a couple of days.

In email, Marian’s relatives Darlene and Jessea and Liz all want to attend this tree planting in April. Hmm. So I passed on the info to a couple more people, and by midday they also replied with “yes, sure.” So that will be a thing.

Went to FOPAL with three more boxes of books. While filling them I eyeball-estimated how many more I’d need to take. Probably about 9 or 10. So, bookcases emptied in March. At FOPAL I worked a full three hours, then bought a few groceries and headed home, on the way stopping at FedEx to pick up Godot, the new laptop. It will take many hours to get it configured how I want it, but I started by introducing it to the wi-fi and starting it on upgrading to the latest OS level. It will probably sit all day tomorrow, then on Friday I will really dig in.

Making lunch in the kitchen I realized that though I had emptied out the canisters of various pastas and flours, I had never tossed the 30-40 jars of spices. Well, actually last night I used some cinnamon, and I still use the pepper grinder regularly. But I should clear out that spice shelf.

Thinking about furnishing a studio at C.H. has made me realize there are quite a few things I will want to hang on to, just to make an empty apartment homely. There’s a chair and a small table in the back yard that will do well on the large deck that is a part of all C.H. units. And a couple of plants that I know are hardy and have been thriving even under my minimal care. And some decorative objects that speak to me, including the Linsky painting.

Then I had a brilliant idea for the rest. I will damn well hold a potlatch! The problem is that so many objects have (apparently) no current market value, despite having been bought for their beauty or charm or skillful execution, and cherished for decades. One way to realize the value is to try to sell it on eBay, but from experience I know that is a frustrating, time-consuming process that is unlikely to generate any real money.

But focus on the end-goal, which is just to pass an object on to someone who will also cherish it! Instead of demanding money as a sign of desire, let’s just put the objects out and let people take their pick, guided by their own tastes. I have to think about the details, when to do it, who to invite, how to show the items, whether to include furniture items in the give-away. But the basic idea will be, invite relatives and good friends to come in, take one object each that they really like. Maybe a terrible idea, but at the moment it feels like genius.

Day 85, museum and a movie

Saturday, 2/23/2019

The first scheduled thing for the day was to lead a docent tour at 2pm. So I settled in for a relaxing Saturday morning with the computer. After about two hours I was bored, so finally I left early for the museum — might as well be bored there as at home. Did my tour; went home; changed clothes; and headed out to meet Dennis at the Pruneyard for a movie.

This was my first experience with a theater that not only has the reserved-seat reclining chairs, but the chairs have a tray, and a menu, and you can order a meal. So we ate supper in the theater while the many trailers ran. Not bad food, either. I had a “sesame chicken on rice noodles” thing which had generous amounts of chicken and bell pepper chunks in a fairly tasty sauce.

The movie was Alita: Battle Angel, a sci-fi effects adventure based on a manga series. It was entertaining, although it got kind of draggy toward the end, with a long and complicated third act. The most challenging thing was figuring out how the digital artists at Weta Studios created the central character. According to the Wiki page linked above, famous director James Cameron intended Alita to be 100% CGI. The character interacts fully and continuously with the live-action actors.

mv5bota2ntqzote5nf5bml5banbnxkftztgwotq1mtqzndm40._v1_sx1777_cr001777960_al_ — Eyes like golf balls…

Throughout the film I was looking at the effects as effects, trying to work out how this or that was done. I was assuming that at least Alita’s face and head were that of a live actress, but the eyes… her eyes are at least 30% larger than real human eyes. Did they have to edit every frame to make the eyes bigger? I was trying to imagine a program that could automatically analyze every frame, find the eyes, and stretch them. No, probably the whole face and the rest of her is all computer imagery. And yet the actress Rosa Salazar is credited with playing the part. So presumably she supplied at least the voice, and perhaps some of her body movements were captured as the basis for the images.

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 70, old pics and a game

Friday, 2/8/2019

When I went out to pick up the paper at 6:30 the sky was clear, and the TV news said the rain wouldn’t come until the afternoon. I assumed I could do a run, but it started to rain just as I was ready to leave at 8:30, so instead I drove to the Y and ran on the treadmill.

Then I set out to tackle those boxes of slides that I mentioned on Day 67. The slides are exquisitely organized and cataloged into “groups” where a group is usually one trip, but sometimes a category. There is an index file that lists each group by number and topic and shows which box it is stored in, as well as a catalog that lists each slide by its group and serial number and its subject.

Over the past decade I’ve spent many hours scanning slides from various groups. I would inspect a group, and scan the slides that were either emotionally significant, or pictorially fine. For some groups that was most of them; other groups just a scattering. Those scans are now on my main computer as well as in the cloud. But now I need to get serious about finishing this job: looking through each unscanned group and deciding which, if any, slides in it deserve to be retained.

I made a copy of the index, and emboldened the entry for each group that hadn’t been scanned, and printed it out. There are 20 or so, for example group 102, “New England Fall 1972”. Sitting in a chair that faced a window, I popped each slide into a hand-held viewer and made fast editorial decisions. No; no; no; don’t care; why’d we keep that; no; hm that’s nice; no;… I set aside a few to scan. On to the next group.

I’d gone through quite a few when Marian’s sister Jean arrived at 1pm. I’d asked her over to go through the memorabilia I had that was purely Lacrampe family stuff. Jean’s attitude toward old stuff is very pragmatic (the Lacrampe women are all unsentimental). Anything she wants to keep, she scans into her computer, “then I toss it.” For this exercise we went through several piles of stuff, mostly pictures. She recognized most of them. “I’ve got that. I have that. Huh, I’m not sure I have that, I’ll take it and scan it.” I set aside a few pictures of Marian that I didn’t have already. Jean built up a pile of 25 or 30 things to add to her collection. The great bulk went into the “recycle” pile.

The mound of pictures for the recycle bin.

The only part of this that had much emotional impact on me was going through a fat envelope of memorabilia from Marian’s trip around Europe. She toured Denmark, Italy and England for a month in 1960. In the folder were all the letters she’d exchanged with her mother and brother, and about 40 postcards which she’d bought along the way and used for notes on each day’s activities. Of course, I felt guilty consigning all this to the recycle bin. It crossed my mind that I could read all these letters, transcribe them into a text file, and have a complete journal of that trip. But then I thought about how the envelope had sat in a drawer in the closet for forty-plus years and, as far as I can recall, she never got it out to look at it. And, as far as transcribing it — there was nobody in the world better qualified to transcribe that material into a computer file than she! And she didn’t. And who now who would want to read it?

There’s a SWBB game at 6pm. Just time for a nap before that. Results tomorrow.

Day 54, haircut and FOPAL

Wednesday, 1/23/2019

Went for a run in the chilly morning. At 11, departed to get a haircut from Chris, just like on Day 18. There was this difference: as I pulled into the Ladera Shopping Center parking lot, I automatically scanned for open slots near to the top — just as I had twenty or more times over the last two years or so, parking to minimize the distance for Marian to walk. And suddenly realized, wait a minute: I can walk just fine. I don’t need to park close to the entrance. I can sashay across the length of the parking lot with no difficulty. And pulled into the first available spot.

Claiming my new life. I never felt any resentment at Marian’s limited mobility, or the limitations it forced on us both. If I thought about it at all, I admired her matter-of-fact, dignified acceptance. This is how I am now, was her attitude, and this is how we deal with it. Parking close to your destination, avoiding stairs, skipping activities that needed many steps — these was just ways the partnership operated.

But I’m living a new life now, and it has pluses and minuses. One of the advantages is that I no longer need to compromise with limited mobility. (Well, for now. How long will I be freely mobile?) Today I consciously realized that advantage.

I loaded two cartons of books and went to FOPAL where I sorted for 2 and a half hours. Afterward I drove down to say hello to Jean. I took a bag of books. When she was at the house last, she took all of Marian’s Tory Hayden books (Hayden wrote books about saving troubled children). Well, that was a genre that Marian had loved. Cleaning out the next shelf I found another dozen books of a similar kind by other authors. Now I brought that bag of books to her and we chatted a bit.

Day 43, Should I stay or should I go?

Welp, it was only slightly better than a hamburger. I started for Castro street (aka restaurant row) in Mountain View, thinking to go to Casa Lupe, a modest little Mexican café that we went to many times. Except approaching it, it occurs to me that I’ll likely be recognized by the waitress that served us many times over the years, and I don’t want to answer the inevitable question. And in fact I don’t want to go to where we went as a couple many times, including, I realized, the last or nearly last time Marian was able to go out to a restaurant.

So there I was wandering down Castro and more or less at random picked a modern Indian casual place where I ordered chicken curry and naan. The waiter wanted to know how spicy, and I said, oh, medium. Whoa. I do not want to know what that cook thought was really spicy, because the dish I got was barely edible, and I usually enjoy hot food. Anyway, back home, watched a little TV, got a serious case of the yawns about 9pm and went to bed, knowing it would mean being up early on Sunday morning.

Sunday, 1/13/2019

And was: up and dressed and had finished the NYT puzzle (38:40, not too far off my average) by 7:30. Out to the old coffee shop with the winter sun just up, shining through broken clouds. Walked along being very consciously aware, in the moment, apprehending the air and the light and my body, thinking, “this is me, this is mine,” deliberately claiming life as a solo person.

And of course I was home again with plenty of time on my hands before I was due to meet Dennis for a movie at 1pm. In the email was the info from Alan that I requested yesterday, on three additional independent living facilities (ILFs, henceforth).

I added their numbers to my document and then made up a little table of their monthly rentals on a 1BR unit, which range from a low of $3200 to a high of $8800.

Given those numbers, it appears that a ballpark estimate of the annual cost of living in an ILF is $60,000, give or take. $45,000 minimum. And when I think about that, I hear The Clash in my mind,

Should I Stay or Should I Go?

I sat at the desk going through the check register and the online bill-pay record for the past 12 months, making an estimate of what it costs to live for a year in this fully-paid-for suburban home. In very round numbers: utilities $4K, insurance $4K (earthquake insurance is a bitch), maintenance including gardener, another $4K, taxes $2K (thank you Prop. 13!). Allowing a very generous $30/day for food adds $11K. So a ballpark estimate to merely stay put is $25,000 per annum, or about one-half the annual cost of an ILF.

Hmmmm…

The decision to “not be a home-owner” was one of the first conclusions I came to when I began thinking about my future as a widower, months before the event. I felt tired of having the responsibility of worrying about building and appliance maintenance and taxes and insurance.

Wanting a fresh start, too; to force a break with the past and to begin a new form of life with minimum baggage.

Is it worth $25K a year for a fresh start?

Or, here’s another way to think about it: apparently I’m willing to consider spending $60K/year for a residence and food. What could I have, if I stayed put and spent the other $35,000 right here? That much money would buy all-new appliances and an upgraded car — and that’s in just the first year.

Hmmmmm…. This indecision’s bugging me… don’t know whom I’m sposed to be…

To be continued.

Day 40, Back to Yosemite

Thursday 1/10/2019

Today I was scheduled to work for CHM at the warehouse where 98% of the collection is held, a big climate-controlled, secure box in Milpitas, off Yosemite avenue. For long months around 2008, and again in 2015, I spent a day a week working there helping to store and catalog hundreds of items. In 2008, it was a huge collection, two tractor-trailer loads, from Germany to process. In 2015 it was a campaign to catalog and photograph thousands of items that had been incompletely catalogued when the Museum moved from Boston to Mountain View. I hadn’t been in the Yosemite warehouse in three years. It hadn’t changed much, and the volunteers and staff who I worked with were all old friends from previous days.

The work was familiar but strenuous. We were moving a group of large chunks of a DEC KL-10 and a VAX, which were sitting on the ground floor, and putting them up on pallets so they could be fork-lifted to one of the upper levels. It was part of a game that Aurora, the site manager, called “museum tetris”, moving things from level to level to optimize space. Each heavy box had to be rolled on its casters up a ramp onto a pallet. Then its screw jacks could be lowered to stabilize it, and compression straps wrapped around it to lock it to the pallet. I worked on that with three others, while three more worked at moving dozens of storage boxes and placing restraint straps to ensure they wouldn’t fall in case of an earthquake.

About suppertime, my niece Denise returned a call and I finally got a chance to offer her our china service. She’ll consult with her partner and get back to me.

Day 36, Stanford Memorial

Sunday, 1/6/2019

Went to the nearby coffee shop to read the paper, but had to leave early because someone had brought in a very cute lad about 7 years old who, though full of energy, was coughing, hoarsely and continuously, hrrroorrkkk! He had been taught to cover his mouth but he was being perfunctory about it, barely swinging his forearm in front of his face as he hacked, so there was plenty of room for his germs to get out. I bundled up my paper and beat it away from the little germ-ball.

Around 11am Dennis arrived, then Jean, then Darlene and Jesse, and off we went to Maples Pavilion for the WBB game against UCLA. Coach Amy’s comps were in kind of a corner, but at least we were all together for what turned out to be a very exciting game, Stanford falling behind by 20 at one point before clawing back into the game and taking a firm lead only in the last 6 minutes to win.

Then we moved across the arena for the “Behind the Bench” talk, which opened with a very nice tribute to Marian. The pictures I’d supplied looked great on the Jumbotron, and announcer Betty Ann Boeving read a short, clear tribute. After the similar tribute to DeeDee Zahwaydah, Tara ad-libbed a couple more sentences about Marian. It was very nice, and nice for Jean and Darlene to see the regard she was held in there.

On return to the house I invited Darlene and Jesse to make free of the remaining items of Marian’s clothing, and they each took a top, more from politeness I think than real desire. Next week the remainder goes to the ACS shop.