Day 359, rain, FOPAL, groceries

Wednesday, 11/27/2019

The first rain of the year arrived yesterday afternoon, first as a drizzle, then a quite heavy shower around 8pm, and another very heavy shower about 4am that woke me up.

At 7am I looked at the weather radar online and debated with myself whether a gap between two bands of green pixels meant it would be dry long enough for me to run. Then I leaned out from the balcony looking at the hills to the west and realized, “that’s a rain shower right there,” and decided no, I would get rained on. But what to do for exercise? I could wait around for the 9:15 strength and balance class, but (a) I like to get exercise out of the way earlier than that, and (b) there’s no aerobic component to it. So for the first time I went down to the gym in the basement and ran on one of the Channing House treadmills. Which are quite new, state of the art ones. I ran for approximately the same duration and speed as I would run on the street.

About 11am I went to FOPAL. Lyft had given me 25% off my next ten rides, so I used Lyft there and back again around 4:30. Both times I elected to use the “shared” option. On the way down, as typical, I had the car to myself, but on the way back at 4:30, the car stopped at two locations to pick up other people.

On Monday or Tuesday, somebody had delivered a very large donation of computer books. The donor appears to have been a practicing developer from 2000 to 2005, using, or at least interested in, the whole Microsoft world of .NET, Visual C#, Access, SQL Server, and more. Box after box of books, many the style I call “tombstones”, big heavy 1000-page paperbacks, mostly in mint or near-mint condition. Only a few showed signs of heavy use, post-its and dog-eared corners.

Sadly they were not really saleable. The most recent was from 2007, that’s twelve years ago, which is a glacial age in software time. I checked the version numbers of the software they documented and none were within even 2 or 3 levels of the current version. So the books can’t be used with the current software; and someone who for some crazy reason has to work with version 1.0 of the .NET framework, surely has any manuals they need. I ended up sending fifteen (15!) boxes to the bargain room. I priced and shelved maybe twenty books from the whole donation.

On return to CH I found a second elevator out. One of our three elevators stopped working on Friday, I think it was, and the latest word from management is that a part needs to be fabricated for it and it will be out 1-2 weeks more. Now today, a second one is “temporarily out of service”. I think I will be using the stairs. Fortunately I am currently on the 4th floor, so going down to meals is easy and coming back isn’t too bad. Leave the one elevator to people on 7 to 10.

In fact I decided to eat a simple PBJ supper in my room and went to bed early.

Day 357, mostly FOPAL, some blogging

Monday, 11/25/2019

Started with a run, which felt good. Then to FOPAL where I had just culled the computer books and was about to sit down at the computer to price 50 or so of them, when there was a rap at the door.

It was a high-school age young woman who introduced herself as Kai and said she was a volunteer and had been told she’d be sorting. As she was saying this, another young woman walked up. I forget her name, but it developed they were both doing High School public service hours. At noon when they knocked off, the second one had me sign a sheet where she was recording her volunteer hours. Over the past couple of weeks she’d done hours at, it looked like, 10 or more different service organizations. Awesome!

They hadn’t done sorting before. Somebody told them to show up at 10am to do that — why? There is not normally any sort of senior person or other sorter there at 10am on a Monday. Well, no problem; I gave them a quick training session in sorting and they dove right in energetically. Smart, hard-working girls, they did a lot of sorting in two hours.

I finished up my pricing, then did sorting along with the girls and continued after they left until the 2pm sorters showed up. I was pretty tired by then. Hey, I’ve got 11,300 steps, 4.3 miles on my phone today. A bit more than half would be my morning run. So I walked about 1.5-2.0 miles back and forth around the FOPAL book rooms — a lot of those steps I was carrying boxes of books. No wonder my back was a little sore and I felt tired. Had a good nap, did an hour on Zooniverse, then sat down to blog.

Before supper I spent an hour going through the first month of this blog. My main goal was to add “tags” to each post, so I can pull categories like Grief, Transition, Movies etc. But it also meant reading the posts. My life has certainly changed in these twelve months. From living in my house on Tasso, just beginning the downsizing project and not sure of where to live, to being settled at Channing House and pretty much everything stabilized and comfortable. I intend to write a longish essay summarizing the experience of this year of transition. It probably won’t be ready on Day 366, the start of the second year, but soon.

Day 353, Anthem, Exercise, Fopal, Lecture

Wednesday, 11/20/2019

I wrote a few days back that the in-house exercise class–actually called “Strength and Balance” class–happened at the wrong time of the day. It’s at 9:15am MWF. In order to participate, I have to change my other regular habits. I decided to try it out today. It wouldn’t be practical to go for a run and be back for exercise at 9:15. Would it? So no run. But what about breakfast? I don’t want to go down to the dining room in my exercise shorts and t-shirt. So eat in my room. But then I’m all fed and coffee’d and newspaper’d by 7:30, with 2 hours to kill. It just upsets everything. Well.

Today I passed the time after breakfast and before exercise, trying to register with my new drug insurance provider, Anthem. I’d tried a few days ago and failed. I would enter my Anthem account number, first and last name, birthdate. It would recognize me, to the extent that it wanted to do 2FA by sending a text to my phone “***-***-1986” as it coyly said. Fine, do it. Then it would put up a cute error message, “Hmmm, that didn’t work for some reason. Try again later, or call support at…”

Today I tried it some more with the same result. So I called support. The person there, who had a very thick Latino accent, was able to find my information, and said well, it is having a problem with 2FA, I’ll turn off 2FA for this account and you can try again. Which I did, and was able to get to the point of providing a username and a password. Then it told me to go ahead and log in with this new id.

When I tried to do so, it put up an overlay message “Getting your information”; then wiped that and displayed a familiar cutesy message, “Hmmm, that didn’t work for some reason…”

So I called support again. This person was able to “find my information,” but she had the sense to ask, When does your coverage begin? Um, January first? Oh, well, you can’t use the website until you are within 30 days of your coverage starting.

Oh. Do you suppose the website might fucking SAY THAT instead of “for some reason”? No, I didn’t swear at the lady. Anyway, it was now 9:15.

Exercise class was impressive. There’s at least 40 people there. Most in street clothes; I think I was the only one in shorts, other than Clark, the staff fitness person who leads it. He does a good job. He leads through a rapid sequence of a variety of exercises, some I found quite challenging. Not because they demanded a lot of strength, but because they involved coordination. OK, sit forward and upright on a chair. Lift your right knee, swing the leg out to 45 degrees; bring it back, repeat on the left side. Keep doing this, left, right, steadily, but now put both arms out straight and make circles. And so on. There were some strength exercises using thera-bands, and various other things, 45 minutes worth, which got me breathing and lightly perspiring.

I had a shower (quite a few people in the class were exercising as hard as I was, in street clothes, and I wondered about that) and then drove up the hardware store to get batteries so I can set up a new indoor/outdoor thermometer I’ve bought. I had a smoothie for lunch at Whole Foods. Then I went to FOPAL; yes, I was just there yesterday, but that was really Monday’s session delayed to Tuesday, and this was my regular Wednesday sorting session. And it’s quite a bit more actual bending and lifting exercise than the class was.

In the evening I attended a lecture here, a local artist presenting on “Who Shot Vincent?” He reviewed the brief, tragic career of Van Gogh, showed lots of his pictures and discussed the development of his technique over the single decade of his painting career, and at the end presented the evidence that Vincent probably did not commit suicide but was shot accidentally by some teenagers goofing off.

Day 352, much FOPAL, booking

Tuesday, 11/19/2019

Since I couldn’t do anything at FOPAL yesterday, I determined to put in several hours today. After breakfast in the dining room I got to FOPAL around 8:30, first person in. There was a huge pile of books waiting for me on the floor at the Computer section.

six boxes off to the right, one more on the cart, and five piles

About twice the norm. There’s been a push on to get more sorting done (yay!) and this may be a result. Anyway, spent two hours culling these and pricing and shelving the worthwhile 50 or so.

(Time is really cruel to computer books. So many big fat tomes, The Complete JavaPerlC++ Bible, a 1000-page doorstop that sold for $35 when new in 2005, now irrelevant. Even when it’s the Third Edition Updated for Version 7.5!!, because I do a quick check and that product or language is now at version 14.3. So it’s off to the Bargain Room where maybe somebody will pay $1 for it, or more likely it will be recycled.)

That done, I started sorting. There was a small wall of boxes, mostly one donation, blocking an aisle. With a few other sorters that came and went over the next hours, we reduced and finally eliminated that wall. Yay us.

I headed on home, forgetting that I meant to stop at the hardware store. In the evening I booked one more theatrical thing in London. The first 7 days of the trip are pretty well filled now, and I think I’ll leave the last three evening open. When I’m there, I’ll see posters, or check the What’s On site, and find things to attend. Daytimes I figure to shuttle back and forth to different museums and galleries, maybe hitting the bigger ones multiple times. (Wally writes that, according to an art lecture he heard recently, you should go to a museum and just study one work, and leave. Well…)

Day 346, haircut, papers

Wednesday, 11/13/2019

I didn’t think anything was planned for today but just had an uneasy feeling I should check the calendar and, hah!, I am having a haircut at 10am. So glad I checked.

So I drove up to Ladera center to have Chris cut my hair. And for the first time in weeks, I had little flashes of memories of Marian (who always enjoyed seeing Chris, and had her hair cut there and her nails done just a couple weeks before she died); and pulses of grief. It is so unpredictable, these bursts of sadness and pity. It’s also too bad that my strongest memories of her are the most recent ones, when she was in failing health. I don’t get flashbacks to times she was healthy. I guess those are too far back.

Now I had to kill time until my next event, a meeting at 1pm, so I drove to IKEA to check their selection of area rugs. Someone around here told me they had a good selection. I beg to differ, boring, drab, frankly ugly stuff.

At 1pm I met with Patty to have her sign my Channing House Communications Representative form. CH has this program: a resident can designate another resident to be their communications rep, if they have some medical problem and are away. The comm. rep. answers any questions about the resident’s health status. I’ve seen this in operation a couple of times already: a resident has some issue, goes away to the hospital for a week, people want to know what’s up, how are they, when are they back. They ask the front desk, for example. Their designated communications rep answers such questions, so the person who is away being treated, only has to talk to one person.

There is a form, actually two forms. One is signed by the resident (me) and the person who agrees to be communications rep (Patty), and the original goes to the front desk, so they know who to refer questions to. The other form is a release form that authorizes Channing House (i.e. the front desk) to give out information on whether the resident is hospitalized or what. Not their condition, just the fact that they are hospitalized, which by HIPAA they couldn’t do without authorization.

So Patty agreed to be my rep should I need one. I gave her the info on my medical agents, Dennis and Darlene, so she could talk to them. In the event I am hospitalized, she might find out first and tell them; or if not, she could find out from them what would be valid to say to other residents about my condition.

From that meeting I went quickly to FOPAL where I cleaned up the Computer section. Six boxes of intake, of which maybe 20 books to keep and shelve, 4 boxes on to the bargain room. I wanted to get this done because I’m away for the rest of the week. I would normally have stayed and done sorting until 4pm but today I had to cut that short after about 20 minutes to come back and attend,

A social event put on by the 2nd floor. The 2nd floor only became apartments 3 and a half years ago, after the completion of the new wing containing the Russell Lee nursing center. Previously the 2nd floor was the assisted living space; then it was converted into 20 rather nice (as I would find out) apartments. The 2nd floor people decided to hold a tea party for new residents and I was invited, along with at least 8 others who’ve come in this year. (At the Residents Association meeting Monday it was announced that all available units have been sold, so I guess I was fortunate in my timing. There will be another 20 units freed up in two years when the renovation is over.)

Anyway the 2nd floor had catered soft drinks, cookies, coffee, and some rather nice brownies and provided printed name tags, and 30 people stood around and chatted for an hour. One new couple, Frances and John, both worked in the Apollo Guidance computer program, working directly for Margaret Hamilton. Then, five 2nd floor people had open house, so we could visit and admire their units, which are indeed spiffy. They have full kitchens and generally are snazzier than the older units. I expect my upgraded unit when I get back to it, will be as nice. No cooktop, but I don’t care.

I had had enough snacks there that I skipped supper.

Day 344, residents meeting, tech, FOPAL

Monday, 11/11/2019

I wanted to attend the monthly residents’ association meeting at 9am, so ate a regular breakfast. These meetings are a reminder that CH is a functioning community with a degree of self-governance. The long-range financial and other decisions are made by a Board, and day to day administration is by a CEO and paid staff; however the residents association has some discretion and input, and the meeting is run formally with a (fairly lengthy) agenda, committee reports, etc. As I’ve frequently noted before, the residents here ain’t no dummies, but retired professionals, most with all of their wits about them.

Following the meeting I met up with Susan who wanted help with her Mac. She has a wee little Macbook 13in, connected to a bit (23in?) monitor. She wanted to not be prompted to log in every time it came out of sleep, and a couple of other tweaks.

Next I went to FOPAL to do the post-sale triage of my Computer section. Before the sale it had 409 books, after it had 299, net 110 books sold. I looked through all the remaining and sent another 70 or so off to the bargain room because they’d sat too long without selling. Reduced the prices on some others. Priced and shelved two boxes of new. Did a little sorting.

In the late afternoon and evening I did more research for a possible London outing. The dates will be Feb 14-23. I made a list of 20 or so museums and galleries I might visit. Since several of them justify a full day of exploration, obviously I won’t get to all of them. At least the biggest are open every day; the days of museums being closed on Mondays are gone.

Day 339, FOPAL, Docent, papers

Wednesday, 11/5/2019

Today I had a docent tour to run starting at 11:30, but it is also Wednesday before book sale at FOPAL, the day that section managers should have their sections in final shape for the sale. I could do that before or after the museum; I opted for before. So I had breakfast at CH. Carrying my red docent shirt for later, I headed out for FOPAL at 8am.

There were only two boxes of boooks waiting for me, and I ended up shelving only 8 additional. Then I did an hour of sorting which brought me to 10am. I took a break and had coffee and a scone at the local Peet’s Coffee before heading to the museum.

There I met a group of 22 undergrads from the University of Toronto. They are so cute, just adorable. Lucky for them, Pat, docent of the 1401 lab, was available and offered to do them a 1401 demo. So I gave them a short tour and turned them over to him. They had a good experience, I think. The professor said they were going to the Intel museum that afternoon. I didn’t know there was such a thing, but I bet they didn’t get as good a show there.

Stopped at the car wash to get the car cleaned up on the way home. Looking forward to driving at least one other person to the SWBB game in the city on Saturday. I’d have paid for an external detail job if it could be done in a reasonable amount of time, but the lady at the entrance barely spoke english and seemed to think they didn’t do polishing. Which they certainly do, but I asked a more informed employee while my car was going through the regular wash. Detailing would be near $200 and take half a day. I seem to recall they once did a quick polish operation in less time, but that was probably long ago. Anyway, if I’m going to spend $200 on a polish, I’ll do it at a “real” detailing shop, not a shed attached to the car wash.

In the afternoon I spent an hour answering an email from Katie The Tax Accountant regarding the ongoing effort to complete an IRS form 7-oh-whatever, to recover I forget what part of Marian’s estate tax exemption. Lots of small questions to finish the job, like “Did Marian have an interest in any other trust?” and so forth. All easy to answer except one.

Back in August they said they would file for an extension past the 9-month cutoff for this filing. I said fine. This email asks, did I receive approval of the extension from the IRS? Um, no. The email makes reference to maybe having given the IRS my old address. Despite the fact that in the email exchange of August, I gave them the Channing House address. (OK, I probably never logged into the tax accountant’s website and updated my info there.)

Two days ago I got an email from Richard, the gardener, saying his invoice for August work had been returned by the PO, and could he have my current address. So very possibly the PO is no longer forwarding mail to the Tasso address. However, they were doing so very reliably, back in September and October.

So I sent off my detailed reply to all Katie’s questions, but with a bad feeling that maybe the extension had been botched; that the whole exercise would be a failure; and I would end up paying for a lot of accountant hours with no benefit. The benefit had never been that clear to me anyway, but whatever.

Day 336, coffee, FOPAL, tickets, dinner, plan

Sunday, 11/3/2019

“Fall back” day. Did my usual Sunday morning thing, doing the NYT crossword at home, then going out for coffee. Today I took the car and went to good old Palo Alto Cafe in Midtown. Then, because I have something else to do tomorrow that will interfere with my usual Monday FOPAL stint, I drove on down Middlefield to FOPAL and did the Computer section pricing and shelving. The shelves are pretty full, although I think I will add more on Wednesday. Then we shut down shelving for the upcoming Sale Weekend.

Interesting internet curiosity going on. My favorite tool for book pricing (and others’) is, or was, BookscoutPro.com. This odd little site does (or did) only one thing: given a list of ISBNs, it would present the range of prices for those books, gathered from Amazon and Ebay. It had a brutally simple UI, was blazing fast, and told us just what we needed to know to price used books. And last week it stopped responding. Its server still answers to pings, but it doesn’t respond to HTTP requests any more. Frank, our internet (among other things) expert thinks it was a one-man operation and the one man has either died or lost interest. He and I discussed how we might go about getting the source code of the site and running it ourselves, or recreating its function.

I spent 90 minutes culling, pricing, and shelving, including taking a pre-sale count. Then I spent another 90 minutes sorting. Sorting, by myself, is a highly satisfying occupation. I just blitzed through about 8 boxes of books, creating a nice clear space in the sorting room. Then I bought a few groceries and headed home.

About 2pm I got a call from George, who is giving a talk on Monday. The A/V committee assigned me to run this show and I had emailed him about the details of his laptop earlier. Now he very sensibly wanted to do a trial now, since he had another commitment that ran right up to his scheduled start time. Excellent idea. We met in the auditorium where I turned on the projector and we connected his laptop. All fine.

And only as I wrote this, I remembered: did I turn off the projector? I zipped down to the auditorium and no, I hadn’t. It’s an expensive projector but it wasn’t shining its light. Hopefully with no input it wasn’t burning itself out over the last 8 hours or so.

Then there was an email from Patty, to a list of several SWBB fans, wondering about the coming game with USF next Saturday. It is to be played at the Chase Center in SF, and we started an email discussion on logistics, is it practical to take Caltrain, etc. (Answer: no.) In the midst of this, it occurred to me, I need a ticket for this. It’s not part of the home season pass of course. Tickets via Ticketmaster, $50. Turns out the event is a double header, women at 3pm, USF men vs. Princeton at 6, one ticket for both events. With the result that many of the good seats have already been bought by (presumably) men’s fans. And parking is $30. Well, got that all bought.

Went down to supper by the stairs, meeting David and Helen on the way. Then Patty said we should sit together. So nice supper with four other people. David worked at SRI and knew Doug Englebart.

After supper I thought about my oft-stated idea of spending a week in London, visiting museums and seeing shows. Quick check of Road Scholar, they have nothing like that. Given I know London fairly well, I don’t need excursions to the well-known places. So, plan it myself? How hard can it be?

First thing is, when? I look at the Google Calendar. Lots of conflicts with SWBB and other pre-purchased tickets. Also, January is when the move back to the 6th floor should happen. However, there’s a nice gap in mid-February, the 9th to the 20th, with no serious conflicts. So I open booking.com and look for hotels. There are several attractive places in Chiswick and around Hyde Park where I can stay for 10 nights for less than £1000. I find officiallondontheater.com, ticket brokerage. Lots of shows one could see with prices around £30-£50. And of course there are the museums, I would use TripAdvisor to refresh my memory of those. But it should not be difficult, the work of a couple afternoons, to plan a 9- or 10-day stay with one museum and one performance a day. So we will see.

Day 333, meeting, tour, supper

Thursday, 10/31/2019

Did some exercises before breakfast. I really haven’t got a satisfactory solution for the exercise situation. I feel I need more guidance and motivation for that, since I don’t go to the Y any more. However, the C.H. “strength and balance” classes are at 11:45 on MWF and that schedule just does not suit me. I want my physical exercise done in the morning, not impinging on my midday like that. Wouldn’t have to be 6:30am, but at least 9am.

Went to the quarterly meeting of FOPAL section managers and sorters. Had a talk about emergency response from the guy who manages the Cubberly complex where FOPAL is. Basically, after an earthquake, move out to one of the athletic fields, don’t cluster in the parking lot getting in the way of emergency vehicles. In other news, Janet is organizing additional shifts of volunteer sorters to try to make headway against the backlog. And our favorite website for pricing info, bookscoutPro, appears to be down permanently. It’s much more tedious to use BookFinder, etc.

After that I went to the museum to lead a tour for a group of 19 Google software developers. They seemed to enjoy it.

Back home, got a call from Mary Beth, would I join her and her husband Bruce and new resident Ann for dinner. Sure!

Day 332, fopal, something

Wednesday, 10/30/2019

Damn. Let too much time pass. Don’t remember what I did this day. Well, a bit. I spent half an hour on the novel in the morning, adding some text that did not satisfy me at all. I went down to FOPAL around noon, priced a couple dozen computer books, then did sorting until after 4pm.

Oh, yeah. While sorting I got kind of hungry, and decided that for supper I’d go to the Peninsula Creamery and have grilled cheese sandwich and one of their magnificent chocolate/chocolate shakes. Which I did, walking up from CH and back in the dark.