Day 313, phone fix, skin check

Friday, 10/11/2019

Went for a run, the first in about 3 weeks. First impression out the door: whoa, fall is here! The temperature was around 60º but felt quite chilly in my shorts and t-shirt. Back to the room for a warm shower.

Headed out in the car in time to catch the iPhone fixer when he opened at 10. There are several hole-in-the-wall iPhone places nearby, Smart Repair is close by, on University Ave, but I have been going to Fast Repair, on El Camino near California Ave. I was there earlier this year to get the battery replaced. This time I noticed his shop now has signs, “Apple Authorized Repairs.” I’d heard that Apple had loosened its former policies about third-party repairers. Anyway, a new front glass for my iPhone 7 costs $160.

Leaving the phone, I went to Town and Country and parked conveniently close to PAMF, where at 11am I was due for a dermatology skin check. I passed the time at Peet’s, then walked to the derm. dept. While waiting to be called I got the email from Fast Repair that the phone was ready.

My skin is mostly fine, one little thing to freeze on the tip of my ear, but there’s a little node on my left upper eyelid–to me it looks like a whitehead, maybe an infected lash?–but the doctor wanted it biopsied, and that has to be done by an opthalmic surgeon. So he referred me for that, and later in the day I got a call and made an appointment for that on Monday.

Back home, after parking the car, I heard another resident trying to start her car from what sounded obviously like a near-dead battery. Been there, done that, just yesterday. I talked her through what she’d have to do. Maybe I should carry jumper cables? I could have done a jump start, instead of referring her to AAA. Nah, when is that going to happen again?

In the afternoon was the monthly TGIF party on the 11th floor, this time sponsored by the 7th floor. They had a wine tasting and lots of snacks. I chatted with a couple of people, ate a lot of snacks, and didn’t feel like supper. So afterward I watched a whole lot of backed-up TV, determined to stay up past 11 so as to get my sleep schedule back to normal.

Day 295, FOPAL, singing, packing

Monday, 9/23/2019

Went for a run in the morning, the first one in a week, also the last one for two weeks, because I don’t plan to go jogging out of a hotel in Athens or Heraklion or wherever.

Went to FOPAL at 10 and worked until 2. There were 8 boxes of computer books waiting. Chuck, the guy who trained me in managing the computer section, joined me at 11 for a refresher in pricing, and we did the last four together. Then I sorted donations for two hours, bringing a great deal of order to the chaos of the donation room, which was satisfying. Grabbed a couple of protein bars at the grocery for lunch and headed back.

Napped, and almost overslept the time for the singing group meeting, which I’d been recruited for back on the activity expo day. My voice is… I can still carry a tune, I don’t think I sang any sour notes, but my range is about |that| wide, so I’m forever having to drop an octave for the highest notes or go up an octave for the lowest.

Had supper sitting alone. Afterward, despite my best intentions to put off packing to tomorrow, I couldn’t resist, and packed up. Everything indeed fits easily into a carry bag. It’s one piece of a three-piece set of Victorinox luggage from way back. There was a big suitcase, a small roller bag, and this carry bag, or carpet bag, or gym bag: like a giant purse. I’m pretty sure it fits under an airline seat, even full. We sold the big bag several years ago. I still have the roller bag and had thought about using it for this trip, but I wanted to try using the little one.

Everything I need for two weeks, on the assumption that I do hand-laundry every third night, fits. Including a nice adapter that converts a Euro two-prong plug into a US three-prong plug PLUS two USB charging ports. The chromebook and its power supply slips right in, and I have nice noise-canceling ear-buds to plug into the phone or the airplane audio; and speaking of the phone, I have a power brick that will charge the phone at least three times over. All in the bag, which weighs out at 16 pounds.

Day 288, FOPAL mostly

Monday, 9/16/2019

The weather guy on the TV news talked about light rain, and when I headed out the door at 7am for a run, indeed the ground was damp. By the time I’d finished the running part and was walking back down Homer street there was a nice light shower getting me wet. The temperature was nearly 70 regardless and it was quite comfortable and fun.

A bit before 10 I drove to FOPAL for the post-sale cleanup. This time I had been asked to do pre- and post-sale counts of my section, so I counted the books as well as inspecting each and deciding to keep it at the current price, reduce the price, or give up and send it to the bargain room. Bottom line, of the 366 books in the section before the sale, 86 were now gone and presumably sold. Don’t know if that’s good or bad. With an average marked price of about $3, that’s over $200 for the library, anyway.

That took two hours, then I spent another two hours sorting. By then I was a bit tired, so I bought a few groceries and headed home. Had a nap; went downstairs for a light supper; then back for a quiet evening. Feel a bit sub-par and weary. Hmm: over 10,000 steps today.

Day 285, paperwork, activities

Friday, 9/13/2019

Despite a forecast of high hot heat — and it did top 100 on my balcony later in the day, as reported by my totally accurate indoor/outdoor thermometer — I went for a run. I was out before 7:30 and back before 8:30 and it was very comfortable. Next I went to the Financial Advisors’ office to sign a bunch of papers. When we met on Monday we decided to put 1/3 of the house money with one of their favorite brokers, Kahn Bros., and 1/3 with another, Robotti. This requires opening two new Schwab accounts.

My IRA account has been managed by Kahn Bros. since forever, but you can’t just randomly add money to an IRA. So I have to create a new account to receive the money to be managed by Kahn. We had not had money managed by Robotti before, so that meant setting up yet another new account for them to run. Each of the brokers that my F.A.s use follows the Benjamin Graham “Value Investing” paradigm, but each has different methods and favors different parts of the market.

Anyway the Schwab paperwork to create an account takes at least four signatures and a couple of “initial here” items, and each brokerage has a disclosure agreement that takes a couple more. Then, the package needs to include proof that I’m the trustee of the family trust. The “Statement of Trust” document that the F.A.s had on file was out of date, superceded by the revisions following Marian’s death. So I went home and scanned the relevant pages of the current documents to PDF and emailed them. This was all managed and handled by the supremely competent and cheerful Cindy, who is the soul of that office.

Paperwork done, I put in an hour or so working on the novel. I’m in an easy part, basically doing a careful edit and slight modification of the parts I’ve already written. Removing one particular SF gizmo that I decided I didn’t like, while inserting a couple of clues that will be relevant to the ending I’ve outlined. And generally tidying up. I’m also reading Show Don’t Tell, one of the most practical and useful books on writing fiction I’ve read (and I’ve read a few). That motivates some of the edits I’m making.

About 2pm I started getting phone messages and emails from C.H. staff alerting us that the “chiller” that cools the ground and 3rd to 6th floors had broken down. We were advised to hydrate and if we felt any distress, to go to an upper floor lounge. Then there was a knock on the door, one of the nurses from the nursing wing was checking on each apartment on the floor to make sure we were OK. Actually I was quite comfortable. I had closed the drapes earlier and I don’t think the temperature got above 77 in my unit.

Today was the much-advertised Activity Fair, at which all the volunteer organizations have tables and try to get new members. I was interested in the A/V committee, who mainly provide people to run the sound (and video when necessary) in the auditorium. I’m supposed to get an email scheduling a training session.

I was accosted by the Chorus group who want me to come sing with them. Dubious, but I may try it. And I was hit on by Betty of the Writing group. They do a weekly thing where they send out a “prompt” — a sentence or something — and everyone writes something based on it, and they meet to read their creations. Hmmm. And by the editors of Scribble and Sketch, the in-house magazine, wanting contributions. Hmmm.

Because of the A/C breakdown, the Activity Fair in the Auditorium was managing attendance. They were monitoring the temp and if it got over 85, they’d have to cancel it. Meantime you had to wait at the door for someone to come out before going in, to keep the crowd small.

By 5pm the A/C was back online. At six I went down and didn’t like the look of the menu so I went out in the car to find supper. I was thinking of the restaurants at the Town and Country shopping center, but on the way I noticed Whole Foods, and said bleep that, I’ll just get a smoothie. And did.

Day 283, writing, FOPAL

Wednesday, 9/11/2019

Went for a run. After that I spent an hour on the YA book, and worked out the general outline of an ending. The problem had been, that I’d allowed my party of protagonists to split up and I needed a convincing reason for them to get back together in time to figure out and thwart the disastrous action planned by the villain. And I did, I see how it can all go down now. This was very satisfying. There is a positive endorphin rush that comes from working out a creative problem.

Then I spent another hour on Lisp. Then it was 11:30 and I went to FOPAL for a pleasant afternoon of sorting. I had meant to do four hours, but at 3pm my feet and back were hurting, so I called it a day.

In the evening I cleaned the interior of my printer, which has been smearing ink on printouts. Emboldened by a couple of youtube videos I got in there with tissues and paper towel and alcohol and sopped up the excess ink and cleaned the bottom of the print head.

Day 281, FOPAL, money

Monday, 9/9/2019

Went for a run first. Then to FOPAL where I found eight boxes of books for the computer section. It took just over two hours to do the culling and pricing. The monthly sale is this weekend so it was time to tidy up. I had an email asking section managers to do a pre-sale count. This makes good sense, to be able to report how many books sell from each section, but I’d not done it before.

After grabbing a bit of lunch at the grocery next door, I headed over to the financial advisors’ office. We worked out how much of the house money to keep as liquid reserve, and how to allocate the rest between the different brokers, and began the process of creating accounts and disbursing things.

Back home I spent some time on Lisp. I’ve finally gotten to the syntax for iteration and it is… well, the kindest thing is to say it is extremely general. To put it in my terms, a loop is encoded as

(do ( iterators ) ( test finals ) ( actions ) )

Doesn’t look so bad except that an iterator is a three-element list,

( var initial_value ( increment_expression ) )

and there may be more than one. test is a parenthesized expression which when it yields T (true) ends the loop, and finals is a series of parenthesized expressions to be executed at the end of the loop and determine the value of the loop. actions is the sequence of parenthesized expressions in the body of the loop. So, a simple loop to count 0..9, printing each one and returning NIL, comes to,

 (do ( (i 0 (+ i 1) ) )
     ( (> i 9) NIL)
     (format t "~A~%" i)
)

That’s the right number of parens, I just ran that and it runs.

Day 275, many small doings

Tuesday, 9/3/2019

First thing, went for a run. All normal. On return I tidied up then sat down to organize the info about the Tasso street sale. Made a little spreadsheet showing the gross sale price and all the things that could be charged against it, commissions, taxes, and all the various contractors who were employed in preparing it for sale. Bottom line, it appears the net proceeds are just a shade under the appraised value as of December 2018. So there probably won’t be any capital gains charged; maybe a bit of a capital loss.

I put an hour into Zooniverse. Then Craig called; the tech squad had a request for help and he wanted me to come along. The caller, Grace, coincidentally lives in the apartment next door to where I’ll be moving at the end of the week. While Craig figured out why her Comcast email wasn’t coming up automatically like it used to, she told me how that next-door apartment was recently fitted with a new toilet, one of the high-efficiency kind that flushes with a great swooshing. Since that bathroom (soon to be my bathroom) backs up to hers, she hears the toilet whenever it is used. Knowing that is going to cramp my style a bit. Whenever I get up in the night to pee, I’ll be maybe waking Grace up. Well, it isn’t essential to flush then. It can wait to the morning.

After that I pursued a couple of items that have been in the back of my mind. One is to get a proper comfy reclining chaise for the deck. Early on I brought back a wicker chair from Cost Plus but it really isn’t comfortable for lounging. Several years back Marian obtained two very comfortable metal chairs for our back yard. Both of us napped in them often. They had deteriorated a bit and I let them go in the sale. Now I wanted one back, but what were they called? I looked at the outdoor furniture on the Pottery Barn and Crate and Barrel sites, but their idea of a “chaise” didn’t look right. Browsing Amazon and finally spotted what looked right. Turns out the key phrase is “zero gravity” chair.

A bit more searching; it appears they are stocked at good old Walmart. Well, not at the Walmart in Mountain View. So back to Amazon and just order one already. It’s only $50 and will be here Thursday.

The other items related to the upcoming trip to Greece. I figure to pack light and do my own laundry, which means, quick drying clothes. I have quick-dry casual pants on the way, but I have in my drawer just two quick-dry briefs. Plus, I’d like to have a USB charger with the Euro style plug, and/or a Euro style adapter into which I could plug a USB charger with US prongs. So I went off to the travel store at Stanford Shopping Center. Success there on a couple of pairs of quick-dry briefs, but they didn’t have the ideal adapter/charger combo that I was sure must exist.

So back to Amazon again and of course, there it was: plugs into a Euro wall socket, offers two US style outlets and two USB ports. So I can charge the phone and plug in the adapter for the Macbook, and also the charger for the camera battery, if I decide to carry my Nikon. All in one small cheap device.

There’s a theme here. Both cases, I knew what I wanted, and went looking for it at local merchants, and didn’t find it, so back to Amazon Prime.

At 6 I went downstairs to join Lily and her sister Helen who had invited me to join them for supper. Also invited, Tammy, who moved in the same day I did, and Michael, the newer new guy who moved in a week later. Also Lynn. Turns out, Michael lost his wife last July, and in December Lynn lost her husband and Tammy, her older brother. So we were the bereavement table, for a while.

Day 271, getting stuff done

Friday, 8/29/2019

Wednesday I had found various things niggling at my mind as needing doing so made a to-do list that got longer and longer, so after a run this morning I sat down to-do. First off was the laundry. While that was running I paid two credit card bills, filed some odds and ends on the desk.

Then wrote to Katherine the Insurance Person telling her that (a) my house is gone, you can close out my homeowner’s and earthquake insurance and please how much do I get back? and (b) if it makes a difference on my car insurance, please note that the car is now garaged in a secure gated garage every day; and (c) yes I want renter’s insurance but I don’t think I need coverage for $100,000 of property value as shown in your quote, maybe half that?

Then as I had half-promised, I wrote a nice five-star Yelp review for Chuck the realtor. He really deserved five stars, for all the back-and-forth and planning and phoning and texting that went into this sale. Which, I remind myself, he did while managing other clients at the same time.

Then I sent an Amazon gift card thank-you note to Deborah the Estate Sale lady, thanking her for being alert and encouraging the couple during the estate sale, who eventually became the new buyers.

Then went through my last eight months of credit card payments to try to get a handle on how much I spend. The point of that exercise was that I have an appointment with the Bob the Finance Guy on the 9th, where we will decide how to allocate the proceeds of the home sale. Bob and his partner Marshall have a recommended procedure where one keeps five years living expenses in a rotating set of liquid investments, apart from the rest of one’s capital. Well, to set that up we need to know what a year’s expenses are. Adding up the average of my credit card payments over the last 8 months, plus my Channing House rent, suggests that to maintain my present life-style I need… well, I don’t want to put the number here. But suffice it to say that by Federal poverty standards I am living very well as a family of four. So I sent an email to Bob telling him this info as prep. material for the upcoming appointment.

What else? Oh, I have it in mind to buy the painting that I saw on Day 154, Eight Pelicans. I had emailed the artist, Carol Aust, a few days ago and gotten tentative times to visit her studio. As she’s in Oakland I thought it would be fun to get Darlene and Jessea to go along with me. So I called Darlene, but they are going off for a few days. We decided the 20th would work. So I emailed Carol asking if we could come on that day. Later she replied that would be fine, so that’s booked.

By now the laundry was dry so I folded that and then it was lunch time.

After lunch and a quick nap I decided on two events I’d clipped out of the Thursday entertainment insert in the paper. One was Eric Clapton at the new Chase Center in SF. I checked the google map and it is a doable thing, it’s less than a mile walk or Lyft from the Caltrain depot. There are tickets but they cost just… If Eric was the pitcher, a nosebleed-level seat outfield of third base is $90. First balcony at the coach’s box angle, which I’d consider acceptable, is $325. Nope for now. I might reconsider the cheap seat. I mean, it’s rock and roll, so no problem hearing him; and surely he’d turn to his left once or twice so you could see his face through your binoculars…

Second was Momix in San Jose. I have good memories of seeing Momix at, I think, Memorial Auditorium at Stanford, probably 20 years ago. And this was quite reasonable, a good seat on a Monday night, $50. So I booked that one.

And now my monster to-do list was almost to-done.

I had seen an ad for Skechers shoes mentioning “wide fit”. I am having some trouble with a corn on my right foot and both my feet are odd-shaped so, how about it? So I drove to Valley Fair shopping center and bought a pair of Skechers. That took a couple of hours, round trip. About 6pm I went down to supper and decided I didn’t like anything on the menu. So I got back in the car and on a whim, drove to Palo Alto Pizza on California Ave and had a delicious small pizza and a beer. Brought home a couple of pieces for breakfast.

Day 269, docent disappointment, FOPAL, escrow closes

Wednesday, 8/28/2019

Went for a run in the morning. Initially told myself, “listen to your body”, bearing in mind I was not 100% yesterday. However when I got up, my temperature was 97.7, i.e. the Shingrex Fever is gone. Started easy and thought of cutting off one loop, but finally did the whole usual course and felt ok.

Around 10 I got a call from a lady at Chicago Title; she couldn’t figure out how to do a wire transfer to my Schwab account. I quickly gave her the number of Cindy, the knows-all does-all person at my financial advisor’s office. Shortly after I got copied on an email from Cindy, and soon after that, my Schwab account showed that my “personal value” (sum of all accounts) had increased by 112%. Not a bad gain for one day.

So I definitively am no longer a homeowner. That was one of the first firm decisions I made when, a bit more than a year ago, I started thinking about how I would order my life in the likely event that Marian did not survive. I formally started the process about seven months ago. Now it is finally achieved. I felt a brief flutter of uncertainty, almost a panic, realizing that now I have no other place than this one. The Tasso street house had not been my residence since I drove away from it June 15th. From the end of July, when the estate sale cleared everything out and emptied the place, returning was no longer even an unlikely fallback option. But now, it’s irrevocably gone.

The feeling didn’t last. Thinking about it several hours later, I don’t feel panic or uncertainty; just a bit of the familiar grief at having shed another piece of the old life.

I was scheduled to lead a tour at 11:30, a private tour of 30 Apple employees. Looking forward to talking to techies. And I had been told that semi-famous Apple guy Bud Tribble would be in the group. So I went to the Museum and waited, and waited, and they didn’t show. The desk guy called the contact number; someone answered and said, “I’ll check and call you back,” and didn’t call back. Huh. I left at 12.

I had not intended to go to FOPAL today, thinking a full tour would be enough exertion, but since there was no tour, I went back to CH, changed out of my red docent shirt and went to FOPAL. There I put up new shelf labels in the Computer section that I had made last weekend, using a bigger font so they are easier to read. Went through three boxes of books and kept almost half of them. Then did sorting for three hours. My steps for the day: 12,061, 5.4mi.

After supper there was a jazz concert in the auditorium, a local group, the leader and I think the pianist both friends of C.H. residents. They were ok but I didn’t stay for the whole show.

Day 267, run, relief, bridge, shot, FOPAL, realty, dinner, outage

Monday, 8/26/2019

First thing in the day I went for a run. A bit over 30 minutes of jogging, and it felt good. Not just ok, actually good.

I was scheduled to play bridge starting at 10. I was showered and dressed by 9am so I sat down to face my fears, or at least, my discomfort: dealing with the rejection of that

Road Scholar (RS) insurance claim.

To recap, I had scheduled a tour starting September 6. Later I realized that was the day I had to transition to my temporary apartment for the upgrade, and also that the house sale might push toward that date. So I re-booked the tour for 9/28, but unfortunately did this just too late for it to be free. Instead, RS gave me half credit for the later tour and I had to pay the additional half, about $3200. So I filed a claim with the trip insurance I’d bought, and a couple days ago, got the rejection of that claim — even though I thought I had been covered by the RS “for any reason” cancellation policy.

Now I went deeper into the RS website and found that the “for any reason” clause is not part of the insurance policy, so the insurer is not required to approve the claim on that basis, only on the allowed reasons in the policy. The clause is a Road Scholar policy that applies to clients when they have bought a trip insurance policy at the time of booking the trip. The policy is, if you cancel a trip “for any reason” and the insurance doesn’t apply, they give you the value of the unpaid claim as a credit, under the small restriction it can only be used to book a different trip.

When I understood this, I called RS and a cheerful customer service rep looked up my account and confirmed that, yes, they did show a $3200 credit that I could use against any other RS trip in the next 15 months. OK. Done. I’m pretty sure I will want another RS trip sometime in 2020, so… ok.

This was a big emotional relief for me. I had been dreading trying to protest the insurance claim via email, finding documents to bolster my case, etc. That’s all off the table, I won’t lose the money and I don’t have to do any more to save it. So I went off

to play Bridge

with a light heart. Craig is a serious bridge player and, since we were bottom pair last time I partnered him, he wanted to meet before the scheduled 10:30 start so we could go over our convention card. There have been a number of small changes and tweaks since Marian and I studied bridge techniques.

Craig’s group plays tournament style bridge, with pre-made hands in “boards” that are played by all tables, with your standing at the end depending on whether on at least a few hands you did better (e.g. an overtrick) or worse (e.g. going down on a game contract) than the people at the other table. Table singular since we only had eight players, two tables.

Almost to lunch time one of the other players announced he didn’t feel well, and went off to the Wellness Wing to get looked at. So we went early to lunch and Craig scared up another player, Ruth. She was glad to join us because it was her move-out day, and she had been looking at a boring day sitting in a guest unit while the contents of her unit were moved.

We finished the last board about 2:40. (That evening I got Craig’s results email; he and I were once again bottom pair of the four. I am just not that good a bridge player to do the tournament game. I wouldn’t mind playing casual bridge, but there are currently no casual games being organized, although I understand there are couples who meet to play regularly in their private units. I can do one of two things: play a lot in some of the many online bridge games and try to get better; or perhaps organize my own casual game. Or forget bridge. TBS.) So now off to

my Shingles shot.

Multiple people have independently recommended that I get a Shingles booster. The previous Herpes Zoster vaccine has proved ineffective, and there’s a new one. I got an email from PAMF telling me that a limited supply of the new vaccine was available and recommending I book for one, which I did last weekend, for 3:15pm today. Then Craig asked me to play bridge; but I was pretty sure I could get to the Los Altos location by 3:15 after bridge, and so it turned out.

The list of possible side-effects for the new vaccine that I had to sign is pretty long and has some really dire symptoms. Most common is arm pain and possibly a slight fever.

From there I went to FOPAL to clean up the Computer section. It was a typical haul, four boxes sent to the bargain room, about 30 books priced and shelved. While I was there I got a call from Chuck. The escrow will pretty surely be closing tomorrow, and he wanted to request a favor. He’s had a good year, and would like to defer the receipt of his commission on my sale to 2020, when possibly conditions won’t be as good and his taxes would be lower.

I guess this is OK, although it does mean that I would receive the amount of his commission as part of my receipts out of escrow, and would sign a no-interest promissory note to him — I think? It’s a tax dodge, but as long as my hands will be clean, I don’t mind doing him this favor. I called my financial people, and everybody was in meetings or out of the office, so I left a voice mail for Howard. Who unfortunately didn’t call me back. So I headed back to CH for

Patti’s Farewell Dinner

Patti had invited me, Craig and Diane, Jerry and Betty, and Gwen, to join her to celebrate the eve of her move-out to a different floor. People have various reactions to moving. Me, I’ve only been here 2 months. I don’t mind the move. I really like my unit with its Eastern view and floods of light all day, and will be very happy to get back to it next January. But I’ve got no big emotional investment in it. Others, like Patti, feel like it’s an exile; she’s concerned about her plants and other items, and feels like she’s being separated from her friends.

So after I’d returned to my room and was browsing Reddit about 8pm, a goose (as I learned next morning) flew into some power lines nearby and blacked out the middle of downtown Palo Alto. People took this pretty easily. No running and shouting. There was, I think, someone trapped in an elevator; at least, I heard the elevator alarm bell being rung. Don’t know how that was resolved.

I went to bed at 8:30, and woke up at 9:30 when the lights came on again. Turned them off, went back to bed.