Day 106 – plants and books and termites

Went to the Creamery for a burger and coffee. Breaking with tradition I did not order a chocolate/chocolate shake. Just a burger with coleslaw (not fries) and coffee.

Walking from my car to the Creamery I noticed

Mac’s Smoke Shop

and remembered the many times Marian and I would browse the magazine racks there. It’s been a long time since I bought magazines on a regular basis; I stopped doing that even before I stopped buying physical books. But I remembered one of my favorite magazines for occasional purchase, WoodenBoat. I think I bought WoodenBoat for the first time in an airport gift shop, and bought occasional copies for years after, when traveling, or at Mac’s. I always found the highly detailed, loving accounts of boat restoration to be deeply relaxing. I could sink into (well, poor metaphor there) a copy of WoodenBoat for a couple of hours.

So for the heck of it I walked into Mac’s and scanned the magazine shelves. I wasn’t even certain the magazine still existed, but on about the fifth rack I checked, there it was, and in good health, too, a hefty perfect-bound block of pages, solid in the hand, full of ads for WoodenBoat classes and WoodenBoat boat plans and even WoodenBoat t-shirts and hoodies! It is clearly surviving in the Internet age. I bought a copy, and one article occupied the whole of my dinner.

On return home I found an email from Katie the

tax person

, saying that my submitted workbook and documents look good. Yay me!

Watched a documentary on the fall of Theranos, then took WoodenBoat to bed with me.

Monday, 3/18/2019

Up and about. Started the day with a run. Then wrote checks for the cleaning lady coming tomorrow, and while I had the checkbook out, one for the hairdresser I’ll see on Wednesday. (Now if I can just remember to take the check with me on the day.) Watered

the plants;

I’m happy to say all the remaining ones are doing well. On day 2 I threw out the bathroom ferns I’d never liked; and of course Beau and two philodendrons went to Liz’s place. Of the remaining eight, I’m pretty sure I will take at least four with me when I move.

Spent two hours

scanning

20 slides; only about 40 left to do. The slides in this part of the pile were from a trip we’d taken across Canada in our first RV back in 1989. That slide group had never been scanned, which surprises me; I had scanned the groups for all our major road trips, I thought. But not that one. Well, getting to it now. Somewhat emotional viewing this group; they were from a time when both of us were strong enough to go for reasonable-length hikes, something not true in the past decade.

After lunch I decided to drop down to

FOPAL

and see how the Computer section was doing. The sorters had delivered four boxes since I was last there, so I culled those and priced the better ones. Most of the 50 or so books I priced I marked for 3 or 4 or 7 dollars, but four were “high value”, meaning they had market prices over $25. These go on a special shelf to be sold separately. One little pocket-sized “reference book of graphic algorithms” has a going price over $75, who’d’a thunk it? With the — or, I guess it is now “my” — computer section tidied up I came on home.

There I boxed up all the remaining books from our collection of paperbacks. There is one tiny section of stuff I need to review, and a collection of Women’s Basketball books that I need to think about, and that will be it. All the, what, something like 1,000 volumes that we’d saved because we might want to re-read them “someday”? Gone.

I also cleaned out a drawer of computer-related stuff. Man, how many USB cables does one person need? Some items to trash; some for the sale; a few set aside to keep.

Termites.

About 3pm there was a knock at the door; a young man with not great English, and a car that had “Fumigator Services” on the side, said he needed to measure the house so that the termite inspection report could be completed. Uh? I said go ahead, then emailed Chuck. He replied quickly that yes, the termite inspection had found termites, and it was legitimate that an estimate for a fumigation would be in the report. He apologized for the lack of notice, said he’d tried to tell these services to contact him before going to the house.

Well, so there are termites. No huge surprise; we had a termites in 2005 and the house was tented then. Our first clue then of a serious infestation was when we noticed little crumbs of dark-brown sawdust piling up on the table beside Marian’s favorite chair. They were working in one of the exposed beams that make our living room ceiling so charming, and crapping down on the table.

Nothing so blatant now; I presume the inspector found their little tunnels running up the inside of the foundation, perhaps. However, this is a serious strike against the idea of selling the house to owner-occupiers, and greatly raises the odds of selling to a developer. The cost of a fumigation will surely be in 5 figures. I could look up the receipt from 2005 but you know? I don’t care. IThMISEP and they’re welcome to it.

Supper; a bit of television; now I think I’ll go to bed and relax myself by finishing that issue of WoodenBoat magazine. (Hey, better than alcohol.)

Day 105, Sunday drive

Sunday, 3/17/2019

Had a lovely sleep, waking only once around 5am and sleeping unusually late, 7:15. Began the day, as has recently become my wont, by walking to the coffee shop. Going and coming, as also usual, I was

pondering

the difference between the new life and the old one. We all live within constraints that bend our actions. Some constraints are imposed by the physical world and our bodies, some by society, but many constraints are voluntarily assumed. Marriage brings a thousand little constraints, so many things you wouldn’t do, or do differently, because your partner won’t or can’t do it thus; and all voluntary.

When the marriage is gone, those particular constraints are lifted, but it takes time to understand (in the gut, not just in the mind) that this is not a bad thing, not a loss, but only a change. So why are my eyes damp?

Walking into the yard I notice a little failed plant. Well, not a failure; it is still alive and in fact blooming. I don’t remember its name; it has the unusual feature of blooming direct from dormancy, little purple starbursts on straw-colored stems, without a leaf in sight. But the three of these have never thrived and even when in full leaf, look as if they are about to shrivel and blow away. So? Well, Marian selected these plants for those spots when the garden was remade in 2012, and she always watched them and worried about them. Now I am trying to resolve my feelings about the plants. How Marian felt about those plants is history. Does it have any relevance going forward? How should I feel about them, or, does it matter that I don’t particularly like them and don’t care if they live or die? I don’t have any resolution for these questions.

With time to kill I decided to

pull weeds.

In 2012 the reworked yard was mulched; no more lawn. And yards of mulch have been put on it since. Just the same, every winter the rains bring many little green shoots popping up. Pulling them is easy, and I used to regularly go out and spend an hour pulling them while listening to a podcast. This year until now I’d studiously ignored them on the basis of ISMISEP. Or as it should be by now, IFMISEP or even IThMISEP. However I realized that the sprinkle of little green things alongside the walk to the front door could make the place look neglected to potential buyers. So I spent an hour pulling up a couple hundred little green sprouts. During this a

neighbor

stopped by to chat. Steve, the doctor next door, and I hadn’t spoken in many months. He remarked how he used to see us sitting in the living room and wondered if Marian had had to move to some facility? He hadn’t heard she’d died. I thought all our neighbors knew, but I guess not. So we chatted a while about this and that; I think he was reassuring himself that his geezer neighbor was getting on OK.

At eleven, Suzanne’s pal

Louise

came to continue her evaluation of Marian’s jewelry. She is being incredibly generous with her time, putting many hours into this and promising to deliver a complete report on Friday, and not asking for payment. Louise has also remodeled her current house in Seattle, so we naturally ended up talking about the things Chuck thinks might be done to spiff up this house.

Like me, she doesn’t see any problem with having a door between the stove and refrigerator. But she had a great idea for the bedroom, where Chuck’s design consultant Amy wanted to put a tub and toilet. Louise agreed that people, as she put it, pay ridiculous sums in order they can go from the bed to the toilet in five steps. But she thought it would be better to make the current walk-in closet into a bathroom, with a European style shower, and then she remembered the right phrase, “a wet room”. A wet room (according to that link) is

a bathroom with an open shower… with a shower floor that is flush with the rest of the bathroom … generally completely tiled and water is handled through a drainage system that serves the entire space…

Such a room would fit nicely in the closet space, while the passage between the bedroom proper and the closet/wet-room — space I’ve used as my office for decades — could be furnished as an elegant his-n-hers closet area.

While Louise was working I started cleaning up my

MacBooks,

of which I have 4. I have fully moved my daily life to Godot, so there are two MacBook Airs, Marian’s old one that was getting flaky and the newer one we got for her a year ago, and my rather tired MacBook Pro that Godot replaced. So while Louise rated gems and tested gold, I created a bootable USB drive with Mac OS X “Mojave” on it, and did a disk erase and clean install of the OS on the newer Air and the Pro. There was a little qualm in finally erasing Marian’s machine, but I am confident I moved all significant files to the cloud weeks ago. I’ve needed to refer to nothing on it since December.

After Louise left I decided the weather was so nice — the second day of spring-like temperatures in a row — I should

get the hell out

of the house. I drove up Page Mill road to Skyline where there is a trailhead, and went for a mile and a half walk on Russian Ridge. I took a panorama from a hill but in fact, the best view came a little later, as I was driving North on Skyline. Behold the absolute essence of California coast springtime:

green_road

I don’t even know what that road is, or how to get to it. I was surprised to see a paved road when looking West from Skyline drive. (Edit: probably Rapley Ranch Road.)

Anyway I came down 84 through Woodside, enjoying how the Prius plug-in charged 6 or 7 miles-worth of power in its battery on the descent. Now home, I am thinking about going out again for supper somewhere.

Day 104, two tours

Edit: I forgot to mention that last night, I went to a TheatreWorks production, Marie and Rosetta, about the life of Gospel and Rhythm and Blues singer Sister Rosetta Tharp. Very nice production, good music, and a terrific performance by a knockout young actress, Marissa Rudd. She could be a star in time.

Saturday, 3/16/2019

I had signed up to lead one tour at the Museum at 2pm. Yesterday Katherina, the volunteer manager, put out an urgent call for somebody to lead a private tour at 12:30. I like private tours and I was going to be there anyway, so I took it. So after a lazy morning I headed out for the museum. The private tour turned out to be a family group, mom, dad, several nice kids from 10 to 16, roughly. Apparently they’d come early, early enough to catch the 1401 demo at 11:00, which they had enjoyed a lot. They professed to enjoy my tour, also.

After finishing that tour I walked out across the parking lot to the 7-11 to get something for lunch. Several people in our lot were complaining; apparently thieves had broken the windows in three or four cars. My car was fine, but it is unsettling to have this happen in a familiar place. After a snack I led the 2pm tour, about 15 people.

On the way home I stopped at the FOPAL building, mostly to pick up a couple of empty boxes to bring back full. But I went in and looked at the Computer section. There were about five boxes of sorted books. I think I may go in there on Tuesday afternoon and do some culling and pricing.

At home I had an email from Kathy at the tax accountant’s, asking if I had sent in the workbook yet. I was going to wait until I’d talked to the advisor Tuesday, but this tipped me over, and I went and clicked “send to preparer”. Answered Kathy’s email asking that she check it soon as I wasn’t sure I’d done it right.

Not sure if I mentioned this before: with Marian’s demise, there are three important documents that need to be re-made: my “advanced health care directive”, “nomination of conservator”, and “general durable power of attorney”. All of these named Marian as the person responsible for me if I am incapacitated. In all three, my nephew Dennis was first alternate. Now I need to do these documents over. I had emailed Dennis asking if he would be the first in line, and today he responded he’d be “honored”, so that’s set.

I also called Marian’s cousin Darlene, who I like a lot and has been very supportive, and asked if she’d mind being the first alternate and she said “absolutely”. So that’s set, and hopefully I can get those drafted and done next Tuesday.

Day 102, cataloging at Shustek

Went to Armadillo Willy’s for a big plate of pulled pork and a beer.

Thursday, 3/14/2019

Took the IBM songbook and went to the Museum’s Shustek documentation center in Fremont. Chris, one of the curators, was there and immediately recognized the songbook but thought we already had one. A search of the catalog showed we did, but not the 1931 edition. Then he noticed what I had not: on the top of the flyleaf in pencil was one of the Museum’s accession numbers. This same book had at one time been cataloged in the collection! A search on that number turned up the fact that some prior curator had deemed it inessential and returned it to its donor. Chris thought probably it should go back into the collection.

I worked with Toni to catalog a bunch of stuff of no great interest. The most interesting was parts of a 1989 attempt at a pen computer with software based on MS-DOS.

Looking up at the intense green of the hills behind Fremont I thought again of taking a scenic drive in them before the green fades. Then thought about how the idea of a solo scenic drive is so very much less appealing than the thought of a scenic drive shared with someone else. Why? The scenery is the same! The eyes looking at it are the same!

Think about that.

Day 94, packing, real estate, FOPAL

I omitted to mention yesterday that when I was at the gym, I was accosted by a man about my own age who I kind of recognized. He identified himself as Mike F., an old IBM colleague who worked with Marian for many years. He very kindly expressed condolences and commented on how everyone knew Marian as “really, really smart” and “a programmer’s programmer”. That was nice.

Wednesday 3/6/2019

Since Chuck and his contractor will be here at 10, there isn’t time for a run — I tell myself. That isn’t strictly true; if I got off my butt and out the door at 8 there’d be time. Or I can take a run after they leave; how’s that for a concept? I’ll consider it. Right now it’s 8:20, and I’m dressed and finished with one of the two “things” on my schedule for today,

packing,

which brought up a couple of emotional reactions. Tomorrow morning I will leave for a long weekend in Vegas (baby), to watch the PAC-12 WBB tournament. Eleven games in four days, whee! Probably won’t watch all, or at least will probably walk out early from ones that turn into a runaway. But today I wanted to make sure I had everything ready.

Packing for one is stupidly easy. Everything fits in a nice little carry-on bag that fits under the seat, so I don’t even have to worry about space in the overhead. Which is a good thing, because I’m flying SouthWest, and I didn’t check in until half an hour after the 24-hour check-in window opened, so I’m number A46, the 50th or 60th person (allowing for gold members, servicemen, women with babies, etc) to board the plane. Don’t care, it’s a 90-minute flight and my bag fits under the seat hahaha.

Inevitably I contrast this to prior trips, where the two of us used at least a roller bag, two for a longer trip, plus a computer bag for our two laptops. We’d check the bag, especially in recent years where we had to go to the desk to check in in order to get the wheelchair Marian needed to travel to the gate. Now, in a moment of release (similar to what I felt back in the first week when I realized I could again walk to Sunday coffee), I realized that I can just print my boarding pass at home, pick up my bag, and bop on over to the security line without a pause. That’s nice.

Prior to that realization I had another moment, not exactly of grief but of combined relief and pity. I went to the “travel drawer” (oh jeez, yet another drawer I need to clean out) to get one of the small mesh bags we used to pack toiletries. The one I picked up had something in it: oh, Marian’s first-aid supplies.

For most of this millennium, she suffered from fragile skin: her skin would split or tear seemingly under a hard look, or at least any small collision with a corner of anything. So she always had to be ready with bandaids, tape, gauze, to patch a split. She handled this as she did all her other maladies, with intelligence and calm practicality. Your skin breaks; you swear quietly, patch it, and carry on. So one of the toiletry bags had this double-handful of assorted patching materials. I was so pleased to be able to throw all that out on her behalf. At least that isn’t an issue any more. As I finished writing that I saw Chuck pulling up so time for

Real estate talk.

Chuck brought his favorite contractor, Vassily, and we looked long at the kitchen and talked about how one could — or mostly how one could not — upgrade it. It bugs Chuck and his designer Amy that there is a door between the kitchen and the refrigerator:

It hasn’t been a functional problem for 45 years. The annoyance of having to open that door to reach the fridge, and close it to reach the pantry that’s behind it, was so slight it never occurred to us to do anything about it. Turns out that was smart, because in Vassily’s opinion, it can’t be done. One, the wall in which that door sits is a bearing wall for the sloping roof above and it would be hard to remove it. Two, if you keep the wall but do other work, because there is a furnace beyond it, the city will make you upgrade that door to a “20-minute fire door” which would mean replacing the frame and the door. If you keep the wall and try to put the fridge in the kitchen it replaces some of the counter, and anyway the counters are 24″ or less deep, so the refrigerator sticks out and you have a problem opening it. You could maybe put the fridge next to the stove where the pantry is, but then you lose all the shelf space in the pantry, plus, having a fridge abutting a stove is kind of weird.

I really don’t care; as I said several times (as much to myself as to them) “I won’t be living here, so I don’t care what you do.” But the decision to do such work does impact me, as I went over with Chuck after Vassily left. If they do remodeling, it can’t start until I move out, and then it will take at least a month (probably more, because that’s how this shit always goes) to finish. And that delays the selling of the house by that much.

We talked about the implications of that. If I move into C.H. they will charge 10% on the unpaid balance of the entry fee, which would come to circa $4000/month until the house closes escrow and I can pay the balance off. But Chuck says, if the upgrade work adds $100K to your sale price, you come out ahead.

Another option that we talked about is that I could go ahead and move out and take a temporary spot in another ILF (one with a month-to-month contract and no entry fee). Again that would cost circa $4000/month until such time as C.H. has an opening, but the work on the house and its sale could proceed.

Against that idea is my reluctance to change my address twice. But then I had the thought that perhaps I could change my postal address to C.H. right now. I need to ask Kim Krebs about that. She said that as soon as I paid my application fee (last Monday) I would be a “member” in the sense that I would get their newsletter and could attend any of their events. Maybe I could start converting all my various accounts to that as my postal address now. In which case I would not have to change addresses twice — only move all my earthly goods twice.

With this possibility in mind I asked Chuck to get me a referral to his favorite estate sale manager. I’d like to get a handle on that situation. Anyway, it’s all very complicated. And so off to FOPAL with three boxes of books.

next day… forgot to hit “Publish” on this. Also, forgot to note that since the FOPAL book sale is coming up this weekend, the sorting room is really crowded, so the three boxes of books stayed in the back of the car for next time.

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 90, Shustek and old movies

Thursday, 2/28/2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Day 86, flat tire and a game

Sunday, 2/24/2019

I tried something new for my Sunday morning coffee. Going to a coffee shop on Sunday morning to read the paper was a ritual for Marian and me for decades. I’ve written earlier in this series about the experiences, both positive and negative, around doing it without her.

A constant so far has been that I would do the NYT crossword at home, before going out for coffee and to read the rest of the paper. But that sequence was a consequence of the fact that Marian liked to sleep in, and I didn’t. So I would get up and spend an hour doing the crossword and futzing with the internet; then when she got up we’d go out.

So, um… I’ve no reason to wait now. So today I got up, dressed, and walked to the coffee shop at 7am, where I read the paper and did the puzzle in comfort, with a scone and a cappuccino. Not exactly an earth-shaking revolution, but still, one more break with the past.

At noon I went out to go to the final SWBB game of the year, and found that the car’s left rear tire was flat. I had noticed a low-tire-pressure warning yesterday, but I looked at the tires before I went in to the movie yesterday afternoon, and they looked alright. I’m glad it held up for the return trip from San Jose, 75mph up I-280 last night.

But, what to do now? The plug-in hybrid has no spare (no room because of the large battery in the trunk) and anyway I wanted to get going. So I called a Lyft. At the game I met with Harriet and her visitor, Bridget, who were using my pair of tickets while I sat in her single seat. She agreed to give me a lift home.

The game was against ASU, and the Sun Devils are usually a tougher opponent that the UA Wildcats who came so close to beating us Friday night. But this game went Stanford’s way early. They had a modest lead at the half, and in the third quarter blew it up to 20+ points and cruised to the end.

This was Senior Day, the last home game of the season (ignoring the fact that Stanford is almost certain to host the first two games of the NCAAs) and I had a bit of trouble controlling my emotions. I kept remembering how Marian had hoped to last out this season, and how pleased she’d have been to reach Senior Day and applaud Marta, Shannon and Alanna who she’d watched grow up for four years. So I couldn’t have talked coherently for a while, but fortunately had no reason to talk.

After the game Harriet wanted to show Bridget the outside of the Cantor Museum and the Rodin sculpture garden, so I walked along with them to that. Then she drove me home where I made an appointment for a mobile tire repair outfit to come tomorrow afternoon, then had a pleasant evening watching TV.

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 74, Scanning and Channing House

Tuesday, 2/12/2019

The refurb-Macbook seller is being extremely nice about my ordering the wrong kind of laptop. I don’t have details yet but they are quite willing to exchange what I actually ordered for something that sounds like what I intended to order.

I started out for a run but the temperature was so low, 41º, which, I know, would be quite comfy for people in some parts of the world, but I quickly found it too cold for running, even with a jacket on. No, I don’t have any sweat pants. So I cut it short, a bit under a half mile.

I scanned one picture of my father that had turned up in the pile of pictures I sorted through with Jean on Day 70. That day had yielded a little wad of old pics that I need to digitize and share with Jean, and this was the first. But looking where to store it in my Pictures folder structure, I realized there are some shortcomings in how pictures related to my own history are organized. I need to spend an hour sorting that out before scanning more.

Then I worked my way half-way through the biggest slide group of all, “120 Big Loop of 00”. In ’00 we went on a six-week ride in our van across the South to Memphis, up to Chicago, West through the Dakotas to Seattle and home. The slides are excellent documentation of that trip, if one wanted to relive it. Pictorially they aren’t yielding much.

At 1:40 I headed out for a meeting with Kim Krebs, the marketing director at

Channing House

where I learned the nitty-gritty about pricing and availability.

Availability is slim at the moment, owing to the on-going upgrade project that Craig told me about when I toured the place on Day 50. When that finishes in two years (!) Kim will suddenly have 20-odd units to sell — the units now being used to relocate tenants as one floor at a time is cleared for remodeling. Still, units also become available in “the natural cycle” as she put it. People die or make a permanent move to the nursing wing at fairly regular intervals. As a unit becomes available, Kim offers it to the next person on her wait list that is interested in that size of unit.

There are actually eleven sizes of unit: four sizes of studios; four sizes of 1BRs; and three sizes of 2BR/2bath units. The only vacant unit at the moment is an Alcove, which is a jumbo studio. She showed me this unit. Picture a rectangle about 25×30 feet. One wall is mostly glass and opens on a 5-foot-wide deck. The inner wall has a walk-in closet and a bathroom. There’s a minimal kitchen, more of a wet bar, by the door. (“We could install a cook-top,” Kim said.)

I’m sure that a good decorator could work out some kind of room divider arrangement that would give that space the feel of a living room plus semi-private bedroom, but I can’t imagine how to do it. Although this unit is ready now for anyone who wants it, I think I would hold out for a real 1BR. (Although again, the floor plans for a 1BR look a little confining, with about 700 sq.ft. divided almost equally between living and bedroom. Maybe the Alcove could work — if I only knew a good designer…)

I now have the official rate sheet. Both the entry fee and the monthly fee are different for each floor plan, and different for higher versus lower floors. For a single person the entry fee ranges from $200K for the smallest, lowest studio, to $500K for a medium 1BR, to $800K for the biggest 1BR on an upper floor. These are not outrageous numbers, given what they buy: lifetime occupancy with “continuing care” at no added cost (“We are a CCRC with a Type A contract” was how Kim worded it; here’s an explanation of that.)

There’s a monthly fee that also varies with the unit type and floor (the rate sheet is quite elaborate!). The range of monthly fees goes from $3600 at the lowest to $10K at the highest. For a medium 1BR it’s about $5500 in 2019. Kim said these fees typically rise 3%-4% each year.

A very interesting financial point is that about $2000 of each month’s fee can be attributed to “medical expense” and thus deducted from one’s taxes. Also, approximately 25% of an entry fee can be a deductible medical expense. I will discuss this with my advisors when I talk to them; I’m not sure what the net effect would be on my taxes.

We talked about the issue of “bridging” between the entry fee and the sale of one’s home. Webster House offers a 90-day interest-free note (a fact that seemed to be news to Kim). Channing House’s policy is 20% down on move-in, and the rest can be paid later, but they charge an annual rate of 10% on the unpaid balance.

Let’s say it takes 60 days to complete the sale of one’s house. The numbers for the $500K fee for a 1BR would work out like so: 20% or $100K down, $400K borrowed for 60 days at 10%, which if I do the numbers right, means paying about $6600 in interest. One would have to consider carefully (or actually, one’s financial advisor could get out the old calculator and do some real work) whether it would be cheaper to liquidate some stocks and pay the whole fee up front. (Bearing in mind that up to $120K of the entry fee is deductible, which ought to offset some capital gains. Not simple!)

In any case, Kim’s advice on selling is to not wait until a unit is available to start the selling process. She recommends getting your real estate person involved now to talk about what needs to be done to expedite a sale when it’s time. As it happens, I’ll be talking to one potential agent this coming Sunday, so I’ll bring it up.

Anyway I am going to begin their application process. This involves two extra steps: they have a health form they want filled out by a doctor based on a recent exam. So I need to schedule a routine physical. And they want a “non-refundable, non-applicable” $500 fee. What that gets you is sort of adjunct membership: you are on the wait list, you get the house email newsletter, and you can attend any of the concerts and such they schedule. I think it will be worth the money to be on the wait list whether I go with Channing or not — which is still an open question.