20 April 2014

A group email from yesterday, 19 April, to start things off.

It is a spectacularly beautiful day here.  It was warm, about 80 degrees or so, but a brisk ocean breeze has sprung up and it's absolutely stellar.  This is when I remember how much I loved living here before.  I think the parade of interesting cars I saw today was a result of the fine weather, as well as the Easter weekend.  I saw an early-1970's Chrysler Imperial (land yacht, driven by an elderly Asian couple who probably owned it from new); a turbocharged convertible VW Beetle (I didn't know they made turbo Bugs!); and a brand-new, bright orange Fiat 500 electric, owned by a mom who waxed poetic about it as a great "tooling-around" car.  I've never found a Fiat 500 owner who didn't gush happily when asked how they liked their car.  I saw a Hyundai Veloster (never heard of it before today).  I also saw a big 1930's something, a Packard or maybe even a Rolls Royce, that turned left across my path in downtown Los Altos.  Lots of Leafs out but no Teslas that I could see (rare; usually they are equally represented with the Leafs).  And when I got home, there was another VW bug in the parking lot, powder blue convertible.  Gorgeous.  And of course, my own lovely Boudicca, which is still apparently the only PT Cruiser GT north of Salinas (well, except for Marie's Infernal).  Salinas is the only place I ever saw another one.  (Jim, I know you're going to ask:  there were a million Priuses out there, but there always are.  And I know I said it was a Chrysler New Yorker, but the 1970 Imperial is the only thing I can find that looks like it.)

Ran a lot of my errands, came home with only two quarts of milk and a dozen eggs (which was what I set out to get).  I went to Dittmer's and got all my knives professionally sharpened for the first time, and the two I thought he would say weren't worth it, he raved about.  Evidently I have good taste in knives.  The one I thought was too old to keep turns out to be high-carbon steel -- "They used to make swords like this!" -- and is the best of the bunch.  He told me to oil it as soon as I got home because putting a new edge on it exposed the metal and it would immediately try to rust.  So I have done so.  I don't use it very often because I know it rusts and I have to dry it off immediately after washing it, but now I can't wait to try it on a big tough beefsteak tomato.  Which, of course, I don't have.

I was going to give away a couple of duffle bags to a thrift store, but just happened to see an ad in the Los Altos Freecycle for someone who wanted some, so I took them over to her place.  Because of the nice weather, everyone's gardens are screaming with color, and she had a bunch of rose bushes in her front yard that looked like fireworks going off.  I might go by again with the camera and take a photo.  She gave me a card for a free Peet's coffee, which was very nice of her.  I am gradually making a square route (ha ha) of Mountain View for my Errands Day.  North up the 85 to Moffett and turn south (it's the Bay Area, remember, where all directions are relative), turn left (east) on Middlefield, get coffee at Clocktower and breakfast at Roger's next door.  (Yes, it backtracks me a bit, but I end up on the correct side of the road for Clocktower.)  Trot west back down Middlefield to San Antonio and gas up at the Arco right there on the corner.  Continue south on San Antonio to California Street and hit the Milk Pail ("We are a European style open air market" said their sign today; they used to be a drive-thru dairy back in the 1960s when such things existed).  The Milk Pail is right on the edge of the San Antonio Shopping Center, and I go there for milk and cream in bottles, fancy cheese, deli meats, homemade frozen take-and-bake goods, and any veg or fruits I forgot to order from Safeway.  Today I also went around the back of the San Antonio Center to the T-Mobile dealer to reload the "car phone."  I also asked them if they had another old-style flip phone since I really dislike that Samsung that I'm using, and they do (it's an Alcatel, whoever they are), but it's $90 and I'm not paying that for a phone I'm just going to leave in the car.  I should probably find another Motorola RAZR V3.  The girl said a lot of people still use their RAZRs because they like the phone so much (yeah, honey, and I just told you that I'm one of them!).  I forgot to ask her if iPads have a jack where you can plug in a headset and use them as phones.  I'd rather buy an iPad as it's more all-purpose than an iPhone (and probably easier to read) but I don't know if I can use it as a phone.  I can look it up.  They have a lot to learn in that T-Mobile store about customer service.  I was over inspecting the iPhones and one of the employees started restocking the accessories rack on the other side of the store.  Wow, if you have someone looking at the high-end phones, you DON'T do restocking instead of helping them.

From the T-Mobile place, I went kitty-corner across San Antonio Road and El Camino Real, from San Antonio Center to Dittmer's (in their new location) and got the knives sharpened.  Interesting guy.  A bit younger than me, Jamaican by ethnicity, but he and his brothers grew up on the Apache reservation in Arizona.  He got started sharpening knives when he was about 10. His older brother (who, as a 14-year-old, used to leave home with his buddies and live off the land for two or three weeks) would sharpen the home knives as well as all his friends' bowie and hunting knives.  Then the brother went off to war. (And evidently taught the instructors a thing or two about tracking and knife work.)  When he came home on leave from Viet Nam, he asked his mother who had been sharpening the knives while he was gone because they were all so dull.  She said, "No one."  So he got his little bro, about age 10 at the time, out in the yard and showed him how to do it, and little bro has been doing it ever since.  He seemed to think that every six months to a year is good for having them resharpened.  I probably don't use them near as much as some, so I'll put it on the calendar for next Easter.  I did cruise through Dittmer's while I was waiting, and found that they have the closest thing to the mortadella that I like, which is the kind with pistachios and green olives.  Theirs has the olives, but not the pistachios.  I will keep searching.  I didn't buy any because (a) the line was out the door and (b) I still have a pound of the yacky stuff that Safeway sent me.  Naturally, because it's awful, they sent me double the amount I asked for.

So, from there I went south down San Antonio Road and delivered the duffle bags to the nice lady with the roses, and went on to Foothill Expressway and then to I-280 "south" (actually east) and 85 South and immediately off on Stevens Creek to my closest Post Office to mail some letters (and one overdue bill).  Went back east on Stevens Creek to the car wash and had an external wash done on ol' Boudicca, who has been looking a right dirty cow lately.  Came back to my local Togo's because I thought I had a coupon for money off on a hot pastrami, but couldn't find it.  Damn, and I'd been doing so well, remembering the bottles and the knives and the duffle bags. So instead I drove another couple miles back down to Sunnyvale and had one of Coco's Cobb salads, and brought a slice of their award-winning cherry pie home for breakfast tomorrow, to start the festivities.  And here I am.

Yes, tomorrow I have reserved for my sugar coma.  I have been without sweets for 40 days.  Well, sort of.  I didn't add sugar to anything and I didn't eat anything that was specifically sweet, like candy or doughnuts.  I blew it a few times right at the start, but all in all I did a lot better than I thought I would.  My compulsive spending went into overdrive as a result, and I bought candy by the bucketload off Amazon, even though I couldn't eat it, and Jo Ellen was completely scandalized when she opened all the boxes by the front door.  I'd said "mm hmm, sure" unthinkingly when she asked if she could open them so she could take the cardboard down to the recycling area.  Maybe tomorrow morning I'll take some of the Cadbury Cream Eggs over to work.  Or maybe I'll just hoard them until they grow fuzz.  Whatever.

The latest on the story at work, by the way, is that despite all our protests, they are definitely going to close the "West Lobby", which is the exterior door right outside our new work area, and make us use 156A (about a hundred miles away) or 156E (almost as far).  The only alternative they have for me is that they will leave a wheelchair permanently in the 156E lobby with my name on it, and I can wheel down to the work area.  I said that was acceptable (although I expect I'll be taking a long time to get there until my biceps build up).  They're going to see if there's another entrance that's better suited to our work area, because other people would use it as well, and that would be the preferable alternative.  Well, leaving the West Lobby open would be the preferable alternative, but they won't listen to me.  I'd tell you to go to Google Maps and look, but evidently Lockheed has requested that they use old photos, because the satellite view is about ten years out of date, and the West Lobby doesn't exist.  Anyway, it's back in their court for now.  Jo Ellen is trying to convince me to get my knees replaced NOW and I'm starting to seriously consider it.  I miss being able to walk where I need to go.  There are some work issues where I don't want to bug out for eight weeks, but maybe they can do without me.  Who am I kidding?  Of course they can do without me, I just need to time it right.  I'll talk to Dave when I'm on day shift in a couple weeks.

And, sadly, my old building, the Blue Cube, is gone, or nearly so.  It appears, from the word being passed around Facebook, that the walls have come tumbling down in the last few days (I don't normally go near Lockheed on my breaks).  A piece of Silicon Valley history is no more.  I was too young to realize how good we had it there, how we dealt with NASA launches and one-off experimental satellites of all shapes and sizes and capabilities and orbits.  I watch the NASA channel at work now and I'm surprised how much I understand about the Space Station because of what I learned back in the 1970's and 1980's in MCC-F. Good times, good people.

I think I need to bug-bomb my bedroom.  I haven't had to do that since I had Tatty, who used to get awful flea infestations. These two don't have fleas (no cat since Tatty has ever had them, probably because every place I lived in England was cold enough to kill them off) but something is biting me at night.  I start to itch on the back of my head or neck, or sometimes even my forearm, and it's a big welt that takes about 24 hours to go away.  It's been going on for months, and the only thing that seems to stop it is when I change the sheets.  Then I can have 48 hours or sometimes even 96 hours without a problem, then it starts up again.  I thought it was spiders, but I don't see any evidence of them, and in fact, I don't see any evidence of anything at all.   So:  a bug bomb, to get anything that's there.  I'll have to take the bed apart so the poison gets to all the pieces, and maybe take the cats out for a drive for a couple hours while everything is going through their death throes.

Anyway, after my day out in the sun today, getting things done, I feel a nap coming on.  Tell me how life is with you.  Go into great and glorious detail because I don't want to be the only person who bores their friends to tears.