Bloggity-blog: November 2021

Monday, November 15, 2021

376. Pandemic and greening

Greco and Pork Store and Outside Lands

Day 578/123 = 10/15/2021

Got my third vaccine shot yesterday so today is a day-off. I had my once-a-month blueberry pancakes out for breakfast and now I’m working at the Peet’s at 8th and Brannan. No exercises today as I’m letting my arm recover and was expecting to not feel that well, though, so far I feel fine.

Getting the shot at my neighborhood Wallgreens lacked the ritual and significance of getting the first two at Moscone Center South. Certainly more convenient, though. I presume I won’t get boosted protection for a couple weeks, but since I’m already taking so many precautions this isn’t so significant. Statistically, it will just move me from under 80% to over 80% protection -- maybe 10% more protection. And there are so many variables that I’m not even sure of that. Probably, because I’m in such good shape and eat so well, I didn’t need to do this at all, but at this point I’m not going to take any chances.

I heard a great bit of new English usage this morning at breakfast. Someone described something as happening in “June of the pandemic.” What I like about this is that it is a way of grouping time that spans two years. (Though I think it was understood that “the pandemic” meant prior to the vaccine.) For me, the pandemic started in March of 2020 and ran until April of 2021 -- so we need to come up with a way of differentiating the two Marchs and Aprils. Perhaps “first April of the pandemic.”

Day 579/124

I’m sitting on the sidewalk at Caffe Greco after shopping at the new Cole Hardware. That corner restaurant between the two has finally given it up and the space is vacant. I got Shoe Goo to repair my boot that Anthony is not in the mood to repair. We are supposed to get some rain this week so I didn’t feel like I could wait to see if he would finally come through. I’m happy to see that Greco at least seems to be thriving.

Everyone talks about workers quiting their jobs or not filling all the empty positions, but I haven't heard as much talk about the small businesses that you can't get to do anything these days. Besides the shoe repair guy, the person who repairs old windows still hasn't responded to my requests for a bid for our work. I'd add the HOA's lawyer to the list, but we always have a problem getting timely response from our lawyers. I don't know why.

I didn’t have much of a reaction to my third COVID shot. The arm pain lasted less than 48 hours so I’m already back to doing my regular exercises. Never did feel sick otherwise. Too soon to tell if my cell phone reception has improved :-|

Day 584/129

By next week we should be under 50 cases a day for our rolling 7 day average. And it is dropping fast. Hospitalizations are holding kind of steady, though they are off their peak. [And this is the problem with extrapolating. The numbers hit 50 and then rebounded.]

So what does this mean for me? Perhaps next week I will go to the Pork Store and not worry about how crowded it is. They are still checking vax status, though I still don’t see the value of that. Aside from annoying the anti-vaxxers.

Day 593/138

I was looking for the daily case numbers to drop below 50 to declare an end to my personal SIP, but I’m not sure that is going to happen. Both the case rate and the hospitalization rate seem to have plateaued or worse right around 50. The next few weeks, before Thanksgiving, were supposed to be my happy time before hunkering down again after Thanksgiving. But maybe not.

I also thought my greening season was over but I’m working at least one more day. I’ve avoided the hell of Outside Lands, but we will continue to sort the trash for four days after the concert ends. All the shifts on Monday were too early, and it’s supposed to rain most of Tuesday, so I took an eight hour shift on Wednesday. I may regret this, but it seems like the least I can do for the team. Plus I repaired my work boots and I want to see how they hold up. And it’s an excuse to have brunch at the Pork Store again. Was there last week and learned that the last of the regular waitresses is leaving at the end of the year. This is the one from Luxembourg.

Day 597/142

Worked a full eight hour shift of table sorting to finish the Outside Lands cleanup. Was working with a new woman who has worked in the past with a returning regular. He should have put us with some of the less experienced people, but it was interesting working with someone who was similarly trained. There is a lot that is subjective about the sorting process. She pulled some tofu containers that I had tossed in the landfill and moved them to recycling. It is almost impossible to get the plastic film off the top of the (semi) rigid plastic tubs. I’m pretty sure they just get tossed by Recology. Then I pulled a big dirty aluminum tray out of the landfill and used a towel I had saved to clean it up enough for recycling. Aluminum is one of the few things we are certain will actually get recycled, so the only reason to not recycle it is if it’s too dirty to clean up.

We were using the largest size debris boxes which was a problem after they got so full you had to close the rear doors. They are just a little too tall to dump a can of sorted trash over the side, unless you are over six feet tall. There was a time when we would have had ramps, but these were judged to be unsafe so now we have to improvise. Stupid. It’s especially a problem when you overload a bag/can making it too heavy to even lift over the side. This is something I’m frequently guilty of. I needed help on multiple occasions as a result.

Up to a certain weight, you can toss bags over the side without much difficulty. Except that bags are not allowed in the recycling stream. Previously this year bags weren’t allowed in the other streams either, but they seem to have made an exception for this event. Thank god.

One of our crew actually lives in San Jose and was unclear on how to get back to the train station after his shift. So one of us knew the best way to get out of the park -- there are still fences up everywhere limiting where you can go. And the three of us took the streetcar that SHOULD have dropped him where he was headed. But then it said it was not going all the way. I talked to the operator and he said we could still stay aboard as his train was going to switch from being an N to a T. This was a new one even for Muni, but I finally figured it out. There was a Warriors basketball game at Chase Center and Muni was adding N trains to the usual K/T trains that serve that area. Makes sense once you realize what they are doing, but the K/T thing is already so nuts adding N/T trains to the mix is just over the top.

Sunday, November 14, 2021

375. Fleet Week and COVID booster

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Greening and Booster

Day 561/106 = 10/7/21

We are now at the peak of this odd greening season. Last weekend should have been the dragon races at Lake Merritt but instead was a beer festival in downtown Oakland on Saturday followed by the Folsom Street Fair on Sunday. My first back-to-back eight hour shifts. This coming weekend should be Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, and we are, in fact working a greatly reduced HSB event. I have a strange afternoon to night shift on Sunday down at pier 70 where I have no idea what to expect. It’s a venue we haven’t used for three years and I’m going to be working it all by myself. Strange.

Tomorrow will be six months since I received my second vax shot. So I will qualify for the booster, though I’m going to wait until after Fleet Week to actually get it. Fleet Week will mark the end of my Greening Season so I’ve scheduled a bunch of health related appointments for the following weeks, the third vax shot will be one of those. And that will also mark six months, more or less, of a return to almost-but-not-quite-normal-life. I am typing this at the Bank Cafe, though I’m masked and had to show my vax card to get in. And I’m still double masking at our busier events.

Just yesterday I thought I had come up with a brilliant idea, wearing a cloth mask over an N95 with valve mask when I work. The idea being that I would be able to breathe easier and the cloth mask would still protect others. To test the concept, I wore a cloth over a regular N95 to lunch yesterday, thinking I would buy some N95s with valve after. But what I realized was that N95s tend to use elastic straps around your head which would be hard to undo for drinking water. And, I wouldn’t be able to wear my preferred glasses as they don’t fit with that style of mask. I could use some other glasses, but that would not be ideal. The drinking problem is really the killer.

Pandemic problems.

Day 573/118

Fleet Week is now past and my greening season is over. Last night after I got home I cut my hair for my derm. apt today. Now I need to get my boots repaired. And I need to add some tape to my work pack.

Even a three day Fleet Week is no comparison to a three day HSB, but it was still 24+ hours on my feet and I am pleasantly beat. All my mitigation strategies have worked: I exercised and stretched and rolled and consumed liters of electrolyte water. Even had a few bananas. What I learned was the advantage of having a toter rigged out for all three streams when cleaning up after a picnic heavy event where our eco-stations get overwhelmed. Worked like a charm on Sunday. Also, with the Cady toters (very nice model with four wheels instead of just two) it works great for doing grounds.

My favorite parts of working at “Little Marina Green” instead of the main field were: Better dog watching; not as far to walk, less overwhelming. We were all wrapped up early all three days.

While this wasn’t as good of a test as the usual HSB, it still worked as my version of a Serengeti migration. In other words it told me that I was still capable of such a physically demanding three day effort.

I hope to catch up on my sleep tonight.

Day 574/119

This has not been my morning. Someone was supposed to get some contact numbers to me for an official HOA mailing I need to send out... they got me all but the most important one so I have to put off the mailing until tomorrow.

Then discovered my shoe repair place is now only open by appointment. And finally, the Bank Cafe is closed for some reason.

What a world we live in!

Otherwise it’s a beautiful day. And they’ve started the demo in unit 202 but so far the work is not affecting the rest of the building.

After working three straight days, it feels odd walking around without my trash picker. I keep getting this instant of panic when I realize I don’t have it.

Saturday, November 13, 2021

374. Super cruisers and Beyond Burma

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COVID and the Pacific War

Day 522/67 = 8/21/21

The new cases curve has finally reversed. And pretty dramatically. Hospitalizations are still going up, but that’s to be expected. I’m actually thinking I may drop back to a single mask for the final Stern Grove concert.

But that’s not why I’m writing: I am still reviewing my old blog posts and came to another assessment of Japanese ship building decisions leading up to WW2. Drachinifel has also talked about this in a Drydock episode or three. Latest thought: what about a scaled up Tone class ship instead of the Yamatas? Not sure about the actual gun size, but there would be six grouped in three twin turrets with a small citadel. The rear would be AAA and float planes. The speed would be at least equal to the Kongos. The protection would be better than the Kongos. It would have torpedo tubes deep in the hull. It would be hard to argue for anything below 15”, but 16” would probably make it too large a ship. You probably couldn’t get double the ships, but you probably could have had three by the start of the war and maybe one or two more during the course of the war.

Now that I think of it, if you really do this knowing what the war will be like, you could argue for going with a well protected 12” armed ship -- the ship the USN thought the Japanese were building and built the Alaska’s in response. So a ship between the Tone and the Kongo. Smaller but still powerful guns. Similar speed. Better protection. Full load of torpedoes. These ships would have been perfect for the Solomons and for carrier escort duty. And they would have saved fuel oil over the Kongos in those roles. So if a ship like this could have been built on 20,000 ton displacement, then you might well have had four of them by the end of 1942 and six by the end of 1943. Maybe.

Day 530/75

The final Stern Grove Festival concert (Tower of Power) had to be cancelled after a burst water main flooded the venue bringing down some trees and doing extensive damage. They will be lucky to have everything repaired for the 2022 Festival season. I’m already signed up for a number of events in September, so this is not the end of my greening work, but it was significant as the resumption of my greening work after the unprecedented pandemic break, I was actually looking forward to that final concert. I’ve yet to work a full eight hour shift, but that’s coming up soon. We will see how I hold up. For the businesses' sake, I’m glad to see so many events are happening. Most of them have been up north and I haven’t worked them. I still think these gatherings are a little nuts, but at least it’s outdoors.

At the moment it looks like I could end up making about half my usual greening income this year, which would be nice. More than I expected to make this year.

Day 545/90

Now I feel bad about something beyond being slow to continue this blog. The neighborhood restaurant that contributed the most to making last year tolerable, was Beyond Burma. While their tea leaf salad was disappointing, everything else was excellent and I went there about once a month and picked up food for four or five meals. Post-vax, when I could move around more, I returned to my previous favorite Burmese restaurant (with the amazing tea leaf salad). I just walked past Beyond Burma and they are closed and the room emptied out. They had spent most of the pandemic redecorating. I just checked my records, and I hadn’t given them any business in five months. I didn’t even get a chance to say thanks, and goodbye.

Friday, November 12, 2021

373. Pandemic and Chico...

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...and Greening

Day 497/42 = 7/27/21 - Pandemic/"Post" pandemic (since the vaccine started getting things under control

Ran into a quote that makes clear something I should have already known: “The vaccine is best at preventing serious disease, hospitalizations and death, but not infections per se,” said Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease expert with UCSF. “The vaccine was never really great at preventing infection.”

This is so obvious once stated. So I’m doubling down on taking other measures -- masking and social distancing -- to avoid infection now that the virus is spreading quickly. I double masked once since the 4th of July but then stopped, but will resume that on public transit. And I will continue to avoid my favorite places to eat as they are too crowded. Though I should still be able to get something to go at my favorite Burmese place the next time I’m out that way.

Day 498/43

Last bus ride to Greenbrae... and back. The storage unit is empty. That chapter of my life is over. Would have worked better if I could have gotten one of the thrift places to pick up, but such is life. I did as well as I could under the circumstances. Better than if a fire or tornado had destroyed everything. Though much harder. Will still be getting rid of stuff and reorganizing storage for about two more weeks. How much did it cost me to clear it out? $295 for the final haul, $200 for the rental car (plus gas etc.), Shipping costs $100?, Bus rides to Greenbrae $127 Mechanics Institute membership $120 Total=$820? [Minus anything I get for silver and glass.]

Day 503/48

At Bank Cafe. I’m happy to see almost everyone here is wearing a mask. I was being more careful than all the others a week ago, but now they have joined me as the case numbers continue to soar.

Yesterday I worked the end of the Joan Jett concert at Stern Grove. Getting better at this every concert, I had a nice little sorting station set up in the middle of the venue after the concert so I could sort all the bags coming in from concert goers and the volunteers picking up trash. We seemed to be all done early so I clocked out after only working two and a half hours only to discover a long line of bags where I had been sorting as I left. I have no idea where they came from. I almost stayed, but there did seem to be enough of our workers on hand to deal with this. Still, if only they had brought the bags out when I was there I could have sorted it all.

Day 510/55

Time flies when you are slowly disposing of a ton of personal belongings. While my storage unit is now a thing of the past, I still have a pile of containers in my living room and a lot of reorganizing to do in my apartment. But slow progress is being made. (The passive voice is so appropriate there.)

Yesterday was the biggest Stern Grove concert yet, featuring Thundercat & Cassowary. It was the largest crowd yet and I would say the best music, though I only arrived at the end so I only heard the one jazzy act. (Not sure which.)

The crowd was, for some reason, also the worst yet at sorting their trash. Usually our stations remain pretty well sorted until the end when everyone leaves and they just toss mixed bags of trash in random containers. But I spent the almost-hour of the concert actually pulling all the recycling and compost out of the landfill. Now I think about it, I think this may have been because people were leaving early as it was -- once again, and unlike the previous Sunday -- cold and foggy.

Because the crowd was considerably larger than we had been told (so we didn't have enough workers) we ended up having to work an extra half-hour to get everything sorted and nearly ran out of room for the compost. (In which case you lay a layer of cardboard on top of the compost dumpster and walk/jump on it to compress it and make more room. Just like old times.)

I was working in a double mask (cloth over surgical) which worked pretty well. When the crowd dispersed I removed the surgical mask. SF's new case count is still exponential, but the hospitalization numbers are not that bad so we are still pretending everything is fine.

Can someone explain to me why people who refuse to be vaxxed are okay with being cared for in an ICU? Shouldn't their need for freedom keep them home?

Day 515/60

The new cases and hospitalizations continue to rise. So far the only local change is a requirement to show proof of vaccination for some indoor activities -- I tried to show mine today at one of my pizza places but they weren’t interested. Concerts are continuing. Though we are promised smaller numbers tomorrow at Stern Grove, though that doesn’t seem to be related to the pandemic as near as I can tell.

I just returned from my first trip out of the Bay Area since 2019 and my first road trip in over a decade. I had a good time racing up to Chico for a quick overnight stay to pass on a bunch of family collectibles for the Air Museum there and for my friends in Chico to try to sell on ebay. Will be interesting to see how that goes. I’m hoping to get back enough to cover the cost of the trip.

Also, I was warm for over twenty-four hours, which is something. The true cost was about nine gallons of gasoline [I was forgetting about the four bridge tolls]. I was early picking up and dropping off the rental car -- and the latter even though I did the idiot’s loop around Oakland (580 to 980 to 880) since I managed to miss the 880 turnoff when getting off the Bay Bridge. And I think my not having driven in years contributed to a stupid mistake I made regarding recording the fuel level at the beginning of my trip -- why the temperature gauge is more prominent than the fuel I don’t know. Once I realized which gauge was which, everything went smoothly and made more sense. The Corolla I rented was very nice and the smoke from the wildfires was never a problem though it was noticeable, especially in the morning when the rising sun was red in Chico.

One of the items I didn’t know the provenance of was an old seven foot long U.S. flag. We opened it up and counted the stars and discovered it only had 46 stars which means it was created after Oklahoma became a state in 1907 And when New Mexico and Arizona became states in 1912. Of course what strikes me about this is how quickly after they became states the navy gave the name to new battleships. USS Oklahoma launched 1914; USS Arizona launched 1915; and USS New Mexico launched 1917. It is also curious that two of these are the only two battleships that never returned to service after the Pearl Harbor Raid.

With this trip I’ve gotten most of the stuff out of my apartment that I still need to find new homes for, but there remains a good deal to do. I will start the next phase of the project on Monday. But everything out of SF is done. Now it’s just local with very little requiring me to even leave my street.

Thursday, November 11, 2021

372. Greening and aging ...

Link to Table of Contents

...and getting rid of stuff.

Day 34 post-pandemic

Today I treated myself to breakfast at the Pork Store. I figured it would be much less crowded Monday mid-morning, and I was right. Unfortunately, by the time my food was delivered the place was packed. So this will be the last time... for now. Still waiting for more details on who is and who isn’t getting the new cases of covid. The numbers are soaring, but if they are all unvaxxed people then it isn’t my concern.

I volunteered for a couple hours at the latest Stern Grove concert on Sunday -- which was packed. My new anti-fogging spray (Zeiss!) seemed to work well so I kept my mask over my nose the entire time. And I only went into the main seating area after the concert was over when the crowd was leaving. I have some qualms about working at what could be a super spreader event, but it is outdoors and it was a windy day. Still seems like a bad idea to me, but we are proving to be a stupid people.

And I do like the work. Almost as much as I like being here at the Bank Cafe working in the deserted mezzanine with my mask on. I ended up training a new hire who was a little too chatty for my taste but her heart was in the right place. Not sure she will really work out -- there are so many variables in this business: Will she blanch at climbing into a compost dumpster? Can she deal with event goers who don’t give a damn? Will she figure out what she should be doing or will she be one of those people who wander around waiting for someone to tell them what to do? In the immortal (apocryphal) words of Zhou Enlai about the French Revolution, still too early to say.

Sometimes I can’t believe how consistent I am. My approach to greening events has always been to find the busiest ecostation or group of ecostations and to work there. As the oldest, in both senses, employee, I can almost always get away with just doing this. On Sunday, without even thinking about it, I dropped down from the main path -- lined with a bunch of ecostations -- to the single ecostation down near the front of the crowd. This was where most of the volunteers were bringing bags of trash they picked up from the stage all the way back to that other path. Then I just stayed there sorting the bags that had already accumulated and the new bags as they came in. If I had been thinking about it this is where I would have gone, but I didn’t even have to think about it. The missed year and more of greening was evidenced in my failing to drag over a box to use as an improvised sorting table, but we worked around that. A lesson for next time -- that I’ve already passed on to my boss.

And since I was just volunteering and not on the books, I left when all the field sorting was done and everyone had moved to the dumpsters for the table sorting of everything else. My least favorite part of the job. I ended up working two and a half hours and the first hour was just monitoring a couple stations on the edge of the crowd because I managed to get there an hour early and was bored.

The music was good this week and the weather was, again, cold, foggy, and windy. Weather that suits a concert venue in a redwood grove.

Day 37

Have I written before about why I’m nervous about entering my seventies next year? I’ll have to review. I had a good example of why I’m nervous just this morning. I did some painting in our hallway and went up to look for misses and problems under the different light at mid-day. What I noticed instead was that the weatherstripping installed yesterday was not done properly -- lots of light showed through indicating that the weatherstripping wasn’t tight against the door and so, wasn’t actually doing anything.

The person who installed that weatherstripping is now past 85 and that fact is more important than that he was an engineer with a long career at one of the nations top engineering firms. He is helping his son remodel the apartment, but his son is in the awkward position of finding him things to do knowing that he may have to do them over again himself. It’s like when little kids want to help but if you let them you either have to watch them like a hawk and teach them how to do it right, or hope they don’t screw it up more than you can repair later. Second childhood, indeed.

And this older gentleman is not the type to just sit around and meditate or tell old yarns. He insists on being busy. I’m rather lazy myself, but it is still something I will have to watch as I know I can be a busybody about some things. His wife kept him under control -- or else riled him up -- in the past, but she died last year so he’s having to negotiate that as well. I certainly don’t have the heart to show him what’s wrong with the door.

Day 39 (19 of my personal SIP)

The contrast with last year at this time is striking even though I’m still fully masked most of the time. And I finally bought that Zeiss anti fog spray for my glasses so I can see when I’m working. Last year when I had any kind of an encounter with someone or just grabbed some groceries I was concerned I was going to die a horrible death as a result. Yesterday I was riding the Muni 1 California bus home after a trip to Marin county (part of my storage unit cleanout process) and the bus was a little too crowded. Even after the asshole who refused to wear a mask left, it still felt like I was pushing my luck a little so I only rode to the top of the hill and then walked down from there. It only added two blocks to my walk and was nicer as I walked through Huntington Park.

Then I fixed myself a very nice lunch and spent the remainder of the afternoon sitting in a very comfortable chair in an out-of-the-way spot of the Bank Cafe mezzanine. Last year, after an uncomfortable bus trip, I would be swearing to never leave the house again.

Now my concern is that I will get sick enough to lose my sense of smell and taste. This would be a huge deal for me. I worked a minimal shift at Stern Grove last week and will probably do that again as one worker is still in the hospital for something and her shift hasn’t been picked up by anyone. If I were the city, I would pull the plug on the Festival given our exponential new case and hospitalization curves. But since these are almost entirely people who haven’t bothered to get vaccinated, I don’t feel that strongly about this. Until it affects everyone else’s ability to receive hospital care, it’s just stupid, not that harmful to sane people.

And I do want to work the end of the concert again to refine the technique I stumbled upon last week that worked so well. If the event turns out to be a superspreader for idiots, so be it.

There’s a decent chance my storage unit will be cleared out by the end of July -- next week. I wish I could have found homes for more of the furniture and random items, but I did my best under the circumstances. It will be nice to see the last of the place. Though I still have stuff at home to get rid of. That process will pick up the first two weeks of August. I think this will be easier. Aside from a road trip to Chico (I’ve already rented the car) I at least shouldn’t have to leave the City again while unloading stuff. Getting a little tired of riding the bus to Marin county. It will also be nice to sort out my apartment so there is no longer a pile of boxes in my living room and items to get rid of on every flattish surface. Maybe by the end of August. I’ll wait until October to try to get rid of the Christmas stuff.

For months now -- many many months -- I’ve been reviewing my old blogs and have finally made it all the way to this one. This is the first time I’ve reread bloggity. The early organization is a bit confusing, but I think it will fall into place soon. It is fun to reread and remember about all these books. What a long, strange trip it’s been.