James L Adams—People and Products

Covid 19 and Spare Time (whatever that is).

April 29, 2020

My wife and I are following the rules of behavior for living in Santa Clara Valley to the letter, for a number of reasons,the virus is very active here, we are both over 75, and everything seems to be shut down in the area including Stanford, which is usually a main source of amusement for us.  Also  we are very fond of the Health Officer and Director for the Public Health Department in California's Santa Clara County, Sara Cody, who is the daughter of a wonderful family we have been close to for a number of years.  Her father Tad, was an architect and one of my best friends who unfortunately died a number of years ago.  Sara has successfully worked herself into her dream job, but probably didn’t realize that the likes of Covid 19 would follow.  We trust her absolutely.  If she told us that there was a new rule demanding that we empty our refrigerator, pull the plug, and crawl inside until she gave us permission to emerge, we would do it.  Well maybe not quite, but we certainly do trust her advice.

We do communicate with our friends, who also are following the rules, and they usually want to know what we are doing, in the tone of voice which implies that perhaps we have trouble filling our time. We both have enough projects underway to easily outlast us for several dozen years, and are getting a great amount of pleasure from working on them full time.  Marian is spending huge amounts of time on her exploding garden, being involved in various Zoom sessions, attending the now relatively few but high quality talks being given at the university, buying our food, and wringing everything she wants to out of the internet, her backlog of  books, and TV. I am organizing 20 years of paperwork for the Stanford archives (or trying to), replacing rotten beams in her greenhouse, being very aware of things that need attention in the house (sash weights with broken cords, screen doors that stick, leaks in our main drain pipe, and I should be prepping it for painting, if not painting it.  I am also making sense out of my work spaces, which are overflowing with tools in the wrong place, many surplus, and wood and metal projects I have started and am frantically trying to finish.  And there are my machines, which we just uncovered and are definitely needing some tender loving care (as always)

One of the joys of the machinery was that Loren Bryon, a person of great curiosity and knowledge of old (and new) machinery and who I have mentioned in past was spending one day a week helping me restore them (or as he says, rescuing them to be restored —he does have very high standards.)  And he is a joy to work with.  But he too is living by the rules, and his rules are much tighter than mine, because for three days a week he works in a hardware store.  But we keep in contact by phone and internet, and he too has a shop and can work at home.

As to the Peterbilt, I consider the wiring to be in great shape (the old wire was a confused mess and Loren re-did it) and the interior to be beautifully redone (a two person job).  It now requires a bit of cleaning and body work (quite a bit, including a paint job) and we can justifiably be pleased.  He is able to take parts home and work on them (he is presently redoing the headlights, which were in terrible shape), and I am working on the body itself.  At present I am working on a very large air cleaner which protrudes on the passenger’s side, and the main parts received a huge amount of damage.  Below are a few photos of it before, after I stripped the old finish off, after I applied some Bondo, after I applied more Bondo and sanded it, after I primed the surface again (I ran out of red primer and switched to gray), and after I applied paint to the parts.  Not perfect, but better, and very satisfying to me.  Maybe some day I will shoot for perfection, but probably not—it is a 1957 truck, for God’s sake.

And apologies for the photo placement.  I will spend some of my spare time figuring out how to get the program to let me place them where I want them, rather than using its feeble brain!

 

 

Quick Creativity

April 21, 2020

I had a personal insight, yesterday.  I have gotten so fascinated with the difficulty the human race is having as a whole in working on problems requiring worldwide creativity, that I  have come to overlook many simple opportunities to improve life as an individual. As an example, a couple of days ago,  I was happily working on my truck all alone, as is often the case, when I ran into a couple people who had dropped into my yard to see how I was doing.  They were both wearing masks, one looking official and the other handmade.  I was not wearing a mask, and in fact do not own a surgical one. I have made myself a couple of masks consisting of bandanas and rubber bands, but I keep misplacing them.  Obviously, I was letting down the team.

Later, my wife, Marian, dropped by and invited me to take a walk with her.  Since I had given her the responsibility to make sure I was getting some minimum amount of exercise, I happily accepted.  But once we hit the street, I realized that everyone but me was wearing a mask. Including Marian, who had made herself one that said Stanford University.  I did not want to go back to the house and grub for my bandanas—what to do, what to do? 

This time of the year I often wear a sweat suit when working outside on my machinery.  That day  I was wearing an old pair of fatigue pants and what is called a hoodie (hood attached to the top part of the sweat suit).  She quickly told me to turn it around so it was  backwards,.  I laughed, she said "no, do it".  I did at which point she stepped behind me, pulled the hood drawstring fairly tight, and said that I now had a mask.  And I did, and very wonderful one, two layers of thick dry cloth obviously thick enough to trap evil liquid droplets, porous enough to let me easily breath, , and resulting in a slightly swashbuckling look. The photos below show me in my sweat shirt in backward configuration, with mask up, and from the rear. 

Forgive the haggard look, but I had put in a long days work.  Another advantage to this system is that the front of my sweatshirts always trap the major amount of grease and other stains, and I never use the large pocket on the back. Reverse the shirt, and it becomes a wonderfully useful feature, as well as making the sweatshirt look much cleaner.

This is a wonderful discovery for me, because I have several sweatshirts with hoods, and hardly use this feature of them.  This was an instant piece of creativity on Marian’s part, and I was flabbergasted.  We went walking on a street with other people, all wearing masks, and rather than thinking less of me, they  smiled approvingly, and I could see several of them  taking mental notes.  The sad thing to me is that without Marian's quick creativity, I would have spent my walk brooding about national governments and Covid, collecting negative feelings because I was not wearing  a mask  probably tripped and fallen down, and who knows, perhaps joined the Covid ranks.

We do not intend to patent this wonderful discovery, so if you have sweatshirts with hoods you never use, dig them out and join the club. In order to show it off in a better light the two photos below show me in a clean sweatshirt after a shower with mask down and up. Dashing, what?

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Large Groups, Creativity, and Covid-19

April 5, 2020

I have been struggling against using the present corona virus pandemic as an example of the first few blocks to creativity in large groups of people I have mentioned in past posts, but it displays several of the blocks we will deal with in future posts. First, our friend the short term focus. The U.S. has gone through three memorable viral disease pandemics in my (and my parent’s) memory— the one we are in, the 2005to 2012  HIV/AIDS Pandemic (death toll 36 million), the “Hong Kong Flu” pandemic (1968- death toll 1 million), the “Asian”  Flu Pandemic (1956-1958 – death toll 2 million), and the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 to 1920 (20-50 million people). There have been others, but were classified as diseases (polio, measles, etc.) or took place in Africa and Asia for which we were less tuned r. I was not alive during the 1918 to 1920 pandemic, but heard so many stories about it from my parents and grand parents that I am convinced that it was an earth shaking event.

So now we are in the middle of another one, with the world  death toll at approximately 70,000 and rising.  Although this death toll does not compete with the ones listed above, especially the pandemic of 1918-1950, it is rising rapidly, and is getting an immense amount of attention perhaps due to modern communications and the particularly fast moving character of this pandemic.  Is the U.S. responding in a creative way?  Perhaps, considering this rapidly moving and wide spread nature, but perhaps not as much as might be expected.  Last night my wife and I were drinking wine with a couple of senior and very smart doctors (over Zoom, or course), one who has specialized in epidemics for years and she was telling us that a major pandemic comes along about every 50 years.  Fits the data.  But the U.S. was clearly not prepared for this one —an example of short term thinking.  We live three miles from the San Andreus fault.  The last “big one” was in 1906, and caused major damage ,  We are aware of this, and sometimes tell jokes about it, but except for some upgrading of building codes, do not do much about preparing for it.  Short term thinking again. I grew up near a large dry wash that was formed from a major flood in a channel carved over the years by snow melt.  Some dams have been built, but the channel is filling with housing development.  A major tragedy waiting to happen. Major fires in California and Australia, etc.

Let’s think about a couple of more “blocks” we have talked about.  How about power and order.  The U. S. government is happily designed to be a democracy — power to the people, order kept by the people and laws.  But at the time of this writing it is pretty weak.  In times of crisis a strong leader is needed.  Trump is not one, if creativity is called for.  He is focused on the near term and economy, and lacks the skills and focus an elected leader needs in a situation such as Covid-19,  I do not want to do into the details, but he lies, does not stay focused, does not seem to leave medical strategy to medical professionals and does not understand the science involved.  I also decided I would not talk about Trump in this blog, so make up your own mind—is he pulling the country together in fighting this problem or not.  And how about congress and the courts?

And how about being selfish and competitive.  “Pan” means international.  Wouldn’t all countries, including the U.S. be better off sharing equipment and knowledge a bit better here? In my opinion, the U.S. buying medical equipment from Russia is a good move, assuming it is surplus in Russia.  The many scientists and medical people working world wide in a vaccine for Covid-19 is wonderful.  Any country or individual planning to solve this problem primarily to gain either a huge amount of money or power is not.

And let me finish by throwing in another conceptual block, which is the deep desire to have other people think as we do.  This has been the cause of countless wars, racial and ethnic clashes, and communication inefficiencies over time, and will hopefully not have a bearing on controlling Covid-19, although there seems to be a division appearing between people who want to see “business as usual” return as possible, and people who want to risk as few lives as possible.  And the U.S. government will continue to waste time with its non-cooperative political divisions.