SHARE FAIR AT KING'S BAY LIBRARY

Back in January 2020, my local Buy Nothing's co-administrator came up with the idea of asking the local library to host a swap meet, except everything is free because, Buy Nothing...  The librarian approved the request and the rest was history.  Well, sort of.  Recall that by March 2020, the whole world shut down because of the COVID-19 pandemic.  No library, no swap meet.  Eventually things got back to normal, hard to believe but it happened.  We continued to have monthly event, lots of stuff changed hands, all free, the leftover went to a nearby soup kitchen the next morning.  The event got so popular that these days we need two cars to take the stuff to the soup kitchen.  With the more recent events, I had to drop some stuff by the side of my house and advertise them as Curb Alert.  I live near a train station so there is much traffic, sometimes everything would be gone by the next morning.

Today, I attended a similar event, organized by the Buy Nothing group in the King's Bay area.  The local library is on Nostrand Avenue, between Avenue X and Avenue W.  It was nice to look at the stuff without worrying about people grabbing too many or helping others separate the donations.  I was just an attendee, not running the show.  I did chat a bit with the organizer.  I only visited King's Bay Library once before and didn't know that it has a sort of an art gallery just to the left of the lobby as you enter the building.  It is a spacious room.  The stuff was spread out on tables and clothes racks along the walls of the room and there was a little island in the middle with shelves and more tables.  They plan to drop off the leftover at the Salvation Army on the same block, near the corner of Avenue W and Nostrand Avenue.  I told myself not to take anything but in the end I took a music CD and two books, the books are for my own faux Little Free Library.  It's good to see the Buy Nothing movement going strong and build the community through events like this Share Fair.  Photos in the following Google Album:

Share Fair 2025 March 22 at King's Bay Library

LOW SEE INTO TOE

"Lo siento", sorry not sorry LOL... For someone like me with a little extra girth, it's a pain to cut my own toenails.  I couldn't bend over far enough to use the nail-clipper to do its work.  I had to wear my near-sight eyeglasses so I can see what I am doing, lest I snip some meat off the little pigs.  How nice it would be to have a servant to do the work for me, but I digress.  Recently, I was able to do it all by myself.  No glasses, bending was sufficient to get the work done.  I wonder if the weekly yoga I do with Wii Fit Plus finally paid off.  Or the more frequent walks I did in past weeks.  Not long ago, I discovered that at CityStrides.com I am no longer at the #1 spot in Staten Island.  Some guy at some point put in lots of work and now I am over 100 streets behind him.  Right away I started to re-focus my walks in Staten Island.  No more Elizabeth, NJ or Bayonne, NJ, all Staten Island.  I usually walk as a form of exercise after work, but some mornings I even got up early to head out early enough to put in a walk.  I am narrowing the gap.  Still, at yesterday's doctor visit, the doctor told me I need to lose some weight, so weight-wise I still have work to do, but maybe I improved a bit.  Small victory.

2:30

 2:30, or two-thirty... tooth hurty.  Tooth extraction sounds painful and it is.  That's what I had a few weeks ago.  I don't remember the last time I had one pulled but this one was complicated.  First, a parabolic X-ray was done to show that the target tooth was in the way of another that needed work.  Next, a 3D X-ray was needed to make sure some nerve is not in the way, otherwise the pain after the tooth is pulled will be permanent.  Ouch!  During the experience, something flew out of my mouth and landed on the floor.  I suspect it was the tooth.  Even with Novocaine, it was still quite an experience.  It helped that the dentist gave me verbal update of what was going on.  I breathed a sign of relief when he said the tooth came out, he just needed to sew the wound close.  Whew!

I was in pain for a few days.  I decided to adopt the new habit of flossing more often and brushing after as many meals as possible.  Hopefully if I can keep up with the new habit, no more bad teeth in the future.  I wish I can be like my father with regards to dentists.  He didn't need to visit any dentists for most of his life.  He did mention about having a string tied to a loose tooth and slamming the door that the other end of the string was attached to.  That was the old days in Vietnam, I am sure it really happened.  But that was a for loose tooth, what if the tooth wasn't loose?  Months before his death, my father had a dentist appointment for something.  His condition got worse and oral hygiene was put in the back burner.  He joked about not having to pay any dentists his entire life.  I suppose my having a sweet tooth is part of the blame for my teeth troubles.

SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY

Planning for my high school reunion is proceeding well.  Initially, the Reunion Committee worried that not enough people will pay up front, that we may not have enough money to pay a deposit to the hotel where we rent the banquet hall and have dinner provided etc.  We did get enough people coughing up the dough, but there was another challenge.  In this day and age (the year 2025), you would think any bill-paying platform would automatically have online payment already included.  And you would be wrong.  The bill-paying platform that we use, which I choose not to remember, at the moment, has no such feature.  Or at least, it's not there until I asked for it.  We used the same platform in 2010, I probably was not a Treasurer for the Reunion Committee, or maybe my memory is really that bad, maybe we paid everything by paper checks?  Based on some old email communications, it seemed money was regularly transferred to a bank account, then somebody wrote checks to cover all the expenses - DJ deposit, photographer deposit, catering hall deposit, etc.  Back to the year 2025, or at least late 2024, when the Reunion Committee decided not to have a bank account.  How would payment be made then?  I can add a Vendor, but there seems to be no way to do online payment.  I had to open a ticket with tech support and somebody turned on some switches and voila I was able to send an email to request the hotel's bank info.  Earlier I went through my Committee contact with the hotel and got some info but none of that matched the form in the payment platform.  By going through the payment platform process, I can see that they had the same bank as me, but their account number is masked, I only see the last few digits, which is how it should be.  The due date arrived, I arranged for electronic payment, and money is scheduled to change hand, sort of.  Whew, a hurdle cleared, but it would be so much easier if it's a standard thing to start with.

 

ADAPT OR DIE

 I like technology but I hate to see perfectly-useable wares get discarded.  Like when Apple dropped most ports on its laptops, users are left with only a few USB ports and some USB-C ports.  Or when laptops in general no longer have VGA or other legacy ports, it's HDMI or use some dock.  As a result, in my computer hardware collection I have various adapters.  USB-to-Ethernet, SCSI1-to-SCSI2, USBC-to-USB3, DVI-to-miniDP, so on and so on.  Yes, I still use a Mac computer and once used an Amiga computer, maybe weekly, which explains the SCSI connection.

My current computer is a Lenovo Flex 5 laptop.  When I got it some years ago, it was running Windows 10.  Recently, I finally gave in to Microsoft's push and upgraded to Windows 11.  The laptop has a touch screen and something with a recent Windows update seems to cause the screen flicker every now and then.  If I use an external monitor, there is no flickering.  I have a few external monitors that worked with the laptop before, nothing fancy, as a matter of fact they are somewhat defective, in a minor way, free stuff from my local Buy Nothing group.  Strangely, now none of the monitors work with the laptop.  I used the built-in HDMI port, tried a dock with DP port and HDMI port, nothing worked.  Last-ditch effort, I used an adapter to convert the outgoing HDMI signal to VGA and it worked!  It would be nice if I can go directly from HDMI to HDMI, so I can listen to music on the monitor's built-in speaker, but at least with the adapter I can use an external monitor again.  Adapt or die!  Ok, it's not that serious, I just like to say that.

I YEARN FOR YEARBOOKS

 I run an active Facebook group for my high school alumni.  One feature of the group that makes it lively is the yearbook collection in the group.  After so many years out of school, people lost their yearbooks.  Maybe it was lost during a move, maybe it got flood damaged, whatever the reason, people love to see the pages of the yearbooks.  By some luck, when I got involved with the alumni, my yearbook was sitting right there on the shelf behind my office desk.  I was able to scan the pages and share the content with my class.  But it was just one book, 1985, and the alumni group that I run have people from all over, as far back as 1956 and as recent as 2007.  A few people lent me book from their own year, like 1971 and 1956.  A few other people helped by doing the work themselves, by scanning and uploading the pages.  But for a school that existed over 125 years, there are many yearbooks totally missing.  Enters eBay, mostly.  I set an alert in eBay to notify when the school name, "Newtown High School", is part of an offer.  Newtown yearbooks are hot items on eBay, a few times I had to enter a bidding war, sometimes I lost, other times I won.  But at $70 or so a pop, buying yearbooks from eBay is expensive.  From my point of view, the best case scenario is when someone offer the book(s) to me for free.  It actually happened twice, in bulk.  The first time was when dear Mr. Weinstein passed away and Mrs. W didn't want to keep his yearbook collection.  The school was offered first but they didn't want it.  Other people in the alumni group want pieces of the collection, some may have mentioned willing to re-distribute.  Luckily, many recommended that I be given the collection, because I had the track record of scanning the pages and sharing the work for the group to enjoy.  Another occasion, a teacher decided to give me a collection that cover a few 1990s books.  Over the years, I got a few more, usually it started with someone offering a parent's book and the group would in unison recommended that I be the benefactor.  Thank you, alumni!  With great power comes great responsibility, I won't let you down.

The latest, possible donation I just learned a few days ago is from a 1969 alumnus whose mother attended the same school in 1946.  The donor knows someone in the alumni group, I provided my contact info to the group member and now I just have to wait.  One of these days, I will make the drive to Bayside, Queens NY to pick up the items.  Yearbooks are valuable to me, I prefer to personally pick them up instead of having the items sent through the mail.

DEPOSIT GOAL MET

 Some months ago, against better judgement, I joined the Reunion Committee for Newtown High School (Elmhurst, Queens NY) Class of 1985's 40th Reunion.  I was on the committee back when we had the Silver Reunion (25 years).  I cannot remember why it was painful, but it was.  Lots of work, monthly (?) meetings, hunting people down in many social media platforms, including Plaxo and Friendster - who remember those!?  Facebook was somewhat new for me at the time.  This time around, we already have a good base of interested people, but what I found out recently is fifteen years after the other reunion, many people are no longer active on Facebook, or left the platform altogether.  I cannot blame them.

Proceeded we did, admission price was set and a deadline for collecting x dollars to hand over to the hotel to secure the event space.  I was somewhat worried.  We live in interesting times, a bizarro world with events making writers at the satirical website The Onion scratch their heads.  Inflation, bird flu, uncertain economic future, will people plunk down x dollars to see a bunch of people from high school?  But plunk they did and we now have enough money to cover the deposit.  Whew!  I was worried for a while we won't make it and have to refund the money and lose some more money because the billing service we use charge x percent for every transaction.  Maybe we'll hemorrhage our fund because of the service charges and have to use our own money to cover the refund.  I know of at least one horror story of someone trying to do a reunion and lost $1000s.  OK, not this time for Newtown Class of 1985, whew!