Tuesday 01/20/2026

First up, out the door at 7:10 to walk to a dental appointment at 7:30. Simple quick fill of a cavity next to a crown. No shot, just a quick buzz with the drill and pack in some filling.

Tidy the apartment for the housekeeper coming at 11. Call United Health Care to handle a stupid bit of billing. UHC split my insurance into separate accounts, one for medical and one for prescriptions. The fact that the monthly payment was from my bank by EFT, didn’t get transferred to the new, prescription policy. So now they sent me an email saying it was overdue. The customer service lady seemed distracted, I actually thought she might be ill or on drugs, but she managed to get it done. Or said she had; we will see when the bill gets paid or doesn’t.

So time for the writers meeting. Betty had to leave early so she made me host. I managed to get everyone admitted to the Zoom. Nice meeting, although I hadn’t written others had.

Meeting over, I went downstairs to meet my lunch guest, Harriet from basketball days. We have kept slightly in touch and I invited her to have lunch. I had also invited Joanne and my neighbor Carolyn, subbing for Patty who is more of a basketball fan but had to bail a day ago. Anyway nice lunch, good conversation.

Which led to 1:30 and time for Line Dance class. After which I caught the 21 bus down to Charleston center and FOPAL. Seventh work stint in the last 8 days. And I finished. There are no boxes of donations left in front of my section, all sorted and priced and shelved or put away.

Had a little trouble getting home, had a light supper in the dining room, and going to be a couch potato until I go to bed. Here was my commute problems, as I told them to Lou of the car-free group.

Tonight about 5:30 I was ready to come home from FOPAL at Cubberly Center. I walked out to Middlefield. Dark, and busy traffic on Middlefield.

Lyft had sent me a 20% off deal so I called a Lyft. I was assigned Jose in a red Prius C. I watched it approach on the map. It approached, and it arrived — on the map. Swear to Allah, there was no red Prius C anywhere I could see.

“Your driver is here, he waits 4 minutes”. So I tapped Contact Driver and then Call. Driver’s phone rang 5 times and went to voice mail.

I tapped Get Help, and that called Lyft Support. We’ll connect you to the first available… and hold music. I held for a couple of minutes and gave up.

I canceled the Lyft ride, incurring a $5 fee, and for fun opened the Transit app. OOOh there’s a bus coming at 5:59, and I have just time to walk a block to the Charleston bus stop. Which I do. And wait. Watching the traffic on Middlefield, and watching the little bus symbol on the app. 

The little bus symbol stayed where it was, around San Antonio, with a little number (of seconds?) on it that kept going down and then up again.

At 6:10 the transit app showed me the bus departed at 6:01 and now I could leave at 6:27.

There was NO BUS at 6:01, or any time between 5:50 and 6:20.

So at this point I could have tried Uber I suppose but instead I went to Waymo. The Waymo pickup was right next to the bus stop. It took another ten minutes — I was kind of looking for that 6:27 bus to show and would have had a real moral struggle to think about, if it had. But the Waymo was first.

So, a ghost lyft and a ghost bus. Just glad it wasn’t raining.

Monday 01/19/2026

Forgot to post. Took the standard walk first thing. Attended the event coordinator meeting, not as AV chair, John is doing that, but to propose a new event series. Got good feedback. Then met with Joanne and Prue, the latter is going to do an article about car-sharing and wanted picture of us with Fred.

After which, guess what, FOPAL again for a couple more hours.

Quiet evening.

Sunday 01/18/2026

Realized if I wanted to get some time in a FOPAL, and I did, I needed to do it in the morning. So at 7:30 I summoned a Waymo and off I went to there. I put in 2:30 and made some progress — the great wall of boxes is now down to 11, despite several being added to it over the last couple of days.

That got me back in time to meet Joanne for lunch with Prue, who wanted to get info on our car-sharing arrangement for an article in the newsletter.

I had time after for a nap, and an hour of guitar practice. Then at 4:30 we had a talk on the Chilean wine industry. No, seriously. A resident, Bill Pflaum, has a daughter who manages an 8000-acre farm near Santiago, Chile, where over the past 25 years she has been creating a winery. She’s a grad of Stanford Business school and initially developed the plan to add wines to the family property while in school. Interesting talk.

Saturday 01/17/2026

Somehow I kept busy in the morning. Went downstairs for breakfast, which I don’t usually do. Anyway, had an early lunch then headed out to the Museum to lead the 2pm tour. Good tour, nice crowd.

Back at 3:30 and then met with Joanne about 4:45 to plan some upcoming outings. It had gotten too complicated to get them all planned by emails. At 5:15 we met with the Rhudys, Roberta and Richard, and Sherry, for dinner. Nice dinner, talking about all sorts of things, including photography, which Roberta and Richard are top-rank amateurs at.

At 6:30 we two split for the Stanford campus to attend a concert. This was our first time in the space called the Bing Studio. The Bing Concert Hall has been there a decade, we’ve both attended events in the main concert space which seats near a thousand. But this was downstairs, a nice small room with a cocktail lounge vibe, small tables with 4 chairs each and a stage in the corner. Guessing maybe 150 people max?

The performer was Sasha Berliner playing vibraphone, along with a pianist named Paul Cornish. Their music was… well, there was a lot of skill on display. But it was the kind of jazz where you listen and listen and you can’t pick up a melody or any structure. It just goes a while and later stops. I’m very melody-oriented, and I just can’t imagine how these musicians memorize all their songs, 5-minute, 10-minute long pieces where I just can’t find anything that repeats, nothing to hang on to. There has to be a structure to it but I can’t find it. So we agreed it was interesting.

Friday 01/16/2026

Joined Joanne for our Friday morning walk. We get our gossip on, I learn all sorts of things about my neighbors.

Then I took a tech squad call to help Margaret get her printer to work. Easy.

Soon it was 11am and time for the monthly AI interest group meeting. Inconclusive talk; it always comes down to, what can we actually accomplish. Not a lot.

Then off to FOPAL to spend 3 hours trying to reduce that massive donation. I made some progress but there is much more to do.

Had dinner with Gloria, Jerry and Walt. Walt is hard of hearing (a little hard of thinking these days too). I was rather proud of myself for keeping the conversation going and him included.

Thursday 01/15/2026

Today the Car-Free group had scheduled an outing, to take the #21 bus that loads just across the street from us, down to Mitchell Park for a walk. I decided to go just because I thought it would be interesting to ride that bus one stop further than the group planned, and get off close to the FOPAL building.

The group as a whole were not used to riding the bus, and three had walkers. Stew and Lou, organizing, assured everybody it would be fine. The phone-savvy among us had the Transit app up, and could see the countdown for when our particular bus was coming. At 1 minute to go, it came around the corner right on time. The driver flipped out the ramp, making it easy for the walker users to get on, and off we went.

So at FOPAL I sat down with my computer and went to work on the massive wall of boxes. I spent four hours, 10 to 2, working, and made a visible dent. Then hopped the #21 going the other way to get back. Bus riding is easy for a senior these days, I just tap my senior Clipper card on the reader as I get on and it charges me $1.

I figure to go back, probably using the bus again, tomorrow afternoon and again Sunday.

Wednesday 01/14/2026

First thing today was a hike with Joanne and Martha. The plan was to walk the Dish, but our 9am departure was too late. There were no parking spaces within a mile of the trailhead. So we diverted to the Arastradero Preserve. My gout attack has faded out, and my feet felt fine. (3.5 miles for the day)

Lying in bed at 5am I realized a better way to work at FOPAL. The boxes of donated books are stacked in front of my section (see picture, 2 days back; there were 8 more boxes today). As taught me by the guy who had the section before me, I would go through them, pick out the books that looked saleable, put them on a cart, and trundle them to the opposite end of the building where I could sit at a computer and use a barcode scanner to quickly enter the ISBNs into bookfinder.com to get prices. Then I would bring them back to shelve them.

Well it dawned on me (5am, “dawned” heh heh) that I have a laptop and the scanners in the computer room have USB plugs. So I could steal a scanner, and do the pricing right there at my section. Check the value, mark a price on the flyleaf, and shelve the book all in one pass.

So I grabbed my laptop and went down there and tried this out and it did work. I don’t know how much time it actually saves, but it feels more efficient. I need to go back tomorrow and maybe Friday and Sunday to begin to catch up.

Sixth floor meeting at 4:30, fun, welcomed two new residents, Bob and Nancy, to our floor.

Tuesday 01/13/2026

Busy morning, tidying up for the housekeeper, and running over to CVS to pick up a prescription. But also wanted to write something because it has been over a month since I’v contributed to the writers group. The prompt was, “winter memories” and I had nothin’. But I called Dennis and he reminded me of hot rocks, which I hadn’t thought of in decades. So I wrote about that (see below).

Ran my two loads of laundry in between lunch, the housekeeper, and the line dance class at 1:30. After supper, Joanne came to my apartment and we watched the movie Train Dreams, which she had wanted to see. We agreed that it was beautiful and did a great job of recreating early 20th century logging and other period stuff. But there really wasn’t much story for the last half of the movie.

Hot Rocks

In the two-story farmhouse where I grew up, my parents’ bedroom was on the ground floor, but i slept on the second floor.
The ground floor was comfortably heated from multiple sources: the wood-fired range in the kitchen, an open fireplace at the far end of the living room, and, central to the ground floor and near the staircase, a large, handsome, enameled, wood-fired stove. (Chopping firewood and keeping wood boxes filled were my primary chores.)
The second story was heated, rather optimistically, by convection: warm air finding its way from the kitchen and living room stoves up the staircase.
Winters in Western Washington are characterized by endless, misty rainfall. Temperatures are not drastically cold; people would remark on it when the puddles had a skin of ice on a chilly morning. But it is consistently damp and chilly, and going to a chilly bedroom to climb into a chilly bed could be discouraging.
Hence: the hot rocks.
Our land was basically glacial till, the mix of rocks and sediments left by ice-age glaciers as they retreated back up the skirts of Mount Rainier. Which meant we had a plentiful supply of rocks, many stream-rounded. My father had collected 3 or 4 smooth ones, each about the size of a coconut and weighing 3 or 4 pounds. These rocks sat, during the day, on the flat top of the enameled wood stove in the living room. They got hot; not hot enough to burn but too hot to be held comfortably in the hands.
When it was time for bed, I would take a sheet of newspaper from the kindling box and wrap a rock thoroughly in the paper. I can still remember the scent of hot newsprint. I would cradle the rock in my arms and climb the stairs to my chilly bedroom, and shove it down between the sheets to the foot of the bed. I would hastily change to my PJs and climb in to the chilly sheets, and probe with my bare feet for that blistering-hot orb at the foot of the bed. It was deliciously warm.
The rock would stay hot long enough for me to fall asleep. Usually it would be a cool stony lump bumping my toes in the morning, but if I was active in my sleep, it would sometimes find its way to the edge of the bed and drop off onto the floor with a heavy thump. Either way, I would remember to bring it downstairs the next morning, back to its warming spot on the stove.

Monday 01/12/2026

Off to FOPAL first thing, as I needed to be back by 1pm. First Monday after the sale weekend, and I needed to scan all the books for ones that has seen three sales, and either send them to the bargain room or lower their price. This was made a bit difficult by what I found waiting.

That wall is twenty-one boxes of computer books. With, I’m told, more coming. I am sorry I don’t remember the guy’s name, anyway, he died in a car accident recently and his family is donating his collection which seems to be rather large. And of good quality, too, because I processed only four boxes today, and pulled out at least 20 books valued above $30 on Amazon, for our “high value” group to sell.

Back to CH and at 1pm joined the drama group in the auditorium to try out the new microphones I had found for them, and work on lighting arrangements.

Then to a different meeting at 2:30. This was the “transition” group, residents trying to think up ways to make residents of our new, satellite building, integrate into our “Channing House culture”. Or want to do that.

Some reading, some guitar, dinner, that was it.

Sunday 01/11/2025

Ankle gout much improved. Took an easy 2mi walk after breakfast with no problems.

Joanne and I met for a late lunch at 12:30. We won’t be having supper until 7:30 so we hit the Channing House Sunday Brunch layout hard. Then off to my room for a nap and to read.

At 3:45 we met at the garage and headed out for Oakland, to the Piedmont Piano Company on San Pablo (which is not in the Piedmont district, but whatever). Same place and same event as February 2025, a concert by pianists Stephanie Trick and Paolo Alderighi. I’ve been a fan of her for probably 15 years. It was an excellent concert.

The show wrapped up at 6:30 and we headed out to supper at a place that Joanne had booked, the Parkside Grille in Portola Valley. It’s been there a long time but I had never been in it. It was excellent also, comfortable, quiet, good service. We had some good, solid talk about “us” and what our relationship should be. We are in good agreement on all points.