Monday 08/03/2026

Took a standard walk. Ended up with 10K steps, 4 miles for the day. Then set up for an auditorium event, a First Monday Book Talk where the author that was presenting, is a teacher at the the U. of Manchester in the UK. I set up a zoom meeting as scheduled, then had a panic when the zoomroom that is supposed to put the zoom meeting on our projector screen, wasn’t working. Dashed to the basement to get one of the IT guys to come up and reboot the zoomroom PC.

Soon the professor joined the zoom and it was all OK. As soon as the talk was over, I picked up my carry-out lunch and my other computer bag, and headed for FOPAL. This is the week before the sale and I hoped to get my section ready for the sale. I failed. It was 3pm and there were still 3 boxes of books to go, plus the usual tidying of shelves and taking pictures. I will have to go back tomorrow.

Back to CH in time for the monthly 4pm Poetry Out Loud meeting. Very pleasant little gathering, about 9 people, each reading a poem they like. I read James Fenton’s “In Paris with You”. Down for the dinner mixer at 5, and that’s it for the day.

Almost.

On the way back to my room, I picked up my mail, and here is the quarterly bill from the Mercury News. They have raised it again, and now want $857 for 13 weeks of The Merc. This has been giving me fits for over a year now, each quarter it goes up and I say “too much”. It is now (does some arithmetic) over $9 a day for a daily paper. For a ten-minute read, a crossword and a sudoku. And it is more than the New York Times costs for a year.

I played around with the SF Chronicle but didn’t really like its news coverage. It wasn’t pleasant to read. Maybe I’ll try to get used to it. Problem is, I’m looking at changing a habit of more than 50 years standing! I started reading the daily Merc in 1972.

Sunday 08/02/2026

Out at 8am to pick up Frank. Then we did the long day of standing behind the table and take people’s money as they bought books. Besides Frank we had FOPAL volunteers Irina, Allen, Steve and Joan.

Also, a little adventure. About 2pm we realized that nobody had been tasked with bringing the hand-truck from FOPAL, and we would need it for load-out. So I drove back to FOPAL and picked up the hand-truck from the bargain room. Then, I had something to drop off in the Main room. When I went in there, over by my section, on top of a box of computer books, was: a computer! An Osborne 1 at that.

Somebody had donated this relic of 1981, just yesterday. And I am about to drive back to a vintage computer show. I grabbed that sucker. Texted Frank to clear off space for it on our table. When I got there we set it on the table, plugged it in. The screen lit up with a message, “Insert disk in drive A and press return.” Unfortunately we had no Osborne 1 CP/M boot disk to try. But it looked good.

Some festival patrons were standing around curious to see what we were doing. I quickly looked up “Osborne 1” on EBay. The cheapest one, which it said did not run, was asking $350. OK, we are selling this. One guy in the group says, what do you want for it? I say, “Two Hundred” and he says, “Fine” and holds out his credit card. Boom, gone.

At 5 we could shut down and pack up the remaining unsold books, transport them to our cars, haul them back to FOPAL, and unload them. I finally got in about 6:30. Had a nice supper of PBJ and bouillon in my room.

In whole, the sale was a great success. We took down 42 boxes of stuff, and we brought back 17, so nearly 2-thirds sold. Total receipts over $3000. And a couple hundred or so old books re-homed.

Saturday 08/01/2026

Joanne needed the car today so she drove me to the Museum early, arriving at 9, and dropped me off. Our team of volunteers then managed a long and hectic day. The festival itself seemed more crowded and busy than last year, and from 9:30 to about 3pm our part of it looked like this,

People browsing books and the boxes of old software along the foot of the table. At the end of the day we had taken in over $2000, which is more than we did for the whole weekend last year. And our stock of books is depleted. I think we moved out at least 60% of the books we brought by end of the day. When I left the others were talking about maybe bringing some vinyl records, of which we have a bunch, to give people more to paw through.

But it was a day of standing behind the table and… standing behind the table some more. Joanne came and picked me at 6pm. I went straight to my room, put away the computer I had at VCF, got a different computer, and headed down to the auditorium. I had booked a carry-out supper for 6:45, so I at my vegetarian wrap while setting up the auditorium.

Tonight was our quarterly Fan Boys concert. We showed the Elvis Comeback Special of 1968. David Greene had pulled the DVD set from his library of great stuff. Last week I had edited the hour-long sit-down part, where he is sitting on a small stage with four musicians. I had inserted a couple of numbers from the part where he is standing alone on the small stage. It made a nice one-hour show and everyone seemed to enjoy it. I certainly did.

Friday 07/31/2026

Today’s main activity was to move 40 boxes of books and stuff from FOPAL to CHM and set up our table at the Vintage Computer Fest. This went surprisingly well. A crew of five, including me, met at FOPAL at 11 and went to work loading boxes into vehicles. Off to the museum. Unloaded all the boxes at the loading dock, into the museum using a hand truck and a borrowed cart, and did most of the setup and organizing.

I was actually home before 4pm. Had dinner. Sat around watching a lecture with Joanne. Went to bed early.

Thursday 07/30/2026

At 9:30 we had a demonstration by Stanford Robotics of their current work in progress. It still isn’t ready to accompany a senior on a walk, but they have big plans. At least this one — which is chinese-made and recently banned for import — can climb stairs.

As soon as that was done I went to FOPAL. With Frank’s help I got all 30 boxes of books that we had set aside over the prior 12 months to sell at the Vintage Computer Fest. Got them out of the building into the patio, and proceeded to sort them all into loose categories. Windows, MS-DOS, hardware, etc. Three hours working in the sun.

Came home rather tired and zoned out for the rest of the day.

Wednesday 07/29/2026

The event of the morning was a hike at Wunderlich park. Five people, so we crammed into Joanne L’s Hyundai. Me, Joanne, Martha, Joanne and Erika. A familiar walk through the woods, starting with a 600-foot climb, then a rest, and then down again. Here’s a crappy picture (the lens was dirty, it looks like).

Nice quiet afternoon. Played guitar for an hour, first time in days.

At 6:30 I rode with Joanne to Menlo Park to hear a lecture on Beethoven. This was part of the Music@Menlo festival which a number of CH people attend, including Joanne, but which I’ve always ignored. The lecture was by pianist Gilles Vonsattel, who gave an interesting and clever talk about Beethoven’s sonatas, all of which Vonsattel is performing at this festival. It was remarkable how he seemed to have every one of the (20? 30?) sonatas in his memory ready to play. “So Sonata #3 opens like this,” and he plays a bit, “but then the next movment starts like this,” and he plays that, then goes on to play some other sonata for contrast.

Tuesday 07/27/2026

Busy morning just doin’ shit. Tidy the apartment, start the laundry, pay a bill. Then I realized that when I made 25 copies of the lyrics for toinight’s CMX, I had printed out the wrong file. I had to recycle those, print the right file, and make 25 more copies of the 8-page document.

Writers meeting. I had nothing to contribute but my applause. Took a little walk in the afternoon. Early supper. Then went up to the 11th floor and prepared for the Contemporary Music Exposure event. I had put out a sign-up sheet with room for 22 names, and as usual at least 30 people signed up.

The contemporary artist and album I had chosen was Lorde, Virgin. Goodness this was a more intense experience than the previous ones (Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, Ed Sheeran). Very confessional, about her various experiences and problems. Somebody asked, do the young women actually listen to the lyrics? Carolyn said, “Definitely, my grand daughter loves Lorde and can sing every word.”

Anyway, that;s over. Now if I can get through the Vintage Computer Fest weekend coming up, I will have a lovely calm August with almost no commitments.

Monday 07/27/2026

Took an early walk, a standard 2 mile one, but now I see that somehow I racked up 4.2 for the day. Anyway, drove down to FOPAL at 9:30 and worked 3 hours to clean up my section. Back just in time to get lunch at CH.

Spent some time starting to edit the video of the Golden Stage performances. Then it was almost 4pm and time for Rhonda’s monthly open meeting. Most of that was a report on various things at the Leading Age conference last month. Leading Age is a trade association of senior residences.

A little more video editing and then it was time to join Joanne, Jerry and Betty to drive in Jerry’s car to the campus. We ate supper at the student union. Then at 7:30 walked to Campbell Hall to hear a jazz concert. This is the last week of the annual Stanford Jazz Workshop. Tonight was billed as “Guitar Night” and I had expected that the two featured guitarists, Camila Meza and Dan Wilson, would be on stage together. Quite wrong. It turned out that Ms. Meza and a pianist, bass, and drummer played a 40-minute set. Then a brief intermission and Mr. Wilson came on with a different pianist, bass, drummer, and two sax players, a trumpet, and a trombonist, and played another 40-minute set.

I had assured Joanne she wouldn’t need her earplugs, but already the first group was loud enough to make her put them in. Then with the second group, I was sitting directly in line with the trumpeter and I was listening with my index fingers pressed into my ears, when Joanne nudges me. I look down, she’s handing me a pair of foam earplugs, bless her. I needed them.

Anyway, it was good music, quite amazing how the musicians coordinated with each other, and a nice show.

Sunday 07/26/2026

After I watered the plants and did the big crossword, I settled down to completing prep for the upcoming CMX. I finished copy/pasting the lyrics to Lorde’s Virgin tracks into a document and printed it out. I took the printout down to the lobby and made 25 copies.

I collected a batch of good pictures of her from the internet, into a folder on my drive. I took my laptop up to 11 and tried to set up how I wanted to present. Here’s the deal. I want to connect my laptop to the receiver that runs the big TV. I want the TV to be an external monitor for the laptop. This is all standard stuff, windows and mac systems alike support it. Plug in the HDMI cable to the external TV and set some settings.

Well, not so much with my laptop. I have had problems with this machine driving an external monitor before; it is an M1 MacBook Pro from 2020 and there is something nonstandard about the way it treats the HDMI port. What I want to set up is, a looping slide show of pictures of Lorde on the TV, while on the actual laptop screen I have control of the Music app so I can play each track, then stop for discussion. Could not get that to work; a combination of the crappy old receiver and my MacBook just wouldn’t work.

Fine, I have my old MacBook, it is getting on for 10 now, but still works fine and I have previously noticed its HDMI port plays nicely with other equipment. So I copied my folder of pictures over to it, and signed in to the Music app on it, and took it upstairs. And, yeah, with a little fiddling, I had what I wanted, a slide show of pics of Lorde looping on the big screen, and the Music app with a list of her album tracks on the small screen. So everything is ready for CMX on Tuesday. What a relief.

After lunch, at 1pm, the bus loaded to take us to the Pear Theater. I think I’ve mentioned before how 10 or 15 people here at CH get season tix to the Pear, and all choose the same Sunday matinee, so we can use a bus. Actually there’s a fee for the bus but it is covered by the Heritage Fund, the in-house resident fund. Joanne wasn’t on this bus; she has season tix but opted for a different day of the run, and she went to this show last Sunday.

Anyway, this was the final show of their season, the annual “Pear Slices”, eight short one-act plays by local playwrights. They varied in quality but were entertaining. There was The Shrewing of the Tames, a continuation of the Shakespeare play to show how Katherine gets her revenge later. The one that got the most laughs was Cyrano No No in which an update of a guy’s laptop software introduces a very pushy AI helper that proceeds to ruin his life for him, all with the best intentions.

07/25/2026

In the morning I tried to get caught up with the activity that, I realized last evening, I should have been doing yesterday. I had a long lazy afternoon and I should have spent it doing the prep work for the Contemporary Music Exposure event that I am committed to running this coming Tuesday. That would be, picking the artist, getting info on them for an introductory presentation, getting the lyrics for all the songs from their latest album, and other stuff. Did I do any of that yesterday? No, but I got a start this morning.

First problem was, which artist. I had kind of figured it would be Ariana Grande, but when I started reading up on her I found out that her “latest” album would only be released at the end of this month. Lyrics and music not available for another week. So phooey, we can do her in September. But who else? I decided to go back to the original inspiration, the article in the Mercury News last December, that listed that writer’s idea of the best albums of 2025, and all the names were unfamiliar. The top album, a “verifiable masterpiece” he wrote, was Virgin by Lorde. OK, then. So I started pouring the lyrics for those songs into my word processing document.

But there was also a Section Manager’s meeting at FOPAL at 10:30. I didn’t want to take Fred because, well, silly reason, I had forgotten about this meeting, and hadn’t cleared Fred’s availability with Joanne, and didn’t want to bug her early Saturday morning. So I took a Lyft each way. Attended the meeting, scooted back by 12. Took my stuff down to the auditorium, helped set up for the Golden Stage performance at 2pm. Our talent show went off ok. There was a full house, to my surprise because some people had signed up for a bus trip to the TheatreWorks play matinee showing. But it was full and the audience was appreciative of our various talents, including my and Sandy’s rendition of “Jackson”.

Took a nap, had dinner, now still have time for a blog entry before I meet Joanne and we walk together to see the evening performance of the play that other people went to in the afternoon, called The Employee Dharma Handbook. Newspaper reviews have been very positive. Supposed to be funny. I will report on that tomorrow.