Saturday 06/13/2026

The Bus Barn’s Toxic Avenger: the Musical was silly fun. The plot is comic-book simple, in fact, now that I think of it, it was probably deliberately designed to remind us of comic books of our youths. The hero is close to uncovering environmental crimes by the mayor of his New Jersey town, so the mayor has him dropped into a giant vat of glowing green toxic waste, from which he emerges as a monster in very well-done rubber makeup. Hijinks ensue. The entire cast was five actors, playing about 9 roles, with frequent costume changes. Part of the fun was seeing people enter in a different costume as a different character, and thinking, wait a minute, wasn’t that folk singer a policeman a minute ago?

Our adventure this morning was for me and Joanne to drive down to FOPAL to shop the monthly book sale. Although I have been volunteering there for going on seven years, I had never actually gone in on a sale day and shopped for books. So we went down and got our entry tickets at 9am, then walked over to a nearby coffee place and chatted until the entry time at 10. I found a poetry anthology I can use to find poems for Poetry Out Loud, and a book of music for 50 Lennon-McCartney songs.

Passed a quiet afternoon reading and doing nothing productive.

Friday 06/12/2026

Muffin walk with Joanne. We stopped at Ace Hardware where I bought organic moth repellent for my closets, and a bottle of rooting hormone. I’m planning to try to take cuttings from the poor old Dragon Wing Begonias and start fresh plants. I’ve picked out the shoots I will cut, but I want to wait until their leaves get bigger.

At 11 I put on my red docent shirt and drove to the Museum and led the noon tour. That went ok.

Today was the annual CH staff party, so no dinner service. I got a brown bag in the morning and ate my sandwich with half a dozen other 6th floor-ians in our dining room.

Tonight we go to see “Toxic Avenger” at the Bus Barn. Curtain there is at 8 so I won’t be home until 11. I’ll remark on it in tomorrow’s post if I feel like it. Someone else who’d seen this production said it was very funny, so I have expectations.

Thursday 06/11/2026

Today was a blank slate up to 4pm. I took an early morning walk. I woke up at 5:15 so I was out the door for a walk at 7, back by 8:30.

I spent the rest of the morning reading a book about doing backups on MacOS. The old backup drive used by the desktop and laptop was getting full; I bought a new, 8TB drive, and had some trouble getting it set up so both machines could use it. So I bought a book. I must own a dozen of those “Take Control” books by now. Anyway, spent an hour plus skimming through it, then went to work. Got everything pretty well set up.

At 4 I got together with J and we headed out in the car for Filoli for a Summer Night event. The attraction was the band I discovered, that have played twice at CH, The Rounder Circle who were supposed to be playing there. But the pretty-but-vague Filoli website didn’t really give a lot of info on how things were laid out. Filoli is a huge property, and it turned out the band was delegated to play in “The Redwoods” which was a walk of nearly half a mile from the main house and parking lot. When we found the site, which is indeed in a redwood grove, there were a half-dozen people already there, who turned out to be family of band members. Joanne and I were the only un-related audience for the first half hour, then another 3-4 people wandered in.

Anyway the music was good and the ambience was nice. We left at 7pm and walked back through the woods and came home.

Wednesday 06/10/2026

Joanne, I, and Marilyn went for a hike at Arastradero preserve. Lovely weather, clear and not quite hot yet. Saw this critter,

She (?) was not interested in us humans at all, totally focused on finding mice in the recently mowed grasslands.

In the afternoon it was time for the 6th floor meeting. We had much discussion of the moth situation. I and Craig have moths, little brown ones about a centimeter long when their wings are folded. The pheremone traps I put out a week ago have collected a total of five. I put out fresh traps today, but Joanne thinks I need to also put some moth repellent stuff in my closet.

I spent an hour after dinner trying to find an online site for document sharing. Joanne wants to set up a document, basically a list of possible prompts, for the writers group. Collaborative, so that anyone in the group can accesss it and add new material. Immediately you say, Google Docs. Well, no. Joanne and a couple of other people involved have a thing about Google. So I checked out a number of sites — collaborative editing is a common thing among marketing teams and other kinds of organizations. Dropbox Paper, for instance, but it like others, has so many features, including “AI assisted” features. Finally settled on CryptPad.fr which just does documents. I was able to demonstrate to her that you could get a free login, create a document, and share it via a link for editing by anyone else.

Tuesday 06/09/2026

Got an early morning walk. Well, early for me: out at 7:30, back at 9. Cleaned up the apartment for the housekeeper visit at noon. Wrote a short essay for the writers group. Which started at 10:45. Some nice essays besides mine. No I won’t paste it here, I’m not happy with it.

At 1:30 I went to the line dance class. I had missed it last week, just because I thought the teacher was on vacation, but no, that was the prior week. Brain fart. Anyway, the iPhone gets all excited by the dance class and piles on imaginary steps. It says I had 13K steps and 5.5 miles for the day. Don’t believe it.

At 3 I helped Dennis (a resident of Channing House, no relation) to rehearse for a talk he’s giving in a couple of weeks.

Then Joanne and I went for a short walk for iced chai lattes and to talk about a scheme she is working on to improve the writers group organization. Smart and well-thought-out as I would expect.

Practiced some guitar. Ate a simple supper in my room.

Monday 06/08/2026

Second Monday means, Resident Association meeting. No big news. Much discussion of moths, however. Little brown moths. People putting out traps on 8 and on 6, other floors. My traps have caught several.

Headed off at 10:30 to FOPAL. Found 8 boxes waiting. It took until 2:30 to process all of them and to get my section tidied up and sale-ready. Well, out of that 4 hours I took a 45-minute lunch break, so.

Nap and supper and that was the day.

Sunday 06/07/2026

Sunday morning stuff. Messed around trying to get the setup of a new backup drive right.

After lunch I mentored Alice setting up for a presentation she had organized. She is a Smith College graduate, and she had set up a meeting of Smith alumnae to hear a talk by the person who manages the Smith College botanical garden, which is apparently a big deal in the world of botanical gardens. It was an interesting talk.

That started at 2, and wound up about 3:15. After shooing the Smithies out of the room to continue their wine and snacks in the lobby, I set up for Gloria’s 4pm talk about the tour of Chinese gardens she had managed. She had sent me her powerpoint file earlier but sent me updates to it right up to 3:30, so I was still putting it together to get it on the screen at 3:45.

That talk had a bigger audience and it went quite well also.

While I was doing all that, Joanne was riding the Channing House bus to the SF Opera. The busload of opera goers got back just as the China talk was letting out. Big crush at the elevators.

Saturday 06/06/2026

I’m waiting expectantly to write the date 06/26/2026 but the above is not a bad date either. Anyway, walked early to Cafe Zoe and back. Then sat down to really read a deep dive on what development engineers have to do to make LLMs work well. I don’t expect anybody else to be able to read that. I was juuuuust able to track it. I knew most of the acronyms anyway. But that is a detailed account of what competent engineers have to do, in order to have current AI be actually productive in a business environment. It’s the exact opposite of what the average lay person (or high-level manager!) thinks is how AIs work. You don’t just drop Claude or ChatGPT into your environment and have it writing all the code and answering all your customer email. Far, far from it.

After lunch Joanne and I drove up to Russian Ridge open space, at the top of Page Mill road, for a walk. I’ve been wanting to get back there for a while, I keep talking it up for our Wednesday hikes but nobody else wants to take a half-hour twisty drive to get there and again back. But this was Saturday so we did it.

Turns out, searching the blog, that I walked Russian Ridge back in March 2019 (Day 0.105) and a year and a half later in October 202 (1.328). So it has been a good while. The weather was cool and windy, a strong breeze off the Pacific putting haze in the air. But a nice walk just the same.

Friday 06/05/2026

Friday morning muffin mosey, up to Town & Country and back. Nice.

11am, the ResTech group met. IT staff lead Jean led us through a demo of CUBIGO as it is deployed at The Forum, a large retirement community not far from us, where Jean was IT lead until recently. Again, we could decide nothing until we have actually got a hands-on product. Jean will discuss with Rhonda the timing of this, owing to conflicts for his time (and the time of other staff) with the launch of our new campus, Arris.

Quiet afternoon, good guitar practice. At 4pm I went down to join a TGIF party sponsored by the 4th floor. The theme was graduations and we were supposed to identify where we graduated from and cluster in circles with people from the same or related institutions. I am a proud drop-out from the University of Washington. I gathered with a kind of west coast circle. The nicest part of the party was when they got everyone with a grandchild or similar graduating this month. At least 25 people had grand-somethings, children or nephews or nieces, graduating at some level.

Thursday 06/04/2026

Early-ish, 8:30, I joined Bert in the small conference room to watch a webinar, a lecture on how to build an AI agent from scratch, sponsored by the ACM. It was a bust, very poor instructor who didn’t know how to use Zoom right and just plunged into minutia without any kind of overview or setup. I bailed; Bert stayed but said it didn’t get better.

So I had a couple hours and I brought the guitar and other equipment to the auditorium. I will be entertaining the bi-monthly Birthday Dinner (everybody with birthdays in May and June), that’s in two weeks. I wanted to start to practice with a microphone to get used to singing into a stand mic. So I had a very satisfactory hour plus of playing and singing.

At 3:30 I started walking for PAMF where I was to get an ultrasound exam at 4:45, and supposed to fill my bladder by drinking at least 24oz of liquid before. So I had a bottle of root beer and a large iced chai latte, sitting around Peet’s coffee patio. Went over to PAMF on time. Finished with the exam about 5:30.

Walked back into the shopping center to meet Joanne who had brought the car up to park it in the shopping center lot. We had a light supper at Douce France, then at 6 walked the mile into the Stanford campus to the Frost Amphitheater. Yes the same place we were at a few weeks back to see David Byrne.

This time it was to see Paul Simon. I had been very excited when this concert was announced a couple months back and got tickets as soon as possible. The actual concert was a bit of a disappointment. Simon’s selection of songs were almost all from his more recent work, and while the lyrics are very poetic, the music does not rock even a little bit. Very quiet and meditative and introspective. Except for a couple of oldies, “Graceland”, “Me and Julio”, it was… nice. It would have been awkward to squeeze out of our row early, but as soon as he left the stage, while people were standing up yelling “more”, we left. We were not the only ones, a pretty good stream of people heading out even as, of course, he came back to do an encore.