Sunday 03/08/2026

After watering the plants, but before doing the big puzzle, I headed out to meet with Joanne and we took a long walk to the Cal Ave farmers market. Just to get out, and maybe to buy some fruit, but fruit season is long past, or maybe not yet come, and we didn’t get anything. Total distance for the day, 4.6mi, 12K steps.

After lunch, I boarded the Channing House bus for the Pear Theater. Enough of us, 20 or so, subscribed to the Pear season, and chose the Sunday matinee, that it was practical to use the bus. There’s a fee for a weekend bus ride (overtime for the staff member who drives it) but that was covered by the Heritage Circle.

Anyway, the show was My Fair Lady. They did a really good job of staging a big show in that very small space, about 75 seats on three sides of a stage that is about 20 by 40 feet. I was impressed by the dancing; the local choreographer had got the small chorus (six or seven people) to do some really intricate dance routines, and they executed perfectly. The main characters had good voices and performed with a lot of personality.

The show was supposed to run a rather chunky 2 hours 45 minutes with an intermission. In fact it ran longer, total of three hours from start to final applause. For me, the second act dragged, I was checking my watch often. I’m not sure if the director had tinkered with the original Broadway script or what, but it seemed like Professor Higgins and Eliza were just arguing pointlessly for scene after scene without ever getting anything resolved. In fact they never did reach a romantic conclusion that I could see.

But there were still the great songs, “Luverly” — “On the Street Where You Live” — “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” — “With a Little Bit of Luck” — “I’m Getting Married in the Morning”.

Back home I took a look at the evening menu and decided that I wasn’t that hungry, and went to my room and had a PBJ and an orange. Not sulking, just not feeling sociable.

Saturday -3/07/26

today I drrove to he museum and led the 12pm tour. I noticed that the 2pm tour was shown as “canceled” so I guess none of my fellow docents signed up. Surprises me, but there you go. I edited myself on the fly, speeding through parts of my usual patter, to be sure to get my party of a dozen or so back to the lobby in time for them to join the live 1401 demo at 1pm.

For an hour before, and about 3 hours after, I worked with Bert on a technical project here. Mary Beth, queen of the gift shop, had accumulated a large cart stacked on three shelves with various kinds of electronic devices. When people die, the family is responsible for clearing their possessions out of that apartment. Quite often, after they cherry-pick the very best or most meaningful items, the family will just say to the gift shop people, you take it, thanks byeeee.

Sorry, the gift shop has been renamed, it is the Treasure Trove. Run entirely by residents, it carries stuff like distilled water for CPAP machines, computer paper, See’s Candy, but also stocks lots of used clothing and dishware and canes and such, acquired by the above process. In addition Mary Beth and her fellow volunteers process a lot of stuff that isn’t really saleable, which they pass on to Goodwill or the Ecumenical Hunger Project.

Anyway, they ad this cart stacked with dozens and dozens of things and they wanted somebody technical to evaluate them, are they useful? Saleable? Worth donating? Or just e-waste? Facilities has a special room in the basement where they collect old TVs and other e-waste until they get a contractor in to clear it.

Some of the things I looked at today were clock radios, iPad keyboards, several of those digital picture frame devices, power banks for traveling, a digital audio recorder, a digital camera… It took me and Bert together at least 3 hours to sort it all out. Over 60% went to the e-waste room. The rest we put tentative prices on, typically half of what an identical object was getting on eBay. Lot of work but satisfying.

One item I kept for myself, a tiny little mini-vacuum cleaner for dusting off computer keyboards. And another is the most elegant little digital camera, a Canon PowerShot Elph, dating to about 2004. Almost mint condition, with a cute red leather case, spare batteries, a charger. It seems to be working but didn’t have an SD card in it. I got an SD card out of my drawer but it couldn’t format it. Because? Because this card was an 8GB one, and when I checked the manual, the largest card the camera knew about was 512MB. So I’ve gone on eBay and ordered a couple of 128MB SD cards and hopefully it will be able to deal with those.

I mean, why bother? Since the phone in my pocket takes far better pictures. I don’t know, it’s just a lovely little object and I want to verify it still works.

Friday 02/06/2026

Our customary Friday morning walk was very pleasant. I spent some time in the middle of the day playing music, and some time thinking about an app I want to write with AI help. At 4pm it was the first of a number of Friday rehearsals of the pocket-size “Music Man” that Mary is producing. I sing one song in it. It went ok today.

Sorry, that’s about all.

Thursday 03/05/2026

Went for a walk by myself in the morning, over to Zoe’s and then up University to pick up a med at CVS.

At 11 we had a talk on “Brain Health” which I attended. Guess what: get exercise, sleep, and eat right. Nothing to it.

After supper, Joanne and I sat down to watch the first episode of “Riot Women” off Amazon Prime/Britbox. It’s fun, but in the first episode the captions are screwed up, 15 seconds out of sync with the actual dialog, so we turned them off, but then missed a lot of details, because British accents, duh. I checked later and the captions on the second episode look ok, so when we get around to watching that, it will be better. Anyway, fun show.

Wednesday 03/04/2026

Went for a hike at the Arastradero Preserve with Joanne and Erika. Shortish hike, 1.5mi. Kept it short out of respect for my hip, although that is getting near normal.

Did not much the rest of the day. At 5, met with Joanne, Betty and Jerry to go out for dinner. We went to the Parkside Grille. Had a very pleasant dinner, good service, good food, good talk with friends.

Tuesday 3/3/2026

Writers meeting again. I had not written for the prior 3(?) meetings, so I really felt under the gun. So from 9 to 10 I wrote something. The prompt was “the road not taken — a fiction about some life choice you made or didn’t and the result.” I wrote about how I failed to get a job at IBM and so returned to Washington and became a big-time dairy farmer.

Betty had a medical appointment so asked me to be zoom host, so I had to sign in with her ID and start the meeting, which I did. That all worked fine.

Went to the Line Dance class. Played some guitar. I still can’t decide whether I want to practice more, or give it all up.

Movie day. The Movie Committee continued their Diane Keaton retrospective with Marvin’s Room, a tear-jerker about a bunch of people who are all screwed up. And get only slightly un-screwed by the end.

Monday 03/02/2026

To start with, I installed Susan’s new monitor. I went with her to Best Buy a few days ago and picked it out. It arrived in the package room yesterday. So this morning I went and fetched it to my room. Unboxed it and set it up, and tried it out with my Macbook. Looks great. So I trundled it down to Susan and Harry’s apartment and set it up there. Mostly a smooth operation. A couple of glitches because her new Macbook is running MacOS 26 and I’m still using 18, so some things were different. But it all worked and I was done by 10.

Which was time to go and set up the auditorium for a book talk. Nice talk by a Ms. Jacobs, a Stanford professor who has written a biography of Jonas Salk. Interesting talk.

That wrapped at 12. I grabbed the lunch sandwich I had ordered to go, and my computer and barcode scanner, and hopped into Fred where Joanne had left him after her 9am appointment, and off to FOPAL. Processed six boxes of books and was back before 3. In time for a nap and then it was 4 and time for Poetry Out Load. Only 6 of us this time. I read my Browning thing. Best poem read was “Hope” by Lisel Mueller.

Dinner mixer at 5pm. Nice chat with two familiar people and one I hadn’t met before. Which is the point of the monthly mixer, where you pick a table number out of a jar as you come in.

Sunday 03/01/2026

Sunday morning stuff as has been my pattern now for about 7 years: water the plants, do the big crossword. Not much else. Well, yes, I’d given myself the assignment of choosing a poem to read for Poetry Out Load which comes up tomorrow. About 2am I had recalled a couplet from a poem I once knew well. At 2am I was able to recall the name of the poet: Robert Browning.

Later in the day I looked it up. The poem is “My Last Duchess” and it is a dramatic monologue by a medieval Duke, in the course of which we find out that he is not a nice guy at all. As soon as I started reading it, it was all familiar. At some point in the past I did a dramatic reading of that poem. I’m guessing, maybe during my year or two as an undergraduate English Major at UW? So, 1963 or so? Anyway it will do very well for tomorrow.

Later in the day Joanne texted wanting to know if my hip would allow me to walk. So in the afternoon we got together and drove down to the Baylands and walked and talked. Very nice having a close friend like that.

I had a big lunch at the fancy Brunch service we are doing now, so I had a modest sandwich in my room for supper. Read on a couple of books in my backlog. Watching some TV.

Saturday 02/28/2026

Did something or other in the morning. Early lunch. At 12:30 picked up Fred from where Joanne parked him at 11:30 and headed off to the Museum to lead a tour. Private tour for a family, supposed to be 16 in the party but only 7 actually showed up. Nice folks, very patient with me.

Back home, changed out of my red shirt and tidied myself up for an evening out. Joanne had invited me to join her with her visiting friend Nona, for dinner at Joanne’s favorite restaurant, Vino Locale. We picked up Nona from where she is staying with another friend, in Portola Valley. (That was after Channing House messed up Joanne’s reservation of a guest room, mentioned earlier.)

Vino Locale is a very pleasant place. I’ve mentioned how the staff recognizes Joanne and greet her whenever she shows up. The weather is good, the evening air was warm, and we ate out on their back yard patio, listening to local musician Terrigal Burn playing piano. We sat and ate and talked for a couple of hours.

Friday 02/27/2026

Four point two miles on the phone, I’m not really sure how that happened. I wanted to rendezvous with Joanne when she finished a dental hygiene appointment, so I walked most of my standard route, then we walked another mile plus to the bakery and back.Problem was, I woke up with a sore right hip and just kept using it so now it hurts.

After lunch I met with Jean to mentor her doing video editing. And then at 4 met with Mary and Arlene to practice “Lida Rose”. Arlene is funny, a firecracker of a 90 year old who plays the piano extremely well, and also was enthusiastically directing us in how to stage the song, and keeping the rehearsal going. “Ok, let’s do it one more time, and David has to come in on that second beat, here’s your intro…”