Tuesday 06/16/2026

Took a standard walk early, back by 8:30. Tidied the apartment, sorted and started my laundry. Put out the signup sheet for CMX and put the announcement on CHBB.

Writers meeting, topic was “passports” and there were several nice reminiscences of people’s passports from way back. Finished the laundry. Went to Line Dance; this is the last one of those for a month or so as the instructor is having a knee replaced. She hopes to be back to dancing in a month. I bet it will be sooner. One of my neighbors, Leon, had a knee replaced and was walking without a walker just a couple days later.

Practiced my set for tomorrow night twice.

Joanne and I went for a little walk to CVS for a prescription and for iced chai latte’s. Quiet evening after.

Monday 06/15/2026

Went for an early morning walk and had to abort it after half a mile. Some time last year, I bought some “barefoot” style walking shoes off an internet source. These were very light-weight walking shoes, flexible fabric uppers. I wore them sometimes for walking on pavement and they had been fine.

This morning the right show suddenly decided it didn’t want to cup my heel any more. The back of the shoe kept sliding down and tucking under my heel. Which made the right shoe loose and kind of dangling off my toes. Pulled it back up, a block later it would be loose again. I came on home and dropped the shoes in the landfill box at the door.

At 10:30, time for the monthly Event Coordinators meeting. The EVCO is a fun meeting; we go over the calendar of events planned for the next month, and then talk about issues in various committees that sponsor events. My only role now that I’ve passed the AV chair to John, is to report on the CMX.

As soon as that was over, I picked up my bag of stuff and headed off to FOPAL. The monthly post-sale triage takes over an hour: looking at every book left on the shelf; sending ones that have seen 3 sales off to the bargain room; lowering prices as appropriate. Then I processed three boxes of donations, and headed back. I was pleased to get home around 3:15, thinking I had time for a nap before Rhonda’s open meeting at 4. Come to find out, Rhonda was out sick and that meeting had been canceled. So I got an extra long nap.

After supper I printed out the lyric sheet for the Ed Sheeran album and duplicated 22 copies on the big copier downstairs.

Sunday 06/14/2026

Usual Sunday morning stuff. Before lunch I started preparing the material for a CMX on Bruno Mars, which meant getting the lyrics to the songs on his latest album (The Romantic) into printable form. And I found I did not like the lyrics. Not stuff I want to share with my neighbors. Picky picky. So as I went down the stairs to lunch I was deciding, Bruno is out. Ed Sheeran is in.

So after lunch and after dinner I edited all the lyrics for Sheeran’s latest album (Play) into printable form. Tomorrow I will put out the sign-up sheet for the event on the 23rd.

At 3, I picked up Sandy (Joanne was hosting her book club this afternoon and couldn’t go) and we drove a mile to “Dala’s Nest”, a house in Menlo Park, to hear a concert by the Keller Sisters. They were good as always, and they recognized me and remembered my name. From when I did the sound for them in their CH appearances.

In the evening exchanged a flurry of emails with Joanne trying to organize our so-active lives for next week.

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.