Ssturday 06/27/2026

Set out to get shit done. One thing was to finalize the new Advanced Health Care Directive. I did one more edit pass over it, then printed it out high quality, took it to the UPS store on University and had it notarized. Made copies. Distributed a couple of them, others later.

Made up a helpful lyric sheet for “Jackson”. At 2pm met with Sandy and Mary to practice it. Came away with an action item to get some melody notes into the accompaniment video.

Walked with Joanne across to the Stanford campus, to the Cantor art center to see the exhibit of woven baskets by Jeremy Frey. Amazing. Redefines that a basket can be in your mind. Took a lyft back because why not.

Friday 06/26/2026

Got it wrong yesterday. That was day 206, yes, but not 6/26/26. That’s today, duh. Oh well. Walked with Joanne up to PAMF where she had a brief appointment, then did a little shopping at Trader Joe’s. In the waiting room at PAMF: another CH resident, hi Carol! And then after coffee, at TJ’s: another CH resident, hi Sandy! Us old folks are all over the town.

After lunch I actually sat in front of my desktop machine and coded some Python. I finally found a good, step by step tutorial for writing an AI “agent”. Which is simply a script (program) that invokes an AI via its API (programming interface) and does something with the output. Well, that’s the start of it. I wrote some code, following directions, debugged, it tested it, and Claude Haiku responded to my program’s call. I will pursue this further but my goodness that felt good.

Joanne texted, “going to Costco, want to come along” and sure, why not. So we did a little shopping. I have to admire the Costco method of marketing. They just stack the aisles with these little mountains of stuff which just beg you to reach out and take one. Maybe two. Stick it in your cart, why not. It’ll be handy some day…

After supper, the twice-monthly SongAlong (so called because of a typo made in a poster once). Jerry and Kaye do a great job organizing these.

Thursday 06/26/2026

06 – 26 – 2026 and it is Day 206. Numerology!

Met briefly with Leah Lin in the morning, our semi-annual check-in. She’s my health rep on my Advanced Directive, a function she performs for some other people including Joanne, and she likes to keep in touch.

Then I drove to FOPAL and put in 4 hours getting my section properly tidied up, catching up with what I couldn’t finish on Monday.

Back home for a nap, then out at 4:30 to drive to the Museum for the annual Volunteer Appreciation party. Had a nice chat with Scott. Snacks, speeches. Yay I’ve been appreciated. Oh don’t be such a grinch; it was a nice event.

Wednesday 06/24/2026

Took an early walk for coffee. The at 9am met with Sandy in the music room to try singing a duet on the Carter-Cash song “Jackson”. It went ok, so later we told John, who is organizing the talent show for the end of next month, that we would do the bit. Later in the day after email negotiations I booked 2pm Saturday for another rehearsal with Mary along as a vocal coach.

At 1pm I joined Bert and two other Davids to talk to a reporter from the Palo Alto Weekly. She wants to do a story on how us old geeks use AI. We pontificated and opined for the nice young lady for an hour. Maybe in a month there will be a story on us.

Joanne and I went for a walk later, so I ended the day with almost 13K steps and 5.3 miles. At 7:30 there was a lecture by an amateur biologist (retired physician and medical researcher) on how animals use sound. He had some good videos of birds vocalizing different ways, and slo-mo infrared shots of bats doing aerobatics to catch moths. Coyotes and Pumas and so on. Nice talk.

Tuesday 06/23/2026

Early morning walk; by early I mean, out the door at 7:30, back by 9. Cleaned the apartment. Then, as Betty who usually runs the writers meeting zoom had to go to the hospital unexpectedly yesterday, she asked me to be the zoom host. Of course I did.

I signed in to zoom using her and Jerry’s zoom id, and found the scheduled meeting, and clicked “start” and up it came. But she had sent out a zoom link to everyone earlier, so I used my other macbook to test that link. And of course it didn’t work. I don’t know why (very quietly, “she screwed up” but not going to say that out loud). So I had to get the correct link and email it to everybody with a subject line of NEW ZOOM LINK USE THIS ONE. Some got the message, some didn’t, and it was 11am before we managed to get everyone into the 10:45 meeting. Sigh. Anyway that all worked ok in the end.

After lunch I finished up preparing for the Contemporary Music Exposure meeting on Ed Sheeran. Which involved writing each attendee’s name on their lyrics packet (because having the printed lyrics is essential to understanding a song you are hearing for the first time) and getting a bunch of pictures of him off the web and putting them in folder so I could show them as a slide show on the big TV while the music played. Only somehow I messed that up, too. But it went well and the 25 people who attended all thanked me for setting it up.

Monday 06/22/2026

Monday is my usual day to go to FOPAL. Friday, Frank had texted me a picture of 13 boxes of donations at my section, so I knew there was a lot to do. So I figured to go down there early and work past lunch time. I had gotten well into it about 10, when I checked my email and saw there was a re-scheduled meeting of the Transition committee at 11:30. I didn’t want to miss that (the committee trying to plan how to integrate the residents of the new satellite location into the Channing House social life) so I finished one more box and headed back. I shall have to return later in the week.

The Transition committee heard, among other things, some comments from people who have paid a deposit to have early chances to buy into Arris. Rhonda said the staff had completed their pet policy and had it vetted by the legal team. In the Tower where I live there have never been pets allowed, but Arris will allow them. Which raises all sorts of issues with a senior population. What to do about dogs that poop in the common spaces and the owner doesn’t pick up? In regard to that, Rhonda said that she understands that at The Forum, a large senior residence a few miles away, they actually do DNA tests to make sure which animal left which poop.

What to do when (not if) the pet owner has to move into assisted living, which is in our no-pets-allowed buildings? Or just dies? We didn’t see the actual policy, but Rhonda quoted one of the first prospects to review it, “That’s the most hostile pet policy I’ve ever seen!”

At 4pm we had another meeting about our problems with U.S. Immigration (see 7.177). A resident, Prue, had worked a connection and gotten a NYT reporter interested. The reporter was present for the meeting. So look for an op. ed. in the big newspaper soon. Rhonda updated the situation: one additional person had had to leave employment because their work permit had not been renewed, and ten were still in limbo, with permits running out and no response on extensions.

If a DACA person’s permit status is not renewed, they enter a gray zone in which they are not legal residents. So not only can they not work, they can’t drive, their Cal DLs are invalid. If they were caught driving, that would be a crime and they could be deported. So they basically can’t do anything. Channing House can’t keep them on the payroll. We do give them 60 days unpaid leave so if they get a renewal, they can come back to their former position and seniority, but after that, they would have to re-apply, losing seniority status. Three people described their work history and the emotional stress of waiting for a bureaucratic process to complete, if it ever does. These are skilled people with degrees and professional credentials and long work histories, waiting to see if their lives are about to be turned upside down.

Unfortunately for the “dreamers”, the Deferred Action people, Congress has never acted to create an actual path to citizenship. They are stuck in the DACA status with no way to get naturalized — but no family or work history in any country but this one.

Sunday 06/21/2026

Today, June 21, is the equinox, start of summer, whatever. For some weeks I have been telling myself that on 6/21 I would change my bedding. Back on 6.281, gosh, almost a year ago? I installed my beautiful Pendleton wool blanket. Time to change, I have been thinking, and picked this date.

So the morning I hauled all my blankets, duvets, hand-crocheted throws, off the top closet shelf. Checked for moth damage (none). Folded the Pendleton neatly in its plastic carrier, and made the bed again with the gray patterned wool blanket that I bought at a craft faire on University Ave the same summer I moved in here, 2019. Also changed the throw I had on the couch in the living room.

Watered the plants, did the puzzle, and then took off on a walk to the Cal. Ave. farmers market. A walk I hadn’t taken in quite some time. Bought only some Blenheim apricots and a small number of figs because Joanne had said she would like them. Me, I’m not a fig person. Don’t like the little seeds.

Ran an AV event, a lecture by CH resident Dennis, on whether there’s life on Mars. (“Maybe”) It included some info on the way that NASA handled the first Lunar samples that were brought back by the Apollo astronauts in the early 1970s. He was an NASA employee then and worked in the containment lab.

Saturday 06/20/2026

About 11 I got in Fred and drove to the Museum. The joint was jumpin’ with “techfest” a bunch of extra tables of people doing “maker” stuff, different 3D printers and little robots and what-not. I started right at 12 with a mob of 25 or so, and sped along so as to keep ahead of Jim doing the 12:15 tour. We kind of ran over a guy doing a private tour. I’ve seen him before, and been annoyed by him. He is probably doing a fine tour for a small group for a fee, but he damn well knows that we volunteer docents are coming through at 12 and 2pm, he could easily avoid us by just starting a half hour earlier or later, but no, he’s…. well bitch bitch. I gave a good tour, got a nice hand at the end, all was well.

Later in the afternoon Joanne and I went for a nice short walk. We were to meet again at 7 to walk to the Lucy Stern theater for a play at 7:30. But Joanne says, why don’t we leave earlier and try that new restaurant, Urban Momo? So we met again at 5:30 and walked the opposite way from the theater to the restaurant on University. It does Nepalese/Indian food. We had a starter and a Nepalese grilled chicken thing. The food was good, but the restaurant gets a big negative on account of noise. There were only like 3 other parties there and already it was hard to have a conversation. Too many hard surfaces. So for dessert we walked a couple of blocks to Ton Sui, a place that serves these little coconut puddings in half-pint mason jars. We shared a mango one.

Then as I had 3.3 miles on my health app and Joanne, 4, we called a Lyft to ride the mile to the theater where we saw The Cottage, a kind of pseudo-Noel-Coward comedy about three couples who discover they’ve been being unfaithful with each other’s spouses. It was fairly amusing.

And walked home in the dark, and it was a little chilly but not bad. Got my 10,000 steps in anyway.

Friday 06/19/2026

Took the usual Friday muffin ramble with Joanne. Then at 11 I joined the AI interest group meeting. At this meeting, Rob presented what he’d learned at a seminar on Math and AI at Stanford. I didn’t absorb much of it apparently or I’d say more here.

In the afternoon I worked on my new Advanced Health Care Directive. I need to clarify the sequence of people who have my medical PofA. I have looked at a bunch of AHCD (prounounced, “ah, crud”) forms online. Search for “Advanced Directive California Form” and you’ll see. They’re all similar but have slight differences. Joanne just had her lawyer write her a new one so I looked at that and it has stuff that other forms leave out. So I did a lot of thinking and editing.

One final issue, does it need to be notarized, or witnessed by two people, or both? My old one was signed by two of my neighbors as witnesses. Joanne’s lawyer’s version has a block for a notary to sign and stamp but no witnesses. Need to resolve this. If only I knew an attorney…

When I got tired of that, I downloaded a video of the song that Sandy and I might sing as a duet, Johnny Cash and June Carter singing “Jackson”, and stripped the audio file out of it, and ran that through an online AI magical thing to remove the voices leaving only the accompaniment. I sent that file to Sandy so she can see if the key is right for her voice. It’s just a little too low for me, I need to raise it from C to D. But I’ll wait until she’s tried it.

Thursday 06/18/2026

Today was a long-planned “Monet get-away”. We hopped in the car at 9 and drove to the De Young Museum in the City to view the “Monet in Venice” exhibit. This was a very well-organized museum show. The point was to show the 25-plus paintings that Claude Monet had made of the city of Venice on his one visit there in 1908. However, the curators had set up a learning experience: they had works by other artists who had been inspired by Venice before Monet, with explanations of the different techniques each had used. Canaletto, Whistler, Sargent, famous artists’ vacation snaps, well, no, elaborate paintings, of the famous city. Then finally you get to a hall with the Monet paintings.

On the way home I was thinking about when Marian and I spent a week in Venice in May, 1999. I’ve got pictures of Venice, I’m thinking. So in the afternoon I looked them up. Here’s one Monet would have liked, because he really dug reflections in water:

For lunch last November (6.351) on a similar outing, we had eaten at the Foghorn Taproom, 7th and Irving. Today for fun we walked to Um.Ma, a Korean BBQ place on 9th near Irving. Pretty good, although we had never heard of a lot of things on the menu.

Came on home for a quiet afternoon. We met again at 5:30 for a planned dinner with Karen and David. They had just had a long trip through Spain and southern France and we, well I mostly, wanted to hear about it. Pleasant meal with nice people.