Tuesday 03/10/2026

Morning I was able to run my laundry early and got it almost done.

At 11 met with David M and we walked to the Sheraton hotel, This was to attend a meeting of the Fellowship Forum, a group of men that meet weekly to have lunch and hear a speaker. I will be the speaker next week so the idea was to get used to the format.

Pleasant bunch of older men in “business casual” meaning I had to wear my only sport coat. But no tie. The lunch was a nice hotel lunch soup and grilled salmon. The speaker was a guy from the Hoover institute talking about the Baltic nations, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. And how they are reacting to events like the Ukranian war. Interesting.

In the afternoon I finished the laundry (ironing my docent shirts) and practiced the talk I am giving next week. It’s a good talk, you can listen to how it sounded last November.

At 4:45 I met with Joanne and we went off for a little outing. Some performers we have heard at Channing House and liked, Terrigal Burn and Tamara Dunn, are performing in a hotel lounge on Friday night at 6pm. We thought maybe to go, but then Betty had given us a mixed review of that hotel lunge, and the hotel website was not clear on whether they had food. So we went to case the joint.

It’s the AC hotel, an upscale Marriott brand, on San Antonio road. We drove over there and were able to park on the street, avoiding the valet-parking. Checked out the lounge. Not the greatest venue for listening to music, but it will be ok, and they do have food, a Tapas menu. So we can eat and listen.

It was about 5:30 at this point and we were talking about taking a hike tomorrow, and I was saying my Hoka shoes are worn out. So Joanne jumps on her phone and says there’s Footwear Inc in Los Altos, open until 6. So we drive over there and get to the store with ten minutes to spare and I buy a new pair of Hokas.

Then shall we eat here or go home? Oh there are so many restaurants in Los Altos. But where? I get out my phone and zoom in on Apple Maps and start reading nearby restaurant names. When I hit “Urfa” Joanne says “yes”. So we walk to Urfa which turns out to be Mediterranean, mostly Greek, food. Nice supper at a table on the sidewalk.

Monday 03/09/2026

Yeah, about that supper in my room? I had completely forgotten that I had agreed to join Susan and Harry and Peter for supper Sunday night. I didn’t notice that the message light was blinking on my house phone, from when Susan called from the lobby to remind me at 5pm. I just completely spaced out on this commitment. After playing the phone message at 8am today, I feel like a complete schmuck. I stood up my friends for no reason.

So we had the resident association meeting. These are really interesting, not a chore. It’s the point where all the resident directed things come together and get reported. New residents are introduced, by other residents. Various other committees report. Joanne got up to talk about Scribble and Sketch, appealing for contributions. Then Rhonda reports on what she wants residents to be aware of. Then by convention, all staff leave the room, and the floor is open for questions and comments by anybody about anything.

Afterward I spotted Harry in the lobby and I was able to apologize for being such a klutz, standing them up last night. Then off to FOPAL. There were 5 boxes of donations to process and a final tidy-up of the shelves. That took 2:30. I just barely got back in time to order lunch before orders cut off at 1:15.

Quiet afternoon. Well, emails. Back last November I gave a talk (Day 6.344) about 1975 when personal computers were invented. Resident David M. is on the speaker committee for a Men’s Fellowship organization and he recruited me to give my talk to them. That will be a week from tomorrow. They meet weekly so tomorrow he and I will attend this week’s meeting. So I spent some time getting shit together for that.

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.