Friday 05/01/2026

Friday morning walk with Joanne. Then I proofed a document for Scribble & Sketch, paid a bill, did some reading.

Come 2pm I took my costume pieces down the auditorium and joined the whole crew for the first full run through of the spring concert. That includes the harmonica players doing 3 numbers, the chorus doing 3 numbers, the Jazzy Trio doing a couple of numbers, and finally, “Channing House Goes to River City”, our 150minute condensed version of The Music Man.

In which thanks to another person dropping out, I have two parts to play, a suspicious townsperson with 3 short lines to say, and the previously planned duet with Mary, she singing “Dream of Now” and me “Lida Rose”. That came off rather well today if I do say so. I sounded good and we sounded good together.

Quiet evening of reading and TV.

Thursday 04/30/2026

Well, so much for April. Today was unscheduled, or should I say uncommitted, on my calendar. I spent the bulk of it doing a final editing pass on all the A/V “how-to” documents I’ve written. Then I printed them out and arranged them in a 3-ring binder. Along with a USB stick with all the source files for them.

This binder has been sitting under the A/V desk for a while, but I wanted to bring it up to date and finish it. When I was done I dropped it off with our new IT czar Jean, mainly to impress him, which he seemed to be, also maybe he can learn something about our systems. And maybe see a way to improve them.

That done, I practiced my 3 lines for the Music Man, and then practiced my book talk for next Monday.

In the evening we had a concert by students from the Community School of Music and Arts. Very skilled young artists, 16-18. Playing Rachmaninoff, singing opera solos, etc.

Wednesday 04/29/2026

Four of us went for a hike: Joanne, me, Martha and Erika. I drove us in Fred up to the Edgewood open space. That walk starts with what feels like a long steep climb. Actually about 250 feet of elevation gain. Lovely weather, nice scenery, good chit-chat. Felt strenuous, though. When I got back I just collapsed into my lounge chair for an hour.

Spent the afternoon finishing up editing my collection of A/V documents. Tomorrow I will print them and reorganize the binder.

At 5:30 met with Joanne and we walked to Ethel’s Fancy, a restaurant we ate at one other time, just over a year ago, Day 6.099. We really liked it then. Not so much this time. They do small plates of very fancy preparations, and although the plates we had tonight were very pretty to look at I wasn’t very impressed with the actual food. And the service was a bit slow. But whatever, it was a nice outing.

Tuesday 04/28/2026

Tidied up for the housekeeper, then did some prep work for tonight’s Contemporary Music Exposure event. Sat through the writers meeting, although I had nothing to contribute. Went to line dance class. I am pretty poor at this but it’s a nice workout. And I like to watch Joanne’s feet while dancing; she does it all very well, precise and springy steps. A couple of the others also move like they’ve had dance training at some point.

Spent more time rehearsing my Monday book talk. Then had an early supper.

Went up to 11 at 6:15 and set up for the CMX event. I had to move a bunch of chairs around to get seats for the 22 people who had signed up for this. I had about 20 pictures of our subject, Billie Eilish, on my Macbook. I had them showing as a looping slide show on the big screen of the media center, and the music off Apple Music from my Macbook through the speakers.

I had printed out the lyrics to the ten songs of Eilish’s latest album, so everybody got a set to read. And we listened through the songs one at a time, with brief discussion after each. So now everybody knows who Eilish is, and what she sounds like and what her lyrics are like. Everyone seemed pleased afterward so I’ll do it again next month. I’m thinking Ed Sheeran, but you never know.

Monday 04/27/2026

Took the old standard walk in the morning, starting early, back before 9. Ended up with almost 4 miles for the day.

Drove Fred down to FOPAL and put in 3:30 processing 10 boxes of donations. Now I know how long it takes do one box: 21 minutes. Already past time for lunch at CH so stopped at Palo Alto Cafe for a sandwich.

Talked to J. briefly, then practiced my book talk for next Monday.

Sunday 04/26/2026

Most of today was spent at the Half Moon Bay Dream Machines festival. This was a CH outing arranged by Stew. Fifteen people had signed up, including me and Joanne. We boarded the bus at 9:30. It took 45 minutes to get over the hill to HMB, then another 20 minutes in the long line of cars waiting to enter the festival, which filled about half the HMB airport.

There were cars of all eras lined up along the taxi-ways. At least a couple hundred vehicles. Some really old, restored cars from the ’20s, and cars from the 40s, 50, up to the present day, some restored, some customized. We walked around looking at them, recalling some we had owned, or driven, at different times. There were some old farm equipment, but no steam engines to my disappointment. There were some special aircraft on display but we didn’t walk over to look.

There was a food truck corral, we bought ourselves a pulled pork sandwich to share for lunch while listening to some local rock bands. Then hoof it back to the bus at 1:30 and an hour ride home.

After a nap I worked on some documents I’m editing before supper.

Saturday 04/25/2026

Second day of a seriously over-booked weekend. Today we took off in Fred about 11 and drove to Cupertino where they were holding the 47th annual Japanese Cherry Blossom Festival. The main aim here was to see San Jose Taiko doing the drumming thing.

The Festival was a big deal, dozens and dozens of merchants and organizations had set up marquees around a big park, and in a couple of adjacent buildings. We walked around, had a good lunch from a food truck, but just after SJ Taiko started playing, it started raining seriously. We had an umbrella but didn’t feel like waiting it out, so we headed home.

Later, at 6, we met with Tom and Debbie for dinner, and then walked the three blocks to the Women’s Club buillding. Debbie is a member and had gotten 4 tickets to a jazz concert featuring Mads Tolling, violinist. The concert started at 8 and ran to 10:15 so again getting to bed rather late. But it was good music. Tolling is good, and he had brought a pianist, John R. Burr, who was at least as good, and a really superb bass player, Dan Robbins.

Friday 04/24/2026

Usual Friday morning walk with Joanne. Then spent some time editing a how-to manual for our AV equipment. I wrote that a year ago and there are some things that need updating. Also practiced for the Music Man rehearsal which was at 4pm. It went alright.

From that straight up to 11 for the monthly TGIF party where they had enough snacks that I didn’t bother going down to supper. At 7:20 i went down to the basement, met Joanne, and we drove to Los Altos to attend The Cherry Orchard at the Bus Barn. Bunch of actors working very hard on this long and complicated play. It was a bit of a drag to watch mostly because it didn’t seem to map onto our current societal problems. Hard to get into worrying about the problems of short-sighted Russian aristocrats of 1880. We checked wikipedia in the intermission and got a much better idea of who the characters were and how they were related that way.

Anyway, home just before 11pm and so to bed.

Thursday 04/23/2026

Early, 7:30, I was out for a standard walk (3.5 mi for the day). Stopped for coffee, and at Ace Hardware to stock up on AA batteries.

Then I sat down to work. I spent 20 minutes proofreading for Scribble & Sketch. I spent 20 minutes disputing an obvious scam charge at PayPal. I paid my non-owner’s driver insurance bill for the next 6 months.

Then I put in about 2.5 hours preparing all the material for the CMX that is coming up next Tuesday. I made a sign-up sheet and put it out, and I think it is filling up already. I got all the lyrics from Billy Eilish’s latest album onto a 9-page document. I will have to reproduce 25 copies of that, but that is not a big job, compared to copying them out of genius.com and editing them all into a neat document. This is going to be an interesting session; some of her lyrics are, um, rather spicy. Might have some people walk out? Nah, we’re all grown-ups here.

After lunch I spent a couple of hours finishing the slides and the script for my book talk on May 4th. So that’s done. All that’s left is to rehearse 2 or 3 or 6 times.

At 4:30 I went to a concert. One of our residents, Romie, plays cello in an amateur string quarter. She had brought her 3 friends and they played string quartet stuff for an hour at 4:30. I sat beside Joanne and we made quiet comments to each other. They were, well, amateur. But good hearted and fun.

Ate supper in my room; for lunch I had ordered the quesadilla, which was huge, so I had taken half it back in a box, and I had that an an orange for supper.

Wednesday 04/22/2026

Usually Joanne would organize a hike but rain was accurately forecast for this morning so she didn’t. Instead she and I took the car and drove to a coffee shop for a sip and a chat.

At 10 I went to the auditorium and met with Andrew of the IT staff and Jerry, and we worked out the problem with the audio board, which was a simple matter of a button being in the down position when it should be up. Much mutterings of “Doh!” and slapping foreheads.

At 1pm there was the monthly zoom meeting of FOPAL volunteers. Nothing noteworthy there. Then at 3:45 I had another meeting over the computer, a video visit with Dr. Tamrazi, about the size of my renal cyst as shown on the recent CT. Decision: be alert for symptoms, get an ultrasound in a few months. Drain as needed.

There was some talk of the California gubernatorial debate on the CH mailing list, so I volunteered to put it on the TV on the 11th floor, which I did, and a dozen or so people wandered in to watch.