Monday 07/19/2026

Channing House in the NYT

Today the New York Times published a story that features Channing House and some of my neighbors: Senior Living Facility in Distress as Immigrant Workers are Forced Out.

Back to the boring diary part

I start the day with an early standard walk and a coffee. At 10:30 I join the Event Coordinators meeting in the newly refurbished Board Room, which has been given an absolutely ghastly new carpet. I decide on the fly that I will take August off as far as Contemporary Music Exposure. It’s a tradition at CH that regular meetings are suspended in August so why not that series also.

As soon as the meeting is over I grab the carry-out lunch sack I had ordered, and drive Fred down to FOPAL where 11 boxes of books await my disposition. I end up sending 5 boxes to the bargain room and another box to the high value group, so I suppose I priced and shelved four boxes worth.

Back home to zone out and nap for an hour. Then supper, this time with David and Helen and Kathleen. Much talk about cataract surgery, everybody at the table except me has had both eyes done. My right eye is getting close to needing replacement, but not yet.

Tomorrow is the writers meeting, and the cue is “describe a food item, its look, its taste, etc.” A couple nights ago I inaugurated a new jar of Skippy and decided to write about that. So I did that tonight.

Changing of the Jars

The new jar rests massively in my hand, smooth and slightly resilient. It drops onto the kitchen counter with a solid, meaty thump. I bring the old jar down from the cupboard, so light and flimsy, like a plastic bubble in my hands. I easily unscrew its blue lid and set it aside; then rummage in the drawer for the rubber spatula, unused since that jar was itself new.

The lid on the new jar resists at first, and I welcome the grip of its intricately serrated circumference. Cap off, I am faced with the metal dome of its seal. Using fingernails and then the edge of a paring knife, I tease out one of the three little flaps, and carefully roll the seal away from the rim. It begins by peeling away cleanly, but then of course the last third sticks. I am impatient; I yank it off, leaving the glued remnant of aluminized paper around a third of the rim. Anyway, I can now see the perfect brown surface of the peanut butter, lightly studded with chunks like a brown terrazzo floor.

I take the old jar in my left hand and the spatula in my right, and begin the cleanup: rotating the jar while holding the spat at first one angle, then another, to gather every remaining ounce of peanut butter from the shoulder under the opening, down the smooth sides, and around the inverted dome of the bottom of the jar. Several times I unload the spatula by scraping it across the rim of the new jar. I am pleased that when the old jar is completely clean, there is still a bit of room in the open top of the new jar. I was not too precipitous in the changing of the jars; just right in fact.

I return the two blue lids to their helical threads and put the new jar—so satisfyingly solid—in the cupboard. I toss the old, depleted jar in the recycle basket and begin licking the spatula clean. The ceremony is complete.

Sunday 07/19/2026

Usual Sunday morning, water plants, do big crossword. (My Sunday religious ritual 😉

At 9, Joanne and I took a walk to the Cal. Ave. farmers market. It was jammed, I’ve never seen it so busy. We walked around, I found some Blenheim apricots to buy, Joanne bought some blackberries. We took a Waymo back to CH.

In the afternoon I worked on the music for “Jackson”. I had made an accompaniment track by getting the audio from a Johnny Cash youtube video, and stripping the voices out of it. But then it didn’t have any melody and was hard to sing along to. So I had gotten a melody line, well, it’s complicated. Anyway, need a better one. More to do there.

At 3 I went down and helped Bert set up for his Sunday@Home presentation. These are occasional talks by residents, usually about travels they’ve done. In this case, Bert and his wife Barbara had, in 2004, decided to take a year off for fun. They bought a motorhome, a used I forget what make, 28-foot with a slide-out section, and spent 11 months on the road doing a circuit of the US. This was obviously not a recent trip, but Bert did an entertaining account of the main stops on the way.

Saturday 07/18/2026

Took a walk in the morning. Coffee, then picked up a prescription at CVS. At 11 I put on my red docent shirt and drove to the Museum where I led the noon public tour. I managed to leave out a couple of my better lines and kept my tour under 1 hour, so I could pass people along to the 1pm live demo of the 1401.

Had a quiet afternoon, then at 5 Joanne and I picked up our carry-out suppers and our camp chairs, and went to another outdoor concert at Rinconada park. The band this time was Fleetwood Mask, doing of course the music of Fleetwood Mack. Very pleasant sitting outside on the lawn listening to old rock.

Friday 07/17/2026

In the morning, our Muffin Mosey, and on to the shopping center for coffee, and then Trader Joe’s. For an event next week I was asked to contribute “nuts or trailmix” so at TJ’s I bought a sack of trail mix and a couple cans of a nice nut mix, macadamias and cashews.

At 11 I joined the former AI group, now reconstituted as ResTech, to see a presentation on Cubigo, the interactive system that Jean, our new IT czar, wants to install. We (the res tech committee) had been dubious and nervous about this, because we were afraid it would bury all the control of content as staff functions, with no resident control.

The demonstration, which was a live zoom session by a Cubigo guy, was very reassuring. In particular, the system does support fine-grained, tiered authorizations. So there will be “Cubes” (the system’s name for what anybody else would call pages) that are resident-controlled, and residents authorized to edit those cubes and not others.

There will (of course) be a massive amount of work to do to adapt present practices to the new system, but I feel pretty good about the result at the end.

I spent the afternoon finishing Wachter’s book A Great Leap, about AI in medicine, so could finally pass it on to Joanne, who will pass it on to our library when she finishes it. Bottom line, Wachter sees AI as making a positive contribution, maybe making doctors at least 25% more effective, but sees major issues in regulation and control that will take years to work out.

Thursday 07/16/2026

Today we had set aside for an excursion to the City, to see the exhibit on The Etruscans at the Legion of Honor. This was a good exhibit, well presented and full of interesting objects. The curators had borrowed famous pieces from other museums to give a portrait of an interesting culture that we don’t know about today because the Romans wrote the histories and left them out.

From there we found lunch at a Chinese dumpling house on Balboa street. It was a clear day, or seemed to be, so we drove up toward Twin Peaks and found out that the sightseeing loop around the vista point on Twin Peaks is closed to motor vehicles. Probably has been for a long time but us dumb tourists wouldn’t know.

I took a tech squad call in the afternoon, and puttered around with my AI code. After supper, there was a video in the auditorium about–the Etruscans. There is a plan to run an excursion in a bus, up to the Etruscan exhibit, next week. (Joanne and I are too snooty to go in a bus with everyone else, we had to do it on our own.) So this was a video lecture, quite well done, about the Etruscans. We recognized quite a few of the art pieces in the video as being ones we had seen today.

Wednesday 07/15/2026

A group of 6 of us out in two cars to Edgewood park at 9am. All the hikes we take start with a long climb, it’s odd. Well, except the Baylands. Anyway we did 3.5 miles, the temp was about 78 in the shade, but way warmer climbing in the sun. I was pretty tired after. Also hungry for lunch.

At 2pm met Sandy in the auditorium for a rehearsal of “Jackson”, using a real mic and the sound system. We need more work.

That was about it for the day.

Tuesday 07.14.2026

In the morning I did some logistic planning for a trip we are going to take next year, so far advance planning. More on that later.

The writers meeting was fine, although I had nothing to contribute but my presence. Before and after the meeting I got my laundry done. Joined the Line Dance class at 1:30. After, set to work catching up on some reading I have promised to finish.

David M called up from the auditorium where he was having a problem using the zoom room and projector. I joined him and eventually we had to get Paul of the IT department, but we worked out the problems. Then a quiet supper sitting by myself, reading.

Boring life, huh.

Monday 07/13/2026

Resident Association meeting, followed by the Transition Committee at 11. When that broke up at 12, I scooted downstairs, grabbed my to-go lunch that I had ordered, and drove to FOPAL. Spent about 3 hours doing the post-sale cleanup and processing 4 boxes of donations.

Back home by 3:30. At 5:30 met with Joanne and we drove to the Stanford campus where we had a quick supper in the student union food court, and then attended a concert, part of the annual Stanford Jazz Workshop. The performer was a local girl, Christina Galisantus, daughter of a Stanford musicologist. She played piano and sang, and led a quintet of bass, guitar, sax and drums. They did mainly the music of Joni Mitchell.

The concert was pretty good, but somewhat spoiled for me by the audio. The singer’s voice was not reproduced right, it was like there was a low-pass filter that rolled off all the high frequencies. That takes out all the parts of words that make them comprehensible, all the sibilants. So we couldn’t understand any of the lyrics. No it is not my hearing. Anyway, I give it a C+ score. Good instrumentalists, poor vocals.

Sunday 07/12/2026

In the morning, after watering the plants and doing the NYT puzzle, I decided I wanted coffee and a pastry. Where? How about the Palo Alto Cafe in Midtown. That’s 1.7 miles, so instead of walking there, I took the #21 bus. I love that I can ride the bus with my Clipper Card for $1 each trip.

Had a nice coffee and sit, then, because the Transit App showed the bus as 25 minutes away, I walked back.

After lunch, Joanne and I walked over to the Arts Center (another 1.5 miles each way) to view the annual Clay and Glass festival, a couple of acres of booths with ceramic and glass artisans showing their stuff. Didn’t see anything that made me want to buy.

That was about it for the day. Did some reading and stuff.

Saturday 07/11/2026

Took a walk over to Zoe for coffee, then back through the farmers market. Spent the rest of the morning catching up on podcasts and reading. After lunch and a nap, I put a couple of hours into a beta test.

I was looking for a Mac app that would let me edit the metadata of my thousands of image files. Back in the day, I managed those files using the app called Adobe Bridge, and with Bridge I had painstakingly added titles and keywords and location info to, if not all, at least hundreds of slides.

I’d like to search on and edit those fields, for instance find all the pics with the keyword “statue” or “Marian”, or add info. Adobe Bridge is long gone, absorbed into Adobe’s giant subscription-only package deal. So I tried an app off the Apple App Store. It didn’t do what I wanted so I wrote a critical review, and the developer contacted me and asked if I would like to be a beta tester for the next release, which would have at least some of what I wanted. Sure. So last week I got an email, and installed the official Apple beta test app TestFlight, and today I finally got around to trying out the updated version. I gave them a bunch of constructive friendly feedback. We’ll see what happens.

At 5:30 I met up with Joanne and we walked to Rinconada Park carrying our new camp chairs, that we bought at REI some months ago and haven’t yet used. This was for one of the city’s Twilight Concert series. Tonight it was by an ABBA cover band. I thought I would recognize a lot of tunes but it turns out I didn’t know ABBA’s music all that well. So couldn’t sing along very much. “Take a chance on me,” I knew that chorus.