Wednesday 02/11/2026

First up, a hike with Joanne and Martha. I had proposed we do the Dish walk, the 3.6 mile loop past the Stanford Dish. However parking near the trailhead is usually a problem so we were going to take a Waymo there and back. But recently Waymo has been quoting strange prices, and today it wanted $47 to go the 2.5 miles. (It wanted $27 to do the return trip when we checked later.) So instead we used Lyft, under $10.

Anyway there was rain yesterday and showers forecast for today. It turned out the weather was great, unusual for here with shafts of sunlight through lots of clouds, occasional spatters of raindrops, and a rainbow.

Just a great walk. After lunch I wanted to go to the Bing Hall box office, and Joanne wanted to go to Menlo Park for a medical appointment. So I drove and dropped her off, then drove to the Bing. There a very nice young lady helped me resolve the problem I had with verifying and seeing my Paul Simon tickets. Drove back to Menlo Park just in time to pick Joanne up, so that worked out well.

This was the day for the monthly 6th floor meeting. No big news, just a fun meeting of neighbors, and dinner after.

At 7:30, a talk by Dr. Sara Cody. Recognize that name? If you are local, you do. She was the Public Health Officer for our Santa Clara County, and as such was the first to issue a shelter-in-place order in March of 2020. For which she took a lot of hostility. She recounted the details of those early months of 2020, how little info they had, why they made the choices they did. Her closing slide was a bar chart with three bars. Deaths per 100,000 population for the year 2020, that is, up to early availability of a vaccine.

Again, COVID deaths per 100,000: Santa Clara County, 90, California, 120, United States as a whole, 182. So what they did, worked, producing a death rate one-half of the national rate.

Tuesday 02/10/2026

Really felt like a productive day. Got a lot of little things done I’d been thinking about doing.

Most of that in the morning before 10, along with tidying the apartment and sorting my laundry. At 10 I took over the as host of the zoom meeting for the writers group so Betty could head off on vacation. The prompt this week was “taking advice” and the only thing I could think of was a piece I wrote back in ’21, about me in 1968 learning the important diagnostic principle of “think stupid” (the more modern version of that is, when you hear hoofbeats, think ‘horse’ not ‘zebra’). So I found that and gave it a fast edit and had something to read.

Then did the laundry and something else. At 3 had a meeting with Bert and Craig and the new tech czar, a very cheerful fellow. I was thinking, that was about it, right? Then remembered I was supposed to be setting up dinner with Joanne and me and our new neighbors so I did that, and they accepted, so I reserved a table for that night. Thinking, well, pretty well cleared your list now, right? Well, no, what about this idea for group listening to contemporary music? So I put some actual thought into that, and decided on “fourth tuesdays” and made some notes and I can get that scheduled tomorrow.

Monday 02/09/2026

Resident association meeting at 9. My new 6th floor neighbors Rob and Nancy were introduced. She has an MA in Physics then went to med school and practiced as a dermatologist. He has a PhD in I forget what. Despite having way more professional cred than me, they are quite nice people.

Rhonda introduced a couple of new staff people, including one I expect I will interact with often, Jean — she didn’t give his last name — who will be the czar of IT issues going forward. Seems very pleasant. The Tech and AV squads will meet with him tomorrow.

Then off to FOPAL. Frank had texted me a picture of 11 (fucking eleven!) more boxes in front of my section, and this is the pre-sale week. I have to get the whole thing tidied up and ready for the sale today or tomorrow, and I have no free time for that tomorrow. So I spent three hours down there, 11-2:30. Came back for a short walk with Joanne. Ordered a cheese sandwich as supper to take out. Picked that up at 5 and off to FOPAL again. Two more hours did it, I’m back at 8pm. Except one more little task to do.

I’m in my bathrobe with a shot of Grand Marnier to sip. and fuck all that.

Sunday 02/08/2026

Usual Sunday morning. Then off, not in Fred because Joanne is using him, but rather in a Prius belonging to my CH neighbor Prue. She is just off on a month of travel and asked me to drive the Pru-ius occasionally, so why not today. I needed to go to the Museum to lead the 12pm tour.

It was a nice tour, 15 people, very attentive and appreciative. Half way through I got a coughing fit and one guest asked if I needed some water. Nah, I said, and carried on. But 5 minutes later he rejoined the group, having walked all the way back out to the lobby to buy a bottle of water in the cafe. How nice was that? Not just a plastic bottle, either, it was a screw-cap aluminum bottle of hydration enhanced whatever. Must have cost him 8 or 10. I can reuse the bottle, I think.

All afternoon I’ve been reading books and reading the internet and deliberately ignoring the Superb Owl. No idea. Figure I’ll check out the halftime on Youtube later.

Saturday 02/07/2026

Puttered around in the morning. At 1, met with Joanne and we were off to the Bing on campus for a show. This was Batshit, a one-woman show in which Leah Shelton dramatized the awful treatment of women with mental illness. Her grandmother was instituionalized with schizophrenia in the 60s, and Shelton put together what I decided to describe as a beautifully staged tantrum about the way she and other women were treated then (hopefully not so much any more). It had some very clever staging and effects and made a point I can’t argue with. But we agreed we wouldn’t recommend it to anyone else.

Then we killed time for an hour by walking around campus and browsing the Stanford Bookstore, and having a coffee at the Tressider Union. Then off to have a casual supper at the Peninsula Creamery. No I didn’t have one of their famous milkshakes.

Back at CH it was almost time to set up for an event that Stew, Lou, David Greene and I have been planning, the first of what we hope will be a series of recorded, live rock concerts. To kick it off we had Roy Orbison: A Black and White Night. The smallish crowd of 40 or so loved it, so we will probably continue as planned with quarterly shows.

Friday 02/06/2026

First thing, went for a walk with Joanne. Did some other stuff, Then did a quick edit of the video I shot of the Shakespeare troupe last night, put it on my dropbox, and emailed the manager.

At 11 I met with Pru in order to get to know her Prius. She is going off for a month and wants me a/o Joanne to drive it occasionally. Funny thing, we were going to drive around the block, but when I got into the ramp up to the street, there was a big red PAFD ladder truck blocking the exit. So I performed a 3-point turn and put it back in the garage. It’s fine. I’ll drive it some Monday down to FOPAL.

After lunch I joined a small work party of residents in the resident workshop, in the basement. Bert is organizing a major cleanup. I helped sort lumber into keep and toss piles. The resident workshop was overstuffed with duplicate hand and power tools. The result of years of old guys moving in, and bringing along the best stuff from their garages. Getting rid of a huge pile of tools and materials. Bert will ask Facilities to dispose of it. We all expect that the Facilities employees will cherry pick the pile and load up their pickups. Good.

After supper was a “songalong” group sing which is always fun.

Thursday 02/05/2026

Fun day. Off an on during the day I worked on the video of the book talk that I managed on Monday.

I walked over to CVS and got the different prescription that my cardio had set. I worked on a couple of other projects as well. I collected a couple of graphs that will go with my book talk in May.

About 2am I conceived the idea that it would be fun to do a talk on the Kessler Syndrome, which I recently read might be more imminent than previously thought. So for that, I went to Claude.ai and had Claude look up the relevant scientific papers, and then to help me find websites that show a good visualization of satellite traffic around the earth. (This is a good one.)

Finished the video and uploaded it, and checked my email and AHAH here was the notice from Stanford Live that the Paul Simon ticket pre-sale window was open! Two days ago I donated $250 to Stanford Live so I could be a “supporter” and get in on the pre-sale. And here it was!

So I clicked the link and entered The Worst 40 Minutes I Ever Spent With a Computer. Here’s the email I sent to Stanford Live 2 hours later. AXS is their unspeakable rubbish ticket vending web page, which is completely paranoid about preventing sales to ‘bots.

I just want to tell you — avoiding expletives with an heroic effort — that the experience of buying Paul Simon tickets was the worst 40 minutes I ever spent on a computer, and I’ve been using them over 50 years. 

And it isn’t over yet.

I tried to get AXS to acknowledge me as human using two different computers, and three different browsers on each. Oh, and two different wifi networks. So, about 14 different attempts to follow that link from your email. EVERY TIME it gave me its chipper message about “are you a real fan?” and point me to its useless help page.

Finally I noticed a coy little remark about “change to mobile data”. OK! I go to my phone, turn off wifi, and using Safari over cellular, it let me in right up to the point at which I actually selected two seats.

Then it said I needed to sign in. Sign in to what? Not Stanford Live, no that password won’t work. By the time I had gone through the AXS password reset process — which of course included an email confirmation code and a text message — when I did sign in to AXS it no longer knew about the tickets I had selected. No cart.

So I repeated the ticket selection process and finally actually managed to pay you the $550+. Huzzah! I had made it!

Haha, not so fast, humble consumer! You don’t really have tickets; you have bought the right to download them into our so-special app that you must use instead of, oh I don’t know, Apple Wallet, like every other venue on the planet?

So I go and get the GV app from the app store. OK. And guess what? The GV app wants me to sign in. Oh, ok, reasonable — but when I enter the AXS email and password that I just reset 15 minutes ago, it blocks me with “Are you a real fan?” On my own phone!

Dear Stanford Live — THIS IS MY DAMN PHONE, I HAVE A RECEIPT FOR MY DAMN TICKETS. WHY IN HELL WOULD AN APP ON MY OWN PHONE THINK I WASN’T A HUMAN?!?!

Stanford Live — AXS is a reeking pile of garbage and I hate you.

Dave Cortesi

Wednesday 02/04/2026

Joanne is back from a tour of Baja — whale watching excursion got close enough to a gray whale that she could touch it — and we took a leisurely walk first thing, bringing each other up to date on a week’s happenings. Sherry, a mutual friend, has covid. Her doctor (who is also my new doctor) prescribed Paxlovid, and Joanne ran the errand for her to pick it up. It was $800!

I was exposed to Sherry. She ran the poetry out loud meeting Monday afternoon. So I was 5 feet from her, in a room with the doors closed, for an hour. So today we made a stop at CVS to pick up some more flu/covid test kits. I’m clear so far, cross fingers.

I sat down to try to clear my mailbox. I only keep in my inbox, emails that I need to respond to in some way, or follow up on. There were about a dozen, I did enough follow ups to whittle it down to 6.

At 3 I put on my walking shoes and walked to PAMF for a routine consult with my cardiologist. She made a small change in meds and recommended I do a stress-echo, so that is scheduled.

Between two walks I ran up nearly 11K steps and 4.4 miles.

Tuesday 02/03/2026

Went down to our gym and did the round of machines. Our machines are HUR pneumatic resistance ones. I gather they are not real popular with most residents. But they cleverly remember all my settings, I just wave my id card at them and they know what resistance to set. Anyway that was something.

Then I cleaned up some desk work, paid a bill, checked on the availability of tax forms (not yet) etc.

Time for the writers meeting. This group, which meets on zoom since the pandemic, has had some erosion. Founding members losing the energy to participate and so on. So last week we began to talk about possibly adding members and this time the group had a good, substantive talk. I was really pleased with how constructive and thoughtful everyone was. We agreed on four people to invite to join, and on some simple, easy ground-rules for what constitutes actual “membership” and “participation”. Its so rare for a committee to just settle stuff, amicably and constructively.

After lunch I went to the line dance class. I skipped it last week, but didn’t dare this week, as Joanne returns from her travels today and I’m sure will ask. Following that, I walked to Town & Country, mainly to buy a pound of coffee at Peets. I meant to do that yesterday, at the Peets near FOPAL, and forgot. This turned out to be a good move, coincidentally. I decided to go into Trader Joe’s to look for the bread we like, they didn’t have it, but for fun I texted Joanne to see if she wanted anything. From the San Diego airport she asked yes please, her favorite Power Greens. So I was able to get that for her, and put it in her mailroom cubby for her to get when she dragged in about 7:30.

I attended the Tuesday Night movie, The Competition. It’s soooo 1980s, the cars, the clothes. Richard Dreyfuss at his cutest. But I left early, 40 minutes in. Just couldn’t put up with the posing and the attitudes. OK, so the guy is determined not to let the cute girl affect his concentration — he could be polite, couldn’t he? Open about his concerns? Say something like, “Look, I just can’t think about anything but my concerto, let’s meet for drinks next week and laugh about it.” But no, they have to do clever verbal sparring and cute quips and insults, and hurt each other’s feelings. I couldn’t take the phony tension. Also didn’t care who would win the piano contest.

Monday 02/02/2026

Walked out, just up University for a coffee. Then it was time to set up for an event in the auditorium. For the first time we had a book talk delivered by a remote presenter, a Yale professor speaking from her faculty office. It worked out pretty well, except for me forgetting to start the recording until 3 minutes into the talk.

Right after I zipped off to FOPAL and jammed through 8 boxes of donations in a bit over 2 hours. I could afford to be very selective, since owing to that huge donation 2 weeks ago, I have 5 full boxes of saleable books that I can’t fit on my shelves. So I was really picky and sent I think a total of 6 boxes to the bargain room.

Back at 3, then to the Poetry Out Loud at 4. I read the lyrics to the splendid protest song “Minneapolis (History Chooses You)” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGnj12mI5y8. I’ve trying to learn to play it but I don’t have it smooth enough to perform yet. So I just read the lyrics. Coincidentally, another person had brought a fresh protest poem about the same events.