07/25/2026

In the morning I tried to get caught up with the activity that, I realized last evening, I should have been doing yesterday. I had a long lazy afternoon and I should have spent it doing the prep work for the Contemporary Music Exposure event that I am committed to running this coming Tuesday. That would be, picking the artist, getting info on them for an introductory presentation, getting the lyrics for all the songs from their latest album, and other stuff. Did I do any of that yesterday? No, but I got a start this morning.

First problem was, which artist. I had kind of figured it would be Ariana Grande, but when I started reading up on her I found out that her “latest” album would only be released at the end of this month. Lyrics and music not available for another week. So phooey, we can do her in September. But who else? I decided to go back to the original inspiration, the article in the Mercury News last December, that listed that writer’s idea of the best albums of 2025, and all the names were unfamiliar. The top album, a “verifiable masterpiece” he wrote, was Virgin by Lorde. OK, then. So I started pouring the lyrics for those songs into my word processing document.

But there was also a Section Manager’s meeting at FOPAL at 10:30. I didn’t want to take Fred because, well, silly reason, I had forgotten about this meeting, and hadn’t cleared Fred’s availability with Joanne, and didn’t want to bug her early Saturday morning. So I took a Lyft each way. Attended the meeting, scooted back by 12. Took my stuff down to the auditorium, helped set up for the Golden Stage performance at 2pm. Our talent show went off ok. There was a full house, to my surprise because some people had signed up for a bus trip to the TheatreWorks play matinee showing. But it was full and the audience was appreciative of our various talents, including my and Sandy’s rendition of “Jackson”.

Took a nap, had dinner, now still have time for a blog entry before I meet Joanne and we walk together to see the evening performance of the play that other people went to in the afternoon, called The Employee Dharma Handbook. Newspaper reviews have been very positive. Supposed to be funny. I will report on that tomorrow.

Friday 24/07/2026

Morning with Joanne. Then put the video of yesterday’s tech rehearsal on my dropbox and shared it with the other cast members. And polished up the Elvis ’68 video for next month.

At 11, met with Sandy and did another rehearsal of our song in the auditorium. Tomorrow is show-day. Oh well.

Long quiet afternoon. Later I realized what I could have been doing in that time and kicked myself. Oh well.

At 5 met with Joanne, David G and his wife Helen, David M and his wife Karen, on the 11th floor. The Morrisons had invited us and the Goldens to form a table for the monthly Webster Street Grille, our dining service’s shot at high-class dining. 11th floor converted into a nice restaurant for about 40 people. Five course meal, every course a little picture of perfection on a plate. Lots of nice conversation.

Thursday 07/23/2026

Took a walk with Joanne up to the shopping center. Bought stuff at Trader Joe’s. Stopped at the doctor’s office to ask if he recommended a covid update. He does, and his nurse gave me my booster right then.

At 10am, met with Sandy and we practiced our song for 10 minutes.

Later I worked on ripping the DVDs of Elvis’s 1968 comeback show, and editing them down to a nice hour concert.

At 3pm the entire cast of the upcoming Golden Stage variety show met and we did a run-through. Sandy and I sounded ok, as did the other 8 or 9 acts. It will be an entertaining hour for our neighbors.

Wednesday 07/22/2026

Early on I went down to the dining room to join Joanne and her guests Bill and Lynn at breakfast. I almost never have breakfast in the dining room, having a protein shake in my room while I read the paper, but Joanne had invited me so of course I went.

At 11 I went to the auditorium for a rehearsal and some tech consultation. This Saturday is our Golden Stage, basically a voluntary talent show by residents. John and his wife Frances are producing this and they have lined up 10 performances. I talked to John, who graciously took over chair of the AV committee last year, about how we would play accompaniment music for us and for Jean who is doing a dance. I have those two music tracks on my iPad and I sync it by Bluetooth to the sound console. I showed Alice how to start and stop the music.

Then Sandy and I did our number a couple of times. We blew the lyrics again which is not good. Sandy went and reserved the music practice room for us today at 4 and tomorrow at 10.

I got an email from Stew wanting to talk about an upcoming event, a Fan Boys concert on Saturday 8/1. He wants me to rip the concert from a DVD and add some material to it from another DVD. Sure, I can do that. Except I never have. I spent a couple hours learning how and starting the process.

I also had a tech squad dispatch, but it was an easy one, I fixed that person up in about 5 minutes at 4:30. Then a quick supper. And then joined Joanne at the garage entrance to go to a concert.

This is the month of the Stanford Jazz Workshop which includes several concerts.We went to one last week (7.224). Tonight was the traditional Ruth Davies Blues Night. Davies is a well-known jazz bass player who directs these annual shows. Tonight featured a young blues guitarist named Sean Macdonald and he was excellent. The whole band was good but he turned the evening into a 2-hour revival meeting. Had the whole crowd up and waving and clapping. It was great.

Tuesday 07/21/2026

Went out for a short walk early. Puttered around until the writers meeting. Read my thing (see yesterday), listened to and praised other people’s clever pieces.

After lunch I worked for a while on setting up to capture Youtube videos. This is looking ahead to the next Good Times show, next fall. Stew says it will be Beatles-themed. Youtube video downloaders exist but are flakey; there is a constant battle between the people who create downloader apps and Youtube trying to change things to prevent downloading. But they can’t stop me recording my own screen, so I was looking for a good screen recorder for my desktop system.

At 5:30 I joined Joanne in the lobby. She has been entertaining a couple, long-time friends of hers that she knew in Port Townsend, Bill and Lynn. They recently moved to North Carolina, but were visiting in San Francisco, so Joanne had them stay last night and tonight in a CH guest room. I was invited to join them for dinner tonight.

We walked a few blocks to Tamarine, a very nice Vietnamese place, and had an excellent dinner. During dinner, Joanne brought up that we were going to miss seeing The Princess Bride, being shown in our auditorium tonight. I said, have you never seen it? She shook her head, and simultaneously I, Bill and Lynn all said, “Oooh!”. So we didn’t hurry through diner but didn’t waste any time and we were back in time to go into the auditorium and watch it.

So that was nice. I said goodby to them and went off to bed.

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.