Thursday 05/20/2021

After aerobics I hastily tidied up the apartment, since Wanda was coming in at 9:30 to clean. Then off to FOPAL for a bit of sorting (still nothing for the computer section). The boxes I was sorting, along with two volunteers named Helen and Dennis, were from a single donation and they were about 2/3 full of popular books about business and management, and 1/3 of general psychology-self-help. All from the past decade and all in pristine condition. Somebody was spending lots of money on books to help him be a better manager or entrepreneur, and reading them once if that.

Back to the barn, and my room was all tidy. I looked at the lunch menu on the way up from the garage, and decided I didn’t like what was on for lunch, so I had a nice PBJ in my room.

Afternoon I worked on the Golf model. It’s at the point where I’m trying to carefully paint black on the window surrounds and the wheel arches (that’s how it looks in auction photos). I’d masked very carefully but off course… well. Also worked on the software project. Had supper in the dining room, at the 8-seat “open” table. Evening serving was a not very good meatloaf, mashed potatoes with no gravy (why? just a mound of mashed potatoes.) And some veg.

Wednesday 05/19/2021

Went for the standard walk, felt fine. Wanda stopped me in the hallway coming back, wanting to know if it was ok to clean my room at 9:30am tomorrow instead of the usual 2pm. She has some kind of meeting to go to. Ok, sure.

Neighbor Dr. Margaret called to say, she’d gotten my book out of the library and it was great, and she had questions, could we lunch together. At lunch she praised the book extravagantly. We talked about some issues in it.

Ran my laundry from 12 to 2. Then worked on hobby projects until 5. That was the time I’d been invited to drinks before dinner with Jerry and Betty, and coincidentally they had asked Dr. Margaret. So we chatted over drinks, then went down to dinner.

That was about it for the day. I have been warned that they will shut down the CH intranet tonight at 10 for maintenance, so I’d better get this posted.

Tuesday 05/18/2021

I was the only one to sign in to Veronica’s aerobics, so like a personal trainer. She and I discussed how she is going to handle the class with her upcoming pregnancy leave of several months. Probably it will be picked up in June by A.J., a staff member, who will lead it on the 11th floor at 8:30am. Would that suit me? Sure. And being in-person instead of remote, it might pick up more people.

Then it was time for the weekly writers meeting. Again I had no contribution to read. The cue of “sky high or down to earth” didn’t spark anything in my mind, although others had some really nice things from that.

After lunch I went to FOPAL. Curated a box of books, but only one box. My shelves are starting to look under-stocked. No idea why no computer related donations are coming in.

Monday 05/17/2021

After the usual walk, I took care of a few to-do items, which I had polished off by lunch. Then I had a very productive session with the software hobby project I started a couple weeks ago and have been fiddling with since. I won’t try to explain it here; but here it is. I will probably keep adding bits to it for some time to come. This is how nerds have fun.

Something I didn’t mention in filling in Sunday’s blog: I signed up for three outside, non-virtual activities.

First, the Sunday paper had an article on SiliCon in San Jose, a comic/SF convention originally founded by Steve Wozniak, and now with Adam Savage as artistic director. A real convention, in the SJ convention center. Heck yeah, I could use a weekend of panels featuring SF authors and web comic artists, and merch tables, and cos-players. Bought a weekend ticket.

Then in the email, there was a notice from meetup.com for South Bay House Concerts, one of my favorite local groups, The Quitters, would be doing a house concert at the end of July. The organizer was calling for vaccinated audience only. Heck yes. Signed up for that.

And further down in the same email list, the announcement of the Redwood Coast Music Festival for the end of September. I had been signed up for this festival for the fall of 2020. When they canceled I donated back the ticket price. Well, here they are again. I haven’t been to any kind of music fest in years, and never to this one, but it looks like fun. So I bought a weekend ticket for that, and booked a hotel in Eureka.

So that’s three non-virtual, out-among-other-people, things.

Sunday 05/16/2021

Went for a drive: left at 8:30am to pick up Dennis, and drove on to Carmel-by-the-Sea. We walked around browsing several art galleries, then had lunch. Drove back, as part of 20 miles of slow traffic on 101. Apparently there are lots of people willing to get out on a Sunday.

Went to bed without blogging or even thinking about blogging.

Saturday 05/15/2021

Had lunch with Dr. Margaret, hearing about her in-laws, talking medicine. She knows my cardiologist who joined PAMF just as Dr. Margaret was retiring. She said “Oh, she’s good!” as if she meant it. She doesn’t think I should be concerned about BP of 140/50.

Then I had dinner with Patty and Randy and Lois. Randy was for most of his career, the main guy for maintaining the klystrons at Stanford Linear Accelerator. Lois was an acquisitions editor for textbooks at Addison Wesley.

So I am socializing a lot. Tomorrow, even more. Then I think I will eat dinner by myself for a while.

Friday 05/14/2021

Went for a walk. Futzed around on various things until lunch. After lunch went down to FOPAL where for the third? time in a row, there were no computer books to process. So I spent an hour doing sorting.

At 4 it was time for Rhonda’s phone-in. No exciting news. Today the CDC issued some rather confusing new mask guidelines, more or less saying fully vaccinated people don’t need them even indoors, except for, several conditions.

As far as Channing House, we are under the directions of the California Department of Social Services (Independent Living) and the California Department of Public Health (Assisted living and SN), and neither of these agencies have updated their mask guideliness. For the time being, all staff are required to wear masks all the time at work. Out of respect for them, we in Independent Living, are asked to wear masks whenever we are on the first floor or in elevators, places we might encounter staff. Otherwise, not required.

At 5pm I went to Susan and Harry’s unit for drinks before dinner. This was to get to know Gloria who is moving in next week. Like so many of my neighbors here, Gloria is a high achiever, retired from a career teaching Economics at Stanford. Smart, friendly, articulate. She has three daughters, respectively an architect, a software engineer, and a lawyer.

Thursday 05/13/2021

How’s that for an exciting headline, eh? In the morning I wasted some time on the internet, and also spent a little time editing Pelajis. Eventually it was time for lunch with the boys. I picked up Craig and we drove to “Zot’s”, Rizotti’s, a place a lot like a Munich beer-garden, in the woods west of I-280. There we met with Tom and Scott, and so we had four people who all worked at IBM Palo Alto in the early 1970s, around one table. Nostalgia flowed. Also, talk of our respective medical issues.

Got back to Channing House about 3pm, and at 4pm I walked across the bridge to a unit of CH I had never been to, the Beauty Salon it says on the door, where Leah gave me my first professional haircut since probably January of 2020. Leah did a fine job.

And that was the day, pretty much. When I went down to dinner the luck of the draw put me at a table with the Goldens, and there was more reminiscing. They had spent a year in Switzerland in 1975, the same year the Marian and I had started our 2 years in England. That was a year of heat and drought in England, and they remembered that weather as well.

Wednesday 05/12/2021

Went for a walk first thing. On return, had coffee in the dining room. I’m not thrilled with our selection of pastries, and future occasions I may have coffee out rather than coming back.

Sat in the seating area next to David Morrison who is running this afternoon’s Speaker Series zoom starring Tara Vanderveer. We talked briefly about that, how I should log in about 2:45.

Between then and 2:45 I did a few things. Read over my introduction for Tara and timed it (2 and a half minutes). Re-oiled the coffee table for one. And spent an hour working on a little software project which is threatening to get out of hand and turn into a big software project.

At the appointed time I logged in and shortly, so did Tara. At 3pm David opened the meeting and we soon had 75 participants, which I learned later is about 30% more than usual for the Speakers Series. I gave my intro, then Tara took over and talked for 20 minutes and answered questions until 4pm.

Afterward I got a couple of emails congratulating me on the intro, and in the dining room a couple of people went out of the way to come and tell me how they like the intro. So that was nice.

Dinner was arranged by Patty, inviting me and the Beelers, Leon and Margaret, who are relatively new on our floor. Leon worked many years as an accountant at Sunset Magazine.

Peter is trying to start a more serious critiquing group, with a few people initially. I guess I am flattered he invited me to join. Anyway, what to offer up for nit-picking?

Coincidentally last week, Amazon announced Kindle Vella, a marketplace for serialized stories. I guess Amazon has taken note of how many writers are self-publishing their books as serials, chapter by chapter as blog posts. Most famously Andy Weir published the first draft of The Martian that way, leading to a book contract and a Major Motion Picture deal. But I know of lots of others. Most of them are fan-fic but some are serious novels. Anyway, that put me in mind of my novel Pelajis, which last year I tried to get accepted by agents, to universal turn-downs.

The way Vella is set up, the first 3 chapters of a serial will be free to read, then the reader pays roughly a dime per thousand words to keep reading. So, exactly as with agent queries, the emphasis has to be on starting strong and hooking the reader in the first 1000 words or so.

Well I think Pelajis is quite well suited to being serialized, and its opening chapters need to be made more attractive. So I sat down and did some revision trying to do that, and sent them off to Peter’s group list for critiquing.

Gotta keep flogging that horse. Is it dead?

Tuesday 05/11/2021

After aerobics, I took the green bags to the basement. Then sat down at my desk and did a bunch of silly paperwork, paying bills and so on, which was complicated by the iMac having forgotten how to talk to the printer. Ended up having to reboot both machines.

(Distraction: the TV is on muted, and I keep seeing people doing just horrible things to dogs. WTF? Turns out it is a show on ABC called Pooch Perfect, people competing, apparently, to dye their animals more weird colors than the teams do.)

About 10 somebody above me over-watered a plant and dribbled at least half a gallon of water down onto my deck. No wonder that spot is always damp…

Drove down to FOPAL where once again there were only a few computer books to process, so I put in an hour sorting.

At 5 it was time for the monthly 6th floor meeting. We couldn’t get the audio straightened out on Zoom; there was an echo that made every speaker’s voice break up. Eventually everybody agreed it would be better to violate the rules and meet in person, so 20 people gathered in our lounge for the first time in a year.