Thursday 04/14/2022
It’s housecleaning day, so before I left for Shustek across the Bay, I tidied up for the cleaning lady. I also worked on the letter wanted by Wells Fargo, and sent it to Joanne for checking. And also sent an email to my AV team list, asking for suggestions on what we might ask for a Heritage Circle grant.
Then off to Shustek for a day of cataloging artifacts. One thing that I and Steve Madsen cataloged was a “Data Glove”, a fabric glove with lots of wires, part of a 1980’s research into human input to virtual worlds or something.
At one point of the morning the people working at Shustek discovered that we were all recent widowers. Well, I guess I’m the oldest in that status, having lost Marian in 2018. Dave Bennett lost his wife just last November; Steve Madsen lost his just recently in I think it was February; and Sherman (forget his last name) also lost his wife recently. The Widower’s club. Statistically unlikely, given that (judging by Channing House) there are lots more widows than widowers, but there we were.
In the middle of the day we had an indoor picnic lunch, all the volunteers from the other group at Yosemite came over, to hear a talk on the progress in converting the whole artifact database to a new software base, all in the cloud and hyper connected and shit. Another reason for this break was to give a surprise baby shower to Greta, one of the two absolutely stellar women who keep that place organized. We will have to get along without her for a lengthy maternity leave now; I hope she will come back from it.
This was a nice contrast on the two kinds of volunteer work. What I do for CHM and for FOPAL is simple. Although the work requires attention and effort, it is well-defined and bounded in scope and time. You go there, you do the job, you walk away and go home, done.
The other kind is what I’ve been calling “Manager work”. It has no boundaries of time, it is always on my mind. You have to get opinions from other people, you have to get concensus, you don’t do something and dust off your hands, all the tasks hang around pending on something else which relies on something else, etc., with no resolution. It’s what managers do, and I am a natural “member of technical staff”.
In the evening I got an email from fave artist Carol Aust telling of the Hunters Point Open Studios weekend. I attended this in May 2019 (Day 0.154) and enjoyed it, and ultimately bought two paintings from one of the artists I first saw there. So I marked the calendar for this year, Saturday 4/30. Anyone want to join me?
Codgerville 