Wednesday 09/21/2022
Went for a slightly shorter than usual walk while my first load of laundry ran. Then finished up the other load.
At 1pm was the monthly FOPAL volunteers zoom meeting. The main topic this time was that there have been several instances of nice items growing legs and disappearing from the sale room. The Art section manager had set up a display of prints and a day later, somehow, a couple of them had disappeared. Some items that were in the high value boxes, where we stage books that are valued over $25 to be picked up and sold by the eBay volunteer group, also vanished. So the board has decided to put up a couple of cameras. The footage will be saved on a local server for a while, but only reviewed if there is a question about something vanishing.
At 3pm we had a talk by a resident, a rather new resident, Lou Thompson, whose career has been partly as a consultant advising the California High Speed Rail project. He reviewed high speed trains around the world. China has been building an amazing amount of HS trackage just since 2008. Then he reviewed all the stages the pathetic California HSR project has gone through. It has never been fully funded, or properly managed, or given adequate oversight by the legislature. The state is legally obligated to keep working on it because (a) the HSR Initiative we passed is the law and (b) we have taken and spent a lot of federal money as well, and would have to give it back. But the costs keep rising and the completion date keeps receding. He had no solutions. Good talk, well organized.
Talked Jan (pronounced Yon), who like me has a ticket to the Redwood Coast Music Fest coming up in just over a week. We will drive together in my car. He has a reservation in the same hotel as me.
Codgerville 