Tuesday 02/21/2023
Also fairly productive day, though. Went down to the gym, and there is a new machine in the lineup, one which you use to exercise your lower back and abs, so I worked out how to use that. The workout from going twice down the line of machines, although trivial by any younger person’s standards, leaves me tired enough I need to sit and rest for a bit.
In the two hours before the writers group at 11 I cobbled together something to read. The topic was “Spring”. How boring, I thought. It turns out at least three of the others in the group of 16 had the same thought and the same solution as I, writing about some of the many other meanings of the word “Spring”. How many can you think of? There’s a lot.
That made me think of the famous poem, it gets passed around the internet every couple of years in one form or another, usually titled “English is Tough Stuff”. It demonstrates all the crazy inconsistency of English spelling in clever verses. Here’s the full version. So could I write a verse that used “spring” in different ways, using the same rhythm as that poem? I did. It doesn’t rhyme but it has the right meter.
Springing sideways, rabbit dodges
fox’s springy arching pounces,
runs round bubbling water source,
sidesteps open unsprung trap to
reach her burrow’s welcome refuge;
springing into sudden view
of offspring on their unsprung pallet.
Pups recoil in sudden terror
Then uncoil ‘cause Momma’s home.
After that meeting, I drove down to FOPAL and did a couple of hours of sorting. This because I had noticed there was a backlog, and because I really enjoy the sorting task. It’s a very satisfying thing to do.
Next I worked on Gigi’s pictures. You what? My neighbor Gigi is going to give a talk in a couple of weeks, and she wants to show many pictures — probably too many, but I am not telling her that — which she had drag-dropped into a long text document that is her script. That won’t do; to show the pictures as slides on the big screen during her talk, the pictures need to be by themselves, one per page, filling the page. So I spent maybe 90 minutes culling the pictures out to a separate doc, formatted for good presentation.
Next I went down to the front desk and reserved an hour of the auditorium for next Monday so Gigi can rehearse. Then into the auditorium and changed some of the equipment around. Adjusted the wireless mic receivers so we can use the new, over-the-ear lightweight mics.
Wrote an email to my AV team documenting what I had done. What else? Oh, went over the list of upcoming events, and for all the zoom events in the auditorium, scheduled the zoom meetings so that the auditorium Zoom Room hardware will know they are coming.
There was an hour power outage, but happily the wi-fi kept working so that was just a nice break.
Codgerville 