Saturday 04/22/2023
First activity today was to unbox and try out the new microphone system that I ordered after that shopping frenzy of 4.139. I ordered it on Wednesday and it arrived Friday morning. It turned out to be quite nice, very respectable build quality and decent sound. I plugged it into our portable amplifier and it worked immediately. I have to order a couple of more cables and doo-dads to have a complete system, and I need to try it out in another location. If all is good I may order two more copies.
At 10 I went down to set up the auditorium for a major event, the memorial for Lily Loh. Lily and her sister Helen moved in about the time I did. Lily especially was a well-known character, always bubbly-cheerful with a loud and frequent laugh. She died quite suddenly and two weeks ago. Helen and Lily’s son Derek had set up quite an impressive memorial. They had reserved the whole auditorium and had it set up with tables to seat, oh, I guess close to 100 people. Our Facilities people can do this kind of thing, completely rearrange the place and make a dozen large tables appear, if given enough warning. And Dining Services set up a whole service with hot trays of Chinese food — I’m pretty sure it was done in our kitchen, not brought in — fried rice, broccoli beef, garlic chicken, etc., plus drinks including wine. Well, I imagine they charged the family for the wine. There was probably a charge for all of it, but point being, it was all set up and executed in-house.
My small part in this was to turn on the system and set up microphones, and help Derek connect his laptop to the system to show a very nice slide show he had put together on a loop, with Spotify playing a collection of Lily’s favorite songs, mostly 50s R&R. A niece of Lily’s was the emcee and did an excellent job, keeping people on point and moving along.
It all finally wrapped up around 1:30 and I could put all my gear away. About 12 my phone had popped up an alert. Because I have my tickets in my “wallet” app, it wanted to tell me that I had a Stanford Baseball game at 2:05. Well heck, why not. Their season is well under way and I haven’t been to a game yet, and it was a beautiful day outside. So, off to the ball park.
Stanford wasn’t doing very well, down 0-3 after 3 innings against UW, And I started yawning, I came on home for a nap. For supper I had the remains of my fish and chips that I had brought home after Friday’s outing.
At 7:15 I picked up Patty and we went to a play. I have maintained my two-seat season ticket to the Bus Barn theater. I put out a notice last week on email, “anyone want to go with me to Harold and Maude?” and Patty was first to reply. While we were sitting down there was a tap on my shoulder and there were Scott and June! I had no idea they were Bus Barn patrons.
We debated about H&M on the way home. Maude is the distillation of the 60s and teaches depressed young Harold how to really live his life. It was very well acted by all parties and pretty funny in spots. We thought it went on a bit too long. I thought there were gaping holes in Maude’s philosophy that made it impractical without a very special combination of virtues, but Patty thought it worked.
So finally to bed at 11:15 after a full day.
Codgerville 