Thursday 12/14/2023
Did my usual Thursday morning routine, of tidying up everything and general maintenance, anticipating Wanda’s housekeeping visit in the afternoon. Also processed the video from last night’s chorus performance. I recorded it using Quicktime on my spare laptop, and Quicktime makes a monstrous huge file out of a one-hour concert, 65GB or so. So I put the laptop to work processing it with Handbrake, which reduced it to 5GB. That just finished at 10:20 which is when I needed to leave for the museum to lead a tour at 11.
This was a private tour for a law firm. There was supposed to be ten people but only 6 showed up. Two were very experienced nerds, they’d been in computer hardware before they became lawyers. The others weren’t so techy. Anyway I gave them the bonus 90 minute tour and the seemed to enjoy it.
Back to CH in time to meet at 2pm with Alice who is giving a talk on Sunday. We went over how her slides would be put on the screen and out to zoom. She is quite knowledgeable and also quick (she reminds me of my late sister Joyce: very mentally quick, but very quick to judgement of anything that doesn’t meet her standards). Unfortunately the problem with the Zoom room from yesterday continued, so we couldn’t try anything out.
At 2:30 I left Alice and joined a meeting of the Good Times committee. This is the group that sponsored the 50s sock hop a year ago and the C&W night a few months ago. They are now planning “Strolling into the 60s,” songs of 1959-1963. The name, because The Stroll was a big deal then, and getting people to dance is an objective now. We got the candidate list of songs down to 30. So many many good songs from then.
At 4:30 I had been invited by Joanne L and Erica to a tasting of whiskies, believe it or not. Peanut butter flavor whiskey is actually pretty good, as is red-hot cinnamon whiskey. Even though I was sampling like tiny little splashes, that was more alcohol than I’ve had at one sitting in a long time.
At 7 we had a concert by the Gunn High School Chorus. They were very good, and cute, too.
The director, Bill Liberatore, is friends with several people who live at CH, and jokes that since their first performance here was 1999, he’s been at CH longer than most of us.
Codgerville 