Wednesday 02/19/2025
I didn’t take a morning walk because one was scheduled for later in the day. I got a request from Peter to edit down a documentary so he could use a segment of it in a lecture he is sponsoring next Monday. So I did that.
Then Bert sent an email to the AV list pointing out that the 11th floor lecternette had been damaged. So I decided to fix it. The lecternette is a PA system on a rolling steel cart. At some point a decorative board had been fixed to the front side of the cart to conceal a mess of wires. This board had originally been attached with double-sided tape, which had dried out over the past probably 15 years or so. Then somebody had done a piss-poor job of attaching the board with screws, and it was falling off. So I mounted it properly, which meant using my power drill and a tape measure and some screws I got from the hobby shop on the fifth floor.
All that killed the time until lunch. After, at 1 was the monthly FOPAL volunteer zoom. I was interested because the one and only paid staff, Janette, who has held the place together as long as I’ve been around and before, is retiring, and I wanted to hear how the FOPAL board was doing on recruiting a replacement. Answer, not much; they haven’t finalized a job description yet.
At 1:30 I joined Joanne in the lobby; she had organized a walk. We were joined by The Other Joanne and her partner Erika, and we went for a 4 mile walk in the Arastradero Preserve. Back around 4. Then at 5 I joined Lou and Alice who had invited me to drinks at their place and then dinner. Peter was invited also, and the four of us socialized nicely through dinner.
There was an interesting talk at 7:30 by Vishal Subramanyan, a young nature photographer who recently gained fame for getting the first photograph of a rare animal, the Mount Lyell Shrew. He gave a great slide presentation of his pictures of bobcats, mountain lions, horned owls and other animals, all shot live in the wild.
Codgerville 