Thursday 09/04/2025
I started the day in the gym, doing (for the first time in forever) two full rounds of the HUR machines, which felt like a solid workout. I went a little later, 8:15 when I had been going at like 7:30. The earlier time seems to clash with 3 or 4 other people who like an early start. If they came today, they were gone by 8:15, so, good.
Then I sat down to edit the video of a talk last Monday by a resident, Dean Forbes, about his life-long avocation of Biblical Linguistics. (His professional career was manager of medical instrumentation development for HP.) This was a talk I couldn’t go to, as I was leading a tour at the museum. Bert ran the AV and got the video recording, but he screwed up. Well, not entirely; plus Dean didn’t help him by wandering all over the front of the room, mostly out of range of the camera. So what I had to work with was a video of the stage, with the projection screen in the center showing Dean’s slides, and Dean’s voice on the sound track giving his lecture. Once in a while Dean’s head would appear in the bottom of the frame.
So it was work editing the video (here it is). What I did to keep it at least a bit interesting, was to crop the image to show the key part of each slide as he talked about it. At least it was interesting to me doing it. The talk, not so much. It’s a very dense topic and he did not (IMHO) do a good job of introducing it, just jumped into some details.
Anyway that passed the time to 12 when I drove Fred to Chef Chu’s for lunch with the IBM survivors, organized by Scott. Tom Daniel, and I was happy to hear that his wife, who was very ill last time I talked to him, was much better. Denny Sargent, always the happy-go-lucky bachelor. Diana Bloch, whom I last saw in about 2002? and who has changed so much I would never have recognized her. And Zoe Leptourgos. She, like Scott and Denny, does still look enough like my memories that I would recognize her. Anyway, nice conversation, not totally about nostalgic memories.
Back to CH for a quick nap and then down to the auditorium for the annual Resident/Board meeting, where the audited financials for FY 25 (our fiscal year ends in February, so March 24-Feb 25) are presented, and put in context with prior years, and compared to the numbers for the first half of FY 26. Bottom line, we have finally juuussst squeaked over the line to have a tiny surplus of operating income over operating expense, for the first time in several years. We’re handling our depts and look like staying at break-even or better next year. Then they went over projections for if/when we go through with the purchase of a new building, a “satellite” campus. Which is in progress, but still secret, they still can’t tell us where this building is, for fear of upsetting the seller. Anyway, if or when that goes through, we will add another 10-15 life plan contracts, greatly raising our capital assets while still, they assume and hope, bringing in more monthly operating revenue than it costs. So we are sound for the time being.
Afterward there was a nice reception on the patio with lots of cute little nibbles, with a couple of nibbles and my big lunch, I’m skipping supper. I might regret that decision around 9pm, we’ll see.
Codgerville 