Tuesday 10/07/2025
The writers group prompt this week was, “a friend who influenced your life.” I wrote a couple of paragraphs about how Scott redirected my life, by suggesting I should get IBM to transfer me from working in the City to the Palo Alto Development Center. Looking back, I cannot imagine what my life would have been if I had not taken him up on that. There I learned to program, and met Marian, and got married, and got to spend 2+ years in England. It was in England, working with IBM people from all over Europe, that I discovered I had a skill for technical writing, doing documentation clear enough that a bunch of Swedes and Britishers and Italians could understand. If I had stayed in the city, a completely different life would have ensued.
Got my laundry done in just over 2 hours. At 2pm I remembered to call the surgeon’s office. They had previously told me that I would have my cyst drained on 10/20, but didn’t know the time. Finally we connected and I learned the time, 1pm, check-in at 12:30 that day. OK.
The Lee Center, our assisted-living section, took over the auditorium today at 2 for an Oktoberfest. They had brought in an actual German-style band, with brass instruments, wearing lederhosen and so on. Served pretzels and such. Non-alcoholic beer. I stopped by long enough to have a pretzel, but wasn’t that interested.
Speaking of technical writing, we were to go and hear the Queen of technical writers, Mary Roach, talk about her new book, Replaceable You, about the science of replacing body parts. I brought the car up at 6 and Joanne hopped in and we drove off to Kepler’s. I haven’t been into Keplers in a while; it is doing fine. Just walking through the store to get to the place where the chairs were set up for the talk, I saw so many books I wanted to stop and look at. Ms. Roach was fun, she’s a lively character with lots of stories to tell.
Codgerville 