Sunday 07/26/2026
After I watered the plants and did the big crossword, I settled down to completing prep for the upcoming CMX. I finished copy/pasting the lyrics to Lorde’s Virgin tracks into a document and printed it out. I took the printout down to the lobby and made 25 copies.
I collected a batch of good pictures of her from the internet, into a folder on my drive. I took my laptop up to 11 and tried to set up how I wanted to present. Here’s the deal. I want to connect my laptop to the receiver that runs the big TV. I want the TV to be an external monitor for the laptop. This is all standard stuff, windows and mac systems alike support it. Plug in the HDMI cable to the external TV and set some settings.
Well, not so much with my laptop. I have had problems with this machine driving an external monitor before; it is an M1 MacBook Pro from 2020 and there is something nonstandard about the way it treats the HDMI port. What I want to set up is, a looping slide show of pictures of Lorde on the TV, while on the actual laptop screen I have control of the Music app so I can play each track, then stop for discussion. Could not get that to work; a combination of the crappy old receiver and my MacBook just wouldn’t work.
Fine, I have my old MacBook, it is getting on for 10 now, but still works fine and I have previously noticed its HDMI port plays nicely with other equipment. So I copied my folder of pictures over to it, and signed in to the Music app on it, and took it upstairs. And, yeah, with a little fiddling, I had what I wanted, a slide show of pics of Lorde looping on the big screen, and the Music app with a list of her album tracks on the small screen. So everything is ready for CMX on Tuesday. What a relief.
After lunch, at 1pm, the bus loaded to take us to the Pear Theater. I think I’ve mentioned before how 10 or 15 people here at CH get season tix to the Pear, and all choose the same Sunday matinee, so we can use a bus. Actually there’s a fee for the bus but it is covered by the Heritage Fund, the in-house resident fund. Joanne wasn’t on this bus; she has season tix but opted for a different day of the run, and she went to this show last Sunday.
Anyway, this was the final show of their season, the annual “Pear Slices”, eight short one-act plays by local playwrights. They varied in quality but were entertaining. There was The Shrewing of the Tames, a continuation of the Shakespeare play to show how Katherine gets her revenge later. The one that got the most laughs was Cyrano No No in which an update of a guy’s laptop software introduces a very pushy AI helper that proceeds to ruin his life for him, all with the best intentions.
Codgerville 