Sunday 06/25/2023

The morning was taken up with studying the vendor quote that the IT department has obtained for auditorium work. There are a number of problems with what they plan to, and things the vendor has not properly or completely specified. I spent a couple hours on that, partly consulting with Jerry.

After lunch I drove down to the local nursery and bought myself a coleus to replace a different plant that has been struggling in my living room. Hopefully this guy will feel more at home with my sporadic watering.

Then I printed a bunch of new pictures for my hall picture rails The old display which was big blossoms of one kind or another, had been up for 2 months or more.

Finally I looked at some prize-winning young adult SF novels. A big annual award deal was announced and thought I would look over the nominees for YA SF, because that’s what I’m trying to write. It was pretty discouraging. I read the samples on the Kindle pages of 8 nominees, and they were all really good. One, the winner, was good enough I actually bought it. (This one.) Two things that discouraged me.

One, all of them are written in first person point of view. That is, “I did this, I saw that, I said…” story telling mode. Back in the 90s when I was trying to write fiction and reading a lot of “how to write” advice, every single guru strongly advocated against first person, saying it is a common trap that newbies fall into. Now apparently it is the thing. In the story I’m working on, first, there are two protagonists, what would I do, switch between them, one chapter him, next chapter her? I’ve seen that done but it’s artificial. But also, I want to have scenes that take place where the protagonists are not present. You can’t do that in 1P. In 1P, the only way to report something that happened when they weren’t there, is to have somebody come and tell them about it. Awkward.

The other thing that stood out is how every single one of these award-nominated stories starts bang with strong emotion, danger, or violence. No messing around, no build up, no scene setting. I’m not good at the strong conflict ever, and need to build up to it. Maybe I should change genres, move to Cozy Mystery, where any violence is off-stage and the strongest emotion is wondering who did it.

Saturday 06/24/2023

In the morning I took a walk around and stopped at the farmers market to buy some apricots. Just apricots, no delicious pastries. After lunch I went down to the museum and led a tour of what was to be 16 Google employees, but was actually only 8. What a casual group, they really didn’t seem to know where the others were, or have a leader or organizer or anything. But I did the tour and it went pretty well.

A little after seven I walked over to the Lucy Stern theater for a Palo Alto Players show. This was a Harry Potter take-off called “Puffs” after the house that nobody wants to be sorted into, the Hufflepuffs. The large cast tackled this with immense energy and noise but I didn’t get any of the jokes. I am just not into the Potter-verse. I think I read the first book back in the 70s and I believe I saw the first movie, but probably on TV. Or on an airliner. People around me were laughing at what I assume were clever references, but it was all over my head. It took them an hour and a quarter to get to intermission, and I couldn’t leave fast enough then.

Friday 06/23/2023

At ten am I scored big on the tech squad. Susan has an HP printer that stopped communicating with her mac some days ago. Two people from the tech squad have failed to fix it. Peter failed, then Craig tried and failed. So Craig asked me to try. And I did the thing. Actually all I did was follow the instructions in the printer manual and the on-screen prompts from the “HP Smart” app. However I had to do that three times, varying things, before the very involved sequence of operations actually worked. I am not a fan of the HP printers or their software. Nevertheless I succeeded where two others gave up. Further cementing my reputation as a Mac wizard with Susan, and probably Craig.

After lunch I went to the museum and led a tour for a group of college students from a university in Sweden. Of course their English was perfect, so no language problem. It was a big group and we had two docents, and my group kept catching up with the other group, so I would have to vamp and stall. I thought I talked more than other docents but apparently not this one.

As soon as I was back it was time to set up for the 4pm AV committee meeting. The main draw for this was the Gerald of IT came to tell us about the current state of the request to upgrade the Auditorium equipment. What’s currently in-plan is just a new, 4K projector and a new screen that rejects ambient light better; and a new camera to replace the old one. Plus some wiring changes and an upgraded blu-ray player to support the 4K projector.

Thursday 06/22/2023

Off to Shustek center for another day of sorting the Sandy Fraser papers. Almost done; next time will finish the job.

Edie had invited me to dinner to fill out a table with Lou and Alice. We ended up telling our life stories, since nobody was really familiar with the others. Lou has had a really distinguished career serving more than a decade with the IMF, and being on boards including the California High Speed Train authority. He gave a talk on that system and its lack of progress, a year ago now. Alice served various NGO development authorities and then at the IMF where they met. Edie’s career has been more local, but she has been a transit planner for local agencies and other governmental bodies. Me, just a humble “member of technical staff”.

When I came back from Shustek early at 3:30, there was an “ice cream social” going on, on the patio. There I ran into my next-door neighbor Carolyn and for fun I invited her to come along to tonight’s play, since I continue to buy two season tickets to the Bus Barn. She was pleased to come, so I had company to discuss the production. It was Sunday in the Park with George, a musical about the short life of George Seurat and his famous painting, which the actors recreate as a tableau at the end of the first and last acts. It was very well performed and the production was amazing given the constraints of the tiny theater. It’s not the most interesting story, and Sondheim certainly doesn’t write hummable melodies, but I enjoyed it.

Wednesday 06/21/2023

Went for the usual walk, no problem. At 11 I went over to Stanford to once again help check in campers, this time to Tara’s “elite” (high school age) camp. However I had misunderstood the time requirements. I thought it would be wrapping up by 1pm so I could come back and be not too late to the monthly zoom meeting of FOPAL volunteers.

In fact registration was to start at 1pm, so I begged off and came home. Then at 1pm the FOPAL meeting didn’t start, or at 1:05 or 1:10, and at 1:15 came an email, meeting canceled for “technical difficulties”. Which Frank, another volunteer, opined probably meant, “the person with the password wasn’t available.” So a big nothing day. Well, I got some reading done.

Tuesday 06/20/2023

Got up a little earlier than usual so as to be on the Stanford campus by 7:15, where I assisted with registering campers for Tara’s junior basketball camp. One of 6 fans manning three tables, registering a bunch of grade- and middle-school girls. Nothing much to it. Job done I was back in time for the 10:45 meeting of the writers group. Afterward I did some set-up work for the A/V committee meeting, reserving the auditorium, and persuading IT manager Gerald to come talk to us about the auditorium upgrade. That was about it for the day.

Monday 6/19/2023

Went for the benchmark walk first thing. Felt fine. Foot is back to normal, yay.

At 10:30 it was time for the monthly Event Coordinators meeting, to settle the calendar of events for July. It went fine, no big surprises.

Following lunch I went down to FOPAL and processed 5 boxes of donations. Some interesting things to sell. Hopcroft and Ullman, Formal Languages and Their Relation to Automata is a well-known college textbook on computer science, and a first edition of that from 1969 showed up. According to Bookfinder it isn’t valuable, but I think anyone shopping the Computer section at the FOPAL sale will appreciate it. The same box had other textbooks from that period. Besides those, none of which are especially valuable, I turned up half a dozen other books valued over $30 for the “high value” box.

Back home, entered all the events from the draft July calendar in the Google sheet shared by the A/V team, and sent an email suggesting times we can meet. Then it was time for Rhonda’s open meeting, where the CEO talks to the residents. I was going to join it on Zoom, but the IT STAFF running the zoom had screwed up the audio. I could see exactly what they had done wrong, but no way to tell them. So I went down to the physical meeting.

Rhonda’s main concern is a bill in committee at the State Assembly which would raise the minimum wage for “health care workers” to $25/hour. Unfortunately as written, it defines “health care worker” as anyone who works in a facility with skilled nursing. Not just nurses, everybody, dining services, janitorial, housekeeping, every position. Rhonda estimates that if passed as currently written this will increase Channing House costs by $600,000 per year, or a 3-5% increase in our monthly fees. She points out that a lot of elder facilities outside of Silicon Valley and LA, depend on MediCal reimbursement for their payroll and that is set at $19/hour. Without a corresponding increase in MediCal a number of elder facilities would be forced out of business.

She had written a letter to the Assembly members on resident’s behalf, and read it off the screen for us. There was some debate from the floor about whether Channing House could or should claim to be speaking for all residents. Rhonda agreed and said, how about if I change it to “the below-signed residents” and if you agree, you can sign it at the front desk. So after the meeting there was a line of us at the desk, signing the letter.

Sunday 06/18/2023

Usual Sunday morning habitual activities. Then I spent half an hour pitting cherries and sectioning apricots for a nice fruit compote.

Next up, a pending project in the A/V world. We’ve had requests from certain performers to have monitor speakers, speakers on stage pointing at the performer, so they get a direct hit with the sound they are making. We have a couple of powered speakers that could be used this way, but we have lacked the cables to get audio from the sound board to them. Also actually working out how to do it. A week ago I ordered the cables from Amazon. Today I wanted to try it out, so I did. And I wrote up my results in a poop sheet for my A/V team. I’m kind of proud of it and I will stick it at the end.

Lunch today was fairly spectacular, they laid on three entrees, and wine, and a pick your own dessert table. Dinner of course was to be a sack lunch.

At 3:30 it was time to go set up for Pru’s talk in the Sunday@Home series. She talked about her self-published book and the process of self-publishing. My main concern was that my team member Kass was being the zoom host. We worked through my 3 page checklist and everything worked fine. I hope her confidence is up. Next month maybe she can do one alone.

Only ten of us gathered for the sack supper picnic, various people being away. My compote was favorably received. I still have quite a bit of it left, however, to eat on my own.

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Saturday 06/17/2023

My big toe is very nearly back to normal. I took a walk over to the farmers market. Tomorrow will be another picnic supper day, when the dining services crew prepare brown-bag meals to be picked up after lunch, and leave early. On the 6th floor, most people meet in the floor dining room at 5:30 for a group picnic. Last year (I think it was) I prepared a bowl of pitted cherries for one of these occasions. I think I will do the same, since the market is full of delicious looking ripe fruit. I got cherries, apricots, and seedless mandarins. Tomorrow I will do that.

At noon I went up to 11 and set up the sound system for a meeting. The presenter, who turned out to be a professor of engineering, had already connected his laptop to the TV, so I didn’t have to help with that. Love “helping” techy people.

Spent the afternoon preparing the video recording of the drama scenes show. I described this on Wednesday. 40 minute show of a short scenes, extracts from various plays and movies. I had video’d both performances but in the end I only used the evening show. Split out each scene with a little flip-flop video transition between them. It looks ok.

I also made a start at collecting the videos for the C&W event planned for September, now the committee has selected what they promise is the “final” list of numbers. Lots of time to work on that.

Friday 06/16/2023

Today was the big day for the drama crew that rehearsed last Wednesday. Two performances, 10am and 7:30pm. I set them up with microphones and I recorded the video of both performances. So that was a good part of the day.

In the middle, before lunch, I walked over to the Apple store and purchased a Lightning to HDMI adapter. This because we have a request from Mary Ann, who wants to hold a party on the 11th floor, and have her kids show photos from an iPhone on the big TV. The big TV is set up for that. I prepared detailed instructions, although simple, clear, and illustrated with photos, on how to turn the TV on, how to watch Comcast video, Roku video, play DVDs, or connect any device to HDMI input. Only problem, iPhones don’t have HDMI, you need an adapter. It’s a little thing. I tucked it into the pocket in the back of the instruction binder. It has “Please return when done” written both sides of it in indelible sharpie. Wonder how long it will last…

Also, at 3:30, we had a request to set up the portable speaker and microphone on the patio outside the dining room. This was because the 7th floor was conducting the monthly TGIF party in that location. They didn’t have many announcements to make but they needed a mic for the one, which was for John to be surprised by his wife Francis celebrating his 80th birthday. So I rolled the portable speaker out there at 3:30 and rolled it back and put it away at 5.

So a busy day of AV tech, and there’s another event tomorrow and one on Sunday.