Wednesday 02/22/2023

Did the laundry in the morning. While the wash was running, I completed converting Gigi’s pictures making them suitable for presentation on the projector in the auditorium. Later in the day I showed her what I’d done.

I was invited by Gloria to have lunch with her and a new resident, Allen. Originally Allen had planned to take unit 627, just across the hall from me, but recently he switched to a unit on the 10th floor. Anyway he has been in Palo Alto forever, over 50 years, kids when to Paly High etc.

That was about it for the day.

Tuesday 02/21/2023

Also fairly productive day, though. Went down to the gym, and there is a new machine in the lineup, one which you use to exercise your lower back and abs, so I worked out how to use that. The workout from going twice down the line of machines, although trivial by any younger person’s standards, leaves me tired enough I need to sit and rest for a bit.

In the two hours before the writers group at 11 I cobbled together something to read. The topic was “Spring”. How boring, I thought. It turns out at least three of the others in the group of 16 had the same thought and the same solution as I, writing about some of the many other meanings of the word “Spring”. How many can you think of? There’s a lot.

That made me think of the famous poem, it gets passed around the internet every couple of years in one form or another, usually titled “English is Tough Stuff”. It demonstrates all the crazy inconsistency of English spelling in clever verses. Here’s the full version. So could I write a verse that used “spring” in different ways, using the same rhythm as that poem? I did. It doesn’t rhyme but it has the right meter.

Springing sideways, rabbit dodges
fox’s springy arching pounces,
runs round bubbling water source,
sidesteps open unsprung trap to
reach her burrow’s welcome refuge;
springing into sudden view
of offspring on their unsprung pallet.
Pups recoil in sudden terror
Then uncoil ‘cause Momma’s home.

After that meeting, I drove down to FOPAL and did a couple of hours of sorting. This because I had noticed there was a backlog, and because I really enjoy the sorting task. It’s a very satisfying thing to do.

Next I worked on Gigi’s pictures. You what? My neighbor Gigi is going to give a talk in a couple of weeks, and she wants to show many pictures — probably too many, but I am not telling her that — which she had drag-dropped into a long text document that is her script. That won’t do; to show the pictures as slides on the big screen during her talk, the pictures need to be by themselves, one per page, filling the page. So I spent maybe 90 minutes culling the pictures out to a separate doc, formatted for good presentation.

Next I went down to the front desk and reserved an hour of the auditorium for next Monday so Gigi can rehearse. Then into the auditorium and changed some of the equipment around. Adjusted the wireless mic receivers so we can use the new, over-the-ear lightweight mics.

Wrote an email to my AV team documenting what I had done. What else? Oh, went over the list of upcoming events, and for all the zoom events in the auditorium, scheduled the zoom meetings so that the auditorium Zoom Room hardware will know they are coming.

There was an hour power outage, but happily the wi-fi kept working so that was just a nice break.

Monday 02/20/2023

Went for a standard walk in the morning. It was ok.

At 10:30 it was time for the monthly Event Coordinator’s meeting. This is when everyone who sponsors events, about 20 people in all, meet to go over the calendar for the next month. As usual there is a shit ton of stuff happening, much of it needing A/V support.

We also discussed hybrid zoom events (auditorium events that are also carried on zoom for people who don’t want to, or can’t, come to the auditorium). I strongly stated the reasons to avoid doing them when possible: 1, the extra burden on the A/V volunteers, 2, being more complicated there are more ways for things to go wrong, 3, the pandemic is over.

The people who put on lectures and such sympathized but pointed out, sometimes there are people, e.g. relatives and friends, outside CH who would like to attend; there are some people who actually can’t come down, right now there are four sequestered for Covid or Covid exposure; there are a few people who just won’t come to any group because they are afraid of infection.

So things were left pretty much as they were. Hopefully people will be a little more restrained about booking hybrid events.

That done, I headed out to FOPAL to process the week’s accumulation of computer books. Five boxes. Many really old books from the library of a deceased(?) Stanford professor.

Back home I had a couple of hours. I updated the A/V spreadsheet that is our committee’s self-scheduling tool, with all the events on the new March calendar. Then I put out an invite to the team to meet on Friday.

At 4pm I left to meet Harriet at Jimmy V’s Cafe in the Arrillaga family center, across from Maples pavilion. As a major sports donor, she gets a free pre-game meal and can bring a guest, and she invited me. So I had a free meal while talking to five other SWBB fans.

Then it was game time, against UCLA. Stanford had things under control in the first half, leading by 13 at the break, but UCLA came back and the fourth quarter was all back-and-forth swapping of one- or two-point leads. We finally iced it with two free throws, putting us up by 4 with 12 seconds left.

Then it was time for Senior Day honors, saying goodby to Haley Jones, Hannah Jump, Fran Beliebe and Ashten Prechtel. Back in fall 2017, or very early 2018, Marian and I went with some other fans down to Pinewood high school to see Hannah play, and about then also to Archbishop Mitty HS to see Haley play. It can’t have been later, Marian would have been too weak by fall 2018. So we must have seen them as HS juniors, but juniors can commit to a college, so we would have been checking out these future committed players in their junior season.

Anyway, it’s this kind of continuity that makes being a fan seem like having an extension to one’s family. On the other hand, I confess to being a bit weary of it. I am facing a decision very soon: will I go to Seattle to see them play in the 3rd and 4th rounds of the NCAAs? At dinner we were discussing the post-season schedule. Harriet already has booked her flights and hotel. I should also, if I want to go. But do I?

Sunday 02/19/2023

This morning I decided to go for a photo walk around the California Ave. street market. I haven’t done a photo walk in a long time, and it’s been even longer since I took the Nikon out for a shoot. And damn that D5500 is a good camera! It’s old now, we got it in like 2015. But it still runs rings around an iPhone. Much bigger image, more pixels, better shadow detail, and the lens is better by far.

So I walked around the market shooting “candids” as we used to say, for an hour, then had a cup and a cake at the hidden coffee shop in the alley, and came home. There I spent another couple of hours going through the pics, selecting the best. I never used to mess with the raw image files, just used the JPGs as the came from the camera. But this time, since I have a photo editor that handles raw files, I opened the “digital negatives” as Nikon calls them and tweaked them for exposure and shadow detail. Then I edited the resulting JPGs, cropping and fixing little things.

Here is a gallery with the results. Click the little “play” ▶️ icon for a full-screen slide show.

Then it was time to put on my red shirt and go the museum and lead a tour. I started with about 20 and still had a dozen at the end, all young, under 30 I think, but I managed to keep their attention. One of my better tour performances, actually. It felt good and a couple of the young squirts thanked me and said it was “fantastic”. I’ll take that.

Got home in plenty of time for the 4:30 event of my neighbor Connie Crawford reading some of her poetry. Connie is one of my very favorite people here, just a graceful, classy woman with seriously good writing ability. So about 3:45 I got a call from the auditorium where David G, who was to run the event, was having a problem.

For some reason the Zoom Room machine was not seeing the image from the ceiling camera. Just a black screen. Which if we didn’t fix it, would mean that the Zoom attendees would hear, but not see, Connie read. We both fumbled around and I ended up “fixing” the problem. Big technical achievement: I unplugged the cable from the camera and plugged it in again. Picture! I’m a fucking genius.

Anyway her reading came off flawlessly.

Saturday 02/18/2023

Did pretty much nothing all morning, vegging out in my chair.

In the afternoon I drove for our 5-person carpool to the Pear Theater for another play. A strange play, about the search for Black identity.

Had dinner with the play carpool group and talked about the play and some other things.

Multiple people have commented to me how much they enjoyed the sock hop, and thanking me for my part in making the music run smoothly.

Friday 02/17/2023

Went for a walk, but felt low in spirit and energy and cut it short (and yet, 3.8 miles for the day, how did I do that?).

The big event today was the sock hop, which a large committee has been planning for weeks. My part in it was to prepare a video with all the selected songs, some with live video (Elvis on the Ed Sullivan show for example), some just music with lyrics so people could sing along. I had that done a couple weeks ago.

And on the day, I acted as “vee-jay” running the audio board and starting and stopping the video as three different people acted as announcers to introduce each number. The rest of the committee worked amazing wonders in decorating, in preparing an array of snacks, and in performing some of the numbers. I spent much of the afternoon and all the evening in and out of the auditorium.

To do all this I had to miss a SWBB game, against USC to whom they had lost a few weeks ago. So right after the event was over and I had put all the equipment away, I watched the game on the DVR. Stanford squeaked out a win by 5.

Here are pictures from the sock hop. It was a very successful social event. My neighbor Jerry performs “Unchained Melody” — and not too badly, either.

A fair number of people actually got up and danced.

Thursday 02/16/2023

Lots of things today. Started in the gym. Then I put in an hour on taxes, which was very successful. What I did was locate and download all the 1099 and similar forms that I needed.

I’ve been meaning to get a POLST together for some time. This is basically a more terse statement than my “living will” document, covering specifically what treatment I want, or don’t. I had the form for months, but the hangup was, it has to be signed by my physician, supposedly after a frank conversation on end of life choices. I didn’t expect to see her until August, the usual time for my annual visit. So it’s been lying on my desk.

Finally I got off my ass and did something, specifically, I messaged her asking if I could drop the form off for her signature, and also with a copy of my “living will” which basically says all the same things (“no CPR, comfort care only”) in lieu of the conversation. She messaged back on Tuesday, that’s fine. So Tuesday I dropped those documents off. Yesterday I got a call that the papers were ready.

At 11am I headed out. First to down to Los Altos to the Dr.’s office to pick up the POLST. Then to the Mitchell Park library complex for a FOPAL luncheon. But on the way, stopped at the grocery for some supplies. And then after parking at the library, I spent 5 minutes attaching my new 2023 license plate sticker on the Prius rear plate.

The luncheon was just a pizza party that Janette, the FOPAL director, had put together to make volunteers feel happy. We ate pizza and participated in a Palo Alto history trivia quiz. Sample question, “Leland Stanford owned property in another Bay Area town where he was originally going to site his university — what town was it?” Answer, Fremont. Apparently his wife Jane liked “the farm” on this side of the Bay better.

Back to CH for a 2pm meeting with other AV team members and Gerald of IT, to learn about some of the features of the replacement sound board. It has an effects channel, any mic can be directed through one of a menu of ambience mods, like “large hall”. Basically a choice of reverb effects, which are pretty useless. But also it has a bluetooth input, and he demo’d pairing the board with his phone, and playing music from Spotify into the system. There might be a use for that some time.

Now to make up a package consisting of the POLST, my Advance Directive, and a cover letter listing people to inform “In the event of my demise or incapacity”. Copies of this package to be filed with CH and … where else? Not sure. Handy by my desk to take along if I am every hospitalized.

Wednesday 02/15/2022

Went for the standard walk in the morning, in the new walking shoes, and it all felt fine.

At 10 I had a tech squad appointment with a resident, Joan, to deal with a couple of tech issues. The issues turned out to be minor. One was, she could get Zoom on her iPad but not on her MacBook. Turned out, nobody had ever installed the Zoom app on the MacBook. So I did that.

At 1pm was the monthly Zoom meeting of the FOPAL volunteers. The sale weekend just past netted over $14,000, a good haul.

At 3pm I met with the rest of the Sock Hop event committee to go over preparations for the event which is this Friday thank goodness. There were four people scheduled to perform as singers. One of them had a minor stroke last week and is recovering in the skilled nursing wing.

Today the husband of another let me know that he had tested positive for Covid. I saw him Monday when he was suffering from what he thought was a cold, and he had asked to not do an event that he was scheduled to run. Today he tested positive, and will be in isolation for a week. Well, I asked, what about Karen? He wasn’t sure. So we don’t know if we are down two singers or just one.

At 6 I went down to run the event that David M. couldn’t owing to illness. I had Kass as an apprentice. She really wants to learn to do this stuff, which is great. The event came off with only one minor hitch, when I forgot that I had muted a microphone. When we tried to use that mic for someone to ask a question from the audience, they couldn’t be heard. Turn it on. It IS ON. Oh crap, sorry… I un-mute it. Well if that’s the worst issue we have…

Tuesday 02/14/2023

Did the gym round. There’s a new machine in the line-up, but not operational yet.

Felt very creaky and slow. Took a couple ibuprofen.

Writers meeting. Read a thing. Piece of the novel I keep thinking I will try to write on, and don’t.

Linda across the hall asked me to rip the video off a DVD. She thought it was a big deal, camera store wanted money, would take a week. I did it this afternoon while doing other things. Cementing my reputation as a tech wizard.

Monday 02/13/2023

No walk today because the Resident Association meeting starts at 9, and I wanted to be in the auditorium at 8, to see how David G was getting on with setting up. Not well, he had a lot of feedback issues. I stood back as he got the IT staff guys involved and they managed to sort it out, the meeting starting only 5 minutes late. But damn, “there’s always something.”

No astounding news at the meeting except Rhonda officially said, there would be no coffee bar installed in the lobby after all. This is an amenity I’ve been promoting for a long time. But however, the staff estimates that for supplies and dining staff maintenance, it’s $36,000 a year. Or $100/day as somebody pointed out at the meeting. And with inflation yadda yadda… Just the same I am disappointed.

Then down to FOPAL where I aged-out two boxes of books that had seen four sale weekends, and processed a couple of boxes of new donations.

Back home for what I meant to be a relaxing afternoon, but in fact although I did get a half-hour nap, there was a lot of emailing to do to various people and little shit to take care of.