Sunday 12/25/2022

Sunday morning, and the usual task of watering the plants didn’t need to be done. Owing I guess to chilly weather, all the plants showed up as “wet” on my moisture probe.

Talked to Dennis and later to Laurel.

Spent an hour finishing a to-do list task, moving all the photos that I had pushed into a to-be-sorted folder, into the folders where they belonged. Or deleting them, because now on second thought, they weren’t worth keeping. Big check-off from the list!

Spent half an hour revisiting an old computer game, Vendetta Online. (https://www.vendetta-online.com/h/help.html) I first played it, according to my account settings, in 2007! A few years ago they moved to a “freemium” model, where you can play for free at basic levels, which are quite extensive, but can pay a small sum for extra privileges or whatever. And they have extended it to every platform under the sun including VR glasses and mobile devices. I have only played it on a large desktop screen. I can’t imagine what it would be like to play on a phone.

Anyway it is clear my muscles have forgotten all of my space piloting skills. Maybe I’ll try to relearn them.

CH provided a festive lunch, with wine & fancy appetizers to start, an entree choice of flank steak or baked cod, and an array of fancy dessert bites.

After a nap I decided to do something productive. The 11th floor media center has been changed quite a bit and the instruction sheet that Bert put up there a couple years ago is far out of date. So I went up and took a lot of pictures and prepared a new, 6-page instruction sheet for how to show broadcast TV, Roku TV, DVD, or computer output on the big screen. I almost sent the compiled PDF to my AV crew and then thought, nah, this wouldn’t look right on Christmas. I’ll send it out tomorrow. See? I’ve got social skillz.

Saturday 12/24/2022

Yesterday, as I failed to note, after the game I drove over to Home depot and bought a large and some small plastic organizer boxes. This morning I went down and tidied and organized the A/V cabinet. This is a large wooden cabinet kept in the stage right wing of the auditorium. It contains A/V related stuff shoved in there by at least a decade, probably more, of A/V volunteers.

I sorted out a basket of cables into HDMI-related cables, and audio-related cables. I moved some things around and generally got it sorted.

At 11 I met with Patty in the lobby and we took a Lyft down to the Baylands. There was a “king tide” i.e. a maximal high tide at noon. We walked the full route, from the south end at San Antonio, to the north end at Bixbee park. Along part of the route you could see that the water level of the open bay was at least 4 feet higher than the water level of the inner slough, which is gated by a weir that was closed, I don’t know why. But it wasn’t really very dramatic.

Had dinner with Edie, talking mostly about various travels. Her late husband was an avid fisherman and they traveled to fish famous streams. Marian and I traveled to see eclipses.

Friday 12/23/2022

After a morning walk, I sat down to try out the package of genealogical info that Jean wants to give to all her relatives. And it doesn’t work. The reason is, what she wants to pass on is a “family file” managed by the fairly well-known genealogy app, Reunion. People who get this package won’t have Reunion, so she’s included a copy of the app on the thumb-drive. Unfortunately when you launch it, Reunion looks around for a license, which costs $99. When you don’t have one, it runs in “demo mode”, and in demo mode it won’t open a family file with more than 50 people in it. Jean’s laboriously constructed family file probably contains a couple of hundred names, and Reunion in demo mode just won’t open it.

I made a couple of suggestions to her on what she can do, and she has my sympathy.

At 11 it was time to leave for a SWBB game. This was the first game of the PAC-12 season, and it was against Cal. In the carpool we were all complaining about the weird scheduling. Why would they start the season, and in particular against Cal, at a time when there are no students on campus? The audience was quite small. The team played well and won by 25.

At 5pm I helped neighbor Mary set up her mac to show slides on the big rolling TV to dinner guests. Then I sat down for dinner with Patty.

Thursday 12/22/2022

Did the gym. Tidied the apartment. At 10:30 I drove to the museum where I was one of three docents for a custom tour of 35 STEM students from Australia/New Zealand. I don’t think I connected too well, although I tried to. Of my group of 11, 5 stuck with me pretty close and the rest wandered off.

From there I went down to visit Jean to help advise on a problem she has. She has collected a mass of genealogical info on her extended family, which she wants to hand off to some of the younger generation. Her problem is the data is held in an app called Reunion. In order to read it, you need Reunion. So can she put a copy of the app along with the data on a thumb drive? Yes, but then can anybody who gets it, read it? I took the thumb drive home and will look at it tomorrow.

Ate dinner in the dining room, first time in a while.

Wednesday 12/21/2022

Winter solstice, shortest day, days will be getting longer. Went for a walk first thing, nominal.

Before the walk, while reading the paper, I somehow pushed my new glasses sideways and the right nose pad popped off of its little holder. Leaving a sharp metal bracket pressing into my tender flesh. I tried reinstalling it but it popped right out again. So I protected my nose with a small bandaid and went for my walk. But right after, I drove down to Costco and in about ten minutes was out with a new nose pad installed. Stopped for some groceries and back home.

Next up should have been the monthly zoom meeting of FOPAL section managers, but here came an email saying it was not going to happen, happy holidays see you next year.

So instead I did some more tidying up of the AV equipment. In the course of cleaning up on the 11th floor I had found two home-made DVDs, “Variety 2012” and “Revue 2013”. These proved to be videos of two variety performances by CH people, in those years. The one from 2012 is pretty crude, poor sound quality and the camera was just locked-off, no pan or zoom. But the one from 2013 is near-pro quality with good sound, good camera work, and a very polished presentation of the skits and musical numbers.

Anyway I’ve ripped the videos back to computer files and tomorrow will share them with some people who might be interested. I’m not sure what should become of them.

At 3:30 I met with the committee that is planning the 50’s dance party for February. I was mostly an observer. They were working to settle on 30 songs. There are so many more good songs from the 50s than just 30. They had a tough time. My only interest was, what AV would they require, and how much prep do I have to do, given they want sing along lyrics etc.

I want to insert for the reccord, excerpts from Rhonda’s remarks from Monday’s open meeting.

Let’s review how we got here. On Friday, December 9^th, staff was notified of residents who had tested positive for Covid and had been in close contact with about 50 other residents during the time that they could have been contagious.

Yadira, Caroline, and I divided the list of 50 people and called each one, asking them to report to our pop-up testing site. Which was my office. Angela, Victoria, Ethan, and Alejandra got the testing set up for 50 people with less than an hour’s notice. By the end of Friday, we had 5 Independent Living residents who had tested positive for Covid.

On Sunday, December 11^th, we began to hear from more residents who were experiencing symptoms. In response, we closed the auditorium and asked residents who live in the Tower to visit residents in the Lee Center by phone or online, rather than in-person. We also strongly encouraged those 50 residents who had been in close contact with Covid positive residents to pick up their meals from the dining room and dine in their apartments. In that moment, staff needed to adjust their plans for serving meals, collecting trays, disposing of garbage, and more.

Monday, December 12^th marked the 3^rd day … By the end of Monday, 19 Independent Living residents had tested positive for Covid.

So, within 3 days, we basically added the equivalent of a new wing of “patients”. We needed to create systems supporting clinical monitoring, serving meals, disposing of garbage, etc. in addition to the staff’s regular duties.

One week following the initial case, we had 25 Independent Living residents with Covid.

…We believe we have seen the peak of our numbers in the Tower. And, we hope to see the number of positive cases decrease over the next week or so. But, we still face further challenges. Our nursing staff in the Tower is stretched very thin supporting all the cases in the Tower until they are cleared. And, some of these residents are still pretty sick…. This comes at a time when a number of other staff are traveling for the holidays. So, we cannot call many staff back to cover for our Covid positive staff because they are not even in the local area.

By and large staff did a really good job of coping with this sudden outbreak. And the residents responded very sensibly as well. No carping, just a shrug and “well, back to pandemic rules.”

Tuesday 12/20/2022

Was awakened at 2:29 am by my phone saying loudly “Earthquake! Drop, cover and hold!” It was the shake alert app telling me about a 6.4 quake “in Humboldt county”. I looked at that and said, no way will we feel that here. But I stayed up a while to see how fast media would respond. They basically didn’t. The local CBS outlet had a “crawler” giving the bare facts, half an hour later. So, back to bed.

Went down and did the gym machine round at 8. Then at 9 I met with Mary Ann who no longer wants to show pictures from her phone on the 11th floor (see 4.009) because the covid outbreak canceled the big family visit she was planning. Now she wants to show pictures from her phone on the tv in her apartment. We went over how to do that.

Then it was time for the writers meeting. I again hadn’t written anything and I wasn’t much impressed with the other writers’ output either.

After lunch I went up to 11 and took another look at the TV setup. This time I made the assumption that whoever had put in the new Comcast box had done it right, so I tried turning on the system with the Comcast remote, instead of the TV remote as we had been doing. And sure enough the had sync’d the Comcast remote to both the receiver and the TV so it turns everything on. Then I cleaned out ten years’ accumulation of useless tech junk from the media cabinet. Now I have a bag of tech junk to dispose of.

At three I met with Kass and we once again went over the problems of the “lecternette” she is using for a mic amplifier for the eight days of Hanukkah that she is running in the lobby. They’ve not been canceled because it’s a small group and they mask up. The problem is the lecternette makes a “pop” noise at intervals. I think it might be some kind of RFI from something in or around the lobby, being picked up by the receiver for the wireless mic. But I can’t prove it. I swapped a couple of cables out and jiggled things and it might have gotten better.

At 6 I met our carpool to go to a SWBB game against Creighton. Creighton is actually nationally ranked, but Stanford handled them fairly easily despite giving up 16 turnovers. Lepolo, freshman point guard who till now had not been an offensive threat, busted out with four 3-pointers, three in a row to start the game.

Monday 12/19/2022

Went for a walk — the full benchmark walk — for the first time in more than a week. It was fine.

At 10:30 joined the Event Coordinators meeting planning the January calendar. A number of things were on the draft calendar for which I have never seen EPF (event planning forms). I protested and explained why they were important.

Then off to FOPAL where there were just a couple of boxes of computer books. I spent an hour doing sorting just for fun.

At 4pm it was time for Rhonda’s open meeting, on zoom again just like back in 2021, because we are not having face to face meetings right now. She described what the staff had to go through when in a single weekend, they identified 25 positive Covid cases in the independent living tower. Fortunately no cases in the Lee center; but with 4 staff members also testing positive, and others away on scheduled holiday breaks, things are stretched very thin. Housekeeping people are being asked once again to be “Covid Heroes” and fill in as nurse’s aides, like in 2020-21.

There was also a lengthy and detailed presentation about online scams, in all their various forms. The staff has been assisting people being scammed rather often, it seems.

My neighbor Linda across the hall, a very smart and with-it person, was taken in by a pop-up message on her screen, something is wrong with your computer, it has been hacked, call this number to talk to Apple support. She fell for it, and later had to go around replacing credit cards and talking to her bank, etc.

So last night’s play was a musical The Secret Garden, based on the classic children’s book. I could just about remember the plot, having read it maybe 68 years ago when I was 12? Since I buy two seats on a season pass to the Bus Barn, excuse me the Los Altos Stage Company, I put out an email to the 6th floor asking if anyone wanted to come along. Dr. Margaret did, so I had company.

The Bus Barn is a tiny house, with seats for maybe 90 people? And a stage area that is maybe 35 feet wide and deep, starting about 3 feet from the front row of audience. This show was a huge effort for them. First off, they have no orchestra pit, so the 10 musicians were lined up along the back wall of the stage. Then they had a total cast of 18 people, and for some numbers, they were all on stage at once, which made the stage about as crowded as a cocktail party. Everyone performed their parts well. The young actress who plays the central character, the orphan girl Mary Lennox, was excellent, both for singing and for acting.

There was a technical shortcoming in that only girl Mary had a mic. The other players just had to project as best they could, which would be no problem, in such a small room, in a spoken play. But in this show, a lot of the dialog was in song lyrics, and the singers had to compete with the live instruments behind them. And a lot of intelligibility was lost. I couldn’t parse a quarter of the lyrics. Frankly it would have been better with no orchestra, just a piano for accompaniment. In fact the whole show would have been better, Dr. Margaret and I agreed on the way back, if it had been heavily edited, about half the roles tossed out, and the music simplified.

Sunday 12/18/2022

Up and about early. Watered the plants, fed the hummingbirds, did the puzzle. At 10 I went down to meet with Kass. She is running the Hanukkah celebrations in the lobby for the next 8 nights, and will use the little rolling lectern for audio. We got it out and tested it, and I left it in her care for the next week.

Then it was time to go to the SWBB game. This was a big one, against Tennessee. Long-time fans remember the literal decades of rivalry between Stanford and Tara, versus Tennessee and Pat Summitt. Pat died several years ago, and the Tennessee program is not the powerhouse it once was, in fact this past week they were dropped out of the top 25 rankings for the first time in forever. But it’s still a big deal when they come here. The usual car-pool of 4 was down to just me and Patty, plus Patty’s niece twice removed, or something, a nice young woman named Hailly.

Stanford started slow and seemed baffled by Tennessee’s defense. The score was tied at the half. In the third quarter the Lady Vols took a lead of up to 9 points. In the fourth quarter, Stanford remembered what they do, and took back the lead and won by 10.

Saturday 12/17/2022

Spent a couple of hours in the initial planning process for the Barcelona trip. Back and forth between the TripAdvisor site, lonely planet, and google maps, finding out where things are. I’m beginning to understand the general shape of Barcelona. I booked two excursions. I found the right URLs to buy a transit pass and a pass for the Hop-on-hop-off “bus touristica”. Marian and I always found the HoHo as we called it, a great way to understand a new city.

After lunch I put on my red shirt and went down to the museum to lead a tour. Started with about 25 people but they thinned out to maybe 15 at the end.

In the evening I am going to a play at the Bus Barn. I’ll critique it tomorrow.

Friday 12/16/2022

Went for a walk. Unfortunately the gout had come back in the night so I had to keep it shorter, still 2.7 miles for the day. Foot feels normal again now.

Stew the unstoppable organizer is working on a big event, a 50s dance party, for February, and has dragged me into it for AV support, specifically sound and for some songs, sing-along lyric sheets. I was thinking about this and it seemed like the right tool for the job was iMovie because with it, I can show lyrics in time with the audio of a song, or show actual videos, etc.

So I went to work seeing what I could put together by way of a demo, and in a couple of hours I had put together a rough demo which I shared at this link. (Note to the future, that link won’t work forever, I’ll delete that file soon.)

Between 3 and 5 I went up to 11 and cleaned up most of the wiring behind the media cabinet. Besides a receiver and a giant TV, there’s a blu-ray player, a Roku, a Chromecast, and a Comcast box and a wireless mic receiver. And wiring for left, right, center and surround and subwoofer speakers. Tidied it up a lot and properly labeled everything with removable, readable plastic labels. Replacing some completely unreadable masking-tape labels done who knows how long ago by who knows who.

Didn’t feel hungry so canceled my tentative plan to go out to a restaurant. At all my meals in my room, hand-made sandwiches. Not scared of Covid. Well I better not be because tomorrow I’m going be a docent and then go to a play.