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.

Thursday 12/15/2022

Off to the Shustek center to catalog artifacts. First time in months. Gretta, the archivist, is back from giving birth, well she has been back since August, but this is the first time I’d seen her since spring. There were three of us, me, Dave Bennett, and Steve Madsen, three IBM retirees.

Gretta assigned Bennett and Madsen to work together cataloging. At first I was going to do photography, but there were new problems with saving pictures that she needed the house IT staff to fix. So I was put to cataloging alone. I cataloged a complete New Internet Computer donated by someone who worked at that short-lived company. It was in effect, the Chromebook of its day: a cheap PC that couldn’t run anything but a web browser (Netscape Navigator!). Per the Wiki article I linked, it didn’t sell, and Larry Ellison took a financial bath on it.

We ate lunch at a tacqueria and I had a big lunch, so dinner was just an open-face PBJ in my room. Tomorrow I had signed up for a group walk in the Baylands, but it has been canceled due to Covid. So my tomorrow is open. I have things to do.

Wednesday 12/14/2022

Did the laundry. Tried to work with my new IBM health coverage, but could not. The problem is, for another 2 weeks I am covered by an AARP policy also administered by United Health Care. Every time I try to sign in, it sends me to that account. I talked to a support person who said, call back after 12/16, when support for the IBM policy should be better.’

I don’t really care, except that I would like to set up payment by EFT. I have received the first bill for the new coverage, pay by check, or sign in to the website to set up EFT. United already taps my SFCU account via EFT for the old policy. One would think they could continue to do that for the new one, but no, it’s a different system.

Did the laundry. Went out to a grocery store for paper towels and bleach.

Gouty foot much better, thank you. Almost normal by evening.

Looked at slide show options. I’m still thinking about making a slide show of the London Bridges pics, for the CH “Sundays @ Home” series. But it would be a lot of work trying to do a proper Ken Burns style show. I might do something simpler, no pan/zoom, just click click click with narration.

In the evening email, we have 4 new positives for a total of 22 active cases in the Tower. That would just about 10% of the population! Me, I’m just fine. Ate supper in the dining room. Maybe 20 people there, and service was much quicker than normal. (Silver linings.)

Tuesday 12/13/2022

In the morning I found that Charity Navigator was behaving itself so I did my annual donations, about $5,000 spread across a list of 25 or so outfits. One more big X-off from the to-do list. Saved the report of donations as a PDF in a brand new folder under Taxes, “tax info 2022”. Now I can start thinking about taxes. Bleagh.

I remembered one more London bridge, the Millenium Footbridge, which of course didn’t exist in 1977, but did when we were back there in 2003. I found we did have a good picture of it and I printed that up and added it to the gallery in the hall.

That left an hour before the writers meeting so I hastily threw together a few paragraphs. The theme was “childhood pleasures” and I wrote about cap guns. I was kind of surprised how many chuckles it got and how people liked it.

After lunch I went up to the 11th floor and really checked out all the equipment. More works than I thought, but still some problems. I wrote an email to the tech group about what I found. I also ordered some stuff or labeling and organizing cables. When it comes I am going to clean up the back side of the media cabinet which is a mess now.

I’ve been having gout running around my toes for the past few days. First it was the 2nd toe on the right, now it’s the big toe on the left. I tried going for a walk this afternoon and had to curtail it to a 4-block loop. But the toe is already improving this evening. This shit comes and goes.

Channing House has pretty well shut down. There are 18 “active” cases in the Tower, none in the Lee Center. Besides the 18, there are some others, I don’t known how many but it must be more than 10, who are in isolation because of exposure. They have to stay isolated until they’ve tested negative some number of times. It looks as if the center of the spread was the chorus, who rehearsed together a couple times last week. Several people with covid are members of the chorus. Or as somebody posted to the bulletin board after another person announced they had it, “Oh no, now it’s the altos.”

The number of people actually eating in the dining room is (I am told) greatly reduced, with lots ordering take-out. Like me. I had a sandwich for lunch, and had my dinner as take-out. I think tomorrow, though, I am going to go out.

Monday 12/12/2022

First event of the day was the resident association meeting, held on zoom only since the auditorium was closed yesterday. Nothing special, and I had no input, except during question time. When Rhonda was asked about the progress of a new contract with Comcast, which they are supposed to be negotiating, she indicated that Comcast had been unresponsive (or similar word) but recently had assigned a new representative so maybe things would get better. I put up my electronic hand and said, when Sodexo was unresponsive, we kicked them out and created our own dining services. There are other TV providers than Comcast… Rhonda said they had talked about that but only in a general way. I mean to pursue this idea at least to find out what the actual options are.

At this time we had, by Rhonda’s “unofficial” count, 5 positive covid cases in the building, 4 in the tower.

Then off to Costco because — and I forgot to say this yesterday — during the play yesterday I also got a text saying that my new glasses are ready. I’m wearing them now, and glad to have them.

On to FOPAL where I triaged all the books that had seen four sales off my shelves and priced on box more.

Back home where I actually began to plan a Barcelona trip. I assembled some websites (tripadvisor, lonely planet, etc) as tabs in a browser. After researching “best time to visit Barcelona” I chose actual dates: April 10-21. I figure to depart the evening of 4/10/23 arriving the morning of 4/11, and return on Saturday 4/21. With a little more reading I decided that the right district to stay in was the Gracia neighborhood. I picked a 4-star hotel in that district and booked my stay through Booking.com.

This all sounds very settled but in fact, I don’t pay anything up until 4/9/23, until then I can cancel the hotel with no penalty. When things will get real is when I actually book the flights. Not yet. More research to do.

And then came this email, sent at 6:55 pm:

We have 15 new cases of Covid-19 since Friday. 5 tested positive yesterday and 10 tested positive today. This brings us to 18 cases total in the Tower….

This large number of new cases in such a short time period is almost more than our nursing staff can handle. The nurses are  required to monitor every resident who is Covid positive multiple times each day, in addition to their normal duties.

Tomorrow, we will begin training administrative staff to cover duties, as appropriate, for the IL Nurses. So, don’t be surprised if you find administrative staff in the 3^rd floor nursing station as they work in support of the IL nursing team.

Santa Clara County and the California Department of Social Services (CDSS) will receive our updated report this evening. We expect that additional restrictions will be required. We will update you of the direction from those agencies when we receive it.

Ooops. Plague times again.

Note that I wore my N95 mask at Costco, and FOPAL today.

Sunday 12/11/2022

In the morning I spent a fair amount of time on emails related to, and planning for, the CH Chorus Holiday Performances this week. It turns out that Bert tests positive, as does Jerry, so any A/V for the tech rehearsal on Tuesday and the two live performances on Wednesday, fall on me. Exchanged several emails and phone calls.

The basic tech is simple, all they need is a couple of mics. But I would also like to record the performance, as Jerry did a couple of years ago. That meant figuring out how to get some video into a computer, especially video superior to the ceiling camera in the auditorium.

I thought to use my Nikon which takes excellent video, and then I found that it has a size limit on video files, which amounts to a time limit of about 20 minutes at 1080p resolution. Well I can do that, I’ll just have to two times during the performance, go over to the camera and hit the record button twice, to end one and start another. Plus an iPhone on a tripod for another stream from another angle. But how to get good audio into the laptop? I need another adapter to get audio out of the system, so I ordered that off Amazon, arriving tomorrow.

That settled I was looking at some youtube videos from channels I subscribe to, and one by coincidence had some footage from… Barcelona. Very handsome public spaces. This pretty much decided me, the town I am going to visit next is Barcelona.

At 1pm I joined the carpool of 6 people in all, going to the Pear Theater. The play was Frankie and Johnnie in the Claire de Lune, and I didn’t much like it. Highest respect for the two actors, their memory capacity to start with. It’s a two-hour conversation between two people, and just remembering all that dialog and delivering it with expression and no mistakes is a feat. But the people spend two hours talking and end up right where they started, as far as I could tell.

During the intermission I checked my email (as one does) and there was one from CEO Rhonda, saying that owing to the sudden rise in Covid cases (I know of 8 people in quarantine as of this evening) it is time not just to start masking in the public spaces (see Friday’s post) but also: the Auditorium is closed for the duration.

Which means, one, the resident association meeting tomorrow is zoom-only, and two — no Chorus Performance! I felt a real emotional lift on realizing that. It had been kind of weighing on my mind I guess.

Saturday 12/10/2022

First thing I walked over to the Apple store to buy a lightning-to-HDMI adapter. A resident wants to put the screen of her iPhone on the big 11th floor TV. I ordered a cheap lightning-to-HDMI adapter from Amazon and it came Thursday. Friday I tried it connecting my iPhone to my TV, and it didn’t work. Cheap Chinese-made knock-off crap. So now I got one from Apple at 2.5x the price. And it did work, in my apartment.

Met Mary Ann on the 11th and — it didn’t work. Some problem with the setup there. I sent her away disappointed and emailed for help from the tech squad.

Also I printed up the final London Bridges series prints: six big prints of various aspects of Tower Bridge, the one whose shape everybody knows. I’ll leave them up for a couple of weeks. Then what? Don’t know.

Started to do my annual charity donations, but the Charity Navigator website was behaving very oddly so I put that off, maybe in a couple days they will get it straightened out.

I spent an hour investigating travel options. I decided that none of the Road Scholar tours do what I want to do, which is go and marinate in one city for ten days or so. They have a couple of tours that are just one city (Paris, Florence) and they are attractive, but just too organized. Or something. I may change my mind on that. On the other hand when I look at the TripAdvisor page for a given city, say Barcelona, there’s plenty of stuff to make up a tour of my own.

At 6, after a sandwich in my room, I left for a concert, Voices of Music, six classical pieces at the Unitarian Church over on Charleston street. You know what? I don’t enjoy classical music that much. I can respect the obvious skill and effort, but respect isn’t enjoyment. I was bored. I think next year I won’t sign up for V of M again.

Friday 12/09/2022

Off at 9am in the small bus, a group of 8 for SFMOMA to view the Diego Rivera exhibition. This was fun. They have brought the immense mural that Rivera painted for the great Pan-Pacific Exposition of 1940 (for which Treasure Island was created), to SFMOMA, along a hundred or more smaller works. Here’s the mural. Fortunately we had been primed with the URL of a site, riveramural.org, which has interactive explanations for many of the hundreds of details in the picture.

So you spend some time looking at that and learning about all the symbols and all the contemporary people he put into it. Then another hour or so on the 4th floor looking at many smaller paintings and drawings.

And then on to the other 5 floors of MOMA. I took a selfie in the colored hallway.

I had a very good lunch in the cafe. The bus didn’t come for us until 2pm which was about an hour too long, but I guess I’m lucky, the same tour a week ago didn’t start back until 3. Anyway.

At 7 was to be a concert by the Gunn HS chorus. The Gunn music teacher has associations with several people here and they perform at CH most years around this time. I came out of the dining room at 6:30 to find a crowd of 30 or so HS kids in formal black and white attire in the lobby, being ushered into the auditorium. I followed, and the AV committee member scheduled for this event wasn’t there yet, so I set up the microphones for them.

Then I sat down to wait and opened my email (as one does) and found a very recent email from Rhonda. Owing to several Covid cases in staff and a couple of residents, everybody please start wearing masks in public spaces and at performances. Ooops, there are people still in the dining room that won’t have seen this, and will be coming to the concert any minute.

So I appointed myself mask monitor. I ran up to my room and got a box of blue masks from the case that the resident association had bought, and ran back down and stationed myself at the auditorium entrance. And gave a mask to every person coming in without one. So virtuous I am.