09/11/2022

Woke up at 6:15 and tapped my bedside lamp. No light. “Oh dear,” I said, “we have another outage.” And we did. Went into the pitch dark bathroom and was able to put my hand on my emergency flashlight in one try. Dressed and went down to the front desk, as planned, since I am part of the resident emergency response team that Bert set up only two weeks back. Bert and Leon were already there. Over the next half hour it didn’t seem as if much needed doing. Staff was dealing with everything very nicely. Dining services had instantly switched over from their usual breakfast to setting up a continental breakfast cafeteria line.

So I went back to my room, and thence to the garage and drove down to FOPAL to tidy my shelves after the first day of the sale weekend. Back to CH by 8:30 and found the power was back on, yay! Showered and dressed again, and took some pictures of the Studebaker (below) after which I cleaned my desk up. I really don’t know when/if I will start another model.

At 1:15 I headed downstairs to join a carpool headed to a play at the Pear theater. The play was Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties. (Link to Amazon, you can read the sample.) Lots of message to women, not so much to me. But excellent acting from all five Betties.

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Stubedaker pics – click to open a gallery view.

Saturday 09/10/2022

Did stuff around the house today. Went to Safeway and bought stuff for my pantry and fridge. Speaking of the fridge, I cleaned it. It was grungy. I like to clean the inside of my fridge every three years, whether it needs it or not. In this case, it did.

Kent, a neighbor, got me to come help fighting the Stanford athletics website. Stanford has gone to all “mobile” tickets, which is a major stumbling block for a lot of my neighbors. It’s easy, just open the email on your phone, tap the link to transfer to your Apple or Google Wallet app… my what, now? Plus he had password problems with a couple of websites. So that was an hour killed.

There has been a massive up-tick in the number of hummingbirds. I have a swarm of a dozen or more around the feeders at certain hours. And I have to refill twice a day, where it was just once a day only a week ago.

In the afternoon I printed the tiny (just over 1/2 inch wide) license plate and glued the last bits onto the Studebaker. Tomorrow I’ll shoot some pictures and then clear off my desk and enjoy an empty desk again for a while. Probably a long while.

On the other hand, I’ve got two shelves of closet space devoted to model making tools and materials. So you never know.

It was in my calendar that I was going to a play at the Bus Barn tonight. So at 6:30 I jumped up and said, gotta go, get the ticket, time to leave. Got the ticket and it said “Saturday 9/17”. Oh. Wrong calendar entry. So the evening is open. Guess I’ll watch some TV.

Friday 09/09/2022

I went for the walk this morning, for the first time in a week or more. My right ankle is completely back to normal. It probably was gout, since I get a very occasional flare-up of that in my big toe. However the ankle wasn’t hot or red or swollen, just painful. And as I said it mostly went away the next day, with maybe a lingering ache for another day. But now just fine again.

I glued the body of the Studebaker to the chassis and attached most of the chrome brightwork, except for the rear bumper. To finish that I need to make up a license plate, and I got sidetracked on that, and having problems with my graphics software. I want to make a Washington State custom license “53STOOD” (stoo-dee, get it?). That’s gonna take a little time tomorrow.

At noon by appointment I had lunch with Sherry. At the writers meeting Tuesday it turned out that we have the same cardiologist and that she needs a new aortic valve (stenosis). So I gave her all my experience with the recent TAVR.

At 3pm we had the Activity Showcase, a display of all the volunteer organizations and committees, and there are a shit-ton of them. It was a fun event even though the A/V team got only one rather feeble expression of interest, from Gloria, who’s a sharp cookie although not hugely computer literate. Still she could do the simpler events with training.

At 7:30, SFJazz streamed tonight’s solo concert by Hiromi. I was so pumped about the one last night, that I put it out on the bulletin board that I would put the stream on the 11th floor TV. Which I did, and it was going just perfectly for about 5 minutes, and then the TV started going black as if it lost the HDMI connection, and coming back after a few seconds. How bloody annoying. I, and Jerry, and David M, two of the best tech minds here, plus me, struggled with it for 10 minutes, during which half the audience of 7 or 8 left. Finally when we gave up and just hooked it up like it was to start with, it started working fine. So four of us enjoyed the rest of the concert.

Thursday 09/08/2022

Today I had docent tour, a private group at 11am. This was a small group of high-achieving kids age 14 or so, plus one teacher, plus three people who just kind of wandered in and stuck around. When I got there I found that they were already getting a 1401 live demo. I had not known this, and had planned on starting them in the 1401 lab anyway with my talk on “mid-century computing”. So I had to adapt on the fly. Also peeved because if I’d known they were going to start at 10, I would have been there to be introduced. Oh well the tour went OK.

Back home I did three things I’d been putting off. One, pay the Xfinity bill. Two, order another case of masks; the RA exec committee has approved the expense and asked me to continue storing and dispensing the masks as the Front Desk needs them.

Three, I looked into making custom 3×3 post-its. This is because when I moved in 3 years ago, I received a pad of nice, white, Channing House post-its. Which are all used up now, and nobody has any idea where they came from or where to get more. So I thought they would be ideal items for the Gift Shop to stock, if they existed.

Of course it turns out there are multiple online vendors who will print post-its with your uploaded graphic. It only remained to make a graphic to upload. I looked at the typography used on the channinghouse.org home page. It was easy to lift the little green and orange leaf icon but the words “Channing House” were a problem, mainly because I couldn’t figure out what font they had used. It was a traditional, serif, font with small-capital letters instead of lowercase.

OK it turns out there are multiple online sites that dispense free and for-money fonts and let you filter their collections by “serif” and “small-cap”. It took maybe half an hour to identify good matches to the website font (two free fonts named “cinczel” and “cormorant” were very close). So in about 90 minutes I had created a graphic, uploaded it, and ordered four pads of post-its. If they look good I will try to sell the idea to Mary Beth, Gift Shop manager (you need to order 100 or more in order to get the price down). Anyway I will have some of my own.

At 4:30 I headed out to attend a concert by Hiromi. Marian and I attended a Hiromi set at least 10, probably 15 years ago, at a little club in Half Moon Bay. Probably 5 years ago we went with Suzanne and Chuck to hear her at SFJazz. And now I went alone. I ate supper at the Ramen Cafe and it was very good, a big bowl of noods and tomatoes and chicken.

Hiromi has only gotten better both as a composer and as a musician. Her long, intricate numbers are starting to make real sense to me, not just a lot of notes tossed out for their own sake but with structure and themes. Her technical skill is amazing. She finished up with a version of “Rhapsody in Blue” where for 15 minutes she turned that familiar piece every which way but loose, and it was well worth the standing-O she got at the end.

Wednesday 09/07/2022

In the night, my right ankle started to hurt. Why? Who knows? But it was severe enough that I got up and took a couple of ibuprofen. It was still hurting, making me limp, when I got up, so I did not go for a walk early, which I had planned to do because of 97º heat forecast.

So I did my laundry instead and you know? By 10am the ankle was fine. Why? Who knows? I can only figure arthur itis, but I’ve never had arthur itis before; or maybe gout which I have had before but only in my big toes, not the ankle. But anyway it’s gone now so obviously nothing to worry about. (sarcasm)

Before the laundry I prepared two slides of powerpoint. This is for the Activity Showcase on Friday. The last Activity Showcase was 2019; it’s basically a volunteer job fair. All the many volunteer orgs at CH have tables and there’s entertainment (the chorus, also the harmonica group) and snacks, and we try to get people to volunteer for shit. I for the A/V team will share a table with Bert for the Tech squad, and behind us will be a big TV with a looping powerpoint slide show Bert had prepared, so these slides were to be added into that. Then the laundry, and fill the hummingbird feeders, and make a bunch of protein shakes, and work on the model car and it’s nearly lunch time.

After lunch, drive down to the Financial Advisors (not the Fiduciary, the older outfit) to sign a letter authorizing changing the name on some of the Schwab accounts to reflect the current name of the family trust. I see these people typically once a year, but everybody was friendly, how ya doin’ etc.

Back at the shop, Harriet emails, needs advice on getting iPad. I happen to know of one cheap, the one that I reset and cleaned up a few months ago (day 3.094 as a matter of fact) which is still kicking around the gift shop because Mary Beth hadn’t figured out how to price it. So after several emails, Harriet is coming to lunch Monday and to buy the iPad.

Detailed the Studebaker engine bay and glued on a couple more bits.

And in other model car news, I did something I had been thinking about for weeks. Some months ago I finished a 63 VW bug model, and it was one of my better jobs. So I am a big fan of Sarah-N-Tuned, one of three different car-restorer youtube channels I subscribe to. Sarah is currently rebuilding a 69 bug and painting it the same color as my model. So I packed up the model with a note and it is ready to send to her shop in Tucson. But I haven’t sent it, and may not. It’s a pretty juvenile thing to do.

This was an uncommitted day, nothing on the calendar. Tomorrow on the other hand, is rather busy.

Tuesday 09/06/2022

Went down to the gym this morning and ran the cycle of the machines. Tried to write some more on the aliens story but didn’t get much done; the story just keeps branching out in all directions, so I was trying to write one little scene but there was so much to figure out about what must have happened earlier to make this possible I just got lost. So I had nothing for the writers meeting, but fortunately lots of other people had written.

Then off to FOPAL to finish setting up my section for the upcoming sale weekend.

Later I took care of a bit of managing. There’s a simple event with no coverage. There’s a committee member who’s been pretty inactive. So I called her up and was pleased to find that she is still interested, and we arranged that we would cover the event together and I would show her how to do something she hasn’t trained on. Successful management!

At supper, Lynn, who lives on the 4th floor, asked me for help showing a movie on their screen. Stew, who is very active on the 4th floor and who led a drive earlier in the year to install a big-screen TV on the wall of their lounge, is away this week. So of course Lynn comes to me as the tech guru. So after supper I spent a few minutes figuring out how Stew had set up their DVD, and wrote up a page of instructions, and then at 7:15 met with Lynn and walked her through the process, so she is now a trained movie projectionist, more or less, for her 4th floor buddies. Teach a person to fish and they’ll use a lot of worms. Or something.

Monday 09/05/2022

Today I was responsible for the A/V of a book talk. The speaker was Dr. Patnode, who has lectured here many times. He doesn’t use any slides, just a whiteboard, so the setup is real simple. And he doesn’t want it recorded, so I don’t have to remember to start the zoom recording. So I managed to run an event without screwing anything up.

Prior to the event I walked briskly over to NY Pizza on Hamilton and ordered five big pizzas for the floor dinner tonight.

I’d been invited for lunch with Marcia and Kent, plus Connie Erica and Joanne, so that was very pleasant.

After lunch I went down to Fopal and ripped through 9 boxes of mostly crap. I need to go back tomorrow and tidy the shelves and do a pre-sale count, for the sale this coming weekend.

At 5:15 I went down and waited for the driver with the pizzas. In all there were 14 of us in the 6th floor dining room for dinner. It was very nice and sociable.

Sunday 09/04/2022

Usual Sunday morning. At 11:30 I started walking to Maples Pavilion to attend a Stanford Women’s Volleyball match against #1 Texas. Longer walk than I had estimated, but not too bad. The temperature was in the low 80s, not at all the scary heat wave that had been predicted.

I bought a general admission ticket, got a hot dog and drink and sat down to watch the match. It was pretty clear from the start that Stanford was overmatched. Texas’s defense was quite noticeably better. The first set ended 25-16. So I left, and got a Lyft home. Later I checked and, yup, they lost in straight sets.

Did some work on the Studebaker, which is getting pretty close to done. I’ll finish it next week. And a couple of hours of pleasant coding.

At 6 I was out the door to attend the second theatrical thing of the weekend, Hershey Felder as Chopin. Mr. Felder is a well-known pianist and he has been doing these, what I think of as tribute band productions, where he impersonates a famous pianist, performs some of their works and talks about “his” life and times.

The program said, 90 minutes no intermission. I said, “oh dear.” And yes, if there had been an intermission I’d have not come back from it. Well, it wasn’t bad, just not great.

Anyway, on to Labor Day.

Saturday 09/03/2022

Three meetings in the space of an hour this morning. I met with Grace in the lobby to help her with some photos on her phone. Then with Bert and David G. to talk about resident assistance for the staff Emergency Response Team. They expect power cuts this weekend (but in fact the promised dangerously hot heat hasn’t happened here, no doubt it’s tough in Sacramento but we have yet to break 85), and during the first couple of hours of any emergency, the front desk tends to get overwhelmed. So at Bert’s insistent lobbying, Rhonda and staff have agreed that selected resident volunteers will come to the lobby and set up an info table. We will monitor channel 3 of the house radio and answer in-person and on-radio questions, shielding the front desk person. Channel 3 is the channel of the in-house walkie-talkies that residents are expected to use. There’s a handset in every floor’s lounge with an instruction sheet.

Then off to the fifth floor for a tech squad call on Mary Ann who had various problems with email and facebook. Somehow she had acquired two Facebook accounts and two iCloud accounts, and wasn’t sure of the passwords for any of them… I won’t say I got her straightened out, but at least I clarified a few things.

Later I made a silly mistake with the Studebaker. I glued the body tub with seats and dashboard onto the chassis, failing to notice that a large section of the bottom of this piece shows through the chassis. I should have painted it flat black but didn’t, so white unpainted plastic glares through the chassis. I will have a ticklish job painting it, reaching around the driveshaft and other parts.

Had dinner with the Allens and Edie and then it was time to walk to Lucy Stern center to see the Palo Alto Players production of School of Rock. Here’s the review I posted to CHBB today:

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It’s a silly silly play but if you don’t go looking for depth, it’s a blast. I remember the movie (2003) and I saw a Broadway production in NYC. This was a really good effort, with a cast of 40 (FORTY!) and multiple fast scene changes on the relatively tiny Lucy Stern stage. The kids were all cute and talented, and the principals worked their butts off to pretty good effect. The music was satisfyingly loud, but not so loud that you needed earplugs. (As an A/V amateur I am in awe of the sound setup, with 40 people wearing wireless mics and multiple electric instruments to balance.)

Friday 09/02/2022

I took a shorter than usual walk, and picked up a prescription on the way back. Then changed to my docent shirt and went to the museum to lead the noon tour. There only four people, a family of mom, dad, 10 year old boy who has a Raspberry Pi, and granny. So a very intimate tour.

At 4pm it was time for the monthly AV team meeting. Nothing of great note there. I went down to dinner at 5:30 and sat at one of the two-person tables… and sat and sat. We’re shorthanded again it seems. After ten minutes without any attention I got up and drove to Town&Country and had a burger at Kirk’s.