Monday 08/22/2022

I woke up at 6 as usual but immediately knew, without even putting my glasses on, that the power was off. There are a couple of things on my desk with pilot lights, quite bright ones when my eyes are dark-adapted, and they were off. Stepping into the bathroom, the little blue night-light was also off.

I put on clothes and went out to explore. Met Paul, another resident, and we exchanged notes. All the houses outside were dark as far as Middlefield, two blocks over, and for a couple of blocks the other way.

I was pleasantly impressed with how many lights were working, presumably from the emergency generator in the basement. All the halls were lit well enough, and the lounge and dining room on each floor. And the hallways through the basement to the garage, as I found out later. The staff coped very well indeed. Kitchen staff apparently had enough power for refrigerators and some heating, because they served a cafeteria-style breakfast, lunch and dinner. The Wi-Fi worked! And they put out status emails every couple of hours all day. We were not to use water, as the pump didn’t have power to get water above the 5th floor. The main elevators were not powered, but the one freight elevator was up. I ended up climbing to 6 twice during the day.

I went away to FOPAL for my usual Monday, spending 2 and a half hours on 8 boxes of books. Then back home. Around 2pm a staff crew came around to all floors above 5th, to manually flush toilets. They had a big plastic garbage cart filled with water, and a bucket, and would come in and flush the toilet with a bucketful of water.

Craig organized the 6th floor for a picnic. We picked up our hot dogs or hamburgers in the dining room and brought them back to our floor dining room. We were sitting around finishing up when at about 6:14, the power came back on. Two people were up at 4am and had no power, so that was a 14-hour outage.

Sunday 08/21/2022

Up betimes (how Samuel Pepys often opened a post in his blog) and had read the paper, refreshed the hummingbird feeders, watered the plants, showered and done the crossword by 9:30. Then I did a bit of real work, reading the draft materials that Mariah the Lawyer had sent me. That went quickly, so I put in half an hour on the Studebaker that I’ve been neglecting all week.

Next, off to the grocery store for bread and peanut butter, and a package of cookies. Because the main activity today was to attend a house concert and it is customary to contribute to the snacks. Sandy went with me. This concert was at the house on Rose Avenue. Back in the day Marian and I attended three or four concerts there over the years. I calculated that the last one would probably have been in 2017.

This one was the jazz duo Brian Holland and Danny Coots. It was excellent, ragtime and a little boogie-woogie, jokes and superb musicianship. Back home by 5:30.

In the middle of the day I started writing a scene from that SF story I was workshopping with Prudence the other day. The writers group cue this week is “an open door”. Talking about it at lunch with Linda something melded between that and the SF story. Hmm.

Saturday 08/20/2022

Took a tech squad call to start the day, at 9am. Visited Nancy to see if I could fix her mac which stopped receiving email when she installed the recent OS upgrade. As I suspected all I had to do was go to Preferences – Internet Accounts and, yup, it needed to log in to Google again to get gmail. Fixed.

Then I went on a shopping trip to look at EVs. I am not very impressed. The BMW i4 is a big sleek sedan but just seemed too heavy and massive. Didn’t like. The Mini Cooper EV is cute and would actually do for me, except that its range is a puny 100 miles. The VW ID.4 is a big SUV. Make a fine family car, but I have no family. I wanted to see the Hyundai Ioniq-5 but they had none. “Extremely limited availability” the web site says and the dealer agrees.

The Chevy Bolt is for the time being the survivor, although I somehow missed the Kia dealer. I need to see a Kia Niro EV in the, um, flesh. Steel. It’s probably more bulky than I want but I can’t tell for sure from pictures. Bolts are available, although the combination of upgrades I’d like are hard to find.

Afternoon, I was to run a hybrid zoom event. I set everything up, I swear, exactly like the last time, only this time, there was nasty feedback from Zoom into the auditorium system. I couldn’t get rid of it. Initially we started the meeting with no zoom audio. Then I thought to try feeding zoom through the macbook’s own mic, rather than from the audio system feed. That gave the dozen zoom users usable audio.

I was very disappointed with myself and pissed at that fucking audio system. We have had months to make this work and every time I try to run a meeting something different goes wrong with it.

Friday 08/19/2022

Went for a walk in the morning. Earlier I picked up on news of an urgent update for Apple devices, phones ipads and macs alike. So i put out a notice to the bulletin board. Naturally I was dealing with replies all day from people who couldn’t figure out how to update their iPads or whatever.

At noon I had a date with Prudence, the other fiction writer at CH. Well, more of a fiction writer than I am; she has published more than one novel for children with a real publisher. I have been mulling an idea, or some related but vague ideas, for a SF book and I wanted her help to figure out some more ideas and approaches. So we had lunch and talked this over and she was very helpful. I don’t want to try to write about the ideas now, or here.

In the afternoon I gave in to temptation and worked on some software. I wrote a large program a few years ago. Called PPQT (never mind why) it was a major effort that never got used by anybody but me. I last updated it on GitHub in 2017, until now. For some reason last week I took another look at it. It depends heavily on a GUI platform called Qt, and Qt has moved on a major version, from Qt5 to Qt6, in the years gone by. So I started in a casual sort of way, to update it to use the newer version. And I find it just seductive. I can sink into the programmer’s meditative state and time just flies by. I need to ration it; it’s like a drug.

At 5:15 I went down and picked up the sandwich I had ordered to go, and met with Patty and Martha to go to the “Cardinal and White Scrimmage”, a pre-season event for the Stanford women’s volleyball team. It was ok, but volleyball is not a game that grabs me much.

Thursday 08/18/2022

This morning I had committed to attend a FOPAL coffee session at the Mitchell Park Community Center at 10:30. We have a substitute maid this month while Wanda is on vac. and she likes to do my room early, instead of the usual 2pm time that Wanda does it. So I left at 9am, did a bank deposit, then sat in the car at Mitchell Park until time. The coffee included pretty good pastries and a talk by somebody from the Library telling about all the activities they have been funding using the money that FOPAL generates.

Stuffed with pastries I went back home and changed to my docent shirt. Patty had agreed to come along on my tour so we drove down to CHM, where guess who was standing in line to buy a ticket but Denny, who I had lunch with two days back. I had told him I was doing this tour and he’d said he might come by, but it was a surprise just the same. Anyway I had a total of about 15 people, just the right size for the tour, and we had a good time.

In between various activities above, I spent a couple of hours making a spreadsheet listing all the full battery electric vehicles I might like to kick the tires of. What they approximately cost, the manufacturer website, the local dealer, etc. Have I decided to buy an full EV? Probably. I certainly do not like the looks of the current Prius line, and I’m tired of waiting for Toyota to revise it. Anyway, I think the tech and the charging infrastructure is good enough to support full EV, especially given my pathetic driving distances.

I might even go look at a Lucid, June’s fave. Patty said she had seen a Lucid up close when they were doing a demo on University ave recently and it impressed her.

Wednesday 08/17/2022

Went for a walk. At 11:30 met with Bert to show him how to erase the hard drive of a mac that had been donated. It didn’t go quite as planned, possibly solid state drives don’t erase the same?

At 1pm there was a zoom meeting of FOPAL volunteers. The sale last weekend was very successful, over $20K income, highest since pre-pandemic days.

At 5 it was time for dinner. Tonight there is to be a talk by Larry Basso, a resident who is sort of related to Dennis from the early days (1970s) of Dennis’s first marriage. So I had invited Dennis and Larry to dinner, and two of my favorite neighbors Lennie and Caroline. Dennis and Larry did have a lot to talk about with each other catching up on various family connections.

Dennis opted not to stay around for Larry’s talk, which turned out to be a wise choice as the talk, while interesting, ran on until 9pm. Since it was not on Zoom, there was a good turnout, possibly the most people I’ve seen in the auditorium since 2019.

Tuesday 08/16/2022

Yesterday I had an email from Mariah the lawyer (her receptionist corrected my pronunciation, it’s Muh RYE uh not Mah REE uh). Attached was a letter of engagement to be signed and returned, and she also requested to see the original family trust document that was the ancestor of the current survivor trust. So my self-assignment this morning was to find the old trust and deliver it and the signed letter to her. I was expecting this to take a while, but no. The old trust doc was just where I looked for it first. I found it, and had printed out the letter and signed it, all in about 5 minutes total. So I headed out in the car and walked in to the law firm in Sunnyvale at 9:01, dropped the docs with the receptionist, and was home by 9:30, feeling very accomplished.

The writers group was entertaining as usual. Mary Ann, I think it was, had written a lovely several paragraphs on family road trip in 1947.

At 12:30 I headed for “Zott’s”, Rosotti’s beer garden in Portola Valley, to meet Scott and Denny. Lots of good stories of old times.

Back at the shop I had that 3:30 appointment with the fitness instructor to get my RFID card and be introduced to the new gym equipment. Which is all pretty good and usable so now I will have no excuse but must get back to strength training on a regular basis.

Monday 08/15/2022

Got up a little early because the new Channing House Gym was to open today. There would be demos at 7am, noon and 3pm, and I figured 7am would be the least crowded. Wrong; by 7:05 there were at least 15 people there.

Plus, Veronica the rec director wasn’t fully prepped to demo the machines, which are new and will recognize a special badge which each of us is to carry, and the badge will contain some kind of history of our workouts? Somewhat unclear. Anyway I have an appointment to get my badge tomorrow at 3:30.

From there I went on my usual walk. At 10:30 came the monthly event coordinators’ meeting, where they go over the calendar for the upcoming month and note the planned events.

At the end of this meeting I grabbed Nancy, who coordinates concerts and such, all excited to tell her about Suzanne and how she could do a recital for her students. Oops, no; Nancy informed me that there is a long-standing policy NOT to invite music teachers to give recitals here. Too many music teachers around, apparently. So later I had to email Suzanne and apologize.

Off to FOPAL to clean up the computer section after a sale weekend. It was apparently a good sale, netting over $15K in all. Quite a few gaps on my shelves. It took a couple of hours to triage the shelves, send a couple of boxes of books that had seen at least 3 sale weekends without selling, to the bargain room.’

Sunday 08/14/2022

After the usual Sunday morning things, plants, crossword, yadda, I had nothing to do until leaving for the museum at 1. So I went for a moderate walk, and then generally wasted time on the internet. At 1pm I went to the Museum and led the 2pm tour. They had canceled the noon tour for lack of docent, I noticed. They really need to start a docent training program and recruit a few more. Anyway, the crowd looked light, but in the usual magical way, at 1:57 I was talking to five people and at 2:00 I had a group of over 30. It’s really amazing, like they come up out of the floor or something. I managed to keep most of them interested right to the end, yay me.

Back home, change clothes, take a short nap. Then at 6:15, out to dinner at Suzanne’s.

Suzanne was my manager at Informix lo these many years ago. 1980-85? Besides being an excellent manager, her side gig was being a piano teacher, and Marian and I attended a couple of student recitals at her place over the years. Her then-husband Chuck was (still is) a realtor. Chuck helped us buy and sell two properties in the 80s, and as noted in the first year of this blog, was my agent selling the Tasso house.

Last year she had gotten in touch to let me know that she and Chuck were divorced and she was now living with Jim. Last week I saw a funny email about musical terms and forwarded it to her, with the result she invited me to dinner with them. So off to their place, what turns out to be Jim’s long-time home in Menlo Park. We sat at their kitchen table while Jim cooked dinner and jawed away, telling our three respective life stories, from 6:30 to 9:30. Very pleasant an informative evening. Jim is a multi-talented person with degrees in both EE and law, a practicing lawyer and a near-pro level photographer as well as other hobbies. Suzanne has gone to full-time piano teaching.

Home late, nearly my bedtime, and I have to get up early (writing this at 6:15am) today.

Saturday 08/13/2022

Pretty much a nothing day, I didn’t leave the building.

Last night before I went to bed I did something I’d been thinking about, namely, set up the Nikon on a tripod with the 500mm mirror lens pointing at the hummingbird feeder. From about 8 feet distance, its field of view nicely frames a hummingbird’s size. With the sun up this morning I shot a bunch of pictures, exactly one of which was sharp and well composed. I shared it on the CHBB list and got lots of nice reactions back.

Not quite perfect, a perfect shot would not have cropped off the end of her tail.

Also yesterday a new flash drive arrived from Amazon. One by a name-brand maker, SanDisk, so presumably not fake garbage like the previous one. I put it to work copying the Users folders from Lois’s old iMac, so as I promised her I would have all of her old files if she needed them (she won’t). Then before supper I started the machine reformatting the hard drive with a “secure erase” meaning it writes every sector twice. I am hoping that this will improve its horrible slow performance. That took 2 hours. Meanwhile I cleaned its filthy keyboard and the case and screen. Now it is re-installing the OS. I can probably see it booting before bedtime.

At 2pm I went down to the auditorium to run a movie. Karen who manages the movie series had chosen Lion about an Indian orphan who uses Google Earth to figure out where he was born and go back and (spoiler) find his mother. I was ok with it to about the half-way point where they introduce a lot of (I thought) unnecessary family conflict and misunderstandings, so I mentally checked out and read a book on my phone.