Thursday 07/14/2022

Out the door at 8 for a medical appointment: a routine “wellness checkup” as the social security codes it, formerly a “physical”. Dr. Marx was as nice as ever, and was very pleased with my condition. The kidney cyst seems to be stable in the last couple of scans I’ve had so that is not an issue. She recommended a dermatology checkup, my last was in 2019.

Back home and then out again for a run to the City. I took Caltrain and Lyft to get to SFJazz at Hayes and Franklin. I have tickets to concerts on two successive nights, July 29 and 30 and wanted to check out the parking options and the eating options. My old favorite casual eating place has closed, but there are numerous other decent-looking places that will be open. And the Performing Arts garage is convenient. On previous trips to SFJazz I have parked in an on-street lot, but with car break-ins becoming so common in SF, I would rather park in an enclosed garage.

Back home by 3:30 and I got a tech squad dispatch. Ann turned on her 10-year-old Samsung TV and heard a loud “pop” noise, and the screen stayed black. Pop is not a good noise. I looked at it an gave it last rites. The TV had some working electronics, its pilot light glowed and flickered when you gave it a command from the remote, but it didn’t do anything. No menu, no picture, nothing. So I helped her measure the hutch she keeps the TV in, it is barely big enough for a 40-inch one, and told her to shop best buy.

Wednesday 07/13/2022

This turned out to be a less busy day than I expected. I had been booked to lead a private tour at the museum at 1:30. So I started the laundry, went for a walk, came back and finished the laundry around 10:30. Changed in to my red docent shirt and got my stuff together for that. Then I got an email: sorry, the Facebook group have canceled their tour at the last minute, sorry for the late notice. So I got my afternoon back.

Had lunch and puttered around. Went over the body and hood pieces of the Studebaker, filing and sanding off mold marks and trimming edges so everything fits nicely. Puttered in my garden for a bit.

At 4:30 it was time for the 6th floor monthly meeting. This time we had CEO Rhonda as a guest. She has been attending floor meetings for the past two months, has two floors to go. The purpose is to review the several items off the last satisfaction survey that scored low, where people on average were not satisfied with Channing House. Some of us had heard that she had a rather rough time on another floor, and several of us resolved that we’d treat her nicely on the 6th floor. Which we did, although serious issues were addressed quite freely.

Every floor meeting the floor reps (who are now Carolyn and Edie, replacing Jerry) reserve tables in the dining room, so we moved on to dinner as a group. I had to eat quickly because I wanted to leave at 6:30 for a concert on the campus.

This was the annual Ruth Davies Blues Night for the Stanford summer jazz festival, this year with Shemekia Copeland. It was a fun concert, very good musicians, just solid blues and soul. It seemed to short at just over an hour, and to my surprise, no encore.

Tuesday 07/12/2022

First thing this morning I walked over to University ave and picked up a prescription at CVS. The first planned activity this morning was the writers meeting at 10:45, but about 10 Rich, one of my AV volunteers, called from the auditorium, needing a bit of a consult on an upcoming meeting. I was able to resolve his issue. Then the writers meeting was fun, several entertaining little essays.

Next up I drove to Safeway and bought a 10 pound sack of sugar for the hummingbirds. After months of refilling a single feeder every 3-4 days, we are now at the peak with half a dozen birds emptying two feeders in less than a day.

On to FOPAL where I finished culling old books out of my section and processed another two boxes.

Next was what I was looking forward to: a trip to a hobby store. After spending at least three hours online over the last couple of days, I have figured out which spray paints most closely match my memory of Gary Pierce’s father’s 1953 Studebaker. I’m convinced it was two-tone maroon and gray. It looked like this,

…except imagine the pistachio green on that car is maroon instead. Months ago I picked up a 53 studebaker kit and I’m going to build it next.

Parenthetically, that is going to be a bitch of a kit to build well. There are so many little details… Look at the top of the rear fender, see that chrome rail? On the model, that is cast into the fender, just a little raised ridge about 1/16 of an inch high. How to make that look like chrome is a major issue. Or the chrome trim around the rear window or the drip rail.

Anyway the first step is to paint the body shell, and that means, finding the right color of spray paint. There is a great online resource where you can see the actual Studebaker paint chips. All I have to do is find a match to “Coral Red” and “Olympic Gray”. After 3+ hours of online research as I said, I settled on two colors from a japanese hobby paint company, Mr. Color, which are sold by a local retailer in Redwood City. Which is where I went, but alas! Their door was locked and they say they are only doing business over the web. Their web page doesn’t say that, but what can you do.

Tomorrow will be just as busy but in a different way.

Monday 07/11/2022

First up this morning was the monthly Resident Association meeting. Since I’d written document on how to do a zoom simulcast, David G. who usually manages this event, asked me to come along and help. And between us we managed to botch things up pretty good. Somehow we had a nasty audio feedback thing happening that we couldn’t tame until half way through the event. Paul and Gerald from the IT department tried to help, even Vanessa the IT manager, and it was a bit reassuring that they couldn’t figure it out either.

Anyway, after that fiasco was over, I went down to FOPAL for the usual post-sale triage. Pretty much have to look at every book, and decide if its price should be reduced, or if it has been there through enough sales to give up on it. I got about halfway through and ran out of steam. I’ll go back tomorrow to finish.

Had a nice evening meal at a table for 6 with some of my favorite neighbors, just a pick-up group. Eva just back from her birth city of Prague, told us about that, etc.

Sunday 07/10/2022

After watering the plants and doing the Sunday puzzle I decided that (a) I needed a walk and (b) needed to check my section at FOPAL, to tidy it up before the second day of the sale weekend. Per Google maps it is 3.3 miles walking from here to there. So I took a Lyft down there. My section was surprisingly neat, not the usual disorder left by shoppers. Which doesn’t speak well for the sale weekend.

Then I walked back. I stopped in Midtown about 10am and had a protein (mostly) breakfast, ham omelet and OJ. So fair amount of exercise, and a filling brunch, so I skipped lunch.

At 1:30 I joined Patty who drove us to the Pear theater to see Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women. It was, um, interesting. In the first act, a 92-year old woman who is not all there mentally, reminisces about her life to a caretaker and a young legal aid. Although she’s mixed up about a lot of things, you get a fairly clear outline of her biography. Albee, and the actress, are mercilessly exact in perfectly reproducing the quarrelsome, crochety speech patterns of a once-powerful woman with failing faculties.

In the second act the old woman has had a stroke and is a comatose dummy in bed, while the same three actors now take on her persona at ages 26, 52, and 78, and argue over the phases of her life, when she was happiest, or if she was every happy at all. The actors were excellent in what must be very demanding roles. Not a comfortable play to sit through.

Saturday 07/09/2022

Pretty much all I did today was to go to the Museum and lead the noon tour. Started with about 30 people, still had more than 20 at the end, and got a nice round of applause. The rest of the day I just lazed around, reading and watching youtube videos.

Not eating bonbons, though. I’m off carbs. Again. A couple of months ago I dieted my way down to below 163. (June 1, 161.8, I have it right there in my vitals spreadsheet.) Then I stopped dieting and over the following month, day by day creep creep creep, my weight went up again (July 9, 167.2). Was I indulging in candy and cookies and beer and stuff? Not really, although several times I did have ice cream for dessert after dinner. So anyway, I’m not exactly dieting, but I am eschewing carbolicious food, trying to eat just fats and protein and veg.

Friday 07/08/2022

Went for The Walk. Right after, I had a date with Lois and Randy to help activate Lois’s new iMac. That took most of an hour but was successful. While the iMac was transferring files from the old backup disk, I helped her identify some stuff that had been at the back of her desk for, she said, years. One was an external hard drive that was plugged in to power but not to the Mac, and was blinking red/blue like it had a problem. I took it away and checked it out later, it was a 400GB drive but it couldn’t spin up. For at least a year it had been sitting back there blinking that it had a problem, and nobody knew. Or cared. Another was a nice powered speaker set, bass and two tweeters, also not connected. And couldn’t be connected because it wanted stereo RCA jacks in. Lois’s “old” iMac, at least 5 years old, behind which the set had been sitting, doesn’t have analog stereo outputs. Maybe her machine before that had, but that was a while ago, and since then, the speakers have been taking up space and gathering dust.

Then I stopped by and helped Dr. Margaret resolve some problems with Mac Mail. I hate the Mail app but everybody else uses it, except it doesn’t do what they want. This was quite a tour through the app’s many settings to get things how Margaret wanted them.

Which brought me to lunch time. Today I met with Patty, Lois, Randy and Mildred. We crammed into Lois’s Prius and off to Mandarin Roots on El Camino, a highly regarded chinese place. We had several dishes, a couple really good and a couple just meh. The point was to check it out for Patty. Her son, his wife, and 2 teenage grandkids are coming to visit next month. They’ve requested chinese and mexican cuisine so Patty is trying everybody’s recommendations.

Nothing scheduled after that. I goofed off in my room, had a PBJ supper, and that was it.

Thursday 07/07/2022

Today’s activity was to take a nice road trip to Carmel with Jean and Dennis. I had to hustle to get my apartment tidy for Wanda’s visit at 2pm, then left at 8:30. I thought I was being clever in adding Ben Lomond as a GPS intermediate destination, thus sending us on a nice scenic run down highway 9. Unfortunately I didn’t check the route overview, and the helpful GPS had routed us over 17 and then back up to Ben Lomond. So we had a fast freeway run to Carmel.

We walked around a bit, looked at the ocean, had a very nice lunch, and headed back. I got back just before 3. Almost exactly 200 miles, 52 mpg. Yay Prius.

Wednesday 07/06/2022

Went for The Walk first thing, fine. Then it was a matter of killing a bit of time until 10:30 when I went to the lobby to await the arrival of my guest, Dan Nitzan. He’s a charming guy who knows a lot and has done a lot in the tech field. (He doesn’t seem to have much of an online presence. Here’s an old interview from 2012 about his fireworks job.)

In person it turns out he is one of those people who has something entertaining to say about any topic, and he kept my group of AV nerds entranced for an hour in the auditorium, talking about our system and what we could do with it, and for another hour having lunch. (Scott would know what I mean when I say he could out-talk our friend Denny Sargent.)

After lunch I triaged some of my plants. Got rid of a couple that were sickly or actually dead, and noted what pots I have available.

In the afternoon I drove down Middlefield to the gas station and fueled the Prius for tomorrow’s outing. Then into the nursery where I picked up a couple of new plants.

There was a memorial reception on 11 at 6pm, which needed a mic, but I had delegated that job to Kass. She called me at 6:30 saying they had 4 people going to sing and they’d like a mic. She and I agreed that our mics don’t work when set back from the speaker, they have to be right by your mouth. But the people who were going to sing insisted, so I went down and got a mic stand from the auditorium and took it up to 11. Set the mic in the middle and instructed the singers to stand close and lean in. Which they didn’t do, so there was very little amplification. From what I could hear, that wasn’t a great loss anyway (he grumped). But Kass thinks we should have a more appropriate mic for this situation. Not knowing what to get, I did the obvious and emailed the question to my new bud, Dan Nitzan. I’m sure he’ll have an answer.

Tuesday 07/05/2022

A day with not much scheduled. I spent some time printing some new photographs for my picture gallery outside my door. The pictures there hadn’t changed in a while. I also reloaded the ink tanks in my Epson EcoTank printer. This was the first time I had done this since I bought the printer near the end of 2019. It has printed maybe 100 big color prints, not a whole lot of text.

I attended the writers meeting as usual, and read my reminiscence about shooting off fireworks in my youth.

I checked with Dan Nitzan, who had tentatively scheduled to visit here tomorrow, and confirmed that, and also reserved a table for lunch. Nitzan is a local expert in AV, setting up systems at local theater groups and churches. He has had relatives at Channing House. Patty and Lennie met him at a Pear Theater fundraising event.