Tuesday 04/05/2022

I haven’t done any work at Zooniverse for a while so this morning I did an hour of that. At 10:45 was the writers meeting. I had no contribution but there were several striking essays by my neighbors on the theme, “out of the blue”.

In the afternoon I worked with Joanne on passing the Treasurer info. We are both highly annoyed with our supposed personal banker at Wells Fargo who appears to have gone completely silent. I tried to call him but the number on his card seems to be a general number for that branch. Nobody picked up and the call went to a message, “None of the bankers at this branch can help you at this time” and suggesting to call the general WF customer service number. Don’t. It leads to menu-tree hell and when I got through to a live person, they were “in the call center” (where?) and had no idea how to reach anyone. We just have to get away from that bank.

I am further annoyed with Joanne’s laptop, although I didn’t say so to her. I had made a nice spreadsheet, a cash journal, and it had three “sheets”, for the transactions in each of three calendar years. This was in Numbers, the MacOS app. Joanne of course has a quite old HP laptop running I don’t know what version of Windows. What I know is, the exported version of the workbook shows only the first of three sheets and we could not find how to make it display the other two, assuming they had even survived through the export process. I personally think that she is running a very old and flaky version of Excel but that’s not my problem. She requests that I print the three pages. Ohhhh-kaaaay, fine.

Monday 04/04/2022

Final results from the crossword puzzle tournament were posted and I came in 180th out of 283 participants, or about 63rd of 100. So back of the middle of the pack, slightly better than last year. I did very well on the 7th puzzle which helped to recover from the disastrous fifth puzzle, which I turned in with more than half the letters blank.

Went for a walk in the morning. Then got the car washed and bought some groceries to restock my refrigerator. Lazed away the afternoon like a couch potato. Going to bed early. I just can’t find a balance between feeling stressed and overcommitted, and being bored having nothing to do.

Sunday 04/03/2022

In the morning I did the big NYT puzzle first to warm up my brain. Then I did the 7th and last puzzle from the Tournament. This one I just buzzed through in what should be a good time. In the current standings I’m at #203 or 250 or so. Similar back-of-the-pack to last year.

Then it was off to the Computer History Museum to lead a docent tour. Big crowd, at least 30 people at the start, and still over 20 at the end.

Later in the day I worked with Joanne, the incoming Treasurer, to transfer the checkbook and file of papers to her. I have been using a nice spreadsheet as my cash journal. Unfortunately it is in Numbers, the Mac OS spreadsheet, and she uses an old HP laptop running Windows. So I had Numbers export the file to supposedly compatible .xls format. Unfortunately, her version of Excel won’t open it, claims it is incompatible or something.

I sent the converted .xls to Peter who has Excel on his Macbook. He was able to open it fine. So I had him do a save-as to make a new .xls file written by a version of Excel. And sent that to Joanne to try. Maybe an Excel file written by Excel will be acceptable.

Saturday 04/02/2022

Today I had blocked out the whole morning for the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. I’d paid $70 a month ago, for the right to participate virtually. There was supposed to be a live stream from the real tournament site in Connecticut starting at 8am, but in fact they had some kind of technical difficulties and didn’t. The puzzles were released on schedule though, about one per hour. I was disappointed with the general amateurishness of it and decided to let the puzzles just accumulate — when I read the rules I realized there was no benefit for doing them as they were released; you basically have until Monday night to finish them.

So what to do with this block of time? I realized that this is the week before a FOPAL sale weekend. Ordinarily I would go prepare my section and take my pre-sale count on Monday, but why not today? So I did.

In the afternoon I sat down and did all six of the tournament puzzles. I ripped through five of them in good time, finished well within the allotted time and with no, or few, errors. One puzzle, #5, was an absolute demon, I couldn’t make any headway with it. I finally gave up and submitted what I had, which was pathetic. It was mostly blank squares. I got only 22 of the 100+ words in it. Anyway, sometime Monday they will post the results. Last year I was #743 of about 1200 online entrants.

Started planning a day-trip for flowers with Jean and Patty.

Friday 04/01/2022

Started the day with a benchmark walk; it felt ok. The first big event of the day was being the AV tech for the Colby memorial (see Wednesday). In the end the event came off pretty well, no big visible screw-ups. But the hour leading up to it was pretty hectic, as we went through three MacBooks before getting one that worked. I won’t go over the details, but it was intense, coming down to brief minutes before showtime. Again, I’ve reviewed the recording of the zoom session and it looks smooth, audible sound, slides shown properly, etc.

After that I went to the 11th floor and set up the big TV to show the women’s basketball. During the first game, South Carolina v. Louisville, I spent most of the time writing an account of the mistakes we made on the Colby event and the lessons learned.

In the second game, Stanford had a terrible day of shooting, some usually reliable players couldn’t hit the side of a barn let alone a basket, and they lost to UConn by a few points. So the season is over for another year.

Thursday 03/31/2022

First activity of the day was to walk to PAMF for an MRI. I had an echocardiagram a couple of weeks ago. The report indicated some further degredation of the aortic valve from the previous echo of not quite a year ago. I didn’t have any direct comment from the cardiologist except that her nurse called a week ago and said the doctor would like an MRI with contrast to better visualize the valve. Which we scheduled and that was this morning.

So I walked up there and got to play like the stuffing in a burrito for 45 minutes. Seriously. The MRI is a much tighter enclosure than the CT scanner, and it has been a while since I was in one. The machine sucks you in on your little powered sled and there you are in a pipe while the machine makes a great variety of construction noises around you. It used to have a lot of hammering and knocking but this time it was more like power drills and car alarms.

I strongly suspect when I see her on 4/21, I will hear that my porcine tissue valve is on its last legs. The next step is a new valve via a TAVR procedure. That’s been in the cards for a couple of years now; the question will be, how soon?

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After lunch I went on a tour, organized by our Events Committee, of the public art along California Avenue. There are several murals, some that have been there for a long time, and some new ones. The only piece of art that moved me enough to want to take a picture was the nice patina patterns on this fountain.

Wednesday 03/30/2022

The big deal today was a rehearsal of the Colby memorial on Friday. At the AV committee meeting I had agreed to do this one, with David G’s help. I never met Jean Colby; she had moved to skilled nursing before I moved in. The daughter was to arrive at 10. I went to the auditorium at 9:30 and did much of the tedious and complicated setup for a zoom simulcast. One laptop as the host, and its screen mirrored on the big projector. My iPhone on a tripod, logged in to zoom providing a view of the audience. A second laptop which would have the presenter’s powerpoint slides, and share them with zoom.

David G arrived and we decided to use his laptop to show the slides instead of my spare. Wilma, the Channing House Grief Counselor (whom I’d never met) arrived, then Betsy the daughter and her brother. Betsy had broken down the event into a full-page timeline, very organized. We copied her slide show onto David G’s laptop, and the music she wants played at the end, onto my host laptop when (after 5 minutes of fiddling) we found there was no way to get music from his laptop, into the auditorium speakers, but we could from mine. This is the kind of shit we fight through to do these presentations: you have to get the voices from the room speakers to zoom, the voices from zoom to the room, the music from the laptop to the room, the slides onto the big screen and also visible to zoom attendees, a view of the speaker to zoom, etc. So many streams of content moving in so many directions.

After a couple of hours we had worked through it all and everybody knew what was what and everybody left.

Except as I was going out, I met Jerry coming in, carrying a mic of his own. He had a theory about the supposed failure of the mixer board, so I followed him back in. Long story short, he with my help verified that the problem was not in the mixer board but simply in some loose connectors on a panel. Major coup for the residents, major fail for the sound consultants who were going to replace the mixer.

Had the afternoon free, and I printed a couple more pictures to keep the picture rails on my outside wall fresh. I like to imagine people coming down the hall to check out my pictures, but probably very few do.

Patty invited me to have supper with her and Oscar and Margaret, two fairly new residents. Oscar had at one point in the 1980s, a software venture, his products were file-conversion apps for micros like the TRS-80, to write data on IBM-formatted 8-inch floppies. Ah the good old days.

Tuesday 03/29/2022

This morning my goal was to shrink my email inbox. I don’t normally keep emails in my inbox, unless they represent something I need to do or follow-up on. So that list of things has gotten bulky and I swore to clean it up. Which I did over an hour or two, got the number of saved emails down by half. The remaining ones need somebody else to do something.

Then it was time for the writers group. I took half an hour before to write something, copying and pasting from an early blog entry.

At three it was time for the A/V group to meet. We had two things to discuss. First, we had to distribute the 5-6 events for April. I ended up with the Colby Memorial which has the virtue of coming up quick, this week, then I’ll be off for the rest of the month. Then we had to talk about the resident-only zoom account mentioned earlier. How to manage it, if we have to have one? The group sentiment was to share the ID and password among the 5 of us who can do zoom events. I would have preferred a single “zoom czar” but was overruled.

Monday 03/28/2022

Up at 5:30 and easily into the lobby and calling the Lyft by 6. All travel elements worked nominally; boarded on schedule, departed on schedule, and was on the ground at SFO before 10am. Back to Channing House by 11. Unpacked, had lunch, then down to FOPAL to process the accumulated computer books. Back for supper. No problem-o.

Sunday 03/27/2022

Another day to (mostly) kill. About 9am I walked downtown to try out a new coffee shop, then back to the hotel. Reading, napping. Oh, checking in for my flight tomorrow. I have my boarding pass in email, in my Apple Wallet, and printed on real paper.

Finally it was time to meet Harriet at her hotel, the Doubletree. That meant another mile of walking. Phone says 2.4 miles total, which is b.s., had to be over 3. Anyway, Harriet had arranged to meet up with Cade and Lane, two women who live in Moscow ID, and who have been fans of Tara since she started her head coaching career at the U of Idaho. They had driven in to see the game. They picked us up at the hotel and we went to a nice restaurant, ClinkerDagger, near the arena. Decent meal.

Then into the arena for the game. Harriet and I sat in a long row of vacant seats in the lower bowl but early into the start of play, we got bounced, but were able to settle into another long row of empty seats a little higher up.

Texas and Stanford are both know for tough defense, allowing about 52 points to opponents on average, each. So the final score was Stanford 59, Texas 50: both the defenses were good but Stanford’s was just that bit better. So, a successful trip. The team is on to the Final IV.

Tomorrow morning early I head home, hopefully back to CH in time for lunch (not likely).