Wednesday 12/29/2021

We’ve been having an extended period of rain showers. Looking outside at 8am I wondered if I could go for my usual walk and stay dry. I looked at the radar map at wunderground.com and decided that there was a wide enough break between one blob of green pixels and the next blob, so I went, although I carried an umbrella (first time it had been off the hook for a long time). No rain fell upon me. In fact none fell until the late afternoon.

I spent several hours today writing, divided between two proposals. Both arose from my committee meeting yesterday. One, a proposal to replace the obsolete and damaged microphone systems on the 11th floor. That will go to the IT department when I’m done.

The other is a proposal to the Resident Association Executive Committee, that the RA take on the ownership of several related media subscriptions. The XFinity account for the big common TV on the 11th floor is one. Another is the official Channing House Zoom account, the paid one that allows over 100 attendees in a meeting. Third is the CH Vimeo account, where over 100 video recordings of presentations and past Zoom meetings, and a bunch of Fitness class videos, are kept.

Ownership of these accounts is scattered through different departments of the administration. I really don’t know what department or person is paying the Xfinity bill. The Fitness department owns the Vimeo account and has recently decided that residents can’t upload any more videos. This scattered ownership makes it practically impossible to do upgrades, for example adding channels to the community TV system. I’m going to propose that the RA take ownership of all these resident-facing accounts, pay for them (we have more than enough money to do this) and then be free to manage and expand them without having to go through a staff bureaucracy process.

But there are lots of subtleties and gotchas, so I need to talk to some people first.

Oh, and I did the laundry.

Tuesday 12/28/2021

Started the morning with resistance exercises. I have increased the resistance about 5% on several of the machines.

The big event of the day was meeting with my AV committee. We agreed on a lot of things, a very productive meeting although I don’t feel like detailing all the background now.

One conclusion was that we needed enough copies of three keys so that everyone could have them: the key to the storage cabinet in the stage right wing of the auditorium, the key to the green room behind the stage, and one other. I took the action item to get that done, and after the meeting, I went out to do it.

Not so easy. Where do you get keys made these days? As one does, I got out my phone, Maps app, search for locksmiths. First option: there is a chain called KeyMe that has automated kiosks in stores, and one in the big Safeway in Menlo Park. So I went there. Of my three keys, the machine said that two were “unusual” and not stocked in the machine. They could deliver a dup by mail in just a few days. Nah.

Back to the maps app. I went to the next nearest locksmith, on High street. Nope, gone as if it never was. So to the next nearest, on Homer Ave. Again, no sign of it. How often do they update Apple Maps?

OK, two were in Menlo Park, one on Santa Cruz ave and the other around the corner on El Camino. Walked past the address of the first, no sign of it. That’s three locksmith shops that existed recently enough to be in Maps, that aren’t there now. But the next, on El Camino, did exist. They made four copies of each of two keys, but balked at the third, saying keys of this type (the green room key, a proper door key from Channing House) required one to present a letter on letterhead stationery authorizing a duplicate. Oh well.

Walking back to the car I was passing a big Ace Hardware and thought, why not? Do you make keys? Sure! Can you make me two copies of this one? Sure! Nothing about authorizing letters. Just zip zip make the keys, take the money. The moral? Locksmiths follow rules, hardware stores don’t.

Monday 12/27/2021

This morning I went straight to FOPAL at 9am, no walk, shame on me. I finished renewing the shelf labels and process the single box of books that was waiting.

I had a restless night, thinking about the various problems with the A/V equipment around here. This job is turning into a very demanding gig. What with stuff that doesn’t work, stuff that goes missing, and hopeful but unrealistic requests from event planners, and a complete lack of staff communication, I’m feeling a lot of stress. Anyway I went on a tour of inspection, checking out the stuff used for the 11th floor and for the lobby, and finding missing and not-working things. Anyway I am resolved that I am not going to hold this job for more than a year. This time next year I’ll be a committee member but not the chair.

Tomorrow I am holding a meeting of the AV committee, mainly to dole out different events to members, and also to talk about some of these equipment problems. The next event in time is the New Years Eve party, on the 11th floor Friday evening. The committee has some capable members but the most capable are, unsurprisingly, the ones who are also already loaded up with other volunteer activities.

This place runs on volunteer work. OK, seriously, the real stuff like housekeeping, food service, back-office, and building maintenance, yeah, there is highly capable paid staff to do. But there is a whole suite of what in high school would have been called extra-curricular activities, that wouldn’t happen without volunteers. So, whinge whinge.

Sunday 12/26/2021

Quiet Sunday. Hardest work was refilling the hummingbird feeders twice. I finished polishing the VW body and set it aside as “done enough”. I can see lots of flaws in it but when it is dressed up with chrome handles and wipers and bumpers, they won’t be noticed. So I started assembling the rest of the kit.

Mid-morning I went for an easy walk, and got lightly rained on.

Saturday 12/25/2021

I cannot believe I went to bed last night without blogging. Friday just went by in a happy daze, I guess. Nobody will ever know what I did. Including me.

Today being Christmas I actually slept in an extra half hour, til 6:30. Puttered around for a while, then called Laurel and then called Dennis. Dennis had the more exciting news, since he had opted to go to join his various sons in a house at Tahoe Donner, which was being snowed on heavily. Blizzard conditions, power off and on. I’m good with just some rain; no desire to venture into the mountains.

Afternoon, bored, got the car out and went for a drive. At one point I saw the following pitiable sight and just had to circle back and take a picture.

I call it “The Great Christmas Massacree of 2021”.

Thursday 12/23/2021

Did a good round of resistance exercise at 7:30. Then normally on Thursdays I have to leave for the East Bay, to CHM. So I have to tidy up, neaten up, dispose a basket of recycle stuff, and so on, so that the place will be neat when Wanda comes in to clean at 2pm. But CHM work on hiatus for two holiday weeks, so I had no rush today. Later I spent some time polishing on the VW. Coming along.

After lunch I decided to go do a spell at FOPAL. Mainly because I had left something behind when I was there on Tuesday. There was only one box to process, but I got a start on replacing my shelf labels. I have labeled sections, like “Graphics: apps and design” or “History and opinion“, some 25 in all. The labels are just printed paper cut in thin strips and stuck on with scotch tape, and they are looking ratty so I am redoing them.

At 3:30 I headed back because David M. was setting up for a show in the auditorium and I wanted to help if he had a problem. And he did; he was missing a key piece of info on how to put a YouTube video from a computer onto the big projector screen, and getting a bit frazzled when I came in. Quickly resolved and all went off on time.

Wednesday 12/22/2021

Today was blank on the Google calendar and I’d promised myself to kill items on my lengthy to-do list, of things either I needed to do, or wanted to do.

I started with a walk which was ok, although I came in tired. One problem on the list was to resolve why CVS keeps trying to give me too many metoprolol tablets. I spent an hour with their website and found that the problem was, the doctors had kept changing the prescription in order to change the number of tablets per day, first one, then two, then three. The prescriptions are all for the same drug, which is what seems to confuse the CVS site; they differ in the one sentence instruction to the patient, and in the quantity of pills needed for a 90-day supply, 90, 180 or 270.

Another thing was to update a MacBook Air. This one is owned by the AV committee and lives most of the time in the locked cabinet in the stage right wing. The guy who set it up back in 2016, the late Les Zatz, was a mainstay of the AV committee. At that time there were several residents into theater and such and they put on productions. People come and go, and right now nobody is into that. Anyway, the machine had an info sheet taped to the side of the keyboard with all its passwords etc., and I needed to update that info, as well as to update the software by five years to the current OS.

I also did some sanding on the VW body. Tomorrow probably I will use polish on it.

Tuesday 12/21/2021

I started the day with a round of resistance exercise. Such a good boy am I.

Then off to PAMF Los Altos for a scheduled check with a nurse, comparing my BP monitor to her reading. The Welch-Allen monitor I’ve been using the past year read almost 30 points higher. Bummer. I stopped at WalMart and bought a different one. When I tested it at home in read in the mid-120s, comparable to what the nurse got.

On to FOPAL where I spent 2:15 finishing the six boxes of books left over from yesterday.

Back home I gave Dave Golden a hand setting up for an event. Then it was time for the Stanford women at South Carolina. Stanford did much better than I expected. They took a 14-point lead at the half. Then, just as in the prior game at Tennessee, they went cold in the third quarter and let South Carolina catch up. The 4th quarter was even, never more than a one-possession game, but Stanford ended up loser by a couple of points. Still, it could have gone the other way, and they come away with specific things to work on.

Monday 12/20/2021

Went for the benchmark walk in the morning. Felt fine. Then to the Event Coordinators meeting. When that was over (no real news or discoveries) I went off to FOPAL.

To save time I took some food from the “grab and go” refrigerator. I am disappointed by the provisions in this area lately. No bananas. Only one type of sandwich, roast beef. I was driving down Middlefield trying to eat my sandwich and it was pretty bad. Although the roast beef was sliced very thin, it still had bits of stringy gristle that were impossible to chew.

At FOPAL there were ten boxes of books waiting by my section. I spent two hours processing five of them. I shall have to go back tomorrow.

Leaving there I bought a few grocery items, and drove to the post office to buy stamps. The self-serve postage machine gives you holiday-themed stamps. The final stamp from my prior batch was also a Santa stamp. I must have bought those last Christmas and they lasted all year. Now I have 30 more Christmassy stamps which will likely last to next December.

Sunday 12/19/2021

After my usual Sunday morning stuff I pottered. Worked on polishing the VW body, a multi-stage process. The plants didn’t need much water, shows the effect of lower temperatures. The hummingbirds, on the other hand, were in a mass feeding frenzy on my sugar water, again probably a result of lower temperatures. I shot a short video of it. WordPress won’t let me embed it, but you can click this link to see it out of my Dropbox.

About 2:30 I went to set up for today’s Sunday at Home talk, by Walt, a resident who keeps bees. He has had hives behind his Palo Alto home for decades, and while he rents out the house, he has retained the bees.

Stew, who organizes the Sunday at Home series, had prepared some short videos. He also wanted to do a zoom simulcast. So this was complicated, with one laptop looking at the stage and another laptop showing the visual aids on the big screen, and also sharing its screen with the zoom session. And a couple of mics. I had been antsy about this production for a week, and I’m very glad to have it over with and no big mess-ups.

Oh. The internet. It just keeps getting more amazing all the time. How amazing? OK, we are waiting for people to dribble in (nobody comes on time for one of these) and Stew, killing time, says, does anybody know any bee jokes? I lean over to the laptop in front of me, the one whose screen is mirrored on the projected screen at the back of the stage. I bring a browser to the front and in the address bar type “bee jokes” and hit return. Instantly a dozen hits. I open the top one and just that fast, we start reading bee jokes aloud. I mean, they aren’t great jokes, but it was literally less than 10 seconds from question to answer.