Sunday 11/21/2021

Sunday morning. At 1pm, SWBB would play at Gonzaga, and the only video would be a stream from a Spokane TV station. I intended to do something clever with Chromecast to show that on the 11th floor TV, but I was quite unsure about the details so I wanted to get a start at it.

I buzzed through Sunday morning, and ran into a hitch when the big NYT crossword took more than the usual amount of time. I took a short walk, and then I was up there playing around about 11am. Jerry came along and we both tried to get to the TV, me from the Macbook and he from an Android pad. The original Chromecast proved very flaky and unreliable. He said he’d heard that later ones were better, but we don’t have a later one. So I did the reliable thing, attached my Macbook by an HDMI cable.

But at 1pm that Spokane station didn’t go live with the game after all. I’m told they finally did, an hour later, show the second half of the game. But by then I had found that the Stanford radio broadcast, plus the live stats page, gave quite an adequate account of the game. KHQ Spokane can go stuff itself.

Stanford trailed by a bunch in the first half, caught up, and just squeaked out a win at the end. One of their best players was “unavailable” for unstated reasons. Now they are off to the Bahamas for a three-day Thanksgiving tournament. Jerry has paid for a subscription and will broadcast those games as Zoom meetings.

I took another walk before supper. I’ve been turned down by more people for my Thanksgiving lunch table; everyone it seems is going to their relatives. Well, Mary Ann says her kids are unsure of their plans and she’ll let me know tomorrow. Elizabeth isn’t going to her daughter’s until late, and says she’ll stop by and drink some tea but doesn’t want to eat.

See, this is why I don’t like to attempt hospitality. Too much stress.

Saturday 11/20/2021

The big meeting between Vanessa, the Channing House IT director, and members of the AV team, happened finally. Somewhat inconclusive. Vanessa is a sharp cookie who likes to dive into problems. That’s good. Her main concern just now is, she’s been directed to make it possible to have smooth webinars that use the auditorium and look professional and can be seen in the Lee Center as well as on TV within the building. A tallish order.

David M. came equipped with facts and figures on the system he recommends, a $500 box from ATEM. Vanessa was unconvinced. David M’s church has a multi-camera semi-pro zoom production and he is to make arrangements for her to see that system. She went away with I think a better understanding of the top issues on the 25-item issue list I had prepared, but no fixes were forthcoming.

In the afternoon two people had asked me to get the Stanford-Cal Big Game on the 11th floor TV. I made a mess of this, failing to realize initially that main PAC-12 channel was directly available in the basic Xfinity subscription that TV has. So I spent a lot of time trying to get PAC-12 via the Roku box. Duh. Anyway it worked.

I am trying to populate the 5-person table I’ve been promised for Thanksgiving lunch. There’s me and Paul, my neighbor and a very recent widower. And Jean has agreed to come. I have two more seats to fill.

The next four SWBB games are away, and not on any TV channel, only streamed. Ended the evening exchanging emails with Jerry and Stew about how to get these onto the 11th floor TV. I am all excited about the Chromecast device I discovered while flailing around this afternoon.

Friday 11/19/2021

Went for the usual walk. Back just in time for a 10am appointment with Nancy to try to get her printer running. Fumbled around with her mac and the printer and managed to hit the magic combination so MacOS could find it and yay, another success.

Spent quite a bit of time, like 2 hours, trying to reduce the number of emails in my inbox. There were only a dozen but each represented something I had to follow-up on. After lunch I helped neighbor Carolyn to get her printer going, and succeeded there, too, by simply rebooting both the printer and the mac.

At 4pm we had a special Zoom session supposed to be about new Covid regulations. And Rhonda announced what I had agreed with Carolyn she could not possibly announce yet: Santa Clara County is OK with allowing outside guests into our dining room! Lots of rules: have to show proof of vax, etc; have to make reservations beforehand; other things. But it will start next Monday and be in effect for Thanksgiving.

Who felt like a smart cookie? This guy, because I had already reserved a 5-top for Thanksgiving. I confirmed that when I went down for dinner. Called Dennis and invited him and Toni, but he wasn’t sure if Toni might have other plans.

Thursday 11/18/2021

The main activity of this day was a bus trip to San Francisco, to visit the deYoung museum.

I started the day with two rounds of resistance machines. Then tidied the apartment in advance of it being cleaned this afternoon. At 9:30 we boarded the house bus for the trip.

There were two exhibits of note. One, Patrick Kelley: Runway of Love, was about a guy who went from Southern Black kid to celebrated fashion designer in a short time, and died tragically young of Aids. There were 30 or 40 of his dresses on display and they were — different. Amusing, fun to look at, not really practical. Who would actually buy and wear one of these, I asked by female neighbors. Nobody. But they were fun to look at.

The second, Judy Chicago, a retrospective was a lot deeper and I enjoyed it a lot more. Judy Chicago had a long career as an artist and was a feminist when that was a new thing. I took a couple of pictures of pieces that impressed me.

Both of these are huge canvases, 5 or 6 feet high, done with spray acrylics, and aside from the striking imagery, I just can’t figure out (from my primitive experiments with an airbrush) how in the heck she did them. So, impressive on two counts.

At dinner Patty persuaded me that I should reserve a table for Thanksgiving lunch and invite some people. So I did and got “sorry, prior engagement” from the first I asked.

Wednesday 11/17/22

Was going for a walk but remembered in time that Facilities was coming to shampoo my carpets at 9am. Which they did, and were gone again by 10. Then I pretty much idled in my apartment the rest of the day. Sending emails trying to organize an AV committee meeting. Everybody has conflicts.

David and Helen invited me to dinner.

Tuesday 11/16/2021

First thing I went to the gym and did multiple rounds of the machines. Which was fine. Then I did some desk work, bills and records.

Last night I worked until nearly midnight on a thing for the writers group, which alas didn’t go over well. Too intellectual and too long for the audience. I mean, nobody booed or anything, but it just kind of landed with a thud.

Took an extra long nap after lunch. I had planned to drive 3 others to the basketball, but then David G offered to drive five of us so I rode with him.

This was Stanford v. Portland University. The Portland Pilots had clearly seen the Texas game and adopted the same pressure defense, and although they couldn’t execute it as well, they still slowed Stanford down. During the third quarter they pulled with 12. Then either they got tired or Stanford finally began to understand how to handle it, and we pulled away to win by 20. But my my my basketball is not a game of grace or finesse under that kind of defense. More like Rugby Lite. But three of the freshmen got to play and did very well.

Monday 11/15/2021

Went for the walk. Had to have a severe chat with myself. I was thinking, I have a meeting at 10, I don’t really have time for a walk, blah blah. Told myself severely to cut the bullshit and get going. And of course completed the walk and home about 9.

Meeting was of the Events Committee, featuring the introduction of the new online Event Planning Form. This took quite a while.

After that I drove to FOPAL and did the post-sale triage. This took 90 minutes of standing up looking at all 350 of my books and deciding which to keep for another sale, which to reduce the price one, etc. My back got quite sore doing that. Anyway, done. 55 books went in the sale last weekend. Of course most were priced at $2-3 so my section’s contribution to the libraries was around $120-150.

Back at home, there was a zoom meeting with Chef Tobias to respond to people’s questions about Dining Services. Generally the news was good. A number of things people had requested are being done or will soon be. Notably we have our liquor license and glassware has been ordered; as soon as it arrives it will be possible to buy wine or beer with your meal. Lots of requests for various menu tweaks have been acknowledged and will be implemented.

Sunday 11/14/2021

First thing after watering the plants and feeding the birds, I drove down to FOPAL and tidied the shelves of my section. Got back by 10, leaving the car in the front lot.

At 11:15 I met with the people who wanted a ride to the game, Jerry and David G, and off to Maples for the first “real” game of the season. And it was a dismal loss. Texas, whose #25 rank is going to get a boost when the next rankings come out, mounted a very active, disruptive defense, and Stanford (whose #3 rank will drop a couple) completely lost track of the basket from the three-point line, hitting 2 of 23. Two excellent defenses frustrating each other. The score was 10-10 after the first quarter, and 25-25 at the half. Eventually Texas hit a couple of timely 3s for a lead and held it.

Following the game in a mercifully brief ceremony they handed out the championship rings from last season’s win. Possibly they will win again this year, but they have some work to do.

Saturday 11/13/2021

For lunch I went down and visited sister-in-law Jean. We went to my favorite Mexican place, Casa Lupe on Castro Street. Jean is doing fine. She has completed several major downsizing projects, organizing and then disposing of the huge collection of images that she and her late husband Bill had created.

In the evening I decided to do the battery replacement on my old Macbook Pro. This machine, Godot, entered my life on day 0.73 of this blog, 02/17/19. It was not new then, being a refurbished 2015 model. I opted for a 2015 refurb because it was the last one with a good keyboard, adequate ports, real function keys and a magsafe charging cord. Following that year Apple went to a couple of USB-C ports for everything including charging, the “touchbar” instead of function keys, and what was reported by many to be an unreliable keyboard.

Over the past year Godot has several times complained that its battery was in bad shape. Now that Apple has regained their senses and produced a new MBP with several ports, magsafe, and function keys, I ordered one and am using it (but it doesn’t have a good name yet!) Now I feel confident it is working and all my files are safe, I felt safe enough to take down Godot to install the new battery I ordered months ago from iFixit.

That took a couple of hours, but when it was back together, it booted and ran! I had prepared a thumb drive with an installer for the current MacOS Monterey and I used that to erase Godot’s internal 1TB drive and install Monterey. That went fine, also. So now I have a nice clean 2015 MBP that needs a home.

Friday 11/12/2021

Went for a walk first up. Then among other things, I clicked “List Item” on the eBay listing for the IBM manuals.

At 2pm it was time for the “survival celebration”, starting with a presentation by Rhonda and other staff members in the Auditorium, followed by snacks and drinks for all in the dining room.

The point of the party was to celebrate a whole list of milestones:

The four-year-long upgrade project has wrapped up, with the last “campers” returning to their permanent apartments at the end of July. There were lots of pictures of this process: every apartment on every floor had its ceiling opened up, new heat/cool piping installed, new wiring, sprinklers and fire alarms, new double-glazed windows and doors, new carpet and paint. That’s about 180 apartments on 8 floors.

This job was finished ahead of the planned schedule — despite the pandemic freezing all action for several months.

Completion of HVAC repairs on the second floor. The second floor was newer than others and wasn’t to be upgraded, but its coolant piping had to be completely replaced because it wasn’t done right 5 years ago when it went in. Every unit had its ceiling cut open and then repaired.

Also finished ahead of schedule.

As part of refurbishing the third floor, half of it was converted into “IL+”, or assisted living lite, expanding our service offering (more income!). This included moving the nursing headquarters and office to the 3rd floor.

Transition from Sodexo to our own in-house dining services, and from cafeteria service to table service. This involved remodeling the kitchens while still turning out meals, and training new staff in new procedures and methods. Still in progress, but getting better and (I hear on the grapevine) now running at about the same cost as we paid Sodexo before, after an initial overrun.

Implementation of electronic health records, replacing manual folders and files: just completed.

And of course, surviving two years of Covid pandemic.

And finally, in researching for the presentation, Rhonda had discovered that the original ground-breaking ceremony for the construction of Channing House was almost exactly 60 years ago this week!

So this was a big deal day

The dining services staff had worked hard to present a wide assortment of attractive snacks, so many and so tasty that pretty much everyone was saying, “won’t be down for supper tonight”. I didn’t, although about 7pm I got a bit peckish and had a slice of cheese and bread.

During the party, Frances, head of the very active Racial and Social Justice Committee, buttonholed me to tell me that she had just secured Judge LaDoris Cordell, a local celebrity, as a speaker for next February, and that she expected we would be able to have her speak live in the Auditorium but also appear by Zoom to residents of seven other local senior residences. OK, Frances, no pressure there.

Coincidentally I, Bert, and David M are to interview IT director Vanessa tomorrow, who specifically wants to talk about zoom simulcasts. I had sent her The List a couple days ago.

For entertainment I rummaged around in my box of DVDs and noticed I had a two-disc set of Led Zeppelin. Which I don’t remember buying and certainly have never played. So I listened to Led Zeppelin at Royal Albert Hall in 1973. Going to be “Dazed and Confused”.