Sunday 05/23/2021

Watered the plants. The dragon-wing begonias that I cut back to a little cluster of brown sticks 2 months ago have grown up a thick 2-foot cluster of big leaves already.

It was 7:30 and I felt like getting out so I took a Lyft down to Byxbee park. Walked the full Baylands trail down to San Antonio road, which turns out to be just 2.5 miles. Took a Lyft back and was home again by 10am.

Played around with various hobbies the rest of the day. Wasn’t thrilled with the supper menu so had a cheese and baloney sandwich in my room.

Fiddled around. Went for a medium walk, ending with picking up the usual nummy pastry. Worked on some hobby projects. For lunch, passed on the daily entree (pepper steak) and had Avocado Toast instead, a really nice light meal on the backup menu.

More fiddling around. For supper decided I didn’t want the evening entree either (baked chicken) and decided to walk out up University Ave. Downtown PA was jumping, with lots of people out, many with masks but not all.

The Apple store was fully open, so I went in and got fingers-on with the latest MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. Apple has kind of shot themselves in the foot with the latest machines. Both the Air and the Pro use the identical silicon, the new M1 chip. Possibly they have lowered the clock rate in the Air? But there are very few differences between the two. The Air costs $200 less, has 2 hours less claimed battery life, the screen has 400 nits of brightness versus 600 nits for the Pro. They both come with exactly two USB-C ports, incompatible with anything. That’s it. Well, the Pro has the “touch bar” in place of the top row of function keys. I need to go back and try the keyboards, but I think they are the same. So why get the Pro?

The new iMac is pretty but only has a 24-inch screen where my 5-year-old one is 27″. I’ll wait for the follow-on there.

Friday 05/21/2021

It is getting easier and easier to go to bed (usually around 10pm) completely forgetting to do a blog entry. I really don’t want to admit defeat and give up doing this diary, or to let it become intermittent with ever-longer gaps. Dunno. Maybe shorter entries.

This day was the first meeting of a small critiquing group, different from the CH writers who meet weekly on Tuesdays. That group expects a new, short piece each time, on a given topic, and you read it aloud, and get generally nice strokes for it.

This one is for people working on longer stuff of their own choosing. We are supposed to read the material and mark it up with comments beforehand, and say what did or didn’t “work”. I tried this out on the first 1000 words of Pelajis as I am rewriting it. Of the others, Prudence also presented the opening of a middle-grade work. It was quite good. I can imagine collaborating with Pru sometime.

Thursday 05/20/2021

After aerobics I hastily tidied up the apartment, since Wanda was coming in at 9:30 to clean. Then off to FOPAL for a bit of sorting (still nothing for the computer section). The boxes I was sorting, along with two volunteers named Helen and Dennis, were from a single donation and they were about 2/3 full of popular books about business and management, and 1/3 of general psychology-self-help. All from the past decade and all in pristine condition. Somebody was spending lots of money on books to help him be a better manager or entrepreneur, and reading them once if that.

Back to the barn, and my room was all tidy. I looked at the lunch menu on the way up from the garage, and decided I didn’t like what was on for lunch, so I had a nice PBJ in my room.

Afternoon I worked on the Golf model. It’s at the point where I’m trying to carefully paint black on the window surrounds and the wheel arches (that’s how it looks in auction photos). I’d masked very carefully but off course… well. Also worked on the software project. Had supper in the dining room, at the 8-seat “open” table. Evening serving was a not very good meatloaf, mashed potatoes with no gravy (why? just a mound of mashed potatoes.) And some veg.

Wednesday 05/19/2021

Went for the standard walk, felt fine. Wanda stopped me in the hallway coming back, wanting to know if it was ok to clean my room at 9:30am tomorrow instead of the usual 2pm. She has some kind of meeting to go to. Ok, sure.

Neighbor Dr. Margaret called to say, she’d gotten my book out of the library and it was great, and she had questions, could we lunch together. At lunch she praised the book extravagantly. We talked about some issues in it.

Ran my laundry from 12 to 2. Then worked on hobby projects until 5. That was the time I’d been invited to drinks before dinner with Jerry and Betty, and coincidentally they had asked Dr. Margaret. So we chatted over drinks, then went down to dinner.

That was about it for the day. I have been warned that they will shut down the CH intranet tonight at 10 for maintenance, so I’d better get this posted.

Tuesday 05/18/2021

I was the only one to sign in to Veronica’s aerobics, so like a personal trainer. She and I discussed how she is going to handle the class with her upcoming pregnancy leave of several months. Probably it will be picked up in June by A.J., a staff member, who will lead it on the 11th floor at 8:30am. Would that suit me? Sure. And being in-person instead of remote, it might pick up more people.

Then it was time for the weekly writers meeting. Again I had no contribution to read. The cue of “sky high or down to earth” didn’t spark anything in my mind, although others had some really nice things from that.

After lunch I went to FOPAL. Curated a box of books, but only one box. My shelves are starting to look under-stocked. No idea why no computer related donations are coming in.

Monday 05/17/2021

After the usual walk, I took care of a few to-do items, which I had polished off by lunch. Then I had a very productive session with the software hobby project I started a couple weeks ago and have been fiddling with since. I won’t try to explain it here; but here it is. I will probably keep adding bits to it for some time to come. This is how nerds have fun.

Something I didn’t mention in filling in Sunday’s blog: I signed up for three outside, non-virtual activities.

First, the Sunday paper had an article on SiliCon in San Jose, a comic/SF convention originally founded by Steve Wozniak, and now with Adam Savage as artistic director. A real convention, in the SJ convention center. Heck yeah, I could use a weekend of panels featuring SF authors and web comic artists, and merch tables, and cos-players. Bought a weekend ticket.

Then in the email, there was a notice from meetup.com for South Bay House Concerts, one of my favorite local groups, The Quitters, would be doing a house concert at the end of July. The organizer was calling for vaccinated audience only. Heck yes. Signed up for that.

And further down in the same email list, the announcement of the Redwood Coast Music Festival for the end of September. I had been signed up for this festival for the fall of 2020. When they canceled I donated back the ticket price. Well, here they are again. I haven’t been to any kind of music fest in years, and never to this one, but it looks like fun. So I bought a weekend ticket for that, and booked a hotel in Eureka.

So that’s three non-virtual, out-among-other-people, things.

Sunday 05/16/2021

Went for a drive: left at 8:30am to pick up Dennis, and drove on to Carmel-by-the-Sea. We walked around browsing several art galleries, then had lunch. Drove back, as part of 20 miles of slow traffic on 101. Apparently there are lots of people willing to get out on a Sunday.

Went to bed without blogging or even thinking about blogging.

Saturday 05/15/2021

Had lunch with Dr. Margaret, hearing about her in-laws, talking medicine. She knows my cardiologist who joined PAMF just as Dr. Margaret was retiring. She said “Oh, she’s good!” as if she meant it. She doesn’t think I should be concerned about BP of 140/50.

Then I had dinner with Patty and Randy and Lois. Randy was for most of his career, the main guy for maintaining the klystrons at Stanford Linear Accelerator. Lois was an acquisitions editor for textbooks at Addison Wesley.

So I am socializing a lot. Tomorrow, even more. Then I think I will eat dinner by myself for a while.

Friday 05/14/2021

Went for a walk. Futzed around on various things until lunch. After lunch went down to FOPAL where for the third? time in a row, there were no computer books to process. So I spent an hour doing sorting.

At 4 it was time for Rhonda’s phone-in. No exciting news. Today the CDC issued some rather confusing new mask guidelines, more or less saying fully vaccinated people don’t need them even indoors, except for, several conditions.

As far as Channing House, we are under the directions of the California Department of Social Services (Independent Living) and the California Department of Public Health (Assisted living and SN), and neither of these agencies have updated their mask guideliness. For the time being, all staff are required to wear masks all the time at work. Out of respect for them, we in Independent Living, are asked to wear masks whenever we are on the first floor or in elevators, places we might encounter staff. Otherwise, not required.

At 5pm I went to Susan and Harry’s unit for drinks before dinner. This was to get to know Gloria who is moving in next week. Like so many of my neighbors here, Gloria is a high achiever, retired from a career teaching Economics at Stanford. Smart, friendly, articulate. She has three daughters, respectively an architect, a software engineer, and a lawyer.