Tuesday 07/22/2025

Hit the gym for one round of machines. Better than none. Then did some admistrative work for the AV team, but possibly I have a victim, excuse me, noble volunteer, to take it over.

Then with some time to spare I wrote a little thing for today’s writers meeting. Nothing special. Several much better essays in today’s meeting.

Did some more work on pictures from Joyce’s book. It’s as much trouble as the editing of the text, grumble grumble. But then I remembered to look in the big family genealogy book of Laurel’s that I got from Dennis a while back and never looked at. There I found some versions of pictures that were in Joyce’s book but printed much better, like this one of Joyce and Eleanor at ages 7 and 9, about.

Later in the day was the monthly Tech Squad meeting. Considerable discussion about the proposed new satellite campus, and whether the resident volunteers would provide tech support to the people there, a long 5 minutes walk away from 850 Webster.

After that I checked out the new music practice room, and took the liberty of moving a music stand from the green room into the practice room. Exciting times around here.

Monday 07/21/2025

Took a standard walk in the morning. At 10:30, the monthly Event Coordinators meeting. Immediately after I hop in Fred and go to FOPAL where as Frank had warned me, there were 16 boxes of donated books waiting. I hoped to process them all but I also needed to leave at 3:30 so I had to leave 4 boxes undone. I will go back on Wednesday.

Returned by 4 just in time for Rhonda’s monthly meeting. A recap on the satellite campus thing, still no precise details. And encouragement to take part in an annual satisfaction survey run by an outside vendor. Much nattering of questions about this.

Sunday 07/20/2025

Sunday morning ritual, water plants, do crossword. Also spent a couple hours trying to rescue some of the pictures from Joyce’s book. She included pictures, like this one of her in the high school prom dress she made herself.

I do not have access to the original Kodak print. All I have is the book, which was reproduced at a Kinko’s or some such service. I scan the page with the image and then apply the digital tools I have to try to clean it up and make it presentable.

Got through about 10 of them. I will eventually add them to the “Family Album” on Smugmug.com.

Anyway, at 12 I got together with Joanne and we drove “over the hill” to the San Gregorio General Store to listen to some music. Unfortunately we both wanted to be back to CH for a presentation at 4:30, so we could only stay for one set, and then had to leave at 3pm. But it was a nice outing anyway.

The presentation was by our neighbors Jerry and Betty. They took a lengthy tour in 2000, documented with a camcorder. Jerry has been editing the camcorder footage into a travelogue of this trip. Previously he had shown their time in Viet Nam and in Myanmar. This time it was India and Egypt.

Saturday 07/19/2025

Main activity today was to drive Fred over to the museum and lead the 2pm tour. This was “NVidia day”, employees of NVidia and families were free, so the place was really crowded. When I started my tour group was easily over 40 people, which is really too many, they just don’t fit into the small exhibit areas. I primed them beforehand that the spaces were small and if they got bored or couldn’t hear, just peel off and enjoy the museum, I won’t mind. Quite a few did, by the 3rd or 4th stop on the tour the crowd was down below 30. The remainder all seemed to enjoy themselves.

Friday 07/18/2025

In the morning, met with Joanne for a nice “muffin mosey” when we walk to her favorite bakery and she buys a very large bran muffin which it is her custom to share with her usual group of pals that meet for breakfast on Saturdays. She is walking normally to me eye, no walker or cane, although she says she doesn’t feel quite normal yet. Still, 4 weeks from a cracked pelvic bone, not bad.

At 11 was the AI interest group meeting. I walked them through a thing I had done with Claude.ai a week ago. Too complicated to write up here.

At 3:30 I met with Bert and Craig and Lenny to interview Leah Lin. I know Leah as the trusty person who has my medical authority. But this wasn’t about me, it was that I had suggested her to Bert, who runs our volunteer tech squad, as an outside support person. The tech squad gets calls sometimes that we can’t, or Bert feels we shouldn’t, handle. “We fix, we don’t train” is his motto. In the past he has sent some people to the Geek Squad at Best Buy, or to the Apple Genius Bar as appropriate. But Leah would come in and work with people here at CH. So we all talked to Leah about this and she impressed well, and Bert will be referring a few people to her and then we’ll talk it over again in a few months. So a good turn for a friend.

Thursday 07/17/2025

In the morning, wrote two carefully composed and highly thoughtful emails. Well, that takes time. They were so much on my mind that I didn’t go down to the gym, as I had sort-of planned to do. Later did some music practice.

After lunch, edited 3 more chapters of Joyce’s book. One very long chapter about her not-quite a year in the Poor Clares monastery, and a couple of chapters after. I appear a couple of times, she treats me very kindly. And again, she tells about things that I absolutely do not remember. To be fair, she was writing in the 1990s, about events of 1967-69. Maybe I would have remembered some of these things if you asked me in 1995. But now, when it is 50-60 years ago? Nuttin’. Could have been some other guy than me.

Although one thing was helpful to me. She says she and I moved into the apartment we shared on 25th avenue in 1967. I remember the place well, and I remember that at the time I was working for IBM, but still as a unit-record (punched card equipment) repairman. I remember that sometimes I would be on call, and a few times I got service calls and Joyce was highly indignant on my behalf at being called out late at night to fix some machine. I can also remember sitting in that apartment, at a big desk that she remembers we had Emil make for us, and studying the schematic for the 029 keypunch until I had it memorized.

Point being, this nails down a date I was kind of fuzzy about. I would have been not more than 18 months with IBM at that point. I knew enough to be useful, so it must have been more than six months, but by 2 years in, I switched to maintaining software. So thanks to Joyce’s recollection I can be pretty sure it was 1966 when I started with IBM.

Wednesday 07/16/2025

Took the standard walk in the AM. Did some reading. Edited another 2 chapters of Joyce’s book. It continues to be good, well-written and affecting. These chapters were about her entry into Catholicism and leading up to her entry into the Poor Clares. Her religious feelings are completely foreign to me, but I can appreciate the detail and sincerity with which she recounts them.

She talks about how, when she was ready to enter the monastery, Cecil came down to SF, and that “David loaded my two suitcases into a gold Cadillac borrowed from the Zone Office and Mother, David, Dennis and I drove to Aptos.” I do not remember this at all. You would think I would at least remember getting to drive a new gold Caddie a couple hundred miles, but no. I do remember driving down with John Snow to bring her back when she left the monastery. But that will be the next chapter, which I haven’t gotten to.

Did a little music practice in the afternoon. Then right after supper, met up with Joanne and we drove over to the Stanford campus for a concert, Ruth Davies’ Blues Night. It was pretty good, Chris Cain is a true virtuoso of the electric guitar and the rest of the band was top rank. It was a little too loud for me, and a lot too loud for Joanne. I had warned her to bring earplugs and she had meant to, but forgot. So she spent a lot of the evening with her fingers in her ears. But she said she liked the music anyway.

Tuesday 07/15/2025

First thing, out on foot to an 8am appointment to have my teeth scraped. The dental office was for decades on University, but this spring moved to a new office a whole block further away from me. Anyway, routine thing.

Back in time to tidy the apartment for the cleaning lady who comes at 12. Then started to put together a brief slide show explaining the vintage computer fest, for the FOPAL volunteer zoom coming up tomorrow. Then the writers meeting at 10:45 to 12. And right after, the cleaning lady ringing the doorbell.

After that, I spent some time on the phone with Dennis, and then time on the phone calling the Clipper Card customer service. (For anyone not in this area, the Clipper Card is the access card for all public transit, bus, train.) I had a regular one but Joanne had pointed out that with that, I pay 3x as much as I would if I had a Senior card. So I applied for a senior card and it finally came, but it doesn’t have any money on it; my $50 balance had not moved over. So I spent time on the phone with the nice lady who got that straightened out, hopefully.

Then I did my laundry, interrupting that process to attend the Car Free group meeting at 3pm. Then finished the laundry and had a little time before dinner. Then time to attend the monthly movie, this time it’s Broadcast News from 1987. Report on that tomorrow.

Monday 07/14/2025

Down to the Resident Association meeting. Sat beside Joanne, which was nice. Nothing of supreme note in the meeting. Then I took Fred down to FOPAL and did my post-sale cleanup and processed 3 boxes of donations. Kind of spectacular donation was two fat binders of the collected algorithms of the Association for Computing Machinery,

Dates? 1961-1972 inclusive. Page after page after page with descriptions of code routines, mostly in FORTRAN.

Yes, the Computer Museum has this, I just checked. Kind of thing I would just hate to throw out, but OTOH, who the F would buy it?

Back home, played a little guitar. Then made myself a nice supper in my room: microwaved two ears of corn, ate them both, along with hunks of sourdough bread.

Sunday 07/13/2025

After watering the plants, and discovering that the San Jose Mercury had reprinted last week’s NYT crossword (a major screwup), I decided to walk the mile to the Palo Alto Clay and Glass festival. This is an annual thing that I’ve usually gotten an email about beforehand, but not this year. I noticed the cluster of tents and marquees when starting for San Jose yesterday.

Anyway that was a nice walk and a tour around looking at all the pottery and blown glass craft stuff. Nothing worth buying or photographing.

After lunch it was time to join the carpool to the Pear theater, this time as a passenger not a driver. The play was Constellations. That linked Wiki article has a terse synopsis of the plot but doesn’t give the flavor. The idea is there is a multi-verse, where on different time lines the same people might make different choices, or not. There are at least three time-lines with scenes repeated almost but not quite word for word. It was complicated. Interesting, touching sometimes.

That was about it for the day. Quiet evening reading and TV.