Saturday 07/12/2025

In the morning I walked to the Saturday market, bought some apricots and bread. Spent a little time editing a couple more chapters of Joyce’s book. Practiced a little music. Had a pastry from the market for lunch.

At 2:30 I met with Joanne and we drove down to the Obon festival in San Jose. This is a big annual street fair in Japantown. Marian and I went to one probably 10 years ago and I remember it has having several cultural exhibits, flower arranging and such. This time not so much, it seemed to be all about food and drink, nothing else. Also crowded and hot. However we stuck it out to 4:30 when San Jose Taiko performed and that was good. Joanne had only a vague idea of Taiko drumming and was pleasantly impressed. So we made our way back home just in time for dinner.

Friday 07/11/2025

Started the day with a nice walk up to the Town and Country center with Joanne. Walking back, got a phone call from Dennis with some not-so-good health news.

Went to the line dance class, held for the last time on the 11th floor. At 1pm, went to the opening of our new Fitness Room on the second floor. This is the former Activity room, now expanded and remodeled into a big room for exercise. There is a wide variety of fitness classes, averaging 2 or 3 per day, most of which I do not attend. They have been held in various venues around the building but now will be concentrated here.

Spent the afternoon hours continuing to edit the chapters of my sister Joyce’s autobiography. I think I must not have read it when it was given to me, because reading it now, I am really impressed. This is a really good read. She has detailed recall of everything, and tells it all with absolute frankness. Some of it makes you weep.

Thursday 07/10/2025

Off in the morning in Fred to PAMF Los Altos for my annual Medicare Wellness Exam, aka physical checkup. Dr. Julia Marx was as pleasant as always. She didn’t find anything to complain about with me other than my kidney function which is below normal, although not changed from last year. Re-check creatinine level in November. Talking to Joanne as we passed in the lobby, she said “I have a fix for your creatinine.” You what? “Tell you tomorrow, it’s easy.” I have no idea what she is talking about.

After lunch I put on my red shirt and went to the Museum to lead the 2pm tour. For this I took Lyft. I just felt squeamish about using Fred twice in a day, which I’m sure Joanne will tell me is ridiculous. Anyway I took Lyft both ways.

The tour went well. There were several people who just locked eyes on me as if they couldn’t get enough of my well-practiced spiel. Nice round of applause.

Wednesday 07/09/2025

Took the standard walk in the morning. Spent most of the day working on four projects.

One, Bert asked me to try again feeding all the comments from the Dining Services Survey into Claude.ai and get them analyzed and sorted into categories and themes. Which I did and Claude handled pretty well.

Two, I spent half an hour with the guitar (not enough).

Three, I fixed up and printed a nice set of pictures of the striped cathedrals of Orvieto and Siena, Italy, and put them in my hallway gallery. Took down the close-ups of flowers that had been there for a few months.

Four, I edited another 4 chapters of Joyce’s autobiography. Her books was certainly different from her mother’s book. Cecil wrote about people and events. Joyce did that too, but she also puts in a lot of sensory detail. She remembered her childhood from age 4 on, colors, tastes, sensations; and she is very frank about her emotions.

Then went to Rhonda’s open meeting, a special one, where she shared some information about the “satellite campus” the board is about to buy. By that they mean, another building, said to be “10 minutes walk” from 850 Webster. It can house “up to 30” people in units that each have at least 2BR, kitchen and laundry. So that would be — 15 units? She went over the financials in detail which seem to work out very well, although they are predicated on filling the place over 90% full in one year.

Of the many questions after, she had to say no comment to many because the specific address can’t be disclosed until the sale is final. A major question in my mind, which she couldn’t answer, was: if this is a completed apartment complex in Palo Alto, does it have existing tenants? And if so, how do you get them out so you can sell the apartments in a year? Guess we’ll find out.

I will now go to a lecture by Paul Saffo, on the future of Silicon Valley. Expect to be underwhelmed.

Tuesday 07/08/2025

At 7am I went down to the gym. I was doing that on Tuesday and Thursday for a while, a while ago. How long ago? The computer never forgets. I waved my gym ID card at the computer and it was pleased to tell me that I last checked in August 2023. Oops. Oh well. So I did one round of the machines.

Then I cleaned up the room for the cleaning lady coming at 12. Attended the writers meeting, which didn’t have the usual amount of good stuff, and nothing from me.

In the afternoon I edited the video of Colin’s book talk from yesterday. That was easier than most as he had no slides or anything. Just straight video of him talking, with a few shots of the audience. Also did a little editing and printing of pictures for the next hall gallery.

At dinner people asked about my going car-free and the car-sharing deal. There are several people who are in the situation Joanne and I were in, owning cars but using them 2 or 3 times a week if that. Talking to Joanne later, she said there was a suggestion that car sharing would be a good article for the newsletter (she’s on the newsletter staff) and would I write it. Aw shucks, ok.

Monday 07/07/2025

Started with an early walk, out the door at 7:30. Back in plenty of time to set up for a book talk at 11. This was my neighbor Colin, who is in remarkably good shape for being 96 years old, presenting on a book, Heels to Hiking Boots, written by his daughter in law.

When that was over I headed down to FOPAL in Fred. Here I found 9 boxes waiting for me, the bulk of which I sent to the bargain room as too old and not of interest. Two and half hours. Back to CH in about 3. At 4 joined the Poetry Out Loud group. I read an e. e. cummings poem.

I was bushed and had an hour nap. Then it was 6 and I didn’t feel like going down to dinner. However I had in my fridge an ear of corn, and a box with the leftover guacamole from last night’s dinner at Del Sol. That made a nice supper.

Sunday 07/06/2025

Spent the morning reading poetry trying to find something worth bringing to poetry out loud. I found a couple of possibles but not happy with them, or with modern poetry.

After lunch I picked up neighbor Prue who wanted to see the CHM, and we drove (in Fred) to the museum where I did the 2pm tour. Quite successful; Prue was impressed.

Back CHM by 3:30; changed out of my red docent shirt. Then met with Joanne for a planned dinner outing. We went to Del Sol on California Avenue, her pick. I remember eating there several times in the old days but I hadn’t eaten there since well before Covid. Now they have a big outdoor seating area. But the food is still good.

That was it for the day, pretty much.

Saturday 07/05/2025

On my calendar at 9am it said, Fred Up. That meant I needed to bring the Forester up from the Lee Garage so Joanne could drive it. She isn’t yet confident about getting it in and out of the underground garage. At 1pm I bumped in to her coming in the front door. She had ditched the walker for a pair of walking sticks, and been out with Fred to run some errands, and she’d gotten him washed and filled up with gas, too. So I put him back in the garage.

I spent several hours doing the OCR scan of Joyce’s autobiography. Then later I started printing out pictures of striped cathedrals for the next hall exhibit. But the printer, which otherwise works extremely well, was smearing ink. That doesn’t matter so much if I’m printing out some casual memo or something, but when it smears ink when printing an 11×17 inch photo it’s not good. For one thing I am running low on 11×17 photo paper and that shit’s expensive. The cure is to get inside the printer with paper towels and alcohol and to clean up under where the print head parks, where it gets a yucky build-up of ink. I was being very careful wearing vinyl gloves and all, and yet somehow I managed to drop a daub of ink on my carpet.

Which brought me to 5:30 and time to depart for a concert. This was one of Palo Alto’s free summer concerts, in a park about a mile away. I bought a burrito from a food truck and listened to the Sun Kings, a Beatles tribute band, as they ran through about 25 Beatles hits in an hour and a quarter. I don’t have a light folding chair I could take to one of these, so I was standing up the whole time, leaning on a tree. They were still playing when I left to walk home.

Friday 07/04/2025

First up, we are back to our customary Friday morning walks. Joanne is still using a walker to take some of the weight off her pelvis, but she walks fast and smoothly regardless. We walked a one-mile circuit with a stop for coffee.

I was just having a nice nap at noon when Tammy called to remind me that I had agreed to join her table for the BBQ luncheon. I’m a doofus. Tammy is a casual friend, she moved into CH the same week I did. Anyway joined a nice group of people. The lunch was good, too.

I went through my photo collection and picked out the shots of two striped cathedrals, Orvieto and Siena, collected them in a folder and began improving them. With new AI-based photo tools I can take a slide I scanned 15 years ago and improve it significantly, for printing. I also spent a few minutes looking over Joyce’s autobiography. It won’t be too much of a job to digitize it.

At 5:30 the 6th floor gathered in our dining room for pizza. I had to leave early to set up the auditorium. I was the designated AV person to run a movie, The Gods Must Be Crazy, at 6:45. The Party Planners had decided, why I don’t know, to show this movie 6:45 to 8:30, before the official party at 8:30. They had gotten a DVD from the public library, but I opted instead to project it from my laptop, using Amazon Prime. This worked very well.

With the movie over I put my stuff away and went up to 11 where there was the official fireworks watching party. From our roof you can see fireworks shows in about 6 different Bay Area cities. I didn’t stay long. One beer and out. Not feeling social, I guess.

Thursday 07/03/2025

I had an appointment with my cardiologist at 11. So, a morning to fill. I felt like practicing my music but I have a rule not to do that in the apartment before 10, so as not to disturb my neighbor Carolyn, who can hear me in her bedroom. So there I am at 8am… I went up to the unofficial music practice room on the 9th floor and played there.

Then off on foot to PAMF, with a stop at Peet’s coffee first. Dr. Dibiase was encouraging. No issues, but she “strongly recommends” I take advantage of CH classes for strength and balance. “You’re well enough muscled now but you won’t always be.” To be considered.

After that I put Cecil’s biography together as a single file and sent it to the next generation to redistribute. Followed by a 3pm meeting of the Good Times group.

Over dinner with Bob, Bob, Andrew and Mary, we were talking about Siena, Italy. Bob had just come back from a grandchild’s destination wedding there. Three of us had seen Siena, and were talking about its black-and-white striped cathedral (here’s a random internet picture). I remembered that there was another zebra-striped cathedral I had seen, in Orvieto (another random internet picture). It’s time to refresh my picture gallery in the hall and I believe I will put up a bunch of our pics of those stripey cathedrals.