Took the standard walk in the morning. At 10:30 I met with Joanne and we were off for a nice outing in Fred Forester. We drove by various back roads to Half Moon Bay for lunch at a newish restaurant I had heard about, Fattoria e Mare. It was a nice looking place, and we were almost the only people in it so we got attentive service. The food was just ok, but it was a nice time.
We walked around the main street of HMB a bit. Joanne is still using a walker to take some of the weight off her hips, but she’s walking without pain. On the way back we stopped at the Pulgas Water Temple.
Practiced some guitar in the late afternoon. Dinner with a few other nice people. That was about it.
Tidied up for the housekeeper. Futzed around with Cecil’s book. I had thought about making a “real” book of it using Blurb.com, where I made a couple of books for the Stanford Fast Break Club, more than a decade ago. But after an hour of trying to use their book-creating software I gave it up. Terrible tool design. I think probably ai will just put all the text in a single file and call it good.
Writers meeting. About half a dozen pieces. I read mine. OK. Then after lunch and the housekeeper visit I did my laundry.
In the evening we had a movie in the auditorium, The Piano. Famous movie I had never seen. I’m sure of that as I would certainly have remembered it.
Monday is the day I usually go to FOPAL, and despite having spent 4 hours there on Friday I decided to go. How? Why not walk? So I walked what Google Maps says is 3.1 miles to FOPAL. I was annoyed that my phone showed only 2.6 miles. (Now shows 4.3, 10K steps.)
Did my work there and took a Lyft back. I had made a mental note that I should use the Transit app to find a bus ride home, but I forgot to do that. Next time.
Practiced some music. Slowly getting on top of the new songs. About 3 Joanne texted that she was ready for a short walk, so I joined her for a loop around the nearby park. Then I sat down to write something for the writers group. The prompt this week is, “what would you like you kids or young relative to know–about you or about the world?” so I wrote about the only piece of advice I ever give a younger person, go live abroad for a while.
Did some work for the Food & Dining committee. They had been given the bulk responses to the most recent resident survey, containing the comments provided to 14 questions, probably 500 different comments. Lots of data but little info. I put each group of comments through Claude.ai, which produced fairly readable summaries of the comments, with main points and action recommendations. That took a couple of hours.
Practiced some music. I’m working on adding some songs to my repertoire. “Daydreamin” by the Loving Spoonful. “Count on Me” by Bruno Mars. “We’re going to be friends” by Jack White. The old hymn “I’ll Fly Away”. Fun stuff.
Sat around and watched YT videos. Usual stuff. A day without leaving the building.
Day of self-indulgence. In the morning I walked over to the local farmers market and bought a basket of raspberries and two ears of corn. Then for lunch, I shucked one ear of corn, wrapped it in saran wrap, and gave it 2:30 in the microwave. While I put the raspberries in a bowl and poured over them the contents of 6 of the little coffee creamer things I had picked up in the dining room. So that was lunch: hot buttered corn on the cob and raspberries with cream. Or, “cream”. Whatever, it was good.
Middle of the afternoon I walked down to the Edgewood market. That’s a walk I’ve taken with Joanne a couple of times (and expect I will again in a few weeks). Hmm, looking at the phone I see I have got 5.1 miles, 12K steps, for the day. Not all on that walk, but, heck, go me.
At5:30 I was looking at the dining room menu for tonight when I remembered, there is a summer concert in the park series starting. Tonight at Mitchell Park, Petty Theft (Tom Petty cover band). Well, what the heck.
Rather than get out the Forester, I took Lyft for the 3-mile ride. Probably picked up at least a mile of that walking just getting from one end of the large park to the other and back. They had advertised “food trucks” but there was only one. I had a burrito, it wasn’t bad. But I did not have what everybody else had come with, a chair or at least a blanket.
So I stood around and listened a while and decided I wasn’t that big a Tom Petty fan after all, so I came on home.
Brought Fred Forester up from the garage at 8:30 and Joanne climbed in and we were off to Town and Country for coffee at Douce France. And a little grocery shopping at TJ’s. Then went and sat by the duck pond for a bit.
Last night late Frank from FOPAL had texted me, that there were eleven boxes waiting at my section. So now I grabbed a sandwich and went down there and spent nearly 4 hours processing all those donations. Longest I ever spent there — I record my time in a book on the way out and it is usually 1:30 or 2:00. This time 3:45, a record.
After supper finally got around to practicing some music.
First scheduled activity today was to board the Channing House bus with 20 other residents to go for a trip to the Computer History Museum. I was the docent for this tour. Unfortunately the museum had scheduled three other tours to start in the same hour. Fortunately I know my talk well enough that I could stall, or speed up to keep from colliding with the other docents. At one point we just skipped around one. Anyway my 20 neighbors seemed to have a good time.
In the afternoon I conferred with Joanne about an insurance issue that threatened our car share deal, but we figured out a satisfactory solution.
Then I joined Gwen and Betsy, mainstays of the Entertainment committee, in going through the two-drawer file of old Entertainment Committee documents in the Green Room. We filled a large box for recycling, saved maybe 5 pounds of paper for Diane the archivist to sort through. She wants the 2-drawer file; she’s going to get it with some possibly valuable material to sort through and discard.
Took a standard walk in the morning. Did some good things in the rest of the morning and I can’t remember what. At 2 we had the monthly AV meeting. One highlight was the introduction of a new IT staff member, Andrew, a pleasant young man. Another was Tom, who demonstrated that you could get a movie going on Netflix, and project it on the auditorium screen. I had thought you couldn’t; apparently I was wrong, and glad to learn that.
This evening we had a talk by long-time local politician, now retired, Joe Simitian. He gave his analysis of the state of the nation now and how it came about. In a nutshell: 50 years during which
only the top 10% (never mind the 1% or the fabulous 0.1%) made economic gains, 90% of the population has at best held their position;
the foreign-born population increased from 4% of the population to 15%
and one party found a way to capitalize on the resulting discontent. In 1970, senators from the poorest 20 states, he said, were mostly Democrats, and senators from the richest 20 states were mostly Republican. This has inverted; today the poorest states are mostly represented by Republican senators, and the richest states, by Democrats. In politics, the candidate that says “I hear your pain, and here’s what we’re going to do about it” has the edge. Interesting and amusing talk by a skilled presenter.
First scheduled thing today was to meet with Leah Lin, my medical communicator, at 9:30. Before that I tidied the apartment, made up a batch of breakfast shakes, and did a little gardening on the patio.
The meeting with Leah was a regularly scheduled thing, she likes to actually see a client every 6 months. We met at Mme Collette’s coffee shop for a pleasant chat. Then back for the writers group zoom. For various reasons the group was smaller than usual and only three people had contributed any writing.
After lunch I met with Gwen in the green room. She’s the Entertainment Committee treasurer, and wanted to have a look at the two-drawer file of old Ent.Com. files. She will check with staff to see what if any needs to be kept. Seven years for IRS docs, right? That would be 2018; there are things in that file dating back to the 1990s.
Then I edited the video of the book talk the other day. This was very frustrating. Something was wrong with Professor Chang’s microphone. It wasn’t apparent at the time; everybody could hear him fine. But in the video his voice drops to inaudible every couple of words. Makes the video very difficult to listen to. I apologized to Gigi, the book talk producer. She watched it and said it is still good enough to keep on our Vimeo page.
Just a packed day. First thing I filled out the DMV form for release of responsibility for the Prius, put it in a stamped and very carefully addressed envelope, and mailed it as I headed out for a walk (3.8 miles for the day, yay). Picked up a prescription on the return leg.
Then immediately off to FOPAL to process 7 boxes of computer books (first solo drive in Fred the Forester). Back at 3:30 just in time for the 4pm Common Areas committee. Which is progressing.
After supper I put a half-hour with the guitar. First time I’ve played anything for a week, tsk tsk.
Codgerville 