Sunday 06/22/2025

Spent the morning getting the Prius washed and assembling all the documentation, maintenance history, etc. Darlene and Jessea arrived about 2 and we did the handoff. They are super happy to have the car.

After they left I moved Fred, Joanne’s Forester, into my parking spot in the garage. Hope being indoors at night isn’t too much of a shock for him. It’s been a bit of a shock for me. Being without a personal vehicle for the first time in, oh, 60 years? Yeah it would have been 1964 or 65 when I owned a car, as opposed to driving one of my parents’ cars.

Saturday 06/21/2025

Went on a nice morning drive in Joanne’s Subaru Forester, whose name, I have learned, is Fred. While enjoying the sun at Filoli, we signed an agreement we have been working on: a car-sharing agreement. This was initially Joanne’s idea: she uses Fred only a couple of days a week, and parks it in the surface lot at Channing House. Often there is no space, so she has to park on the street. I only use my car 3 or so times a week, and I have a spot in the underground garage. Joanne said, why don’t we share Fred and you can sell your car? We considered all the ins and outs carefully, and spent some time writing an agreement that we both signed this morning. She retains full possession; but I have been added to her insurance as an authorized driver. We will be splitting costs of everything, insurance, fuel, maintenance, going forward. I will keep my spot in the garage and we will park Fred there, safe under cover.

With the agreement signed, I called Cousin Darlene. She and her partner Jessea wanted to buy my car some time ago, and have been dithering about what to do with their aging Prius which needs a new engine. So I offered my car to them for a very favorable price, about half the book value. Darlene was delighted! They will come over tomorrow to sign the pink slip and take it away. And I will be car-less. Which is very scary: not owning a car for the first time in 60 years or so.

That settled, I drove the Prius for the next to last time down to the Museum to lead a nice tour on a busy afternoon.

Friday 06/20/2025

Had a meeting at 10 with a couple of people to look at boxes of old “entertainment committee” files in the green room. One box turned out to be all about dramatics, and that got shipped off to the one person who is self-identified as organizing amateur dramatics. The two-drawer file proved to have records about entertainment events going back more than 25 years, including neat bundles of canceled checks for 2002 and other years. I hadn’t brought boxes to dump stuff into. I will come back with some boxes and try to separate out genuine historical stuff and stuff to recycle.

Then the AI interest group met, and we kind of went down a rabbit hole of bitching about the internal website, familiarly known as ResWeb. And coming up with all kinds of things that staff “should” do to take advantage of AI. I put forward a minority opinion, saying how about we talk to the senior staff, find out what THEY are interested in, and offering our time and smarts to do research for that. Not sure if I made a dent.

Spent too much time walking to the hardware store to buy a nut, to fix a loose bolt, in the stand for the electronic keyboard we put on sale yesterday. Also edited 3 more chapters of Cecil’s book.

After supper attended a show by “The Great Thomsonini” an amateur magician. He did some pretty clever tricks, and I could not see how any of them worked.

Thursday 06/19/2025

First thing I took care of some bookkeeping for the Treasure Trove, documenting the items we had put on sale. Then off for a standard walk. Edited another chapter of Cecil’s biography and was so impressed I sent a couple of dramatic paragraphs in an email to the Fam.

Then at 1 down to the Museum to lead one of two, 2pm tours. It was Juneteenth and they expected a lot of people, so doubling up on the tours. In fact, the first tour went with 20+ and then I had another 20 when I started at 2:20, so yeah.

Took a tech squad call in the afternoon. Person complained that their Mac’s keyboard had gone nuts, when they tried to type a @ (upshift 2) they got a double-quote instead. I suspected an issue with keyboard mapping. MacOS lets you map your keyboard to the layout for your country. I did some deep research… ok, no, I asked Claude.ai. Literally asked: what MacOS keyboard mapping replaces @ with “? and got an immediate answer, probably the U.K. English keyboard, maybe the Australian English one. AI takes all the challenge out of researching tech questions but it sure is quick.

Went to the lady’s apartment, checked system settings, keyboard, and sure enough. I can’t explain how she managed to do it, it isn’t a single function key thing, you have to take some pains to change your keyboard mapping, but her iMac had been set to U.K. English keyboard. In and out in under 4 minutes.

Wednesday 06/18/2025

In the morning I worked on moving unwanted items out of the Green Room and into the gift shop’s third-floor furniture showroom.

Sidebar: gift shop, properly known (since a naming contest a year ago) as the Treasure Trove, is one of the most successful resident-run programs, routinely generating large amounts of cash for resident activities. When a person dies or moves permanently to the nursing wing, they or their relatives decide what to do with their stuff. Often, the choice is to just give it to the T. T. for resale. Residents and staff alike shop the T. T. for all sorts of stuff, from jewelry to housewares, and some furniture. Mary Beth, who runs the resident volunteer staff of the T. T., has set up a room on the 3rd floor where furniture and other large items are displayed for sale. She uses an open-auction system, where each item has a bid sheet, you enter your bid, after a month whoever posted the high bid gets to buy the item.

So this morning I moved a large Casio electronic keyboard and stand up there, and posted its bid sheet. That took some fussin’ because I discovered the stand was falling apart. I had to make trips to the resident workshop to find an allen wrench and so on.

Then I took a nice break and took Joanne out for a drive. She can only walk limited distance, like across the car park, so she was glad to get outside. We drove down to the old Palo Alto duck pond and watched birds and talked.

At 1 I joined the FOPAL monthly volunteer zoom meeting. No big news there. Then at 2 I met with Sandy and we moved the remaining items from the Green Room to the 3rd floor showroom and I made bid sheets for them using Mary Beth’s template as a guide.

And at 4 I met with the Good Times committee, another hour finalizing plans for the September show.

I completed editing two more chapters of Cecil’s autobiography. By editing I mean, reading it and correcting the minor errors the scanner software made. She told quite a story. Miserable. I really feel for my mother.

I also worked on a project that Joanne and I are cooking up, more on that later.

Tuesday 06/17/2025

Did a couple things in the morning: there’s some old equipment from the green room that I wanted Sandy to get rid of by giving away on NextDoor, so I organized the info on those and took some pictures of them and got it to her on a USB drive. And scheduled the next AV team meeting for next week. And wrote about 1000 words for the writers group.

Then the writers group meeting, and then it was lunch time. One medical item; when I got blood tests the other day they gave me a stool sample kit, and today I got around to getting that sample, so after the writers group I drove up to PAMF and turned the sample in. Then I started my laundry, which I have moved from Wednesdays to Fridays and now to Tuesdays.

While the first load was running I went to the auditorium and ran an experiment with zoom that I have been wanting to run. I put a monitor speaker on the stage and drove it from my phone playing music (Benny Goodman, actually). Then I started a zoom event and took my second laptop out to the lobby to be a remote attendee at this musical event. And like I feared, the music sounded like shit. Zoom does horrible things to audio, I presume to compress the bandwidth? Whatever, though the music sounded great in the auditorium, it was not fit to listen to, remotely.

This is not good as we have requests to send Auditorium events to our nursing center across the campus, using zoom.

Well if you look at the audio settings in the zoom app on your laptop, there are some options that should fix it, like the option “Use original sound for musicians”. But in our situation the sound from the microphones in the auditorium is funneled through a Zoom Room box. That’s a special automated client meant for remote meetings. I searched its menus and I could not find any sort of audio settings like that.

Then it was time for the Car Free meeting and I helped Lou the orgqnizer, set up his slides on the big screen. And then back to finish the laundry.

Monday 06/16/2025

Took the standard walk alone, early. Quickly prepared a presentation for the Event Coordinators meeting. Went to the meeting, presented on the problem of old files of the entertainment committee cluttering the Green Room. One person volunteered to help, and people suggested a couple of others. Emailed those others.

Then got a text from Joanne: she had taken a fall in her apartment, was texting from urgent care. She had a pelvic fracture; she could walk with a walker but it would take a while to heal. (8-12 weeks, I read later). She had used the CH transport service to get to urgent care and thanks, didn’t need me to drive her back, just go on with your day.

Which I reluctantly did, 2+ hours at FOPAL processing computer books. Back to CH. Joanne showed up for Rhonda’s open meeting, with her walker. In some pain but determined to continue eating in the dining room. She will see the CH PT person tomorrow. But obviously not going to be leading 3-mile walks for a few months at least.

After supper I took pictures of the items in the Green Room that we had decided could be given away. Sandy will post these on the NextDoor app. Anybody want a good-quality audio cassette player? Or a Casio electronic keyboard?

Sunday 06/15/2025

Watered the plants; did the puzzle. Took a bit of a walk. Spent the bulk of the day scanning my mother’s autobiography. The scanning went quite smoothly, but the .rtf files need editing. There are scan errors–not a lot, Vuescan does good work, but even 0.1% means 2 or 3 typos per page–and formatting issues. So after scanning I started editing, and got through the first two chapters, about her childhood. I had forgotten that her father, Samuel Neill, was a mean son of a bitch, depressive, emotionally abusive. He’d get “black moods” where he’d go days without saying a word to his wife and kids.

Went down to dinner and found myself feeling like granddad, low and mean, suddenly not liking anything or anybody.

Saturday 06/14/2025

Thought about the job of digitizing Cecil’s, and maybe Joyce’s autobiographies. Have to pull out the staples. Don’t want to discard after, so — binder. How big? Measure them, both a bit over half-inch thick, so 1-inch D-ring binders. Rather than ordering from amazon, I got the car out and drove 2 miles to Staples. Then started the process, got through the first chapter, realized I was not doing it right. Will have to start over but it will go fast. Fastish.

At 11 met with Bert, Carol, Jerry in the green room to try to make sense of the immense amount of clutter there. Rhonda has agreed to refurbish this room but there’s a ton of stuff left in it by literally decades of amateur organizers. We identified a lot of stuff that could be given away or trashed. I went off and emailed several people asking them to take responsibility for one part of the mess or another.

After lunch met up with Joanne and we walked across to where the No Kings march would be coming through. Lots of enthusiastic people with clever signs. (I especially like “Trump: a Faux King Joke”) Walked with them down to Rinconada park. March was very well organized with traffic monitors keeping people out of the road and making them obey traffic signals. No sign of police whatever.

At the park there were lots of booths for various orgs set up. The entertainment or speeches hadn’t started. There were plenty of seats in full sun, but all the shady spots were taken. We decided not to wait and went home.

At 5 I took a shower and dressed in nicer clothes, and at 5:30 met Joanne and we walked to one of her favorite restaurants, Vino Locale. How much her favorite? She’s been going there, usually with her group of old friends, for years. She walks in and the owner says “Joanne!” and gives her a big hug. And the manager greets her and the servers do too.

Friday 06/13/2025

Went for a fairly short walk in the morning (although 3.4 miles for the day) with Joanne, who is back from a fast trip to Ashland. We walked to Town and Country for coffee and to shop at Trader Joe’s, then hurried back so I could pick up my sack supper before 10am. Sack supper because there was an employee party this afternoon, so no dining services for supper.

During the day Kass called me to help on the 11th floor. The fifth floor had the duty for the monthly TGIF party. Their theme was “Over the Rainbow” and they wanted to show the Judy Garland clip of that song on the mobile TV. We had practiced doing this before so I thought all would be fine but of course not. Kass could mirror the screen of her laptop on the TV but as soon as it started playing a Quicktime movie it would stall. We eventually figured out a work-around, never mind the details.

In the afternoon I finished the job of putting the family album pictures on SmugMug and notified the few people who might care.

At 4:45 I went up to 11 for the TGIF. They had already played the Judy clip and stopped the playback, but I was told it went fine. They had copious good snacks, and I really wouldn’t have needed my sack supper, but I ate that anyway, later.

At 7 met with Joanne and we went to the Stanford Theater. This is a restored old movie palace, this week celebrating its 100th birthday by showing movies that were first shown in 1925, with accompaniment by the mighty Wurlitzer organ. The movie was “The Crowd” which was actually watchable. Though very slow-paced and corny, there was camera work that must have been mind-blowing at the time, and really decent acting.