Thursday 06/12/2025

In the morning I went for a shortish walk. On Saturday there is going to be a “No Kings” march and “democracy fair” at Rinconada park. People at CH are talking about car-pooling the ¾ mile to where they would intercept the march. I figure that we don’t need no carpool for that, but I wanted to measure the distance. Up to Waverly, over to Embarcadero, down to the park, back to CH. Turns it to be less than 2 miles. So that’s settled.

At 11 I joined a webinar by Smugmug.com. Smugmug is the photo sharing site where we put a lot of pictures we wanted to share. I have rather neglected our collection there for the past few years. But I’m a paying subscriber, so they sent me the invite to the webinar to show off some improvements. It was mostly about changes in the way they handle photo sales. Apparently a lot of members sell their pictures to people who order via Smugmug. I don’t, so it wasn’t too interesting, but it got me thinking about Smugmug again.

Last Friday I mentioned looking at the family photo album I had put together back in 2001. At that time I scanned all the “kodaks” in the albums my mother had made for me, and I believe on of Dennis’s also. Scanned and fixed up in photoshop, and organized and commented. Now I think, hell, I could put this collection into a Smugmug gallery as a simple way of getting it back online and shared with the 2 or 3 people who’d care. So I started doing that. It’ll take a few more days to finish but I made a good start.

Wednesday 06/11/2025

First thing was to walk the mile to PAMF for a blood draw. I have a physical coming up and the doctor ordered the usual tests. Walking a mile before breakfast, bleagh. Had a nice brekkie after at Douce France. That’s Joanne’s fave coffee shop, I would normally go to Peet’s in the same shopping center, but she’s away in Ashland this week and I wanted to be able to text her and say I was texting from Douce France.

Back to CH in time for the Line Dance class. Between the walk and the zillion steps of the class I had 3.3 miles on the phone today.

Quick lunch and then down to the museum to lead a tour at 1pm. Private tour, 45 students from a local junior college. Split the tour with another docent, Nomi Trapnell. She was telling me her husband was a big cheese at IBM back in the day. If I understood right, he took over 360 software development from the famous Fred Brooks. ANYway, the tour group was all 18-20, all cute and attentive but oh lordy did they make me feel old. Telling them how exciting it was when personal computers first came out in 1975, shit, that was 50 years ago. Ask your grandparents about it, kids, they’ll confirm my story.

Back home in time for the monthly 6th floor meeting. This time it was a little party with wine and snacks because our co-chairs Carolyn and Edie are handing the responsibility on to a new person, Jean. Then down to dinner, and shortly after to a lecture. This was a talk by the head of the Museum of American History, which is just a couple blocks away. He talked about some of the odder things in their collection. Like a motorized hair plucker. If you wanted to prune your eyebrows with a vibrating motorized tweezer.

And at 8:30 I’m pooped and going to bed early.

Tuesday 06/10/2025

Tidied up the apartment in anticipation of it being cleaned at noon. Then headed out the door for the standard walk at 8am. Nice cool morning, nice walk.

Writers meeting at 10:30. Cue was “that teacher really didn’t like me”. I had nothing. I can remember a few teachers. One I thought was incompetent (and he was) but none that really disliked me. Some good essays from the others, though. Especially one from Dr. Margaret, remembering being one of 2 female med students in a class of 100, in 1957.

Spent some time studying the songs of Randy Newman, thinking I could find one that I could perform. “Feels Like Home” would be nice to sing but no way could I play the accompaniment.

Attended the Appreciation Fund committee meeting. The Appreciation Fund is a big annual thing here. By law and custom, there is absolutely no tipping or gifting from residents to staff. However, annually the residents organize a fund drive to collect money which is given to staff, in proportion to length of service, at the staff Christmas Party. It’s one giant tip for a year of service. The App. Fund committee starts organizing now for a big kickoff party in October. My friend Kass is the chair and asked me to attend. I have committed only to doing the tech for the show and party in October. But there are a bunch more involved in the project.

Monday 06/09/2025

First up, the monthly Resident Association meeting. No big news. Well, the official introduction of the serving robots with their new names. This pair of robots bring food out from the kitchen to the dining room. They’ve been with us about a year now. Last month the newsletter team ran a naming contest, and the team of impartial judges picked, out of over a 100 suggestions, Bonnie and Clyde. So today they were introduced at the RA meeting, then went to work. Here’s Bonnie at work at supper tonight.

I split from the meeting at 10 and headed down to FOPAL to do the pre-sale cleanup of my section. Back from that about 1, thinking I had a committee meeting at 1:30 but in fact it was 2:30 so I needn’t have hurried. This was the common area advisory group (CAAG), reacting to the tentative upgrade sketches we’d been shown 2 weeks ago. I talked them over with Joanne on 6.171 and with Bert and Patty a couple of other times. Today everybody in the 10-person committee aired their three top issues. Quite interesting. Pretty general agreement, though, that the architects have no clue how we actually use the common spaces we have now. We’ll see how much effect we have.

Sunday 06/08/2025

Typical Sunday morning, quite pleasant. After the usual stuff, I took an easy walk to Gambel Gardens. Took some flower pics on the way. The iPhone 16 is more of a camera than any of the generations of Nikons I owned.

At 1 a four-car car-pool formed up out front, and 15 of us went off to The Pear theater for the Sunday matinee. This was the annual Pear Slices, a festival of short plays by local writers. There were 8 short plays, or skits. All were amusing, two or three were really well-written and well acted.

Here’s the flowers.

Saturday 06/07/2025

Did a lot of little things in the morning, also paid a bill, played a little guitar. After lunch Joanne and I drove in her car down to SJ to visit Dennis. Had a nice long chat, lots of reminiscing, I learned some things about his early years that I hadn’t known, or had forgotten.

Back to CH and a quiet afternoon.

Friday 06/06/2025

I had moved my laundry day to Friday to clear room to go to that movie on Wednesday, so I started it early at 7, so as to leave room for a nice morning walk with Joanne. Back in plenty of time for the Line Dance class at 10:30.

I had put together a quick cheat sheet on my various relatives to prime Joanne for when we visit Dennis tomorrow. That led me to looking at the family photo album I created back in, I can hardly believe this, 2001. For some time it was online, and I could put it back online now. I should do that. Oh well.

But that led me to the shelf in the closet where I have paper copies of the autobiographies of my mother Cecil, my father Emil, and my sister Joyce. A couple years ago I scanned Emil’s autobiography and converted it to a searchable text file. It now dawns on me I could, maybe should? do the same for Cecil’s and Joyce’s.

I did a quick test today. At some point in the 90s, Cecil wrote a 10-page essay recounting her recollections of my childhood and the various problems they had raising me. I have an app, VueScan, which is a great scanner app for photos, but I knew it had OCR (optical character recognition) abilities. I used it to scan that 10-page essay and I was amazed how easy it went, and how accurate the OCR was. It made a PDF that was a perfect image of the document, but the actual text was in it also. I was able to copy and paste the text out of the PDF to a text file and check it over, there were almost no errors, except it got a little confused where Cecil had inserted hand-written notes. And fast. VueScan is one of the great apps if you have a scanner. So maybe I will do those other two books. It would take a few hours for each. Anybody interested in the files, if I do?

Anyway for the amusement of my relatives here is an embarrassing picture from my archives.

Christmas 1960. How many of these people can you name? Hint, I’m the dork in the middle.

Thursday 06/05/2025

And the blog year is half over – 183 days down, 182 makes 365. I spent the first couple hours of the morning editing the notes that Bert had taken of our conference a couple of days ago. He and I and Patty have many many comments on Rhonda’s (actually her architect’s) sketch plan for renovations. I tried to get them organized into readable form.

I spent a while trying to get my fingers to play the deceptively simple opening to “Stuff That Works”. Actually thinking about it now, the chord sequence is the same as the old hymn, “Amazing Grace”. My fingers had some trouble.

After lunch went to FOPAL intending to do sorting, as I know they are backlogged in that area. However I found four boxes of computer books waiting and spent the time processing them.

Back to CH. Helped Joanne install a new backup disk on her Macbook. Then spent some time putting together a sketchy summary of my family history. Which reminded me of my mother’s autobiography. A couple of years back, I used OCR to make my father’s autobiography into a computer file, but I never did that for my mother’s. Or Joyce’s. Maybe I should do that, as they only exist as a very few paper copies now. Hmm. Another project.

Wednesday 06/04/2025

First event this morning was to join a hike organized by Joanne. Five of us, me, Joanne, Martha, and Joanne the other one and her partner Erica, got in Martha’s car and drove to Edgewood park. Martha favors the trailhead off Cañada road. We walked a big loop, 3.3 miles total, and back to CH in plenty of time for lunch.

After lunch I finished editing the video of Bob’s talk. This was fun. For some of the photos he showed, I applied a “Ken Burns” effect, a slow zoom in or out, which made it more interesting. Also he had played two short music clips, songs from The Student Prince, but the audio of these songs was pretty poor. So I found the songs online and patched in better sounding audio. Finally, I changed the order of things. He had ended his talk and had his family come up on stage for a picture, and then had continued to answer questions for a few minutes. So I moved the part about the family portrait to the end and made it look like he had answered questions right after saying “thanks”. The video editor is the master of time and space; reality is what I say it should be.

At 5 Joanne and I had a new adventure: we went out to a movie. This was her idea, to see Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, a rom-com. Its run was almost over, 5:45 today in Redwood City was almost the last showing anywhere close. So we took a Lyft to Redwood City. I thought this was a perfect use for a Lyft, a local trip but we wouldn’t have to mess with parking, it would take us right to the door. The movie was sweet and nice, about a writer struggling with PTSD (of a sort) and a caring but unreliable boyfriend. The right couple get together in the end, awwww. Part of the fun was that much of the dialogue was in French, and with good audio (unlike the DVD a couple nights ago) both of us were able to follow it a bit. Joanne’s French is stronger than mine, but I could get a word in 10. Or 20.

Tuesday 06/03/2025

Note the blog year is almost half over, that will be on day 6.183. Day 6.193 will by my move-in anniversary. Given all that, I was busy all day, doing I couldn’t now say what, but it was all things I needed to do, or felt so at the time.

The writers didn’t meet, as there was a local power outage at that time. This was the first real test of the emergency generator installed last year at great effort and expense, and it worked fine, two elevators remained functional throughout. Later I learned that the writers meeting had taken place. I had assumed that with no power, there’d be no wifi, but I guess that too was on the emergency generator circuit, so some people connected by zoom anyway.

At 2pm I met with Bert and Patty to discuss further our response to the proposed upgrades. Also I tried the damn blu-ray player that failed last night, and damned if it didn’t work just fine today. Bert thought somebody had been messing with the TV and/or the receiver.

Started editing the video of neighbor Bob’s talk.