Tuesday 05/13/2025

Should have been the writers meeting this morning but something was wrong with the zoom link, nobody could get on. I took advantage to leave early for FOPAL where I did the usual post-sale triage of books that hadn’t sold. There were no donations to process because they hadn’t gotten around to distributing the donations that were held back before the sale weekend. There’s some disarray among the volunteers in that organization; I’m a little concerned. But I only see a corner of it.

Back home I decided to do some thinking and writing. A week ago Bert had stirred a pot with an email in which he suggested that several of the things we do are violations of copyright. He sent this to Sally, who is the current president of the Resident Association. He raised legitimate issues, although they are issues that have existed literally for decades without anybody complaining. Bert had to poke all the sleeping dogs.

Well for one issue: for years there’s been a tradition of showing an opera off DVD on Saturday a month. In the auditorium projected on the big screen. 20 or 30 opera fans show up. Of course technically this is a clear violation of copyright. That’s one of five similar or related issues, or sleeping dogs, that Bert had to poke.

So I wanted Sally to understand the details of this. Sally is a sharp cookie, a highly experienced administrator. (She’s only been president of three different colleges.) I am hoping she will figure out how to handle these issues and how to present them to our staff administrators, who are not aware (or seem not to be aware) of them. So I wrote a backgrounder, a survey of the different things that residents are in the habit of doing for decades that are technically violations of intellectual property law. I found a lot of good info and pulled it all together in a readable fashion, and sent it to her.

There’s a concert tonight, some school choir thing, which I think I will go to. Mind you, if they perform a song that is owned by ASCAP or BMI — and damn few songs are not — they should pay a performance fee. Except that music performed for educational purposes is exempt. Fine, around their school rehearsals. But this performance outside their school? Technically they should pay.

Monday 05/12/2025

Pretty much a day of being of service to others. Srsly. Resident Association meeting in the morning, I didn’t have much to do with that other than attending. Then I charged off down to FOPAL but for reasons, it was in a big mess after the sale weekend, and the boxes of donations, and anything else I would use, weren’t available. So I turned around and headed home, I’ll go back tomorrow or Wednesday.

After lunch I decided to tackle a long-standing problem of not being able to play DVDs or Blu-Ray discs on the 11th floor. It took an hour of debugging and analysis to figure out, but I solved the problem and now we can show movies there again.

Then I realized there was a video of a book talk that I should have edited and posted but had not, so I did that, which took the rest of the afternoon. I ate a sandwich in my room for supper. Not complaining, just reporting.

Sunday 05/11/2025

Usual Sunday morning frittering around. Picked up my sack supper — dining room taking the evening off for Mother’s Day. At 1:30 met with Joanne and we drove to the south side of Edgewood County Park and did a 3-mile hike. I had picked that destination hoping to see wildflowers, but the season has already advanced; there were few. A very nice walk anyway. Even though, halfway in, I stepped wrong and pulled a muscle in my right calf. Still sore now, 5 hours and 2 tylenol later.

Sixth floor met for picnic supper in our dining room. Nice.

Saturday 05/10/2025

Whoopee an uncommitted day on my calendar. In the morning I walked to Midtown for breakfast, and back. Three miles and a bit for the day.

Then I spent much of the rest of the day editing the video of the spring concert of last Wednesday. Including my own performance, here’s a link that goes directly to that. An hour and a half of that work was persuading the Midjourney AI to make a nice title card I could use between each act in the video.

I am seriously conflicted about my performance. Quite a few people praised me for it, nobody said anything bad. But the huge difference between what I hear in my head when I’m singing, and what I hear on the video… In my bedroom I can persuade myself that I’m pretty good, but my gosh from outside I am so far from any professional level of performance.

Anyway that was the day pretty much.

Friday 05/09/2025

Started the day with what has become our customary Friday morning walk to Toguy wn & Country, to shop Trader Joe’s and have coffee at Douce France. Back to CH in good time to make the Line Dance class, which is a darn good workout, frankly.

Had a quiet lunch in my room. Then at 1pm went to the auditorium to help set up for a memorial. I barely knew the guy being memorialized, Bruce Heister, maybe talked to him once. By all the reminiscences today he was super-organized, always planning and preparing, and his daughter Megan who organized the show certainly continued that tradition. With only a little help from me she had a zoom going with 25 or 30 remote people, two different slide shows shared on the screen, and a program of about 10 people sharing memories. It all went off smoothly and wrapped up in just over an hour.

That was about it for the day. I napped for a while, didn’t feel hungry so skipped dinner. Watched some TV, early bed.

Thursday 05/08/2025

At 10 I met with Bert on the 11th floor and we ganged up on the TV there. We managed to suppress the Samsung “Smart Hub” with its meaningless and intrusive home page, so the TV just starts up showing the Comcast tv programming. We played around with the Blu-Ray player but could not get it to play nice with the Yamaha receiver.

Then down to FOPAL to lead a private tour for 24 Educators from Monterey county. Took them all around, showed them the exhibits and the 1401 in action. Nice group.

Wednesday 05/07/2025

Today was the day for the Channing House Spring Concert. We’d rehearsed yesterday afternoon and I had left the stage set up, so there was little to do to prepare for the 10am show. The earlier performance is specifically so that the aides can wheel people across from the AL floor to attend; plus some people from the IL tower prefer to attend then. There were about 60 people in the audience for that show. Everybody did their parts well. My little 2-song set went down well.

Between then and 6pm when I went to set up for the evening show at 7pm, I did my laundry, and then lounged around and napped. The evening show was SRO, at least 90 people. Everybody did well, and I got some nice “you were great” comments during the reception afterward. So that was nice.

I got video of both shows, and sometime soon — Friday maybe — I will edit a final version using the best performances from each show.

Tuesday 05/06/2025

The writers meeting cue was “my father”. It happens that I wrote a very short summary of the main points of my father’s life for this group, back in 2020, after I had OCR’d his autobiography. So I had that to read if it was appropriate, and the group did want to hear it so I read it again.

Prior to the writers meeting I worked on editing a video of a talk from a week, or two weeks ago. I finished that just after lunch. Then I went down and set up the auditorium for the Musicale tech rehearsal which was to be at 3pm. At 2pm, completely alone, I got on stage and ran through my two songs and did them perfectly. In the actual rehearsal, with 20 or so people watching, I did one ok, but had made some guitar mistakes in the second and got nervous. So a C+ at best for that effort.

Monday 05/05/2025

In the morning I had to do the AV for the First Monday Book Talk. The speaker was Albert Camarillo, a professor emiritus of history at Stanford. He talked about his book, Compton in My Soul about growing up Latino in LA in the 60s. Prof Camarillo was a pain for me trying to get a video recording. He gave an energetic and enthusiastic talk but he wouldn’t stay put. His computer was on the podium stage right, but he seemed to want to speak from the corner stage left. Every time he wanted to go to the next slide he would walk across the stage to the podium, talk from there for a minute, then cross back to the other side. Hell for a camera man. Aimed one camera at the podium and one at stage left, and then I just cut between them. Didn’t try to pan to follow him as he zoomed across the stage.

Then down to FOPAL to set up my section for the sale next weekend. Only one box of donations, so that took less than an hour.

At 4 was the monthly meeting of Poetry Out Loud, where a group organized and chaired by Joanne meet to each read one poem out loud. I had picked Ellen Bass’s poem, “Gate C22”. It is fun to read.

Sunday 05/04/2025

Sunday morning things. Then somehow I was busy the rest of the morning, I can’t remember with what. After lunch at 1:30 I met with Joanne and we walked over to the Stanford campus and looked at some of the outdoor sculpture, like “The Angel of Grief”.

We ended up at the cafe on the terrace over the Rodin sculpture garden where we had an excellent heart-to-heart talk. We really clarified our relationship, which we agree is: best friends. We are besties, but for good reasons we are not a “couple” in the usual sense of that word.

After supper I went to the auditorium for a showing of the movie Conclave which had been arranged in haste to take advantage of current events. Excellent movie. By sheer coincidence my pal Joanne showed up and sat next to me. She’d seen it in the theater but enjoyed seeing it again.