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.

Monday 06/02/2025

First thing up was to do the AV for a First Monday book talk. The speaker was my newest 6th floor neighbor, Bob McLean. He moved in last year, a retired high school english teacher. The book he was presenting was a biography of Dorothy Donnelly who was a remarkable actress and writer around the turn of the last century, 100 years ago. The book had been written by Bob’s late wife. He did a good job of the presentation as you would expect of a long-time teacher, with lots of interesting pictures.

As soon as that was over I zipped off to FOPAL and spent two solid hours processing a bunch of books. Got back at 3:30 just in time to brush my hair and join Joanne’s Poetry Out Loud meeting. Nice poems to read and talk about.

That ended at 5 and it was off to the dining room for the monthly “dinner mixer”. As you come in the door you draw a table number from a hat, and sit with whoever draws the same number. I sat with Carol, Joan, and Alice. Although I know all three of them well, we agreed that the four of us had never sat at the same table before. So the mixer worked.

Back to my room expecting to join Patty on the 11th floor to assist her showing a movie at 7:30, but I had an email from another resident, Lee, saying that Bert had been helping her but he has a cold, could I please assist her? Simple problem, there is an offsite memorial for a long-time resident on Wednesday and she wanted to send the zoom link to the internal mailing list. Except the only copy of the zoom link she had was a printout. And zoom links are like 200 random characters long. But I kept paging through the material she had, and aha, she had received the same link in another email. So all she had to do was find that other email, copy the zoom link, and paste it into a new email. All complicated by the fact that she was using Yahoo mail on a PC, about which I know zip. But Lee is not an idiot and managed to do most of it herself.

Then up to 7 where I was confident the blu-ray player would show Patty’s movie. It was behaving perfectly for me after I fixed an issue, Day 6.159. And it didn’t work. Just like before, when the receiver is switched to the player as a source, the TV says it gets no signal. I am so fucking sick of that 11th floor media center. That 10 year old receiver is junk and the 1 year old Samung TV is a pain in the ass.

But 5 or 6 people were already settling in to watch the movie that Patty had invited them to see, what to do? I pulled the hdmi cable from the player out of the receiver and stuck it into a spare input on the TV itself. That showed the movie except that the sound broke up every few seconds so the dia ounded like th . Fortunately the movie was My Favorite Season and all the dialogue was in French. So everybody, about 9 people in all, sat and watched the whole thing reading the subtitles and nobody cared the sound was breaking up.

P.S. it wasn’t the old DVD disc, either. Patty just called me to say she played it on her personal TV and player and the audio is fine, no breakups. I’m fairly confident that the problem is the TV or the receiver again. The sound we hear is from speakers attached to the receiver (as normal in a “home theater” setup). The receiver is connected to the TV with an HDMI cable with ARC, audio return channel. So whatever sound the TV makes, comes to the receiver for amplification. All well and good normally. But in this case we had the signal from the DVD player going into the TV on HDMI 3, and the TV had to turn the audio around and send it out the ARC channel on HDMI 1 to the receiver. Somewhere along there is a glitch. Whatever, it’s all crap and should be replaced.

Sunday 06/01/2025

In the morning I took the car out and put gas in it for the month. (I’m really not using the car that much; I think very seriously about getting rid of it.) Then walked the Cal ave market and bought a bit of fruit. Got a bit misty-eyed at this. For years Marian and I would buy fruit at that market on a Sunday morning for the week’s meals.

After lunch I met with Joanne for a walk to the Palo Alto Congregational Church, which is a bit over a mile away on Louis @ Embarcadero. This was to hear a choir concert of 60s songs, sing-along and ice cream social. Been looking forward to this for weeks. Woopsie — it had been cancelled. Well, postponed to 8/31. We continued our walk to the relatively nearby Edgewood Plaza for coffees, then back to CH. My phone shows 12K steps, 4.5 miles for the day.

Coming out of supper I spotted Jerry, who had originally told me about the concert, and he was very apologetic. The director and pianist had both come down with covid 2 days before, and the news went out on the Congregational Church email list. Which we are not on, obvs.

Well we had a nice two-hour walk and coffee date, and made plans for next week. Joanne wants to see a movie, Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, so I got the info where it was playing and when, and made reservations. That’ll be Wednesday.