The mouse ignored the traps again and is still there. In fact it may be nibbling on wires as they do, because now the passenger seat belt warning is on even though nobody is in the seat. And the car still smelled funky when I took it out this morning. So I called Joanne and she agreed we could use her car for our date tonight. I will deal with the mouse by taking the car to Toyota tomorrow and let the pro’s deal with it.
At 3:30 we left in Joanne’s Subaru Forester for Oakland, where we attended a concert by Stephanie Trick and Paolo Alderighi, two performers I’ve been a fan of for years. It was an excellent concert, really good and fun.
Afterward we drove across Oakland to Soi4 Thai restaurant where by arrangement we met with cousin Darlene and her partner Jessea. Had an excellent thai dinner and conversation. Drove on home down 880 and 84, back by 9:30.
Had the morning pretty free. Did some actual reading. Also went and checked the goddam mousetraps in the car. They were un-sprung, but the mouse is definitely still there. Proof, a few fresh droppings, and now little balls of fluff, the little bastard is scraping fibres off the mats and (I guess) underside of the seats to make nest material.
I reloaded the traps with peanut butter bait, but also put a couple of droppings and a bit of the fluff in the trap, so it would smell familiar.
In the afternoon I was committed to helping Peter set up for a big “celebration of life” for his recently-deceased wife, Juthica. She was well known around CH and around the Stanford community, so the auditorium filled up and overflowed into the dining room. I managed the sound and the zoom (only 6 people attended on zoom, so that was a waste). The hour-long memorial was followed by a big reception in the lobby. I don’t want to know what Peter had to pay, because our dining services team laid out an elaborate snack bar with some indian food (Juthica was born in Calcutta) and other snacks, really a handsome spread, plus the usual drinks, for about 200 people.
I feel tired and plan to go to bed early. Tomorrow is a fun adventure day.
Oh yeah. For anyone who cares, here is a link to me performing Annie’s Song. All of the images behind me were made by the Midjourney AI image generator. Except the rose, that was an actual rose. But those people embracing? Totally imaginary.
Started the day in an excellent way, with a walk with Joanne. We stopped for coffee and I gave her a present, an inexpensive scarf, and she gave me a miniature box of high-class dark chocolates. I emphasized “inexpensive” because she has a very explicit policy of not accepting free tickets or meals from me, always insisting on paying her own way for everything. So as I told her, I kept it inexpensive so she wouldn’t be embarrassed by it. (And it did cost less than $20.) She liked it.
Then I had not a lot to do until after lunch. About 2 I went to the auditorium and did all the tech setup for the Good Times Valentine’s Day show. Then I had more time to kill, then went to early supper at 5. Finally got to be showtime. Here’s the audience before the show.
Extreme left, Susan P, whose job was to run the display of lyrics for the sing-along numbers. Various performers and organizers in the front rows. The place was full, 80 people or so, and the show went mostly correctly. There were a few tech glitches but nobody noticed. My performance of “Annie’s Song” was well-received, a good hand after.
So that’s behind me. There are still some things to do this weekend, then my schedule opens up, and I’m glad.
A quiet day between the rehearsal day and the performance day. I really think this will be my last Good Times show. It’s a lot of stress and a lot of work. Between FOPAL, CHM archive days, CHM docenting, CH AV committee, and Good Times, I need to prune back something. Not sure what yet, but something.
I started out early, taking the car over to the car wash at 8am. Got lucky, I could see a gap in the bands of rain on the weather map, so it was dry and partly sunny. Had them vacuum everything and shampoo the floor mats. The car smelled clean after. Then to the hardware store to buy two mouse traps, the clever kind that look like big hockey pucks. Baited them and put them on the floor in the back seat. Also left the windows partly down in the garage to let air move through. (I’m sure the mouses had their own way in via some hole in the floor pan or something, I’m not worried about them coming in the windows.)
Then I fixed the notes I’d taken during rehearsal. On the video, I stretched the opening of one song where I’d trimmed the intro too tight and the singers didn’t like it. Raised the volume level of two songs. Fixed a place where the transition between one song and the next was messed up. Re-made the video, a process that takes two hours. (One hour of iMovie processing it, and another hour of re-processing its output with the Handbrake app.) During that time I went down to the auditorium and got out the iMac used for displaying the lyrics, and fixed a bunch of nits about the format of the lyrics on the screen. Which brought me to lunch time. Well, having all these things to do, and knocking them off, gives a certain satisfaction.
At lunch I say jokingly that I gave up my masculinity. Yup, I’m gonna have to turn in my Guy Card. I was sitting next to Sue G, and she was going on about her car had “just stopped”. She moved it from a parking space on Channing into our parking lot, and when she parked “it just stopped” and won’t start. I had no idea what she could be describing, or what could possibly be wrong. She quite obviously was hoping I would say (imagine a John Wayne voice here) “Well shucks, Sue, let’s just go out and see what could be wrong with your little old car.”
Yeah? No.
I played dumb. Sympathetic but dumb. Not that I don’t like Sue, I enjoy talking to her, but I just didn’t want to get tagged with the role of substitute hubby for all the widows in the place.
The irony is, three hours later I met with Joanne later to work on a problem with the nav system in her Subaru. I hope Sue didn’t see me sitting in Joanne’s car.
Did the laundry, wrapped that up by 10am. Then went for a short run in the car, mainly to Safeway and Ace Hardware.
Something in the car smelt funny. Actually, funky. Have I left some food to rot? When I got back in the garage I looked around with a flashlight and found small black pellets, like black grains of wild rice, on the floor mats. I have a rodent! In my car. My car which I keep very clean. Kept very clean. The car with which I mean to drive with Joanne to a concert and dinner on Sunday.
Well, that’s something to do tomorrow. Get the car washed, including washing the floor mats — hmm I wonder if the car wash will be running, since rain is predicted. Wash or not, buy a couple of traps. Perplexity.ai says, droppings that size are probably from a mouse. So not big rat traps.
After lunch at 1pm I went to set up the auditorium for the Val Day show rehearsal at 3:30. Things worked pretty well, I only came away with 5 notes of things to change, and I sang well on my one number. But when I finally got everything shut down and put away it was 5:30 and I was bushed.
Started with an early walk. Had coffee at Verve at 7:45, then hit the dry cleaners at 8 when they opened, to pick up the sweater I left there on our walk on Friday. Back before 9, I called Marlys to complete a tech squad call. Helped her pair her iPhone with a new Panasonic phone she had bought as her landline house phone. Back to my room and Dr. Margaret called in a panic because her piece for the writers group had somehow gotten messed up. She had asked Prue to make it a PDF so she could distribute it with some pictures in it. Prue had for reasons unclear, ended up with it stored in iCloud and what Margaret had sent out was a link to that which nobody but her could open. Never mind. I got her straightened out. Then it was time for the meeting.
Betty was running the meeting because our usual zoom host, Nancy, was in Berkeley sitting beside her daughter who was in hospice care and expected to die soon. (The daughter did pass this afternoon, I heard later.) Betty asked me to be co-host, fine.
The prompt was to look at the gallery of candid “people” pictures I had put up outside my apartment, and pick one or two and write at least the opening of a story about them. We got some really good things out of this.
Three people wrote about the gal in the upper left. I wrote a story about the singer, lower left and the olive oil vendor upper center. I’ll paste it in below I guess.
While my room was being cleaned at 3-4 I took the guitar up to the 9th floor music room and practiced.
Then I finally tasted Kombucha. I had been curious about kombucha, so sometime last week I picked up several bottles of different brands at the market. Today I pulled them out the fridge and opened them up and tasted them. Bleagh. Kombucha tastes like carbonated vinegar. Some of them have other flavors added, so they tasted like carbonated vinegar with added ginger, or lemon, or something. But always very sour, vinegary, and a little bit fizzy. Not going to be a kombucha fan, thanks.
After supper I wrote a long technical email. Our sound board in the auditorium needs to be replaced, and the contractor has proposed a Yamaha mixer board which would be ok, except that it lacks Bluetooth input. The reason we need to replace our board is because its Bluetooth input is broken! So, duh, we need to get an exact replacement, which is available at the same damn price so why did they recommend a different brand? I didn’t put it like that.
Transaction at the Boise Farmer’s Market
I wanted to write a scene where the gal is busking somewhere and then goes to the olive oil seller to buy something illegal, some kind of contraband, but I didn’t want her to be a druggy, so what? Then I remembered that in some states, abortion is completely illegal and so are the drugs that induce it. So… (click in this to be able to scroll it)
The day started with the monthly Resident Association meeting. Nothing special worth noting. My UHC insurance had scheduled a window from 10 to 2, for a drop-in visit by a nurse practitioner to check on me, which is nice little feature of the IBM-subsidized policy. At 9am, just as the RA meeting was starting, my phone buzzed; it was that nurse calling to say she was ill today and would reschedule. So suddenly I didn’t have to hang about waiting for that. So at 10 I could head out for FOPAL. The monthly sale was last weekend, so this was the time I go through all the books remaining on the shelf and remove the ones that have gone unsold too long and send them to the bargain room. Usually there are also boxes of new donations to price, but not this time. So I was in and out in 45 minutes.
Back to CH for lunch. Then I had a short meeting with Bert, who it turns out had done a very clever political thing with staff, too complicated to describe here, but might have good results in a few months, or years. Or never.
Now with time on my hands I sat down and wrote something for the writers group tomorrow. First time in a long time I’ve done that assignment on the day before the meeting. Good stuff, too. The prompt was to look at the faces in a collection of candid street photos, choose one or more to be a character, and write at least the beginning of a story about that character.
Still time to spare. So I took two Mac laptops down to the auditorium to try to solve the issue I hit the other day, where it seemed that videos embedded in Keynote presentation slides, were not playing back properly, the audio broke up and stuttered and got out of sync with the video.
Turns out the problem was with the newer MacBook. It has always had problems driving our projector. The video slides played perfectly, smooth as butter, with the 10-year-old MacBook driving the projector. Then I got out an even older MacBook Air we keep in a storage locker and it also, played the material perfectly. Only the newer (2022) one with the Apple Silicon had a problem. So that resolves my problem for the Val Day show; I’ll use the two old machines and it will be fine.
Watered the plants, did the puzzle. Actually, didn’t do the puzzle because the themed answers were so dumb I couldn’t get some of them. Then worked a couple of hours in the auditorium and with Jerry’s help figured out solutions to the problems with stage monitors. Gave up on doing bluetooth into the audio system. Whatever.
Then rather than watch the Superb Owl I went over to Stanford Shopping Center and tried to find an appropriate V-day gift for um, someone. Who I don’t think reads this blog but could. Anyway I couldn’t find a suitably attractive instance of what I was thinking about. So came home and ordered what might be an adequate version, and if it isn’t, it wasn’t expensive anyway.
Then Joanne texted me asking if I wanted to go out to dinner at Dinah’s. Where I have not eaten in decades, so sure, why not. So we did. Nice supper.
I had three tech appointments in a row. At 9am I trained David T. in the use of the lecternette on the 11th floor. At 10 I met with Joanne to help her figure out a problem with her phone. Her carrier wanted her to update to an e-SIM and it had failed the first time. But it worked this time so that was easy. At 11 I met with Leon at Marlys’s apartment to try to get her laptop to do screen mirroring on her Samsung TV. We failed, so we helped her order an HDMI cable. She’s sharp enough to install it herself.
In the afternoon I worked on issues from the ValDay rehearsal yesterday. One of several was that Kay wanted to play her flute along with Al Martino singing “Spanish Eyes” but she wants to (has to?) play in the key of G. In every youtube video, Mr. Martino sings the first verse in E-flat and then at the halfway point, he and his orchestra modulate up to G and sing the rest in G. So to make it all in G, I had to pull out the audio into a separate file; split that file in half at the exact point he changes key; run the first half through a website where I can change pitch up to G; put the two files together with the video and add it back to the main ValDay video. A matter of 90 minutes or so.
I went out for a short walk, and called Laurel to talk about a family issue she’s having. She reminded me of a very important thing I need to do. Which like a dope I hadn’t even thought of — a v-day present of some kind for Joanne. OMG how could I not think of that! So did some online shopping.
After supper I picked up two packages from Amazon, one a book (yes I actually bought a physical book) (Judy Dench, Shakespeare, the man who pays the rent, which I am sure other people here will want to read so I’ll put it in our library) and the other, a better (hopefully) Bluetooth transmitter. I’ll test that tomorrow.
Opened the day in the nicest way, with a companionable walk with Joanne up to Town and Country shopping center, to buy a couple of things at Trader Joe and have coffee-and at Douce France, Joanne’s favorite coffee shop. Well, not only hers, it’s very popular. Don’t tell Joanne, but I think the pastries at Mme Coulette’s are better. But we walked and chatted happily all the same.
Then I did a bunch of tech stuff. I replaced the microphone that got broken during the drama event last week. And I experimented with using BlueTooth to feed audio into our sound system. This involves sending audio from my laptop, at the AV desk, thirty feet and through a wall, to a media device in the electronics cabinet backstage. This seemed to work and I was very pleased. The quality of the music playing through that system was much better than if I fed it from the Mac’s headphone jack into an input on the sound board. Later, not so happy.
At 2 it was time go and set up for the big Val Day rehearsal. There were a lot of glitches, and I came away with a long list of things to alter in the video. My own performance of Annie’s Song went alright.
Neighbor Carolyn invited me to dinner with a couple other people, Bob and Romie, long dinner with lots of talk, very pleasant.
Codgerville 