Thursday 11/27/2025

Started the day with a nice walk. Joanne and I walked to Cafe Zoe, just for the heck of it. In the last block she said, “Are you sure they’ll be open?” and of course, they weren’t. So we started walking home and diverted slightly to pass a block away from Mme. Collette’s and we could see people going in and out, so yay, it was open. So we could have a cup ‘n a cake after all. Even though the schedule posted on the shop door said, “Thanksgiving: closed”. I could see why they were open, they were doing a heavy business in doordash and other carryout trade.

Later in the day I tried to subscribe to the Chronicle, but their ##$% web interface fell over and give an error message, so I don’t know if I subscribed or not. Why the #$% can’t businesses get this shit right?

And worked out the right chords and timing to “Feliz Navidad”, now all I have to do is remember to practice it a few times before the first rehearsal which is barely a week away.

Dining Services put on a very elaborate lunch buffet. I came in right at 12. There must have been 20 reserved tables. At least half the total tables in the big dining room. You can tell when someone has reserved a table, there’s a sign with their name on it.

Took another walk alone in the afternoon, 10K steps and 4 miles for the day.

Sack supper in the 6th floor dining room with just Jerry and Betty. Apparently everyone else on the floor has a relative to visit. But it’s ok.

Fooled around with Netflix, looking for some old films I might want to watch and was kind of disappointed in how few there seem to be. Maybe I’m not doing it right.

Wednesday 11/26/2025

Wednesdays Joanne likes to organize a hike, and today the plan was to walk the Arastradero Preserve, yet again as we have been there often. Joanne L and her partner Erica came along. It was a very nice day, cool and clear with nice mists setting the hills off.

3.5 miles; back to CH at 11:45, I went in for an early lunch while Joanne took Fred for some errands. After lunch I took Fred and drove to FOPAL to deal with the 8 boxes of priced books from the big donation. The job was to figure out where to put them on my shelves. I got permission to use one of the rolling red display carts that are extra shelf space for special sales. This I loaded up with shelf of all Ruby/Rails books, and a shelf of books all about designing or debugging embedded systems (computers built into appliances) which was apparently a specialty of the donor. Moving some other sections around got me shelf space for the rest. Three hours and I had it all cleaned up and off the floor. More to do on Monday, but at least it’s tidy.

Time to chill for an hour and then we met with Lou and Alice for a planned dinner. Lou had invited us to dine with them a week ago. He is one of my more impressive neighbors, both of them had important roles with various NGOs, the World Bank, stuff like that, he was on the board of the California high speed rail project for a while; but also very pleasant, smart people.

Tuesday 11/25/2025

Started the day most pleasantly with a walk to the shopping center with Joanne. At 10:30 CH had arranged for a talk about Medicare and such with an expert, I believe he was here last year as well. Intellectual interest to me, as I am content with the IBM/UHC PPO.

However a big thing happened. I have been looking for someone I can train to edit event videos. One possibility I had in mind was a new resident, Jean Yao, who is very energetic and seems to want to be into everything going on. So I asked her about computer use, yes, she is comfortable with computers, she was an “analyst”, I don’t know what kind. So would she like to learn this new skill? Sure, she’d be happy too. Her son is giving her a new laptop, so we’ll start after the holidays.

After lunch spent some time trying to nail down the chords for “Feliz Navidad”. Jose Feliciano in the official recordings that I’ve heard, plays it at such a fast tempo I can’t get the rhythm right. I have to slow it down, and change the key so I can sing it. Oh well.

At 3:30 it was time for the quarterly meeting of the Tech Squad, the volunteer team who provide first-line IT support for residents. The big news here from our organizer, Bert, was that according to his spreadsheet, the number of calls has been dropping. Last year he was averaging 3 point something calls a day, now it is down to 2 point something. Nobody could think of a reason why. My guess is it will shoot up again after the holidays when everybody gets electronic gifts from their kids.

Following that it was the monthly meeting of the AV team. December is a relatively light month. I signed up for only a book talk and the holiday music show. I need to enlist somebody to relieve me running the cameras for that, too.

Supper followed by at 7pm, a monthly sing-along. Except they had a typo in the elevator sign this time, “Come to the Song-along” and everybody thought that was cute, plus some people attend just to listen, not sing; so Song-along is what we are going to have from now on.

Monday 11/24/2025

I went early to FOPAL, got there at 8:30, got home at 3:30. Processed all 20+ remaining boxes of that massive donation. Now I have a much smaller pile of 9 boxes of books that have been price-marked. But not organized. I need to organize them, separate them out into categories. Like, I know there is just a bunch of books on the Ruby scripting language and its web platform, Rails. But they are scattered through all 9 boxes. I need to get them together, maybe find some duplicates, and decide how to display them on my shelves. Similarly a couple of other categories. I’m planning to do all that on Wednesday afternoon.

Quiet afternoon, now to watch a bit of TV.

Here’s a picture from last night’s concert, taken by another CH resident who had a clear shot for pictures (I did not).

Sunday 11/23/2025

Yesterday afternoon Frank texted a picture of a wall of donations at my section. Clearly some computer dude had died and his widow donated his library. So I decided to go down there and get some work done today. This is what I found.

That’s 29 boxes, 5 stacks of five and one of four. I put in 3 hours and processed 9 of them. Based on the pub dates, the anonymous donor was really busy with programming in the mid-teens. Hardly anything pre-2000, or post-2015.

Finished tweaking my passkeys writeup and sent it to the tech squad mailing list. The rest of the day I didn’t do much. Read, watched YT videos. Did not practice guitar.

Saturday 11/22/2025

A completely unscheduled day. When I said that yesterday, Joanne said, facetiously, “Oh what will you do with yourself?” Well, I walked to the local farmers market. Walking back I was thinking about maybe trying to use an AI to do some coding. I’ve been reading about programming with AIs.

Then I got to thinking about another issue, passkeys. Lately web sites have begun bugging you, when you log in with a passWORD, to create a passKEY. Various residents have asked me if they should do that or ignore it and I’ve had to say, I don’t recommend it because I don’t understand it. Well, how about I get to understand it? That’ll fill some time.

I started by having a long chat with Claude.ai, and that was very helpful. (You can read our convo here.) Then I read some of the docs Claude referenced. Then, being a compulsive tech writer, I drafted a summary intended for my colleagues on the Tech Squad. That still needs tidying up, but that filled the afternoon rather well.

At 4 I went down the hall and had a cup of tea with Dr. Margaret. Then went downstairs for an early supper. At 6:30 Joanne found me in the lobby and we walked 4 blocks to the 1st Presbyterian Church, for a concert. Weeks ago we had walked past 1st Pres. and noticed a poster, for a free concert by their “musician in residence”, a Kurdish guy skilled in the instruments of that part of the world. Here’s the description.

It was a nice event. The place was filled, a couple hundred people easily, and at least ten of our neighbors from CH. The music was very much middle-eastern, twangy stringed instruments playing repetitive patterns that reminded me of Indian sitar sounds, and very skilled drumming like Indian tabla drumming but different. The high point was when a lovely woman in a flowing white gown came out and did a Sufi whirling dance. For at least ten minutes she spun slow and fast and slow, making various arm postures as she went. It was hypnotic for everybody. Afterwards people were looking at each other and saying, “how does she not fall down with vertigo after that?”

Friday 11/21/2025

Less than 2 weeks remain to the end of this blog’s year. (Recall that it began with Day One on 12/2/2018.) So the seventh year is winding up. Am I a codger yet?

Took the customary Friday morning walk with Joanne, which has become a treasured ritual for both of us. After that I took an easy tech squad call, a Mac issue quickly solved by a simple change in the System Settings app.

At 11 the AI interest group met. We mainly talked about the earlier meeting with the folks from Stanford Robotics, and about how their goals don’t really align with ours: they have solutions they understand and want to promote; we have needs they don’t really have solutions for.

Spent the afternoon reading, playing guitar (badly; trying to learn new songs and I suck) and catching up on my youtube subscriptions.

Ate dinner my room, having the chicken tender and fries I brought back from yesterday’s restaurant lunch.

Thursday 11/20/2025

Today’s fun was for me and Joanne to drive to the City, to the de Young museum, to view the exhibit “Art of Manga“, and then to have lunch. Which we did, and it was very pleasant. The manga art is impressive but viewing acres of pen-and-ink cartoons with speech bubbles in Japanese, got a little wearing. Here’s a panorama of two of the 8 rooms, Joanne at extreme left.

I was disappointed that the artist of the one manga book I have read, Azumanga Daioh, was not represented among the featured artists.

Then we walked a few blocks over to Irving street and had lunch in the Foghorn Taproom. The food was good, and cheap, and we brought home extras for our respective lunches another day. It was cool, the N Judah stops directly in front of the restaurant, so I was watching it come and go from our table. Of course it isn’t green any more, and the wheels don’t shriek going around the bend at 8th, but such is progress.

Wednesday 11/19/2025

In the morning, Joanne had organized a hike with Joanne the lesser and Erika. We walked the Stanford Dish loop, 3.5 miles. I ended the day with 12,540 steps and 4.7 miles. Weather was perfect for a strenuous walk, overcast and breezy. And we saw the craziest sight:

This white Dish Network van came down the paved hiking path and turned up the service road to the giant dish. You maybe thought the Dish was for radio-astronomy? Seems like it’s for pulling in ESPNU for the campus maybe.

Had a nice nap after lunch. Then after supper we met up and drove to the Bing concert hall on campus to attend Morgan Freeman’s Blues Symphonic Experience. Which was… OK. Definitely not great. Some pretty good blues musicians on stage, backed by a classic string quartet (2 violins, viola, bass viol). A giant video screen above where Mr. Freeman, recorded, introduced each number, and where they showed a lot of various graphics. The sound mix was not good at all, too heavy on the bass, couldn’t hear the harmonica or the vocals; and the amplified string quartet didn’t add anything at all to the music IMHO. But the second half wasn’t bad.

Tuesday 11/18/2025

Massively overscheduled. First thing was to head out walking to the office of what might be my new doctor. This Dr. Chu, member of a group practice providing what is now called concierge medicine, old style family practice where you can get a next-day appointment, or if you are sick the doctor can come to your home to see you. There’s a price for that of course, you pay $500 per month to be a client. On Joanne’s recommendation I signed up for a “meet and greet” with Dr. Chu who gave a good impression, a confident and fatherly sort of guy who answered all my questions. He had a question about my insurance coverage, though, which I need to answer before the deal can go through. And of course the United Health Care website is down.

Back in time to do the cleanup for housekeeping day; then time for the writers meeting and of course I had nothing to contribute. I been busy, he whimpered. Then it was time to start the laundry which has to be done today because otherwise I’m out of socks. Grab some lunch while the washer runs, change loads, then go to the line dance class at 1:30.

Leave the line dance early at 1:55 to join the meeting of selected residents with the team from Stanford Robotics, giving them advice on what robots might or might not be able to do for us elders.

From that to the Car Free meeting at 3. From that back up to finish the laundry, folding and ironing and hanging up, then change pants, grab a hat and coat, and go join Joanne for dinner at 4:40. She is entertaining a long-time friend, Sue, who lives in Port Townsend but also has a place in SF, coming through to visit. We had a nice dinner at Pacific Catch in the shopping center, and then back to CH just in time to do this post, after which I am meeting them again to attend a movie in the auditorium — “The Sting” with Robert Redford.