Thursday 02/13/2025

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.

Anyway that was the day.

Wednesday 02/12/2025

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.

Tuesday 02/11/2025

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)

02/10/2025

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.

Sunday 02/09/2025

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.

Saturday 02/08/2025

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.

Friday 02/07/2025

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.

Thursday 02/06/2025

Headed out early on a rainy day to drive to the Shustek Center. CHM is finally restarting volunteer workdays there for the first time in a good while. However they are still in the process of converting to the new database named QI, so we cannot as yet make new entries. So no cataloging. And when something is relocated, we have to note that on a paper list because locations can’t be updated yet. I, Toni and Bud started the task of digitizing the Loan Records, a complicated clerical task.

In the evening we had a concert, no I was not the person running the microphones, by a local singer, Thu Ho, accompanied by a good pianist and an excellent upright bass player. Standard jazz numbers.

Wednesday 01/05/2025

As I was planning a walk later, I took a shorter walk in the morning, a mile around to have breakfast at a nice coffee shop. Later I processed the video of the Shakespeare group and put it on my public dropbox and emailed the director. Who hasn’t replied yet. Played some music and then it was time for early lunch.

At 12:30 I met with Joanne for the walk she was coordinating, normally several people but today only me, her, and Martha. We walked a couple of miles around the Baylands. The Baylands are a large area, maybe a couple of miles on a side? of sloughs and banks on the edge of the Bay. For decades up until about 1990, Palo Alto had a garbage landfill there, building up quite a hill of trash that was sealed with layers of clay and soil. Eventually, not sure what year, it was converted to a public park. The hill, or series of mounds of sealed trash, covers many acres, twice the size of our Old Ranch at least, and has the local name of Mount Trashmore. And there are paths over and around it and public art works and stuff. So that was nice, and I ended up with 13K steps and 4.8 miles for the day.

On the drive back, Martha and I were trading memories of IBM — she was a systems engineer out of the San Francisco office a few years after I was a customer engineer there. (Her last name is Claypool, in case that rings any bells with Scott?)

After supper I set up the auditorium for a talk. This was by Anton Eremin, a 21-year-old immigrant from the Soviet Union, where he was imprisoned for protesting the Ukraine war. He got away to Mexico and came into the USA for political asylum. Quite an impressive, articulate guy. He arrived two years ago with no English; he now speaks it very well with little accent. He continues to be an activist, supporting protest groups inside Russia, and also agitating for better treatment of refugees here. To a question from the audience, did the USA meet your expectations when you finally got here? He noted that yes we have political freedom and the police don’t arrest and torture you for saying what you think. On the other hand, in the streets of Vladivostok there are no homeless, no graffiti, no fentanyl. So, you know, pros and cons.

Tuesday 02/04/2025

At 8am an AV contractor was supposed to come to look at problems with our sound board. They were delayed, arrived more like 9. The two problems were, One, the BlueTooth module was inop.; we used to be able to pair a phone with the board and play music through the system, but it stopped working. Two, there is an effects, or FX module that you use to add reverb to inputs and it doesn’t work.

The contractor’s analysis: it’s broken. Have to send it back. But we can’t do without it, can you give us a loaner? I’m not sure what the upshot was, I had to leave. Our IT guy Paul finished the transaction.

I had just time to write up a contribution to the writers group for the prompt, a memorable beverage. Lots of interesting contributions. Mine was pretty trivial, I won’t bother quoting it.

Later in the day while my room was being cleaned, I took the guitar to the music room on the 9th floor and practiced. I sounded pretty good. And did other stuff, like re-making the drama group video because some people preferred their morning performance when I’d used the evening one. So it goes.