Sunday 09/22/2024

Nothing much today. Led a tour at the museum at noon, 20 people, it went well. Napped for about 2 hours in the afternoon, I guess that’s an achievement.

Saturday 09/21/2024

I was so wired after our show that I couldn’t sleep, which is rare for me. I have had 6 or 8 emails of congratulation on the show in general and some particularly on my performance.

Joan Baez was of course what made it a really special night. Here’s a picture somebody got of her, better than the one I took. Plus Jerry shot some video which you can view at this link, for however long he leaves it up. The longer clip is the one where she talks about her and MLK.

And then there’s the video of me and Mary doing YGAF, again for however long I leave it up.

Today I had nothing on the calendar so I did a little catch-up. I updated the pictures of London Bridges on my outside wall display, with pics of Southwark and London Bridges. Next time I change it out I will put up a bunch of pictures of Tower Bridge, and that will be it for bridges.

I tidied away all the tech stuff that I just threw in a bag last night. Then I remembered this is the start of CalTrain’s new all-electric train service, with free rides. So I walked to the Palo Alto station and rode the new train up as far as Hillsdale, and then back again. They are indeed beautiful, clean, smooth riding trains. I think next time I go to the City for SFJazz I’ll do the train.

Friday 09/23/2024

All day I was focused on the Folk Fest at 7:30pm. But for a relaxing change I walked to Cafe Zoe for breakfast. And yesterday by email I invited my friend Joanne to walk along, knowing that she usually takes a morning walk. So we had a pleasant walk and coffee and chatting about our neighbors and such. She’s a strong walker and as we approached CH she said, she wanted to walk the half mile up Homer street to where on Friday an artisanal bakery has a popup store. OK. So I ended up with over 10K steps, 4.2 miles. Thank you Joanne.

During the day I practiced my two numbers a couple of times. At 4pm I couldn’t stand it and went down and set up the auditorium for the show. Which only took 45 minutes. Then I had to kill more time. Got a quick bite of supper at 5:15 and then just went and paced around. The other cast and crew started showing up at 6, and by 7 people started to stream in.

Joan Baez arrived with my neighbors Tom and Nancy; Tom was her personal doctor from way back in the 60s, which is how we got her invited, and probably why she came. I think about a third of the 90+ people in the room had figured out who she was, but when about the 6th number in the program was a video of her singing Blowin in the Wind, she stood up from her front row seat, faced the audience, and led them in a sing-along, and everybody went nuts.

A few songs later it was We Shall Overcome, and when she stood up to lead the sing-along, the whole room stood up with her. That was an emotional moment! Then she did a little Q&A, with Tom asking her questions and her reminiscing. Only thing I remember was, that when she sang We Shall Overcome at the famous March on Washington (the day of the “I have a Dream” speech) she remembers that every time MLK talked about non-violence, she would get teary-eyed, and he used to tell people he liked having her sitting nearby because she was always crying when he said that.

I opened the show with City of New Orleans, Craig Allen on harmonica. We didn’t suck, got a nice round of applause. An hour later in the program, after it was time for Mary and me to do You’ve Got a Friend, with John on piano. We not only did not suck, we did our best singing evah. Mary’s voice was the strongest I’ve heard her, and her harmonies were impeccable. I saw her husband Andrew making a video so I’ll probably have that later.

And we all sang Good Night Irene and it was over. Everybody had a good time. Joan B stayed for the whole show, smiling, singing along, and applauding, so I guess she had a good time too. There were several little slip-ups but nothing got badly screwed up. A number of people complimented my singing, and there we are.

Thursday 09/19/2024

Taking it easy today. Took the standard walk, first time this week. Picked up a prescription on the way back. I had signed up for a bus trip to SFMOMA, but when I checked the trip had been canceled, not enough people signed up to justify renting a bus. So I spent some time gardening, cutting back a couple of begonias, and trying to fix up a poor little Hoya aka Wax Plant.

This plant was a sprig, a cutting from Lollie Kelleher’s kitchen window, given to Marian oh, I don’t know, let’s say 2015. She planted it in a 5-inch ball-shaped hanging pot in our kitchen window and it grew well. Propogated it to a hanging pot in another window. I brought both of those here. Hanging pot #2 was dropped and broke during the move, and I just shoved the root ball into a pot with some dirt and set it on my plant stand. Later I propogated that to hanging pot #3. All three of these dudes have spread out to multiple 18-inch branches.

Lately though they have been attacked by some kind of a fungus, I think, looks like black soot collecting on the leaves, also by aphids, and generally they look ratty. They barely bloomed, where they used to put out profuse numbers of the little white and purple blossoms. So was going to repot the one in the 5-inch pot, but it was in such bad shape that I decided instead to try to root some cuttings from it and start fresh. But after I took the cuttings, I took the two hanging pots inside and held them under the shower to wash some of the crud off, and sprayed them with insecticidal soap, and they look a little better.

At 3pm the Good Times committee met to finalize plans for tomorrow night. JB (who 2 years older than me, I learned, January 41 versus December 42) will be coming at 7 and we are arranging the seating so she will not be obvious to the rest of the audience. It will be interesting to see how many people recognize this gray-haired lady from the back, before she is introduced, which will be about 2/3 of the way through the program. She’s going to be right in my line of sight as I sing. Ghaaaaaaaa. No, I will ignore her completely. At least this 82-year-old can still sing. Can she? We will find out. Our joke is that we will try to look like so much fun that she decides to move into Channing House. Wouldn’t that be a kick?

Wednesday 09/18/2024

First thing, do the laundry. While it runs, edit the folk fest video to delete the two songs we decided to cut, and process that. Laundry done at 10. Drop a USB stick with the new video under Stew’s door.

Go up to the 11th floor, meet with Mary and John to practice YGAF one more time, work out some of the rough patches that showed up in the rehearsal yesterday.

Had lunch, then joined the 1pm monthly FOPAL post-sale zoom meeting. Sale brought in $21K. Janette dropped the factoid that ours is the 2nd largest used book sale in California (or Northern California?), 2nd only to San Francisco’s.

Two-thirty, went to the activity room to help a presenter from Avenidas who had come to address Lou’s “Car-Free” group. This is people who’ve given up their cars and share info on using public transit, Lyft, GoGo etc. The person from Avenidas was to present on use of Google Maps. She had her slides on an iPad, and I helped her get connected to our zoom room. I didn’t stay for the talk, figuring I knew Maps pretty well. At supper I heard from somebody who was there that she was not a good teacher and they didn’t get much from the talk.

At 4:30 I went down and set up a mic for musicians who were going to play for the monthly Birthday supper. And that was about it for a busy day.

Tuesday 09/17/2024

Excused myself from the writers group today because I wanted time to obsess about setting up for the folk festival full rehearsal at 1pm. Without the big mobile tv I had no way to show the videos that people are to sing along with. So I decided to sub in my personal 27in iMac. I got one of the shopping carts from the basement and at 11am I trucked the iMac down with my bag of other cables and bits, and put it on a table on the stage, with audio from its headphone jack into the sound board.

Plus Susan was tasked with sitting with her personal laptop, scrolling the sing-along lyrics on the big screen, except at the last minute Jerry had decided he needed his personally prepared video for his song, on that projector screen. Jerry is a heck of a nice guy and a good neighbor, but he’s also just a bit of a… never mind. He’s fine. It’s all good. So I had to train Susan how to switch between the lyric slide show and the video movie, and back. But she’s smart and got it quickly. I mean, that’s what 30 years of teaching college English Lit will do for you.

So 1pm came around and we ran through the show. I didn’t screw up my two numbers too badly or at all really and everybody else was fine. The show came out too long, so after an executive decision was made to cut two of the number.

Also, we have definite word that Joanie is coming, wants to come in early and see the whole show, and will address the group and maybe sing if her voice is up for it. Another reason to cut a couple of songs, to leave room for Joanie to talk longer if she wants to.

Shut everything down and put everything away, trucked my iMac back to my room and set it up again, and shut myself down for the day.

Monday 09/16/2024

Took the standard walk in reverse, it felt fine.

I didn’t mention that Friday, during the activity showcase, I saw that the big mobile TV–an 85-inch Samsung monitor mounted on a rolling cart–had been broken. Person unknown had somehow slammed it into something? And there was a foot-wide stripe of random colors down the middle of the screen. We are depending heavily on having that for the Folk Fest, we show videos of a number of songs on that TV for sing-alongs. Now it was out of commission. Friday I talked to IT manager Gerald about it briefly. Today after my walk I stopped in the IT office and checked. Happily they are on the case, just then ordering a new screen. So it will be usable on Friday, but probably not for rehearsal tomorrow.

Now it was time for the monthly event coordinators meeting. This is when everybody who sponsors events get together and fill in the calendar for the next month, and I can fill in our AV team spreadsheet with events we need to support.

Then off to FOPAL for the post-sale cleanup. That took a couple of hours. Home for a nap an to practice my numbers for the Folk Fest. The at 4pm it was Rhonda’s monthly meeting. Recently there had been announced a bunch of changes in how fitness classes would be run, which was very controversial among the many people who depend on the weekly “standing strength” or “sitting strength” or yoga or line dancing classes. Which I don’t, though probably should. Anyway Rhonda spent a lot of time justifying the changes, not to everyone’s satisfaction.

One big change is the end of putting fitness classes on Zoom, which apparently a bunch of people used. The reason is liability. She said that more and more assisted living homes, which we technically are, are being sued for lesser and lesser things. We had a waiver for zoom fitness during the pandemic, but according to the state licensing body, the pandemic is over. So if somebody fell, in their room while exercising to a zoom session run by CH, we could technically be sued by them (or a relative). So no more official CH zoom sessions. Only in-person classes with a licensed trainer in the room.

After that I got busy with more stuff. I had to edit the Folk Fest video because they had changed the sequence of songs. That’s an hour-long process of exporting from iMovie and processing through two other apps, but I could do other stuff meantime, paying a couple of bills, and scheduling zoom meetings for our October events. By the time I was done with that it was after 6, late for going down for dinner, and I wasn’t very hungry anyway. So ate a PBJ in my room.

Sunday 09/15/2024

My feet were sore after yesterday’s hike. Oh, and using the excellent Dish trail map I worked out that the total elevation change for the circuit is 479 feet. From the Stanford Gate which is where you park, up and around in either direction, you will gain 479 feet and lose it again. I had lots of time to wonder how much climbing I was doing, while I was slowly doing it, so… good to know, I guess.

Today about 2pm I got antsy and took the car down to San Jose to the art museum there. Actually there was some kind of mexican/native american festival on the plaza so I wandered around that too. But the main thing was, they had opened an exhibit of small objects by Alexander Calder, that I wanted to see. Calder made lots of jewelry and trinkets out of twisted wire, for instance. But the star of the show for me was this exquisite little mobile, about 18″ high and wide.

The tiny little wire loops that connect the rods just make you say awwww. That lily-pad plate that circles the neck is just soooo 60s. The whole thing, really. Eames chairs and bell-bottoms, the whole mid-century thing.

Saturday 09/14/2024

On a quiet morning I met with Mary for a short rehearsal of our song. Then I sat down with the three (3!) Tetris Jr. games I bought off eBay. The third one came in the mail yesterday.

One, from Japan, was in fine shape. I put batteries in and it worked fine.

One was sold as “junk for parts”. It had two problems. One of the little buttons on the face had broken. And when I put batteries in it, it kind of worked but a block of pixels on the little screen was dead.

The third, which came from Spain, was still in its original blister-pack. The package copy was all in English. On this one, the little LCD screen had turned mostly black, so it was unusable. But I took the buttons from it and put them in the “junk” one. Then I took another part, I don’t want to spend 500 words trying to explain which, but anyway, swapped another part, and bingo, the dead pixels were back! So now I had two fully working ones, to go with my old original.

About 2:30pm I was feeling pretty sluggish. The temp outside was around 70F and I thought, I should really go for a walk. Where? Well, why not the famous Dish walk? I haven’t done that in a while (later I searched this blog, it was February of ’22). So I drove over there and was able to park and I walked the Dish walk, a 3.5 mile loop that goes past the big radio astronomy dish. It has lots of hills. I was walking slow, in fact I was passed by a lot of people, and I passed nobody. But I made it.

Friday 09/13/2024

Took a mid-length walk first thing. Then had a couple of hours to read up on Waiting for Godot, famous play I had tickets for, tonight. Since I had invited Joanne to join me, and she is an educated and discriminating play-goer, I thought I should know something about the play. I skimmed the Wikipedia page, and it pointed to the e-text of the script itself, so I read the first act and some of the second. I liked the first act; I read parts out loud and it sounded like fun.

I also added a sound track to a keynote slide show that Stew had made, a lot of black and white photos of famous folk singers. I attached sound tracks for several folk songs other than the ones in the show. This will be looping the half hour before the show starts, as the audience comes in.

Lunch time, Ethan the marketing guy called and asked if I would be willing to host a prospect. Sure. His name was Hung Chi, and interesting guy who knows senior residence admin very well since he was, he said, the Facilities manager at The Sequoias for ten years, and since has run senior residence houses. So I guess he must think CH is OK if he’s considering it.

Then it was time to set up for the Activity Showcase. Karen and Donna, who organized it, had done a terrific job. Thirty-five tables in the auditorium and into Quad 4 of the dining room, one for each volunteer-run committee. I sat at the AV table with two more Davids, G and M, and tried to talk people into being interested in microphones and cameras and such. Got a couple of recruits, maybe.

Afterward, took a quick shower and changed into nicer clothes. Ran up to 11 to help Lou set up his mics for his meet the city council candidate night. Then back down to the lobby to wait for Joanne for our scheduled 6pm departure, and she was already there at 5:40, so we headed out.

Dinner at Terun on California Avenue, and then since we had extra time, just walk a loop of Cal ave, which is now a pedestrian mall with a dozen restaurants with outdoor seating, all busy.

Off to the Bus Barn to see Godot. The first act was good. The second act, which I hadn’t had time to read, was a disappointment. Beckett pretty much used up all his ideas in the first act, I think. The actors were good, as usual, and as usual I’m amazed at their ability to memorize two hours of script. But it was 2 hours plus an intermission, and like I say, the second act is kind of a repetition of the first act, with nothing new to add.

So, home late. Saturday tomorrow with nothing on the calendar.