Thursday 08/22/2024

I knew there were still many boxes of books waiting for me at FOPAL so rather than leave them until next week, I headed down there today. I ended up spending 4 hours, 9:30 to 1:30, with a half hour break for lunch. Walking to the car at 1:40 I remembered I had a meeting with the Good Times group at 2, but I made it, just. Planning for the folk festival.

At 4 it was time for the semi-annual Board-Residents meeting, where the CH board mostly goes over the financials for the last year. Channing House is solvent. We are almost at 100% capacity, one open apartment, with a waiting list.

Watched Kamala’s acceptance speech, then got on the ActBlue website and contributed some to her and to five of the critical Senate races.

Wednesday 08/21/2024

For the first couple hours of the day I ran my two loads of laundry, and while the machines worked I started downloading the 20-odd videos for the folk fest video reel. These will run on a large TV screen at the side of the stage. Sing-along lyrics will be shown on the big screen at the back of the stage. Laundry was all done by 11. I started actually assembling the video in iMovie.

After lunch I attended the monthly FOPAL zoom meeting. Then back to editing. At 3, it was time for the weekly coffee break in the dining room. I had set up to meet with Sue for a tech squad call. She had a really puzzling problem with zoom, which I could reproduce but didn’t solve. Finally she decided that since her Mac was old and slow and obsolete, she would just go buy a new Mac. OK, works for me.

Back to preparing the video, and got it done, or at least a first cut at it. I already know of a couple of mistakes. Tomorrow the Good Times crew meets and no doubt will decide on changes.

Had dinner with Patty and the Allens. Some of the talk was about a rather high-handed move by the CH administration, to curtail some exercise classes and stop providing zoom support for them.

Tuesday 08/20/2024

In fact I did sort go back to sleep, drowsed until 6. Managed to write something for the writers group meeting at 10:30. The cue was “encounter with an animal”. I was sitting on my couch looking out to the patio where 5 hummingbirds were using the feeder, so I wrote about the different ways the hummers eat.

Right after the meeting I headed down to FOPAL where I found 9 boxes waiting. I processed 5 of them by 2pm, then headed back. There’s been a shakeup in housekeeping and I have a new cleaner and a new day — for five years it’s been Wanda and Thursday at 2. Starting today it’s Celina on Tuesday at 3. So I wanted to be here to meet her.

During the event on Sunday I had found that the ATEM video switcher was acting funny. I could describe in detail what “funny” means but who would care? Anyway in the night it came to me, why not just reboot it? So tonight before supper I went down to the auditorium and checked. Yes, still acting funny. Pulled the power, counted to ten, put the power cable back. No more funny, all good.

Power it off and on again. Doesn’t work every time, but works surprisingly often.

Monday 08/19/2024

Did a revolutionary thing: took the standard walk backwards. Not walking backwards, but reversing the route. After 5 years(!) of walking a 2-mile loop counter-clockwise, I walked the same route but clockwise on the map. Because I had a whim to have coffee at a different shop. Well it felt revolutionary. Such is the excitement in my life.

Then the monthly Event Coordinator’s meeting, settling the calendar of events. After which I practiced some guitar and then updated the AV committee calendar spreadsheet. At 1:30 I met with Mary to practice YGAF. We are starting to sound not too bad, mostly because she knows how to sing harmony. I just do the melody and she sings nice harmonies around it.

Before and after supper I edited the video from the Rhudy’s presentation of Sunday, while sampling some of the speeches at the DNC. I had recorded the PBS coverage, but annoyingly that recording stopped before the actual main speech, Biden’s. Maybe the convention ran long, I don’t know, but I only saw the latter part of that which was on live after the PBS recording ran out. That was enough anyway.

Writing this at 4am because I woke up to pee, and realized I had gone to bed without blogging. Wonder can I go back to sleep now?

Sunday 08/18/2024

Rushed through my Sunday morning stuff (water plants, do puzzle). Went and got out the car at 8:30, then waiting for everyone to assemble. This was the carpool group going to the Keller Sisters concert at the San Gregorio General Store, long-planned. There were 10 of us in the end, three cars. Joanne and Sandy rode with me. The concert was excellent, everybody enjoyed it. We got under way back home just after 1pm, back by 2pm.

Then at 3pm I went down and set up the auditorium for an event. It was a Sunday@Home, the monthly series where residents show off their accomplishments. This time my newest neighbors, Roberta and Richard Rhudy, presented some pictures they had taken on a recent week in Paris. The went on a tour which was mostly a workshop in Street Photography, shooting scenery and people on the streets and major buildings of Paris. They are quite skilled photographers, and had some really excellent shots to show. Also they are nice people. I had dinner with them and Stew and Kathy afterward.

Saturday 08/17/2024

Main activity today was to lead the noon tour at the museum. Peter came along. He’s a volunteer on our CH newsletter staff, and is doing a series of articles on residents who volunteer outside. I am the first subject. He already interviewed me, but he wants a picture so he came along to get a picture of me in my red shirt leading a tour.

Afterwards he very nicely said I lead a great tour, which was flattering.

Lots of email back and forth with people who are going to the concert tomorrow, or are dropping out, back and forth.

Before leaving for the museum I used an online site to strip the vocals from the recording of Carole King singing You’ve Got a Friend, and then to transpose it up from A-flat to C. So now we have audio of Carole King’s piano but in the key we want to sing in, for rehearsing to. The shit you can do with audio online is just ridiculous – and all free. Actually I’d be happy to pay that website’s owner, it’s so slick.

Ate supper early and then walked to Rinconada park where there was a concert on the lawn, a local group of women who perform under the name Blues Is a Woman (which is a line from an old blues song I think). Anyway they were ok but I left after half an hour.

Friday 08/16/2024

Took a shorter walk in the morning, then got in the car and took it to the car wash and then filled the tank. This in preparation for car-pooling to San Gregorio on Sunday.

At noon, picked up Craig and we went to the Dutch Goose, a beer and burger place, to meet with four other retired IBMers to talk about the 70s (and for some of them, into the 80s) when we all worked for IBM in Palo Alto.

The SFJazz streamed Friday Night Concert looks like it is of general interest so I am going to put it on the big TV on the 11th floor. I need to go set that up now.

Thursday 08/15/2024

Used to be, I spent nearly every Thursday at the Shustek center in Milpitas, accessioning donated objects. Back in April they had a problem with the building that put all that on hold. Today I went over there for a meeting where we volunteers were told and shown what had happened, and got a roadmap for the future.

Shustek center is a one-story office building, mostly open-plan with rows of metal racking, plus a few enclosed offices and storage spaces.. Back around Easter there was a day with a lot of rain and wind. The wind apparently blew over a cinderblock wall that was on the roof, masking the HVAC equipment on the roof from the street. The wall fell on a corner of the roof, which partly collapsed. That wouldn’t have been so bad, but it also broke a sprinkler pipe, which dumped a huge amount of water on the floor at that corner. Water moved across the floor, soaking into carpet. At that corner of the building had been a large amount of old computer stuff in a disorganized mass, which was the personal collection of a guy named Al — not museum property; they were kind of letting Al do his work there. A lot of Al’s stuff was on the floor, and got soaked and eventually had to be thrown away.

The museum stuff, rows and rows of shelving with boxes of documents and piles of media, was all raised from the floor, so once they had the humidity under control, it didn’t suffer, but a loty of stuff had to be moved very quickly. Then carpeting had to be pulled up and rather than replace it, they had a contractor scrape all the glue residue, sand down the cement floor and seal it.

The accessioning work area still isn’t usable, being full of stuff relocated from other spaces. Plus Aurora, the lead curator, has some vacation time coming. Likely volunteers won’t be back to work before October.

Back home by 3, when I took a tech squad call to help install a printer for one of my newest neighbors on the 6th floor, Sophia. Bert had started the install and ran into problems. I was able to get the printer going and sort out a couple of other problems she had with her quite new iMac.

Wednesday 08/14/2024

Went for the standard walk (3 miles for the day). Then settled in to a spell of computer work, at my desktop machine.

(The desktop machine is a 27-inch iMac, bought in 2015. Apple discontinued the 27-inch in 2022, and today it can’t be brought up to the current level of the OS. If I want a modern desktop with a big screen, my only option is to buy a big monitor, the Apple Studio Display or comparable from Samsung or LG, and drive it with a Mac Mini. I refuse; I want the elegance of the one-piece iMac. But currently iMacs only come as 24-inch screens. Today I read a rumor that Apple is planning a new, “iMac Pro” model with a thirty-inch screen, ooh boy. When? Oh, 2025, maybe. Or 26. OK, the old one still works, although it is a bit slow. Patience.)

The work was, to clean up a large folder in my Dropbox named Camera Uploads. For the past year plus, whenever I had a photo I thought worth saving in my permanent collection, I’d put it into Camera Uploads. I can do that from any of my machines because the Dropbox is shared among them all. The idea was that “sometime” I would go over these pics, sharpen and crop and tweak them, and put them in sensible topic folders in the Pictures folder. There were about 75 of them.

I spent about 4 hours today doing that: discarding some, improving others, filing them. Very satisfying work. Then I printed two more Thames Bridges pictures and updated the gallery outside my room. Didn’t do much else but it felt productive.

Tuesday 08/13/2024

Decided to walk to Cafe Zoe for breakfast, and to not wear my ear buds and listen to a podcast, but rather to think constructively of something to write for the writers meeting. I took a different route that added half a mile to the walk (3.3mi for the day). It worked, in that I thought of something that more or less fitted the prompt. When I got back about 9:30 I sat down and started writing but ran out of time and had nothing usable when the meeting started at 10:45.

Had lunch with some other writers to celebrate Connie’s birthday. I don’t know which birthday it was, but probably starts with a 9.

After lunch met with Stew to show him how I had used Keynote to make a lyrics file. He had found it extremely tedious. I showed him just a couple of tricks he hadn’t know of, like how to easily duplicate a slide. So now he is in charge of the lyrics file for the folk fest, editing the one that I produced.

At 3pm, met with Craig and we practiced our number for the folk fest, “City of New Orleans”. After three run-throughs we don’t totally suck.