Monday 08/12/2024

I took the standard walk this morning, it felt fine. I went down to FOPAL and did my post-sale triage, sending books that had gone unsold for 4 sale days, off to the bargain room. Only one box of donations waiting to process.

The hummingbirds have suddenly doubled their consumption, or I have double hummers, because where I was filling the feeder once a day, suddenly it needs refilling every 4 hours or so. My feeder is really old and damaged in various small ways. I stopped Petco when I was buying coffee but they don’t carry bird stuff like they used to. I could order another feeder, a pair of feeders identical to mine is just $15 on Amazon. On the other hand, I had been telling myself that I was going to get out of the hummer-feeding game after this season. So, no.

Back home I did some guitar practice. And then ordered tickets for the 2024 Boogie Woogie festival in November. I ordered 5 tickets on a whim. Two for Scott and June, one for me, two to offer around CH if I can get anybody to go with me.

Sunday 08/11/2024

In the morning before lunch, I prepared a Keynote presentation with all the lyrics for the Folk Fest. The committee has set the final list of songs in sequence, so I got the lyrics for each of the songs and put them in white text on a black background, max 6 lines per slide. This will let us project them on the big screen, while the black background means people can be on stage under the screen and not get a sunburn from the bright projector.

After lunch, I set up the auditorium and helped my neighbors Roberta and Richard rehearse their presentation for next week. That will be a “Sunday@Home”, where residents show their recent travels or other accomplishments. They went on a photography workshop tour of Paris, taking street photos. They are good photographers and have some really wow! pics to show.

Later I took a tech squad call to help a resident who thought she had lost her Apple password, only very fortunately it turned out she hadn’t, she had just mis-typed the password, from the grimy little slip of paper on which somebody had written it. So many people around have these handfuls of little slips of paper with old passwords, crossed out and re-written. The Apple ID ones are the worst, because you so rarely have to enter them, and the procedure for recovering a lost password is really complex.

Saturday 08/10/2024

Started the day by walking to Midtown for coffee-and. I also walked back, for a day’s total of not quite 4 miles.

11am, left the museum, to lead the noon tour. Big crowd, 30+, and as there was a 1401 demo at 1pm, I moved things right along so as to finish by 12:50. Urged those who hadn’t seen the 11am demo, to go see the 1pm one. Then led the remainder back to talk about Xerox Park, the Lisa and the Mac.

At 4pm had tea with Dr. Margaret, thinking I would move her photos to an external drive, but when we actually looked the photos database was only (only!) 7GB, which was much less than I expected, and not worth the trouble to move it.

Friday 08/09/2024

First thing today was a meeting in the auditorium at 9am, to be shown the details of our new camera systems. We now have 3 cameras, and a slick console for switching between them. Lots to learn. I kind of want to dig in and write a how-to manual for them.

From there I went to my 10am meeting with Lou and Stew, to select all the Youtube videos for the folk festival. The lineup of songs is set, so we auditioned like, 10 versions of “Blowin in the Wind” and 10 of “This Land Is Your Land” and so on for 23 songs, selecting the ones to use. That took to 11:30. I filled the time to lunch by pasting the URLs of the selected videos into the spreadsheet of songs, and sending it back to Lou.

After lunch I fought with the Xfinity web site trying to get a printable version of my bill. Then it was time to meet with Mary and John to rehearse “You’ve Got a Friend”. This is going to be good. John is a very competent piano player and seemed to enjoy playing along with us. Mary and I worked out which lines or phrases are hers and which mine and which both. Then I made a fresh copy of the music and marked it with colored hiliter pens.

I had an hour break and then it was time for the 3pm meeting with the whole Good Times committee, to decide on the final sequence of the 23 songs. After which we looked at different ways to display lyrics on the big screen in the auditorium.

Then a quick nap and down for dinner with some of my neighbors.

Thursday 08/08/2024

Took a shorter walk in the morning. Left in the car to pick up some groceries and drive down to Jean’s place for lunch with her and Marc, our nephew. Well, Marian’s nephew. He’s a senior radiologist with a group practice in Seattle. He was stopping off on his way to join a group of people for an 8-day backpacking hike out of Tuolumne Meadows. He looks great, fit and upbeat. He filled us in on all the doings of his sons and of Quinn, the son of his late brother Paul.

Evening, I did a technical thing, preparing a soundtrack for Mary to sing to, practicing for the folk fest next month. I found a website that does an incredible job of separating out the voice from an audio track, leaving just the accompaniment. Mary is leading a group who will sing “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” in the style of the Carter Sisters. I took the audio track from the YT video she prefers, separated the voices out of it, and sent her the accompaniment track.

Bored with the CH menu, I went out to eat at a place I hadn’t tried before, Curry Up Now, Indian with a California twist. It was pretty good food, but the restaurant was almost entirely empty, and the cashier and cook were Latinx and argued with each other in Spanish the whole time.

Wednesday 08/07/2024

Did the laundry in the morning. Played the guitar. After lunch, met with Mary to work on You’ve Got a Friend. Later, figured out how to do something on the Mac, for the benefit of Dr. Margaret. Had dinner with the Mary and Andrew and Martha.

Evening, changed out my bedding. This is a semi-annual, no, tri-ennial? job, changing the blankets I have on my bed. Went from the big beige one to the smaller blue wool one. I have three different colorful crocheted throws, and I rotated the one from the bed to the couch, couch one to the closet, closet one to the bed. Exciting times around here.

Tuesday 08/06/2024

Worked up something for the writers group on the theme of “someone’s leaving home”. Since I had already written about my moving to CH, and couldn’t think of anything else except the 1967 Beatles song “She’s Leaving Home”, I wrote about that, and read the lyrics as a poem.

Edited the video from Gigi’s book talk of yesterday. Late in the day I get an email from her requesting some changes. So that’s to do tomorrow.

Met with Peter to be interviewed; he is starting a series for the newsletter on people’s outside volunteer activities, with me as the first example among many.

Met with Dr. Margaret about various Mac issues. We had a fun time getting rid of files to help relieve her over-full hard drive.

Listened to the Philadelphia speeches by Harris and Walz. Good stuff. “Mind your own damn business,” indeed.

Monday 08/05/2024

Went for the standard walk, which is always pleasant, listening to a podcast, stopping at Starbucks at the 3/4 point for a cup and a cake. Back by 9:30.

At 10 I went down and set up the auditorium for the First Monday book talk. Gigi Tsai, who has been organizing this series now for a year, had scheduled herself in. She is married to Tom Tsai, who published his autobiography a year ago. SInce then Tom has been losing mental capacity, so Gigi read excerpts from his book for him.

After shutting down the auditorium and copying the video recording to my laptop, I stowed it in my room and headed off to FOPAL. There I processed several boxes of books and prepped my section for the upcoming sale weekend. Back home about 4 for a nap. Had dinner with the neighbor Brian and with Sophia and Mark, relatively new residents.

Later in the evening I was reminded of another event video that needed processing, so at this point I have the old laptop working away on processing one and the newer, and much faster laptop zipping through the other.

Sunday 08/04/2024

Took a lovely day off. Easy start, lounge around the apartment, play a little guitar, watch videos, chill out. I liked it.

Saturday 08/03/2024

Once more out the door at 8am, pick up Frank, drive to CHM. Unload the two boxes of books I got last night, arrange our display with some fresh books.

And spend 9am to 5pm standing around selling books. Boring and tiring. Then pack all the remaining books into boxes and schlep them down to the car. Took two cars to bring the books to the sale, but only one car to take the remainder home.

Back to FOPAL and unload. Meet up with the John the treasurer and turn over our cash box and credit terminals. Drive Frank to his place, drive home, crash.

Bottom line: we took in $1,800 dollars, and sold well over 500 books. Double last year’s performance. Looking forward to a day off tomorrow.