Thursday 09/26/2024

Slept very poorly through the night. Woke up to a temp of 99.1, 1.5 degrees higher than the previous two days. And feeling crappy. Felt crappy all morning. Slept a lot morning and afternoon, although by afternoon I was feeling much better and actually did a little writing.

I assume all this was reaction to the pair of shots yesterday morning, Covid and high dose flu. Expecting to be normal-ish tomorrow.

Wednesday 09/25/2024

Walked the mile to PAMF for an 8:30 appointment to have my flu and covid shot. Then to Peet’s nearby for coffee and pastry. Killed a little time there and then down University to the T-Mobil store for a new phone, but they actually recommended I buy it at the Apple store, so I went on to the Apple store and bought a new iPhone 16.

We had the monthly AV team meeting at 2pm. After supper I attended most of a talk by Ed Shikada, the Palo Alto City Manager. I say most, I don’t know how long it will actually run but I was there for 45 minutes of it. Palo Alto is being managed.

Tuesday 09/24/2024

Let’s see, what did I do today? Not much. Couple of long naps were the major achievement. Attended the writers meeting but had nothing to contribute. Assisted a couple of teachers from East Palo Alto to set up for a presentation in the activity room. Played a little guitar for the first time since last Friday. Did an excellent job of clearing out my email inbox, which was satisfying.

Monday 09/23/2024

Started with a walk. Dropped one leg of the usual walk because I just felt a little down. (Although I note I ended up at 3.8 miles and over 10k steps for the day, not sure how). At 10:15 I walked the five blocks to the main Library where FOPAL was having a social for volunteers. You know how much I love standing around talking to people? About that >.< much, that dot right there. I stood around and made chat for about 15 minutes and snuck out.

After lunch I had to hang about to 2pm when a nice nurse (is there any other kind?) came by my room as arranged to give me my annual wellness check. Do I know the date today? Yup I do. I killed the time before 2pm by fetching from the auditorium, the little MacBook Air and the Acer laptop that belong to the AV team, which only rarely get used. Charged their batteries and updated their OSes.

Then went down to the FOPAL office and processed 6 boxes of donations, 2 hours.

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.