Wednesday 01/29/2025

I had a bunch of stuff to accomplish today, and did, starting with my laundry. While the laundry was going I did more video construction for the ValDay video. By construction I mean for example: I have a YT video of Gale Garnett singing “We’ll Sing in the Sunshine”. Now, Karen is going to sing along with this video, but Karen finds Garnett’s pitch too low and asks for it to be higher. I had downloaded this video. (Parenthetically: YT tries to make impossible to download their content, but I have a way around.) Then I stripped the audio track out of it as a separate file. Then I ran that file through a clever web app that can change the pitch of the music, and also strip out Garnett’s voice. I made versions one step up and two steps up, put them in my Dropbox and shared them with Karen. Karen finally got back to me, opting for the one-step-up version.

Today I opened the iMovie project and put the video, without its audio, in its proper place in the sequence. Then I pasted in the audio file with the higher pitch and no Gale Garnett, and carefully sync’d it to the video.

There was one other clip to change, the committee wanted a different version of “Unforgettable” than I had used. They wanted the version where Natalie Cole sings a duet with her father.

With those changes made (in between changing loads of laundry) I could re-make the full video which is a three-step process that takes about 2 hours in my old desktop machine. (A new machine with the Apple M4 chip could do it in 15 minutes.)

I also renewed the car’s license fee at the DMV website and paid a credit card bill. And I had time to go down to the auditorium and test how to put sound from an iPhone through our portable sound system. Also I gave a half hour to consulting with my neighbor Carolyn on her acting role in the drama group’s show. And talked to Laurel about the Mystery of Infant Cortesi. (Later in the day she solved it.) Quite a morning.

After lunch I went down to Los Altos and met with the financial advisors for my annual checkup. Bottom line, I have money to keep me as long as I care to live, with some left over. Which is nice to know. But as usual there are several paperwork things I need to attend to.

And that was the day.

Tuesday 01/28/2025

Started out with a proper walk, which I couldn’t take yesterday owing to having to support the drama group. Then got in the car, did a couple of minor errands, and drove to FOPAL where there were now 6 boxes of donations (there had been 3 when I left on Saturday). I spent three hours processing them and generally organizing shit.

Back home, had a good session practicing guitar. I was lounging in our lounge while my room was being cleaned when Joanne walked by. She was on the way to see my neighbor Edie, who she was advising on how to organize your estate and your affairs, so as to give minimum trouble to your estate manager or fiduciary, “after you croak” as she put it, to my surprise. She showed me some of her organizing lists and I had to confess that, although I’m pretty sure all the info she mentioned is somewhere in my effects, it isn’t as neatly organized and accessible as she recommends.

So now I have some organizing to do, to try to live up to Joanne’s standard. It’s been at least 4 years since I reviewed my estate documents anyway. Which is ironic because in my very own book, I wrote…

The final benefit that you can gain from an honest understanding of death is the motivation to put your own financial and legal affairs in order. When you do that, you prepare a deeply thoughtful gift for your survivors, and they will appreciate it…

After detailing all the various ways you can put your affairs in order, I add,

…the circumstances of life keep changing. Within a year or two, some of your documents will be out of date. … So you need to schedule an annual return visit to the state your affairs. (Perhaps you should make a ritual of it?)

And this completely coincidental encounter with Joanne reminded me that it’s past time to do that.

Monday 01/27/2025

Another day without leaving the building, or walking, or playing music. Har-umph!

First thing went down and set up the auditorium for the drama group, who did their full dress rehearsal of their five-piece show of short skits. I had to set up mics, record video, and turn the lights on and off on cue, or thereabouts.

That took until noon. After lunch I edited yet another video of a lecture, Peter’s lecture on the great hyper-inflation in Hungary 1945-6. It was an interesting talk and I took some pains in the editing. He had shown slides of the banknotes, the million-pengo bill and the hundred-million and such, and I found I could edit the video images so I could zoom in on each bill to fill the screen. Fun.

Got that uploaded and had a nap and then it was time for the Good Times committee to meet. I had the Val Day Video to share and the meeting went smoothly although I got a couple of changes to make, of course.

Then met with Peter to plan the AV for the memorial for his wife, coming up next month. Among other things he wants to play music from an iphone through the lecternette, in the lobby, and I don’t have the requisite dongle or adapter.

Finished that and it was dinner time already. I sat at a table for one so I could read the stream of texts that Laurel had been sending for the prior hour or two 😊.

And after supper I edited Yet Another video, this one by guy named Oppenheimer talking about craftsmanship, which is the name of his magazine, Craftsmanship Quarterly. I had sat through that lecture live and didn’t care for it, disagreed or thought is presentation was blah, now I had to edit the video of it.

Got it done, and so to bed.

Sunday 1/26/2025

Well it was big adventure day. At 10 Joanne and I met in the lobby and walked to the CalTrain station to catch the 10:25 to San Francisco. From the terminus we took a Waymo driverless cab to 7th and Market — that’s where the Waymo insisted on dropping us, apparently it couldn’t go closer to our destination — and walked three blocks to the Orpheum theater. Actually another couple of blocks to a restaurant named Sam’s. Which we had picked more or less at random from the Apple Maps app as (a) convenient, and (b) open on Sunday morning.

In my planning it hadn’t occurred to me that on Sunday morning people go out for brunch. So I expected a restaurant to be uncrowded, in fact it was jammed with happy people having brunch. But there was a table so we had a very nice brunch. With plenty of time to walk back to the Orpheum for the 1pm show. This was Broadway SF’s touring production of Some Like It Hot, a 2022 musical based on the 1959 movie. It was highly polished and professional, amazing scene changes, continuous dancing and singing, very high energy and skill from all performers. Quite fun.

Then we caught another Waymo back to the train, and the 4:25 train home, walked back and got in just in time for supper.

After supper I finished the Val Day video.

Saturday 01/25/2025

Spent a couple of hours working on the VD video, I can finish it Monday. In the middle of the day I went down to FOPAL and processed half of the six waiting computer donation boxes. Now I won’t have to go there on Monday, and will have time finish the video before the Good Times committee meets Monday afternoon.

Played a little music, took a couple naps. That was Saturday.

Friday 01/24/2025

Good start to the day; a walk out for coffee with Joanne. Then I dived into a ton of things I needed to do, and had two whole unscheduled days to do them in.

Through the day I set up a custom video of “Hello Young Lovers” for Mary to sing at the VD concert. I had to lower the pitch to a different key, and suppress the vocals, and merge that modified audio back with the video of Deborah Kerr playing the role in The King and I. Then I edited the video for the speaker from Wednesday night, and uploaded it to Vimeo and sent out links to those who cared. Later I edited the video of Arlene’s talk Sunday evening, and uploaded and sent out emails. Each of those jobs took a couple of hours. And I created my “bumper card”, the image that will go between each song video in the VD compilation. Behold the ginormous candy heart, created by Midjourney to my prompt.

There were a couple of other things, too. In general I just slaughtered my to-do list.

Thursday 01/23/2025

Throughout the day in various spells I worked on collecting the videos for the VDV. Youtube doesn’t like you to download their videos and make it very hard, but there’s a very useful and well-designed website that can download the whole video or just its audio. Another useful site allows me to take an audio file of music and shift its pitch up or down, or pull out the vocals leaving the accompaniment. I used both of those extensively, first for downloading 20 videos and then for three songs where the performers need their backing track but with the pitch changed. At the end I had all the material I need to assemble the video which I may get done tomorrow. “May” because I have other things I need to catch up on then, too.

At 11 I sat in on a talk by Russell Wald, Executive Director of the Stanford Center for the Human use of AI. His main point was that the major companies (openai, anthropic, google) are sucking away all the talent and influence in this critical field, leaving no role for academia.

Wednesday 01/22/2025

Started the day in the best way, by walking the usual route but with Joanne for company. Then sat down and began the process of assembling the Good Times Valentine Day video. (Hereinafter, just VDV.) Immediately found a couple of issues I need to take up with other people on the committee, but got some stuff done.

After lunch I helped Patty and Gwen figure out how to show movies from Gwen’s laptop to Patty’s big LG TV. Then I went down to the auditorium and played around with the equipment, verifying some things and setting up for the AV committee meeting. Which started at 4. We quickly got all the February events assigned, then hashed out some other issues.

Had supper with Joan (not Joanne), Andrew and Mary. Then into the Auditorium again to set up for a lecture by Peter, quite entertaining, on the great Hungarian Hyper-inflation of 1945-7 which he saw as a child. At one point the government was tired of printing all the zeros on a 1,000,000 Pengo note, so they invented a new note where 1 milliard meant, 1,000,000. Soon after they issuing 1,000,000-milliard notes. He had pictures of the full series of banknotes, from the 1,000 Pengo bill to the one that represented 10 to the 16th power.

Tuesday 01/21/2025

The cue for the writers meeting was “fire” which put me in mind of the near-burning of The Ranch, my childhood home. I wasn’t certain of the time or much else, only remembered that my father had thrown his back out beating out burning brush with a wet gunny sack. However, I have both his and my mother’s autobiographies. These were not properly published but circulated as typed manuscripts among the relatives. It didn’t take long to find the accounts.

This happened in 1950, in Western Washington State, about 20 miles south of Tacoma. In the 1930s (? I should check his bio again) my father bought 30 acres of logged-off land from Weyerhauser Timber. No such thing as sustainable forestry in those days; they just clear-cut everything, hauled the logs to the mill, and sold the ground, with hundreds of stumps and piles of slashings. For a decade he spent his spare time putting up a house and outbuildings and clearing the stumps to make tillable fields. Then he married my mother. At one point he hired a bulldozer driver to clear a new three-acre field for him. The ‘dozer ripped the stumps out of the ground and shoved them to the side of the field, leaving high piles of tangled stumps and roots, mixed with soil. Burning these stump piles was like a hobby to him, he’d keep fires going all spring and into the summer when the county fire marshall would put out a ban on open fires.

But it’s hard to squelch one of those burn piles. He wrote that often a “pitchy root” would burn down under the piled soil for days. And one managed to break out; when they came home from shopping in Tacoma, there was a nice fire going in the dry stubble of the hay field. He hauled a 10-gallon milk pail full of water to the field, and a gunny sack, and with the wet sack beat down much of the fire, keeping it from going into a forest preserve to the west, but it started into the neighboring place. Lots of anxious telephoning (only land lines of course) got help from the county and then, from nearby Fort Lewis, an army bulldozer. With that they made a fire-break around the fire and contained it. With recent events in Los Angeles fresh in my mind, I have to think they were extremely lucky in having no wind. With any breeze, they surely would not have been able to contain the fire with only a bulldozed trail.

According to my mother’s account, there was a problem in that, with so many people coming and going, they had to leave gates open. Eight year old David was assigned to keep the cows from getting out the open gate, and apparently I stood watch for several hours. I have no memory of any of this, none what-so-bleeping-ever. So very much of my past has just faded out.

Anyway I wrote that up before 10am. At 10 I met with Lou and walked him through connecting his laptop to the screen in the Activity room. Then back to my room for the 10:45 writers zoom. There were several exciting accounts of fires besides mine.

At 3pm I went to the Activity room for the monthly Car-Free meeting, where I sat beside my friend Joanne hearing Lou showing the slides I’d helped him set up, covering the details of how to use the two ZipCar rentals now in our basement garage. It’s a hard call between renting a ZipCar and taking a Lyft. With the Zip, you can make multiple stops and carry stuff. But, you have to reserve the Zip for a specific time period, and it may not be possible to extend the rental if you are delayed. (Someone else may have previously reserved the same car for the hour after you.) In any case, you pay for the time the car sits idle. So it is not a good way to go to a concert, for example; you pay for the hours you are in the show.

Monday 01/20/2025

Started the day with a walk, which I meant to be a standard one. Before, I put on a shirt and a sweater, and stood on my balcony, and said, “sure, I can walk dressed like this in 40º temps”. So off I went with two layers and a knitted watch cap on my head. It was way too cold for that, I needed at least another layer, so I cut it short (but still 3 miles for the day).

At 9:30 I was in the auditorium for the drama club’s run-through of their five one-act comedies. From there I headed down to FOPAL, stopping to buy some groceries and power bars for lunch. Frank had texted me there were seven boxes of computer books waiting and I was determined to process them all rather than come back later in the week. I was there from 1 to 3:30, but got it done.

Gassed the car, this tank only lasted a month and got 55mpg, thanks to colder weather and me taking pains to run the engine more after having the incident with the flat 12v battery. Got back to CH right at 3:59, just in time for Rhonda’s open meeting at 4pm.

Being at the drama rehearsal I had to skip the Event Coordinators meeting, but Pam put a calendar in my cubby so after supper I filled in the February events on the shared spreadsheet. And emailed my team confirming our meeting this coming Wednesday.

Finally I did a quick edit of the video recording of the drama group rehearsal and put it on dropbox for them to download.

Tomorrow the writers meeting cue is “fire”. Time permitting I will try to find Emil’s account of the time the back part of the Ranch was threatened by a forest fire, and he threw out his back beating down flames with a wet gunny sack.