Saturday 05/04/2024

Worked on music a bit and generally messed around until 1pm when I brought the car around front to drive in the three car pool going to the Pear theater. Thirteen of us went to see Love Letters, which is a simple play of two actors (Wikipedia). Kind of corny but well done today.

Had a nice nap and supper and then took the 15 minute walk to the Lucy Stern complex to see Palo Alto Players production of The Music Man. I had not really expected to enjoy this old chestnut much. The last production I saw was on TV, I think PBS? a couple years ago, and I found it kind of tired and disturbingly sexist. This production was much better. The direction and the acting by the two principle actors, Professor Hill and Marian the Librarian, made the romance more sincere and eased up on Hill’s aggressive assault on Marian. Most important, the ensemble, all the kids and the citizians of the town, were just superb. Whoever choreographed the dance routines did a great job and the players executed perfectly.

Friday 5/3/2024

Walked to Cafe Zoe in the morning (3.2 mi for the day). At 10:30 as planned stopped by Bob’s apartment to try to get his scanner to work with his new MacBook. I failed. I’m the third tech squad person to try and fail. Later in the day Bert called with a suggestion which I will try tomorrow.

Met with Mary and Arlene to practice “An Old Fashioned Wedding”. It will be alright as a comedy routine, probably.

At 1pm helped an outside group set up for a memorial on the 11th floor. This event was arranged by a resident, although the deceased honoree was not a resident. Still, the resident had arranged a nice spread of snacks and wine from Dining Services, which I know is not cheap at all, so… I guess it’s legit. Anyway I set up audio and video for them, and went back at 5pm when they had wrapped up, to take my gear away again.

Thursday 05/02/2024

Took the standard walk this morning, because I didn’t, yesterday. After lunch, put on my red docent shirt and went down to the museum to lead the 2pm tour, which was only 3 people at first, but a 4th joined on the way. Not much else doing.

Wednesday 05/01/2024

One third of the year gone. How about that?

First thing on the agenda today was laundry, which I finished entirely by 10:15, just in time to head down to the 2nd floor to see Leah the hairdresser. I have been letting my hair grow for about 9 or 10 weeks now. I had an appointment at the 6-week mark and canceled it. Just to see. Well, I saw: my thin hair gets long and bushy around the back of my skull, kind of like bozo the clown’s hair. So I made an appointment with Leah and today told her, buzz it all down, make my whole head the same length (i.e. 1/4 inch) as my beard. “Make me look like a coconut” is what I said. So now I have a round slightly fuzzy head. Which is fine.

Lois had called the tech squad line to report that she couldn’t do anything with her iMac, she couldn’t even enter the login password. I asked her about it when I saw her at lunch. Nope, she powers it off and on and it wants the login password but she can’t type the password. So I said I’ll stop by about 2:30. About 2pm I was thinking about it and realized, oho, it isn’t the computer, it’s the keyboard. The keyboard is dead. I was picturing a USB cable lying on the floor or such. But when I saw her machine, it has the little flat wireless keyboard, which connects by bluetooth. And which has an internal battery and you have to charge it up every so often. So I connected it to the wire she uses for charging the mouse, and after about 10 seconds, hey, you could type a password. I did not laugh at her. She said “well that makes me feel stupid” and I didn’t comment.

At 3:30 the Good Times committee met to finalize the list of songs for what decided would be called our Folk Festival — not Hootenanny as I wanted — in September. Also that we will tell the volunteers who like to decorate, the theme is 60s Coffee House. Nothing further to be done before July, now.

Tuesday 04/30/2024

Today was the usual writers meeting, topic “doubt”, and I had nothing to contribute. Several people did, rather nice. Anyway after lunch I met with Lynne to practice our version of “If I Had a Hammer”, there’s your ear-worm of the day you’re welcome. At 3, by arrangement, marketing brought a party of 6 or 7 prospects to see my apartment, among several others. I had spent some time tidying up earlier. People said complimentary things about my furniture arrangement.

Tonight we had a performance by the Fabulous Jeweltones, a group of local women who sing the music of the 20s, 30s and 40s. They’re pretty good and it was an entertaining show. It was complicated for David M. doing the AV because they had requested that we put the show on Zoom as well, both for some of their friends outside, and to get a recording. But we have never done an event where zoom has to hear the general audio of the performers without mics. Our events always have presenters or panelists using a hand-held or head-mounted mic. And tonight we learned that our stage mics don’t work. So probably not good audio.

Huh. Somehow I managed to go to bed without posting a blog entry. First time in a long time I’ve done that. Well on on Monday I took a standard walk, then at 10:30 I visited the apartment of Lois and Randy to respond to a tech squad call. Then I ran off to FOPAL and did 2 hours of computer book pricing. Back to CH in time to meet with Mary and Arlene at 3:30 to practice a song duet that Mary and I are going to do in June. The song is “An Old Fashioned Wedding” from Annie Get Your Gun and it is rather ambitious. Here is a version of it. I’m sure I will sound at least as good as this guy. Snicker.

Sunday 04/28/2024

Pretty much sat around my room playing music and amusing myself for the morning. I found a couple songs to add to my repertoire, like “Margaritaville”. Things that (1) have a fairly simple chord structure, so I can play them, (2) have lyrics that I can get into, with a story line a/o poetic imagery, (3) and are fun to sing. Margaritaville fits all those to a T. “Me and Bobby McGee”, “Gentle on My Mind”, Leonard Cohen’s “Halleluja”. I keep finding more.

At 1 I joined an 11-person carpool to the Pear Theater to see “The Chinese Lady” about a Chinese girl who was exhibited as a curiosity in a freak show in the 1840s. It tried to tell the woman’s life story with only two actors, a lot of talking to the audience, toward the end got into the history of the Chinese Exclusion Act and various atrocities against Chinese. Well acted and produced, as usual, but not entertaining.

Last night’s play, “The Skin of Our Teeth” was pretty well described in the Wikipedia article on it. Which I read on my phone during the first intermission, just to find out what was going on. (Because local theaters no longer go to the expense of printing programs with notes and info in them, grump grump.) It also was very well produced, elaborate effects, costumes, sets, incredible production values for the tiny little Bus Barn theater. But in the end it was preachy and didactic for a modern audience — maybe it hit home, made some points in 1942 but geez, today’s audience has seen three more wars than they had seen in 1942, and the cold war and global warming, and we know all too well that humanity just keeps repeating the same mistakes over and over.

My main gripe at that play was that the theater chose to stick with an 8pm curtain time, when they knew darn well that the play ran 2:45. They could have started at 7 and sent us home at 10pm.

Saturday 04/27/2024

Started the day with a walk to Town and Country shopping center, for the sake of having coffee at a different place.

I was to meet with David G to help set up the AV support for a big birthday bash: Barbara Gordon’s 100th birthday. Barbara, who is a bright and with-it personality, has been resident here I think 29 years? Or so. Anyway there wasn’t much to do so I left him to get on with it and was just passing time in the lobby waiting for the actual ice cream social to start, when Joanne T invited me to go to a house concert with her. That pleased me a lot, and I happily agreed. So met with her at 3:30 and we went to a concert at a house off Alpine Road, jazz vocal and piano.

Got back about 5:30, and was just sitting down to try out a song on the guitar when the phone rang. It was Howard calling to remind me that I had agreed to have dinner with him and Agnes and Margaret, and they’re wondering where I am. Oh, right, be right down.

So left the table at 7:15 and up to my room to get my hat and my ticket and then off to the Bus Barn theater to see a production of Thornton Wilder’s By the Skin of our Teeth at 8pm. Which ran until almost 11. And so home and to bed.

Friday 04/26/2024

Felt fine this morning. Took a shorter walk. At 10 set up for the Buddies meeting. The Buddies is a club of IL residents who buddy up with people in AL and SN, visiting them regularly. I had never attended one of their monthly meetings before. Ian usually runs their AV but he is away this week. The group surprised me by its size, at least 30 people, and by how much material they covered. Three members of the Lee Center staff came over to talk about different aspects of care and how to interact with people with memory or other problems.

At 3pm we had a meeting of the AV group. There were only 4 of us, other people traveling and such. One way or another we got the May schedule covered.

In the evening I went to the 4th floor lounge where Florrie had invited a bunch of people to view a video of the life of her late husband, Tom Forrest. I’d never met him; apparently he died not very long before I moved in. But on the basis of the video I would say I wish I had known him, a really cool, inventive, artistic guy and apparently a pioneer in preschool education.

Thursday 04/25/2024

What a weird day. Woke up feeling sub-par. No fever, in fact the opposite, morning temp 96.7, a degree lower than normal. No other symptoms except just blah, no energy. Took a nice nap at 9am. Gave myself a Covid test: negative. At least the ear-ache was gone.

Felt more normalish by 11, so I meant to go to a FOPAL lunch thing at the Mitchell Park Community Center. This is an annual-ish deal where the library thanks its volunteers. I took the Palo Alto Link — municipal Uber-like system — down there instead of driving myself.

Got there at 11:30, scheduled start time. Made out a name-tag for myself, went in. Many tables, at least 15 tables each set for 6 people; big screen showing slides of happy volunteers; caterers laying out trays of whatever, noshes of various kinds. I look around at the 20 or so people there already and don’t recognize anybody. I sit at a table by myself and look at my phone for ten minutes. People keep coming in, but nobody I recognize. I ask myself, self, do I really want to sit with five strangers, through a lunch, hearing people talk about volunteers?

To which I answered, not really. So I got up and left. Walked the mile back up Middlefield to Midtown and had a sandwich at the coffee shop, and took a Lyft the next mile and a half back home. So I’m an asocial coward I guess. Not the first time I’ve run away from a social occasion.

So at 6pm I headed out again, this time in my car, to attend a thing at CHM. This was called Dial In, and it was a panel reviewing the very early history of social networks, specifically computer bulletin boards and Compuserve and Usenet. It was modestly interesting. I was a regular Compuserve user back in the day; I didn’t do much with BBSs.