Sunday 04/14/2024

Today was a long-planned excursion over the Coast Range to the San Gregorio General Store to hear a concert by the Keller Sisters. This would be the 4th time I’ve heard them: first at a house concert in Menlo Park a couple of years ago, then two previous times at the General Store.

For this there were a total of 8 of us, two cars. Joanne and Erica drove with David and Helen, and Lynne, Mary and Martha in my car. Very pleasant excursion, two hours of good music. Everybody thanked me for my careful driving (guess I don’t have to give up my car just yet).

Had dinner with Mary and Andrew, and Lynne, and Ian and Bob, a convivial table. Nice people around here.

Saturday 04/13/2024

Quiet day, mostly. At 10 I went and set up microphones for a birthday party on the 11th floor. At 3pm I went up and put them away again, and had a piece of birthday cake as my reward.

About 1 Lou called me from the activity room. He was trying to get the screen of his phone (an Android one not an iPhone) to appear on the big screen using the ZoomRoom hardware. I had never done that either so I went and joined him and we brainstormed it. Finally I concluded that the usual fast share just wasn’t going to work, you would actually have to start a zoom meeting and join it from the phone. So we worked through how to do that. Neither of us had paper, so Lou made notes on the whiteboard and we could photograph it afterward.

Ah, technology. Making lives simpler since 1890.

Friday 04/12/2024

Took the standard walk, first time this week, tsk tsk. Then prepped for my big deal meeting with Rhonda and staff. I wanted approval to finish our AV system by installing two more video cameras and integrating them into the system properly. During a wakeful spell in the night, it occurred to me that I should start by asking if anybody had any objections to that? Because if it was uncontroversial, I could skip over most of the slides in my deck, which were all about establishing the usefulness and value of having the extra cameras. If everybody was for it, we could move on to implementation details.

And that proved to be the case. Spending to buy and install cameras was a done deal from the first minute, so I skipped most of the slides I’d prepared the prior two days.

That was about it for the day. Some music practice, some reading.

Thursday 04/11/2024

Tomorrow is a crucial meeting with staff regarding auditorium upgrades. I spent several hours improving my presentation, and also learning about our own auditorium. I had been thinking we needed a camera controller that supported pre-set shots (camera pan tilt zoom settings to frame particular parts of the stage) but Bert pointed out — we already have one. The box that we (I anyway) have been using as a simple joystick control to aim and zoom the camera, is in fact a full controller capable of managing up to 5 cameras and storing up to 100 presets. Realizing this greatly shortened the list of wants; all we really need is one more camera, and to have two cameras properly mounted and wired.

I spent an hour with Dr. Margaret reviewing her video of her Tanzanian safari. She has some great video and her presentation will be a hit. That’s still more than a week away.

The evening menu looked boring so I walked myself to Peninsula Creamery for a grilled cheese sandwich and a chocolate shake, the first in a long time.

Wednesday 04/10/2024

Took a shortened walk because I wanted to be sure to be back before 10, when the covid shot clinic was to start. Unfortunately I found out that I had not actually signed the proper form to join the clinic. I thought I had, but apparently I had only entered the clinic time into my calendar but not actually signed the form at the front desk. They said I could come back at 1pm and if they had leftover shots I could have one, but I did and they didn’t.

Meanwhile, I realized, first at 2am and then during my walk, that it is only 2 days until I meet with Rhonda and other staff to pitch for the auditorium improvements I want. So I spent a couple of hours preparing a short presentation on that.

At 2 I put on my docent shirt and went off to the museum to lead a tour, a private tour by some group of tech people, I don’t even know what. They were a good group though, knowledgeable and interested. I was on my way to the parking lot when Jesse, head of the front desk staff, caught up with me to tell me that one of the women from the tour had been raving about what a great tour they got, “best tour she’d ever had” was the quote. So that went well, I guess.

Sixth floor meeting and dinner, no special news, but a nice time with my neighbors.

Tuesday 04/09/2024

So I wanted to do what would surely be at least 2 hours of work at FOPAL. If I attended the writers meeting I would have to do it between noon and 3, where it would barely fit, or after supper. So instead I headed straight down there at 8. And it did take me to 11am to get everything tidied up for the sale weekend coming up.

At 3 I had been asked by Lou to facilitate a meeting that needed to be on zoom, which I did. This was a presentation on the various options for mitigating the three dangerous points in Palo Alto where the CalTrain tracks have grade crossings with regular streets. There are various options, all expensive and argued over.

That was about the day. Little bit of guitar practice. Reading, napping. A little more excitement when I picked up my mail: a flat pack. What did I order? Open it up: my new passport! I mailed the application for it back on 5.109, just 3 weeks ago. It was supposed to take a long time, and I remember signing up for email notifications as the application was processed. No such emails ever came, but here’s the passport. Good until 2034.

Monday 04/08/2024

First up was the Resident Association meeting. Nothing special there. Off to FOPAL. It is the week preceding the sale and I had a bunch of boxes to process. Unfortunately 2 hours in, and only half-done with pricing, the computers all lost DNS service, claiming they couldn’t find Bookfinder.com when just seconds earlier it had come up perfectly. So I had to repack the unpriced books into boxes and leave, meaning to come back tomorrow.

Then down to a lunch date with sister in law Jean. We had sandwiches at Eric’s and chatted. She is in remarkably good shape for a 96-year-old. We compared aches and pains. She is in the process of moving a huge genealogy project — her family, her French ancestors plus, by marriage, some Cortesi’s — from the proprietary Reunion genealogy app, which she has used for years, into Ancestry.com. She wants to make this accessible to her other family members to see and maintain, and wanted me to test the access to it as a non-user of Ancestry.

Well that didn’t go super well. Ancestry won’t let you just wander in and look. They pester you and harass you until you sign up for a free trial membership, and the sign-up process is very lengthy as they try to force you to begin your own personal family tree. But finally when I could do a search, there is a remarkable amount of info. They know a lot more about Emilio Cortesi than I did. Interestingly, he is linked in at least 6 family trees. Who the heck are the Ruth Family that has my father as a leaf in their tree?

Unfortunately for Jean’s work, my searching did not turn up some of the things she is sure she imported from Reunion. So she has more work to do.

Back to CH for a 3pm meeting of the Good Times committee, planning our September event which will be a Hootenanny, i.e. a bunch of folk music. We are near to finalizing the song list.

Ate supper in my room; not feeling sociable.

Sunday 04/07/2024

Today I went down to the T-Mobile store in Mountain View thinking I would exchange Jet Black Beauty for an iPhone 15. (“Jet Black Beauty” is a reference to the old Car Talk show on NPR. My last two phones have been black and both named Jet Black Beauty.)

Just into the store, which was busy, I was looking at the iPhone display and realized that, one, the iPhone 15 was only a little bit larger than the SE, which pleased me; but also that the iPhone 15 Pro, with a better camera, was the same size and like only $80 more. So while I was waiting for a sales person I made up my mind to get the Pro instead.

But the salesperson had to tell me that sorry, they had a black 15, but no black Pros. So I thanked her for her time and left, thinking I would buy one from Apple and take it to the Palo Alto store to have it baptized or blessed or whatever they have to do to make it answer to my account and number.

Then I thought some more, and checked MacRumors.com, and you know? There’s an iPhone 16 coming this fall. But the reason I need to upgrade right now is this stupid problem that I synced the phone to the computer and as a result iOS set aside a bunch of space for “synced data” so there’s no space left to install the new iOS upgrade. Why don’t I solve that problem, and then wait for the newer model?

So I googled the issue and it turns out that a whole lot of people have been having this problem, where syncing their phone adds multiple GB to their space usage, and there’s a lot of contradictory advice about what to do. But heck, if it’s syncing that’s the problem how about I don’t sync? I connected the phone to the computer and went through all the settings related to the phone and turned off every option that had to do with syncing. And rebooted the phone and hey whattaya know, there’s enough space for the iOS update and more besides. It can easily last now until the end of the year.

Other than that it was a normal quiet Sunday.

Saturday 04/06/2024

Whee, a day with no commitments. What shall I do? I decided to get the car washed, it had some light schmutz from driving in the rain, which bothered me because it hides the lovely shine from the detailing and ceramic coating of a few weeks ago.

I pulled out of the car wash place a little after 9 and headed for the City, destination MOMA, which I had last visited in 2022 and earlier in 2019. (Fun having a searchable diary.) I parked in the MOMA garage and spent 2 hours walking all the floors in the museum. Lots of stuff that I didn’t like. One spectacular piece is Big Pumpkin by Kusama,

and there was a Calder piece that was reflecting red nicely,

Back home, next activity. It is really time to replace my phone. This little S3 has been with me for years, I think I got it in 2019? It has scratches and scars but the real issue is storage. It is a 64GB one which was plenty of space until recently. I connected it to my desktop machine, and the OS suggested I could sync my music library from the desktop iMac to the phone. Sure, why not? Well why not is, that added 16GB of music to the phone and now it is nearly full and it can’t install the latest iOS update because there isn’t enough room. The easy fix will be to get a new phone with 128GB of storage, which is the minimum in an iPhone 15.

So I walked over to T-Mobile but they didn’t have a black iPhone 15 in stock. Supposedly they do have, at the Mountain View store, so I’ll go there tomorrow.

Friday 04/05/2024

The only scheduled thing today was to show up at Stanford Hospital, the Cardiac clinic way up on the third floor, to review my new CT scan with Dr. Amelia Watkins, the surgeon who stented up my dissected aorta back in 2020. I got there early for my 10am appointment but since Dr. Watkins was still in surgery, I was seen by her nurse practitioner. The conference was short: everything looks fine. My aorta shows up beautifully on the CT, a garden hose lined with a basketwork of wire stents, and it is just fine, no change. And no other anomalies to be seen. My renal cysts are still there but no bigger than before.

The NP mentioned that the reason they keep doing annual callbacks is that the stents have a possible side-effect, they can “crack” or break down. This was news to me. Well, they are in there now. But I guess I will continue to get a thoracic CT every year forever. Which is fine with me; it’s kind of reassuring to have somebody look at my innards every once in a while.

For being such a big brave boy who goes to a medical appointment all by himself, I treated myself to a coffee and a delicious pastry. And didn’t do much the rest of the day. Little guitar practice, some reading.