Thursday 04/04/2024

Frank had alerted me to a pile of donations waiting at FOPAL and I wanted to get a start on them before my usual Monday visit. However I had a date with Brian for 11am. So I left at 8am and went down there and did 90 minutes of work before breakfast.

Back to CH to meet with Brian, who has a piano in his unit. Mary R wants me to join her in singing a duet in June, and I wanted to practice it with a real accompaniment. So Brian obliged, playing along. He likes show tunes anyway and this is a show tune: An Old Fashioned Wedding from Annie Get Your Gun.

After lunch I met with Dr. Margaret and we spent 2 hours polishing up her video of her Tanzania trip that she will show here later this month.

Wednesday 04/03/2024

Did the laundry. Worked in 1.5mi on the treadmill. Reorganized my collection of guitar music.

Prepared the new exhibit for my hall photo display. When I first put picture rails out on my hall wall, I displayed prints of our 1976-era pictures of the bridges over the river Thames. That was a couple of years ago. So now I’m recycling that exhibit. But I found a really nice map of the bridges, and blew that up to 11×17. And reprinted a couple of the collection and started the display with the first 5 bridges.

Had dinner with Jerry and Betty and Kay and Mildred, all to honor Patty on the anniversary of her seventeenth year as a Channing House resident. Very pleasant.

Tuesday 04/02/2024

Nice morning with no commitments, since I didn’t plan to write anything for the group, so I took the standard walk that I should have done yesterday. And it felt fine.

Writers meeting. As I say, I didn’t write anything. The topic was “Surprise”. One person wrote about how her second child arrived very suddenly, and she gave birth on her mother’s living room rug. Yup, that’d be a surprise for everybody I guess.

At 2 I went off to the Stanford Imagining center near California ave for a CT scan. This was the third(? I think?) annual follow-up scan for my aortic dissection. I’ll see the surgeon to discuss the pictures on Friday. I suppose if there was anything concerning they might call sooner?

Since I had the scan and it’s been over a year since I had a physical — I had a “Medicare Wellness Exam” August 2023, but that is not the same as an annual physical, which the health care website is careful to stress — I went ahead and scheduled one, for June.

I also uploaded Susan’s video to Vimeo, so that task is done.

Monday 04/01/2024

This morning at 9 I opened up the auditorium and set up for Susan H’s book talk. She read from her memoire, Memories of a Mid-Century Girlhood. This was a wonderfully simple event, she sat behind a table on stage and read from her book. Period. No powerpoints, no zoom, just one microphone. Here’s a frame from the video, which I was editing this evening.

After that I went down to FOPAL and did two hours of computer book pricing and organizing. I picked up a pound of coffee and a loaf of bread and came on back. I paused to take a picture of this wall of wisteria on the end of the market.

Sunday 03/31/2024

Usual Sunday morning. Then at 11 I left for the museum where I led the noon tour. Good tour, 20 people and my chat went over well.

Back home, having missed the Easter lunch service here which I was told later, was really good. Being a holiday this was sack-supper day, I had picked up my brown bag in the morning. At 5:30 many of the 6th floor community met in our dining room to picnic. Nice time.

Saturday 03/30/2024

Took myself out to breakfast, a cinnamon roll at the Midtown cafe. Around 11 I spent an your helping Dr. Margaret add pictures to her video of her visit to Tanzania. After a nice lunch with the Allens and Carolyn I played some guitar, and again in the evening. Otherwise a day “frittered away” as my mother would say.

Friday 03/29/2024

It was raining, so I took a two-mile walk on the treadmill. Then I sat down to finalize my taxes. The preparation company had done a nice job, the federal and state returns plus vouchers for payment and estimated taxes, plus a form to authorize electronic filing, all uploaded to a Sharefile account. Sharefile seems to be thing for document transfer these days, I have Sharefile accounts with the financial managers, the tax people, and one other. So I went through there e-signature routine to authorize the filing and sign the returns, and that was pretty much it. Filed.

Well, an hour of clerical fiddling to print out the five vouchers (one for 2023 payment and four for the estimated taxes), and I made up stamped and addressed envelopes for all five, and wrote two checks for the payment and the first quarter estimate, and took those two down to the mailbox and sent them.

After lunch I helped neighbor Gloria to install her new TV soundbar. That took an hour.

At 5 I had a hasty supper and at 5:30 I drove over to the Congregational Church, where I met with #1 AV volunteer David M, to watch him run the Good Friday service. This was in order to see their setup and how they did pretty much what we do here, support events in the auditorium with a second, Zoom, audience. But their equipment is much nicer. Here’s a pic or two.

The Good Friday service was elaborately scripted, with different people reading verses of the Passion narrative, alternating with choral bits from the choir and once, a flute and soprano duet. It ended with all the lights being extinguished except for one candle on the altar. Then first the choir and then the congregation, all quietly exited in the near-darkness. The light of the world has gone out, see — come back Sunday morning to see what happens next. I told David I hadn’t realized that the Congregationalists had as much sense of the dramatic as the Catholics. He said it wasn’t usually so theatrical.

Thursday 03/28/2024

AKA “an extra-value day” as Bill Pawek used to say. Tidied the house, watered the plants, off to Shustek to put in a few hours cataloging buttons (see 5.104). Left early so as to be back by 3pm, because I had been invited to be part of a photo shoot: assorted CH residents to be photographed in the dining room being served meals graciously while we smiled and oozed sophisticated charm.

From that, at 4pm, I joined AV team mentee Alice in the auditorium where she was setting up for a talk by Deana Wulff, organizer of Unite The Parks, an organization she created to promote the idea of a new national monument, Range of Light. It would comprise the present Sequoia National Forest and a few other forest lands, and connect Yosemite NP with Sequoia/Kings Canyon NP into a single unit.

I helped Ms. Wulff get her computer connected to the projector and set up the mics. And had a glass of wine and some snacks from the rather generous snack table Alice had set up. All that had to be cleared out by 6pm, and it was. Because at 6:30 a jazz trio were coming in to set up for a 7:30 concert.

This was Thu Ho, a local vocalist. She’s performed at CH once before. The real draw for me was that here accompanist was pianist Adam Klipple, who I’ve heard before in SFJazz concerts. Just a superb pianist, who took long extended solos that were very inventive. This event was run by Ian, who handled it easily.

Wednesday 03/27/2024

Since I needed to meet someone at 10, I took a fast 2-mile walk on the treadmill in the gym. But a walk nevertheless.

At 10 I was to meet with Barbara to train her in the use of the lecternette. The reason was, that she wants to schedule five, count ’em, five “fireside presentations” in the month of April. For these events in the lobby (by the fireplace, yes) she wants an amplifier and mics. And I just couldn’t see adding five events to the AV team schedule. So I more or less told this intelligent, mobile, ex-grade-school-teacher, she could learn how to do it herself, or do without.

So before we met, I thought through and printed up a step by step checklist of how to get the device out and set it up and put it away. The checklist had like 25 steps. Which seemed like a lot, but I told her, you’ve been doing laundry all your life, right? Well imagine you have to teach a smart person who’s never done their own laundry, how to do it. There’s a lot of steps if you think about it. This is like that: simple once you know it, but long to explain.

So we went through the process, checking off each step, and it all worked well and she said I was a good teacher and she feels ready to do it on her own.

Then at 1 I went in the auditorium to set up for our monthly AV team meeting. There was a full agenda. I set up to show the new lighting for the podium, and how to show DVDs and Blu-Rays right from the AV desk, and how to set up a monitor speaker — I had presented on that last July, but nobody claimed to remember and there’s a concert tomorrow that might need one — and then we sat down and debated what I should ask Rhonda for, when we meet in 2 weeks to discuss how to spend Heritage Circle money on the auditorium.

This was a lively discussion, with plenty of opinions. But one really good idea emerged. A long standing problem is that, because our auditorium has a flat floor, when they show movie or opera DVDs, with the closed captions on, people back of about the 3rd row can’t see the captions. The heads of people in front block the lower edge of the screen. The solution proposed for this in the past was what we referred to as “side screens” — large monitors that would be mounted — somehow — on the walls. Rhonda has expressed opposition to this idea mainly on the grounds it would be ugly, but also on the grounds of expense: mounting a jumbo screen above the side-aisles and running wiring to it would be pricey.

The idea that came out today was, why not replicate our existing mobile TV. We have an 80-inch Samsung on a rolling cart, with ZoomRoom hardware, and it gets frequent use. If we had one or two more — and if their carts were a foot or so taller — we could position them in the aisles and show anything on them. Particularly, the ZoomRoom, which we are very familiar with, would allow us to put content on them wirelessly.

Tuesday 03/26/2024

The big job today was to run an event. Dr. Larry Basso (a relative of Dennis’s first wife and longtime acquaintance) has been wanting to present his discussion of the life of Leonardo daVinci for many weeks. It was scheduled as the First Monday book talk in February if I remember right, and he had health problems and postponed, and postponed again, but today was the time to actually do it.

I used the adjusted lighting for the first time, and it worked well. Here’s what our camera saw, which is much more accurate and also more flattering than what it used to get

The event came off fine, his slides looked good and I didn’t forget to press “record” before he started, like I have done in the past. Later in the afternoon I started the tedious job of editing the video which will become the 94th video in our growing library of talks and events.

At 3pm I joined the Tech Squad meeting. The Tech Squad, not to be confused with the AV team, handles trouble calls from residents dealing with their devices, mostly TVs and printers. And phones. And iPads…. Bert, the leader, had several issues to go over. We went over them.

I ate in my room; just didn’t feel like socializing tonight.