Friday 03/15/2024

Took the good old standard walk in the morning. Practiced guitar a bit. Then at 11 I put on my red shirt and went to the Museum to lead a tour. Pretty good tour, 10 people.

In the evening I was booked to have dinner, along with 2 other residents, with a prospect, Bob Mclean. This was set up by our marketing department. I’m not sure how they picked me. I suggested they add Susan, and she suggested Barbara, so that was our party, and a very congenial group we were. We talked up Channing House like proper fans. Bob stayed for the evening concert, Steve Gill singing Irish songs. Gill has performed here several times before; he’s very affable, a natural entertainer. So that was all very nice.

Thursday 03/14/2024

Off to Shustek for a day, well 4 hours of effective work, inventory-ing buttons. See last Thursday (5.097) for the details of this work. In the afternoon afterward, I cleaned up a couple of things from the action-items list that I brought home from the conference with the Financials. Also found the US Gov website for renewing one’s passport. Mine expires in 6 months, and although I have no travel plans, there’s no use letting it expire.

Wednesday 03/13/2024

Couldn’t go for a walk because I had to leave at 9:30 for my annual meeting with the Financial Advisors. Bottom line, the Nest Egg is secure. One exercise they do is to predict how much I will have through age 100. The base projection just assumes a linear growth of 6.5%. (In fact under the present management it has been growing at 9% for the last 4 years.) Then they run a “monte carlo simulation” package that tries 1000 different random assumptions, some optimistic, some pessimistic. Worst case, I still end up with money in the bank at age 100. The Nest Egg is unstoppable. As long as I don’t develop a sudden taste for cocaine and Ferraris, I cannot avoid dying well-off.

In the afternoon we had our monthly 6th floor meeting when all my nice neighbors gather. This time CEO Rhonda and Dining Services manager Gloria attended. Gloria answered questions about the new rules for food service. The questions were not really critical. Things are basically OK there. Then we all went to dinner.

At 6:30 I split to set up the auditorium for an event. Sandy came along as an AV trainee. It worked out pretty well. At least I didn’t alienate her completely.

Tuesday 03/12/2024

Took a moderate walk, then it was time for the writers meeting. I didn’t contribute anything. Then drove to FOPAL for the post-sale triage of my shelves, sending all books that have gone through four sales to the bargain room. Back for a quiet afternoon, napping, guitar practice. Just another day in paradise.

Well, I did write something, late. Stew, an indefatigable organizer, wants to revive the idea I was promoting back in 2021 (I can’t find a blog post where I mentioned it, but it was in that year). The idea was that Channing House, or the Resident Association, or somebody, should fund subscriptions to all the streaming services, so we could watch Disney and Netflix and Hulu, blah blah, on the 11th floor TV. The idea died because of the complicated logistics. There would have to be some person, or some elected officer maybe, who had the email address and credit card used to subscribe to all these accounts. Who would do that? And using what funding source? And how do you secure the IDs so the streams couldn’t be used on some other device(s)?

Stew wants to try again, so I spent an hour-plus writing a careful account of what the issues are, with suggestions, and wishing him luck.

Monday 03/11/2024

First up was the RA meeting. At the AV committee meeting people thought it would be a good idea if I addressed the next RA meeting to complain about events being scheduled on short notice. I was going to, but then rehearsing what remarks I could make, it just sounded petulant. I don’t want the AV team to be associated with complaining among the general population. So I decided not to speak at the general meeting, but rather to bring it to the Entertainment Coordinators meeting later in the month. There it would reach the people who could actually do something. And who respect the AV group. So I just attended.

Practiced my singing performance. Finally it got to be 2pm and I went across to the Lee center Assisted Living section to join Mary and Kay to entertain the troops. Here is a picture of them, and about half the assembled audience,

They played three short flute number as shown. Then I did my 3 songs. Then they came back for two more Irish jigs, total program about 30 minutes I did not screw up, no major guitar mistakes, remembered all the lyrics. Audience seemed to enjoy it. So that was alright.

I am very careful to not be judgey about this audience. That’s me in not a lot of years. So just enjoy vitality and mobility while you got it.

Sunday 03/10/2024

This was the start of daylight saving. It has been my habit to change my bedding with the clocks. Since the change of clocks last October(?) I have had my fluffy feather duvet on the bed. Today I pulled it off, washed the slip cover of it, and put duvet and its cover away. I brought out my beige blanket and made up the bed with that and a colorful throw, one of the crochet throws that Marian made.

Other than that I went out for a couple of errands, and practiced for my performance on Monday. Tomorrow! Agh!

Saturday 03/09/2024

Twice today I practiced for the Monday performance at the Lee Center. At 11 I left for the museum where I led the 12:00 tour. This was a fun group, very responsive, stuck with me the whole way while I nattered for an hour and 10 minutes.

Back at CH, had a nap, then at 5pm opened up the auditorium for the Noorani Dance group. Their leader slash teacher slash choreographer, Fara, was extremely nice and easy to work with, and the dancers were good. I had to run their musical cues manually, and managed not to screw anything up. We had what looked like a full house, easily 90 people, and a good time was had by all, it seemed.

So a very successful day.

Friday 03/08/2024

Took the standard walk and felt fine. Practiced guitar. On Monday I will be among a small group playing for the people in AL in the Lee Center. Not a hugely demanding audience, I believe. But I practiced twice today and will some more on the weekend.

At 1pm I met with Lynne with whom I will share the stage on May 10. She plays ukulele. We have decided on “If I Had a Hammer” and today practiced together for the first time. She’s head of the harmonica group, a half dozen people who perform standards on harmonica as a group. She is an assured leader, not at all afraid to direct and correct somebody else. OK, no problem. One of her neighbors wandered in to listen and said we sounded good.

Then I took the guitar over to Gryphon Instruments where I had an appointment. I wanted them to install some kind of button or knob at the top end of the guitar, around where the neck meets the body, to accept the end of a strap. I’ve been using with a strap that kind of wraps around the head, in between the tuning knobs, but that isn’t satisfactory. So they did that in about 10 minutes, $15, very reasonable. We talked about adjusting the action to lower the strings, but they would need to keep the guitar for a day or so, and I couldn’t do that, see above about practicing for Monday. Maybe next week.

In the evening I went down and internet rabbit hole, exploring the world of automated music transcription. I would like Kay to play about 20 seconds of bridge on her flute during one of my songs. She says “I don’t improvise, give me a score.” I don’t have any skill at notating music or any music paper. But there must be a dozen sites and apps that promise they can convert audio into sheet music. So there went the evening, trying to find one that actually worked and didn’t want a prepaid subscription.

Thursday 03/07/2024

Tidied for the cleaning lady, then drove to the East Bay to spend the day in artifact work at Shustek. Aurora set me and Toni to work correcting the inventory of a mass of buttons. Not clothing buttons, but the kind of metal buttons with a slogan and a pin in the back, ephemera from long-gone trade shows and such. (On slogan I remember was, Burroughs Begs to Differ.) There were literally hundreds. They had all been cataloged at some point (back 10 years ago and more, I think). The catalog crew had put each button in a plastic bag with its barcode tag, and then put them all in boxes in piles. Now we get to reorganize the boxes up and repack the buttons so the bags stand up in lines. The goal is that a person looking for one particular object by its number and description, could reasonably flip through the contents of a box and be confident they had seen every one. I should have taken a picture. I will, next week.

Wednesday 03/06/2024

Today was laundry day so I did that.

Last night Kass was to run the Tuesday night movie, a DVD. In the afternoon yesterday I went down and walked her through the process. The DVD should have played, it had a few very light scratches and I cleaned it of all finger prints. We ran the first five minutes and all looked fine.

This morning I got an email from Kass describing the disaster. Ten minutes into the movie, the Tascam player stopped, and restarted itself from the beginning. And then did that again. Ian was in the audience so he stepped in, and tried to run the DVD with different hardware: a laptop that we keep in a cupboard with an Apple external DVD player. But he couldn’t make that work. So the movie was canceled and the audience went away.

This is not the first time the Tascam player has barfed on an older DVD. Maybe the third? Anyway something has to be done. I remembered that I have a Blu-Ray player that I took from the 11th floor when I replaced it a few months ago. It’s sitting in my closet. So let’s use that for older DVDs. I took it down to the auditorium where I found Ian just reproducing the setup that failed for him last night, and of course today it worked. But the old Blu-Ray also worked. It’s easy to set that on the AV desk and patch it into the projector with an HDMI cable. So we put that in the AV cabinet backstage and Ian will use it on Saturday when he is due to play an opera DVD. Those opera DVDs are all from the private collection of our opera enthusiast and are not in great shape, so that will be a good test.

Other than that I practiced guitar a lot today. I am trying to learn “If I Had a Hammer” which turns out to have a fairly tricky chord sequence. I went through four YouTube tutorials before finding one that looks learnable. Lots of practice time to come.