Sunday 02/25/2024

Usual Sunday morning. This time of year, the plants take very little water; watering everything took about 3 minutes. Did some music practice. Then it was time to depart for the SWBB game. The carpool was reduced to one person, me. Patty went to the Symphony in SF instead; David G rode his bike, Martha likes to walk to day games. So I drove alone.

I had already made up my mind — I’ve been saying this for months — that this would be my last season, I won’t renew my season ticket next fall. But this was the final home game of the season, so it was the last time I’ll sit in that seat that I’ve occupied for, oh, I don’t know — 20 years? Probably that long, or nearly. At the end of the first quarter I was sure; I really just don’t care, I don’t feel any emotional investment in the team or the program or the venue. So I told Nancy Sabbag, who has been sitting next to me for most of that time, that I wouldn’t be back.

Then, at half time, I got up and just didn’t go back. I felt pretty emotional about it, but also sure. Later in the afternoon I drove to an auto parts store and bought a plain chrome license plate frame. Our car since about 2015 has worn a rear license plate frame that has “Stanford Women’s Basketball” on it. I removed it and replaced it with the plain frame. I kept the old one; I couldn’t stand the idea of dropping it in the recycle. I put it with other historical memorabilia in the history file in the closet.

Later on I had a very productive music practice session. I almost have “Puff” to a state where I can perform it without embarrassing fluffs. And I just kill on Seeger’s “My Get Up and Go”.

At supper time I sat with Patty and Mildred and Miriam, and I told them about basketball and Patty had some strong feelings about my dropping out of the carpool and not sharing games with her and others.

Saturday 02/24/2024

In the morning I spent an hour and a half working with Dr. Margaret on her video of her trip to Tanzania. She owes me big-time. But I really don’t mind because the pictures she got are so good. Her party got really close to lions, baboons, hyenas harrassing lions, hippos, and various birds, and she got really good video and and stills. It’s going to be a great presentation.

In the afternoon I went to a Stanford baseball game. They’ve been playing for a couple of weeks and this is the first time I got around to attending. And maybe the last. I have always liked the location of my seat, but for the first time I have neighbors, large neighbors, on both sides. And although the air temperature was under 70F, it is in direct sunlight and I was cooking. And you know, bottom line, baseball isn’t that interesting a game to me anymore. So I left early, which was just as well, since Stanford ended up losing 3-13.

So add baseball to the season tickets I won’t be renewing next season.

Friday 02/23/2024

Took a short walk in the morning. At 10am I went and set up for an AV event, the “Buddies” meeting. The Buddies are a group of residents who regularly go and spend time with people in assisted living in the Lee center, keeping them company and socializing. It’s a highly worthwhile cause. The Buddies meet monthly, and Ian usually does their AV, but he is away visiting a daughter who is ill, and he asked me to fill in.

I was a bit surprised at the amount of content; two members of the Lee center staff attended and did presentations on the activities program and the snack program — yes, they have a planned snack program.

Then I changed to my red docent shirt, had a quick lunch, and went to the museum to lead a tour of 30 Japanese exchange students studying at Stanford. They were adorably cute, such a nice bunch of kids. Thirty is a very large group for a tour. There really should have been 2 docents, I don’t know why there weren’t. But I instructed them carefully that if they felt crowded, or weren’t interested, just to wander off, there was plenty to look at. Which some of them did. By the end I had a group of 15 or so, with kind of a cloud of another 6 wandering in the vicinity. Anyway, they were appreciative and I think got a good experience.

At 6 the carpool met to drive to the SWBB game. Not a good game; Arizona had very good defense and Stanford was missing its star center. And they lost, going from a 10 point lead with 3 minutes to play, to losing by 5.

During this game I began to feel quite strongly that I am done with SWBB as an enthusiasm. This has been building for a while, starting with the destruction of the PAC-12 last fall. Then on the way home, David G pointed out the new court ruling that came out today, effectively ending all NCAA restrictions on paying student-athletes to transfer to other schools. In other words, college athletics — at least the major ones, football and men’s basketball — probably Fencing and Lacrosse won’t be affected much — are no longer amateur sports. The athletes are free to bargain and the booster organizations are free to bid up their offers, and it is basically now a free-agent market for young professionals. And I don’t care. I’m not going to be around to watch it after this season. Maybe not all of this season. There are only a few games left. Probably Stanford will host the first/second round weekend of the NCAAs, and I might attend those, but that’ll be it.

Thursday 02/22/2024

I signed up to lead a tour of 15 Apple employees at 11:30 am, but Wanda wanted to clean my apartment at 9:30 so I left early, did an errand, then sat in the car and listened to a podcast in the museum parking lot until time. The tour went well. I’m doing another tomorrow, which may not go so well.

Back home and by arrangement met with my neighbor Dr. Margaret. She is recently back from a trip to Tanzania with a ton of really good pictures and cellphone videos (close up lions, baboons, elephants, etc.) that she wants to put together with iMovie. She’s been trying really hard to learn it on her own with youtube videos and such, so I offered to help. We spent a solid two hours hunched over her laptop building the first 20 minutes of a movie. I think she has learned enough to carry on for a while on her own.

Then practiced music. I am scheduled to perform sometime in March at the Lee Center, for which Puff the Magic Dragon is requested, and then in May at the spring concert, I hope with Lynne doing the routine I scripted yesterday. Which means learning these songs well enough to not embarrass myself. Back a few months, I was going to do Puff and then dropped it, so I had practiced it a lot, and still had problems. So now I’m switching to a different way to do the chords which seems to be a little easier. Anyway.

Wednesday 02/21/2024

Did my laundry. Took a medium walk between loads. During the walk I conceived a way to do a cute musical act. Taking off from that Durante-Shirley Bassy video I linked yesterday. So I wrote it all up screen-play style.

At 1pm was the monthly FOPAL volunteer zoom meeting. No big news. The February sale netted a fairly weak $16K.

Spent some time printing four new pictures for the gallery in the hall.

At 7:30 I went down to listen to a lecture by Russell Toll, who is a professor of neuroscience and operates a clinic where TMS (trans-cranial magnetic stimulation) is used to diagnose and treat PTSD and depression. Quite interesting. Their site is still “under construction”.

Tuesday 02/20/2024

Did a couple of chores first thing, and then still had time to write something for the writers group meeting at 10:45, so I did. The cue was “your favorite hour of the day” and that was an easy question to answer.

After lunch I did some music practice. One thing: the song that Lynn wants to duet on is one I’d never heard, Jimmy Durante’s “One of Those Songs”. She had a sheet with guitar/ukulele chords on it but I wanted to hear it better, so I looked for versions on YouTube, and I found a real gem. This is just too good. Now, there is no way Lynn and I could reproduce this performance but it sets a bar for enthusiasm.

After supper I had the AV job of running a movie. In this case it was Kramer vs. Kramer with an impossibly youthful Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep.

Here’s what I read to the writers group. It’s very meta, talking about itself and all.

I like 8 to 9am.
I am at my sharpest, most alert, most productive. I exit the bathroom showered and shaved. While I dress I hold the shape of the coming day in my mind, its lumps and gaps. I anticipate the times of trouble, times of accomplishment, times of rest.

And usually, I have a mental list — or, often, a physical, written one — of things I need to do. Then I do them. Briskly.

Today I had two listed items, scrawled on the back of a waste sheet of paper last night as I was going to bed, and I quote:

1099
Docent

This morning, after making the bed, putting on shoes, and — the last step of dressing — taking the phone from its charger and slipping it into my pocket, I sat down at the desktop computer, signed in to Schwab, and downloaded the 1099 forms for my various accounts: PDFs dropping neatly into the folder named 2023 Tax data.

Moving to the laptop — because for reasons unclear, the bookmark for the Computer History Museum volunteer sign-up sheet isn’t on the desktop machine — I reviewed my Google calendar for the rest of this week, and reviewed the list of available time slots for docent tours. I meant to pick one, but there were two that looked like fun and I signed up for both, updating my Google calendar to mark off the time for each. There’s a couple of accomplishment time-lumps to be considered on Thursday and Friday.

And looked at the clock: it was 8:25. I love 8 to 9am; there’s still time to hack up some kind of essay for the writers group…

But there were several essays to the group that were better than that. I can’t quote them because I don’t have permission. But this group writes good stuff.

Monday 02/19/2024

I took the standard walk, which seemed a bit more effortful than sometimes. At 10:30 it was time for the Event Coordinator’s meeting. This has often run long but today it was all wrapped up by a bit after 11.

One of the attendees was Lynn, who among other things runs the harmonica group, and plays the ukulele. She wanted to show me her “fake book”, that’s the term for a musician’s collection of sheet music. “Fake” because usually it only shows the most minimal info for a song, the key and the chord changes, or maybe a melody line. She’s been building this for years and it’s a huge binder.

Like me she is slated to perform in the spring concert in May and she wanted to talk about sharing the stage. Which is fine by me. I had two songs planned, and she had one. We agreed that we’d sing together on her song, then I’d do one of my solo, then we’d sing together on the third. Now we have to rehearse. But May is a long ways off.

Then to lunch with Stew, Lou and Joanne, the principals of the Good Times group that put on the Strollin’ event on Saturday. Stew wanted to do a post-mortem but there wasn’t much to dissect, feedback has all been positive. We, actually they, talked about how to get more people to dance. But then talk turned to the next event, which will focus on folk music, and will be in September.

After that I headed down to FOPAL, finding a stack of 8 boxes of donations. I got through them all in 2 hours, and got back in time for Rhonda’s open meeting at 4pm This was well attended, there must have been 80 people in the auditorium and 20 or more on zoom. The topic was the dining services changes which had provoked so much comment at the RA meeting last week. Discussion was calmer this time but there were plenty of questions.

Then I had supper with Patty, Martha, and the Allens. Craig has pretty well recovered from his recent operation to remove a tumor from his neck.

Sunday 02/18/2024

Just a typical Sunday morning. At 1pm I brought the car around to the front forming a line with three other cars for a 12- (or 14?) person carpool to the Pear theater. We saw To Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday. It is an ok play, very well acted by a cast of six. An exploration, partly realistic and partly symbolic/fantastical, of aging and the desire to never grow up (Peter Pan) while inevitably aging.

This was interrupted in the middle by a member of the audience (of about 40 people) collapsing. The play was stopped while the person was helped out; we later heard that he had a problem with low blood pressure. The actors, who in the scene were gathered around a family dinner table, stopped where they were, then when the audience was back in their seats, restarted the scene from the top and carried on. Very professional.

Saturday 02/17/2024

Today at 1pm I drove down to the Mitchell Park library, stopping on the way at City Hall to drop off my ballot. At the library I attended a social gathering of FOPAL volunteers. This wasn’t much of an event, just snacks and coffee and stand around and chat. I left after half an hour.

Killed time until 5pm when I went down for an early supper and then into the auditorium to set up for the Strollin into the Sixties event. 20 great songs, about half of them with various residents including me, singing along with them. My rendition of “Who Put the Bomp” got a nice hand, but in fact I messed up the lyrics and had to fake a couple of lines. Which put me on a par with the other amateurs.

Anyway I am glad to get that off my mind, preparation for that event has been a job for several weeks.

Friday 02/16/2024

Went for the standard walk. Spent quite a bit of time practicing guitar. Spent some time re-reading the contract I signed when I entered Channing House. This, because of the people complaining about staff “not listening” to residents about the meal plan changes. Since the contract is the only thing that really defines my relationship to CH, I wondered what exactly it promised in the way of food service and other services, and what did it say about my rights with respect to the staff. It was quite an interesting read and I started a little essay about it.

Had an early supper, then joined David G, Martha, and Patty to car-pool to the SWBB game. The visitors were the Cal Bears, and Stanford mauled them severely, winning by over 30 points.