Friday 11/17/2023

Took a standard walk. At 10:30, put on my red shirt and drove to the museum to lead the noon tour. That went pretty well, about 10 people, very attentive.

Practiced guitar. Revised the short video I made yesterday, to make it a little longer, at Kass’s request. Then sat down to make an orange color.

Previously I had purchased some Light Orange acrylic paint. It looked like the right color in the color patch at the online hobby store, but when it arrived it was clearly too light and yellow. Today I sat down with a sheet of plastic for a palette, and a couple of blunt hypodermics for dispensing small quantities of liquid precisely, and experimented. I had some deep red from the same paint company. Pretty quickly I worked out that just a teeny addition of the red to the orange got the right color. About 1 drop to 16 drops, or so.

I put all the orange in a bottle and threw in a couple of screws I had in my junk drawer, to facilitate mixing. Measured the weight of the paint in the bottle (by weighing an empty bottle then the full one), and began dispensing single CCs of red and shaking, shaking. Pretty soon had the right color. Here it is, posed against the same reference pic as yesterday.

Thursday 11/16/2023

Today’s main activity was to drive to Berkeley to attend the funeral mass for Bob Kelleher. Bob’s wife Lolly was Marian’s college roommate at Cal. For decades we played bridge with Bob and Lolly, once a month, alternating their house and ours. Lolly died a couple years back, and Bob died just 3 weeks back. I had not expected to find the coffin was at the mass, but it was, with burial scheduled for this afternoon.

There was to be a reception at the parish hall after and I know that had she been there, Marian would have stayed for all of it, of course. I kind of wanted to, but was intimidated. There were maybe 100 to 120 people there, and when the mass (finally!) ended, they all exited the church and formed a large chattering mass outside on the church steps. So many people I didn’t know, who all apparently knew each other. And a few people I did recognize but couldn’t instantly put names to. The four daughters I knew, and I recognized a couple of their husbands. I hugged one of the daughters, Bernardine, but the others were not in sight, or surrounded by layers of well-wishers. So I chickened out and left.

I took advantage of being in the East Bay and stopped at one of the few remaining well-stocked hobby stores, Hobbies Unlimited in San Leandro. They have a very complete display of paints from several makers, but I still couldn’t find a good orange. Wait, have I mentioned the 240Z? I finally acquired a model kit for a Datsun 240Z. They aren’t available in the US, but I found a Japanese kit on eBay. I must paint it the orange of our (Marian’s) 240Z. Here’s a reference shot, not our car but very similar,

There are several different colors of orange in that shot, depending on the angle of the light, but none of them are available in a bottle or spray, that I can find. It’s a “burnt orange” color, kind of hinting of caramel. Right?

Came on home and finished editing a short 4-minute version of the Appreciation Fund kickoff party.

Then off to SWBB. There were 5 for out carpool and I drove. Yes the Prius holds three across the back. My supper was a tall cup of Chicken Pho, which was delicious. Very spicy and hot. The game was v. Cal Poly, who were completely out-classed, the final score was like 80-30. Basketball really should have a “mercy rule” like they have in softball. Up by more than 30 in the third quarter, game declared over, drive home safely. But no they have to play on to the end. Which risks injuries as tired players get desperate.

Wednesday 11/15/2023

Did my laundry. Took a shorter walk than usual. Took a tech squad call: printer won’t print, turned out to be out of ink. Edited the video of the Appreciation Fund event of a few days ago.

About 5 David G. called. He’s to run an event tonight, a lecture on Eichler building style, but his daughter is having an operation and he wants to visit her about 6pm. Sure, no problem, I can run an event.

So I do run the event and while I have run these things multiple times before, I fuck this one up. Here’s what I wrote to my AV committee later.

She had powerpoints on a little Microsoft Surface PC. I had her start Zoom, join the meeting, made her co-host, had her share her screen. This all went smoothly. Her slides up on the big screen and going out to Zoom users.

She mentioned she had a video in the powerpoint, but I didn’t think what that implied — audio.  So I let her share her slides withOUT ticking the little box on the share dialog that says “share audio”.

So she’s in her talk, and gets to the video, and clicks Play, and no sound. I immediately knew what was wrong, but fixing it, live on stage, turned into a clusterfuck. What was needed was conceptually simple: Stop the share; Share again; and this time click “share audio”.

Alas, she was just not able to get to the zoom meeting window, under the full-screen display of her slides. Somehow in trying to find it, she managed to leave the meeting. Then she couldn’t find the Zoom app to click Join, so she got a web browser and signed in to zoom.us on the web, and from there you can click Join, but it didn’t seem to recognize the meeting ID at first…

After about 10 minutes of f***ing around on stage with the audience fidgeting, she/we got back into the meeting and shared her slides, but still not with sound, so she gave up on the video.

I must say the lady was very chill and calm about the whole thing, kept her head amazingly well, and was nice about it afterward

So that was my nightmare evening. The talk actually went pretty well, there was a good Q&A session afterward. But there was 10 minutes of sweat in the middle.

Tuesday 11/14/2023

Sat myself down at 9am to write something (anything) for the writers group. Felt totally uninspired by this week’s cue, “Holidays”. But I worked out something fairly clever by 10:15, it got a couple of chuckles and compliments. I’ll stick it at the end.

At 4pm there was a marketing event, the CH marketing department invited everyone to the auditorium for drinks and snacks and to hear how well they have been doing. They expect a contract to be signed on 11/30 for our last opening, at which time we will be 100% occupied. (Note regarding this and yesterday’s rant, that’s the independent living units. The AL and SN units together are only 60% full.)

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Monday 11/13/2023

First thing up was the monthly Resident Association meeting. No big news there. I attended remotely, on Zoom, for the first time since the pandemic because I wanted the time to read the materials for the next meeting.

With that out of the way I got in the car and scooted down to FOPAL to do the monthly cleanup of my section after the sale last weekend. I pulled three boxes of books off the shelf because they had survived four sale days without selling. There was only one box of donations, which I processed. Then I grabbed a couple of energy bars at the store and ate them for lunch, getting back to CH in time for my 12:30 meeting.

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This was the Strategic Planning Committee meeting, the subject being to hear the initial report from the consultants that were employed. They had done a very thorough job of evaluating our market and how our pricing does or doesn’t fit with the demographics of our market. All of which, in my humble opinion, was a waste of time for a simple reason. We are full. We have 98% occupancy, plus over 40 people have paid $10,000 for the privilege of being at the top of our waiting list.

There was much nattering about how “the market” is moving toward larger units. When they hold focus groups, what people tell the marketers is, they want two-bedroom apartments that have full kitchens and private washer/dryers. According to the consultant, new and planned new senior facilities no longer include studio apartments at all; the smallest units being built are 1br.

(The laundry thing is especially annoying to me. We have a nice, clean, functional laundry room on every floor. It’s a 30 second walk from my door, and I’m at the end of the hall. I use it every second Wednesday. What an insane waste of resources it would be, for me to have a personal washer and dryer and iron and ironing board, to use twice a month! What are people thinking when they tell focus groups that life would be intolerable if they had to share laundry facilities?)

Anyway, this is presented as a problem for Channing House because over 50% of our units are studios, and we have very few 2br units. So our building is completely out of step with the times. Oh dear or dear whatever shall we do?

All of which hand-wringing completely ignores the simple fact that WE ARE FULL and that we have a list of people who have PAID MONEY to be on the WAIT LIST.

The consultants went to great length to define and analyze our Primary Market Area — basically, Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Stanford and a bit of Mountain View. In that area they actually counted 3,000 households headed by people over 75 with incomes over $100K — i.e., people who could afford to move into Channing House today. In order to remain full, all Channing House needs is about 15 people per year to fill new vacancies. That’s 0.5% of the available market! — a market which the consultants say is growing at about 1% per year. All we need is to locate that one half of one percent of the eligible buyers who don’t crave a 2br unit with full kitchen and laundry (i.e. sane people). Out of 3,000, I think it should be feasible to locate 15 such people a year.

Channing House does not have a marketing problem, and today’s meeting was a large waste of time. The consultant’s work was not wasted as it definitely showed in numbers, that we don’t have a marketing problem. The market is full of people who will buy what we offer.

Anyway.

After practicing guitar — today was a day when I sounded and played like shit — it was off to CHM for a celebration of us volunteers. It was a moderately nice event. Everybody clapped for everybody’s achievements, which have been many and genuine.

Sunday 11/12/2023

Today’s plan is for Scott and June to come here just after 2 and for four of us to drive to SFJazz for the Boogie Woogie Festival. But first thing comes an email from Sandy, she doesn’t feel well, go without her. I spend some time before lunch trying to find people who would like to use her ticket but no sale. People going to the Opera instead, or to the SWBB game, which I am sorry to miss but not much.

At ten I met with Ian in the auditorium to try to figure out what went wrong yesterday when he couldn’t play the DVD for an opera as scheduled. My diagnosis is that the new Blu-Ray player is very finicky about disc quality. The very old opera disc had fair number of fine scratches and smudges. My fix was to show him the external DVD player that goes with the Macbook Air we keep backstage. Hook the Air by HDMI to the projector, the Apple player had no problem with the old DVD. So that will the route in future, for discs that aren’t in perfect shape.

So off to SF. This was a great trip. Smooth ride, easy traffic, despite our initial concern about streets being closed for the APEC Summit. And an excellent, really outstanding concert, six great pianists alternating, having fun with jazz and boogie woogie. Couple pictures.

Saturday 11/11/2023

Got up a bit early. Took the extra time to download the appreciation fund videos and put them on a thumb drive and put that under Jerry’s door. So that deferred/forgotten chore is off my mind. Zipped over to safeway for a couple of things and parked in the front lot. Tidied the car.

At 9:30 Joanne, Erica and Sandy joined me and we drove to the San Gregorio General Store for two sets of music by the Keller Sisters. Good stuff, very enjoyable music. Took rather a long way back. I can still drive competently on winding roads, smooth, no discomfort for my passengers.

In the evening had an email from Jeb, asking for the video of his wife’s travel talk from July. The event was on 7/16, which I noted. Sometime in the following days I did something to make a video and emailed him a dropbox link for it on 7/22. Sometime later I deleted the file from Dropbox and from my mac. Now he wants it. I spent half an hour with Time Machine on the laptop and can’t find it. Now I’m thinking maybe I did the video on the desktop machine, I will check its Time Machine backups. (I checked. Nope.)

Friday 11/10/2023

Took a shorter walk than usual. At 10, met with AV volunteer Rich to talk about an event on Sunday. Memorial on 11, and relatives want to show a slide show on the mobile TV. Rich had signed up for this event before we knew about the slide show ask; now had to coach him on how to get a laptop connected which he hadn’t done before. He had set up to try it out with the relative at 2:30. I checked with them about 3 and Rich and the relatives were all happy, it had worked. This please me greatly, seeing Rich have a success. Being a manager.

Played some guitar, napped. Completely forgot I was supposed to be editing the Appreciation Fund video for Jerry to use. Now won’t have time before Sunday. At 6 joined the rest of the End Of Life committee for a wrap party dinner at Il Fornaio. Very pleasant chatting with them.

xxx

Thursday 11/09/2023

Cleaned up the apartment and left for Shustek. Only half a day today. Steve and I cataloged the original XO-1, the main product of the One Laptop Per Child project. That was a noble effort to distribute cheap laptops world-wide. It failed for a number of reasons. But they designed a cute little laptop that could be cheaply produced, the XO-1, and Nicholas Negroponte, the guy who founded the whole thing, gave what we were verbally assured was serial #1 to CHM. The machine had no serial numbers visible on the outside. Maybe there was a big Serial 00001 on the inside somewhere. But it ran, which was fun to see.

Then we all headed over to the Yosemite warehouse because they had agreed today was to be a group lunch and “show and tell day”, bring something to show. I had nothing, but I wasn’t alone in that. There were some cool things like a 1950s-era wire recorder that worked, with a collection of pre-recorded spools of wire. Curator Aurora showed off a jacket she made. Stuff like that. Then the volunteers left because the curators had an afternoon meeting.

Wednesday 11/08/2023

Took a standard walk in the morning, felt fine. After, went up to the 11th floor and set up the lecternette for use by Peter and the final End of Life session, which was to be a workshop where people could get assistance filling out POLST and Directive forms.

At 1pm I had a haircut. At 4:30 we had our monthly 6th floor meeting. No important business, just a nice get-together. After supper it was time to meet with other fans carpool to a SWBB game. This was the first game I attended this season (there was an exhibition game last week but I stayed here to run an event). And at this game I experienced a complicated mix of strong emotions.

First, on entering through the door onto the upper mezzanine level of Maples Pavilion, and the sound of the Stanford Band hit me, I felt an intense wave of grief. I was close to tears for the next ten minutes sitting waiting for the game to start.

It’s been almost five years since Marian died, and I hadn’t felt this kind of grief in this venue since 2019, the first season after she was gone. For the twenty years prior, 2017 back into the late 90s, Maples and the SWBB team were central to her life and thus to our lives. Since then, in the 20-21, 21-22, and 22-23 seasons, I’ve just basically been a fan, going to home games and keeping tabs on the team, but no strong feelings.

I think what primed me for a major hit on today’s season-opener, was the thinking and feeling I’ve done over the past 6 months watching the PAC-12 dissolve, really internalizing that this is the final season of PAC-12 play. Between that, and the new rules that make the “student-athletes” into “student employees of fan donors”, and transfer rules that encourage the good players to shop around for the best money — starting this time in ’24 everything will change; all the old rivalries and the regular cycle of familiar opponents will be wiped out. And the tradition, and memories with them. So I was primed to feel loss, and it really hit me for a few minutes.

Then that emotion passed, and by the second quarter it was replaced by a different feeling: Boredom! I was just not interested. The players are good, play is just as skilled and intense as ever. But I felt further and further removed from it. I didn’t care. I was literally yawning. I spent some time on my phone, sending an email, during the third quarter. Athletic young women doing athletic things. Eh. That’s nice. Is it over yet?

I’ve been saying, because of the PAC-12 thing and the other stuff, the complete overturn of the old system, that when this season is over, I’m done. Now I’m feeling I may be done before the end.