Saturday 10/28/2023

I omitted to mention yesterday, that there was a private event on the 11th floor, and after the AV committee meeting, I went up there to set it up. I didn’t stay for that party, but had dinner alone, as I mentioned. This morning I went up at 8am to tidy away the equipment from that party. I noticed that the electrical cords on the lecternette were a tangled mess. Also I remembered that at the meeting, we had agreed that the key to the backstage equipment rack should be put in a different place. So I took care of those two things.

First I walked up to our hardware store, to look for velcro cable tie thingies. They had them in a nice roll. Plus I bought key tags and a stick-on hook. Back at CH I tidied up the cables on the lecternette and put it away. Then I went to the auditorium and put the roll of cable ties in a supply cabinet where we can use them for other things.

The equipment rack for all the AV equipment got a new door in the recent upgrade, and the pair of keys for the door were just dangling in the lock. I put a tag on each key and I stuck the hook on the side of the rack and hung one key there. I gave the other key to the front desk person to be stored with other keys they manage.

I had a long session with the guitar. So frustrating. For the couple of songs where I can trust my fingers to hit the right chords reliably, and I can get into a groove and sing freely, I can sound pretty good. One song, Jambalaya, the only two-chord song, C and G7, in my list, that one I can do without looking at the music or the lyric sheet and sound pretty good. Acceptable, anyway. I live in fear of being a William Hung. His audition for American Idol was gosh-awful, but he seemed blissfully unaware of how bad he was, and the producers let him audition in multiple rounds just capitalizing on the cruel humor of it.

Had a very pleasant dinner out with Edie, talking about among other things, trusts and bequests and the end of life series. As old folks do.

Friday 10/27/2023

Took the standard walk this morning, first time in a week? More? Anyway it was alright, maybe a little tired at the end.

Then I sat down to edit the video of the third End of Life session. I don’t do a great deal of editing with these. I cut out spans when nothing is happening. In this case there was a 20-minute video shown; I cut out those minutes of the camera, which just shows the empty stage, and replace with the actual video that was shown.

Anyway that took a bit under an hour; then another half hour to run the 10 GB output of iMovie through Handbrake, to produce a 1.2GB file. And upload that to Vimeo and notify the people who need to know, that it’s there, and the URL.

At 2pm it was time for our monthly AV committee meeting. I talked about the use of the media player. I had prepared a single sheet instruction page for its use. Gerald stopped by to talk about what’s going to happen, mainly the new screen to be installed.

That was about it. I ate in my room. Initially I called Edie to see if she wanted to out for supper but she had plans, so we agreed to go tomorrow. Rather than go out two nights in a row, and not feeling like the dining room, I just had a lonely sandwich. Not looking for sympathy; I enjoyed the quiet.

Thursday 10/26/2023

Just tidied the place as usual, and headed out to the Shustek center in Milpitas. There was lots to do. For one, they had just received a robot named Pepper.

Pepper recently retired from a job as a lobby concierge at WeWork, or so I think they said. Later I cataloged a late-70s document workstation with 8-inch floppies, then in the afternoon helped Kathleen catalog documents.

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On another topic, I had a couple of waves of grief lately, the first in quite a while. Both were sorrow for the past life. One was when I was putting the season schedule for SWBB in my calendar. When putting in the away games I was remembering the times we traveled to Spokane, Denver, L.A., Corvallis. And this makes the death of the PAC-12 even more cruel. The other was, strangely, in the local Ace Hardware. I was cruising around looking for something when I got a flashback to Brown’s Hardware on San Juan Island and the summers we were at Paul and Katie’s farm. Living in an apartment in what amounts to a nice hotel, I still find a need to stop by Ace every couple of weeks. Imagine how much more often you need something from the hardware store, living on a working farm.

Wednesday 10/25/2023

Why Amazon always wins. Because they have it all, right where you want it. Wednesday mornings I refill my pill cases for the week. Today I noticed my supply of two supplements and of my Famotidine acid reducer, was running low. So I sat down to order more.

First to a site where I’ve ordered supplements many times, Swanson Vitamins. They had my Resveratrol and my Calcium Citrate Petites, but they didn’t have Famotidine. Oh. I looked at the bottle; it’s a generic Famotidine that I got at CVS. No problem, go to CVS.com. Sign in because I have an ID at CVS. Search for Famotidine. It shows me nothing but the name brand Omeprazole, no generic. But I got it there! I open a new tab to shopping.google.com and search Famotidine there. One of the first results is CVS! So they do have it, they just don’t want to show it to me. Another result from Google: Amazon.

I go to Amazon and in under 2 minutes, I have located both my supplements, exactly the brands, dosages, and quantities that I want to replace, and the generic Famotidine. All at one site, one order to place, at the same prices as the other sites. The only annoyance is that with any drug or supplement, Amazon makes it easy to accidentally sign up for a subscription, and forces you to make an extra click to get a one-time purchase. That aside, the convenience wins. And a big fat raspberry to CVS for hiding the generic product.

Which brought me to 9am and time to go set up for the third End of Life session. That came off smoothly. Had a quiet afternoon. In the evening I took a tech call, a resident complaining that one particular show was in Spanish. Craig warned me beforehand that this would be the Secondary Audio Program (SAP) support on Xfinity. Somehow the alternate audio gets switched on. He was right. Somehow Hannah had gotten the Spanish soundtrack for that one program switched. Switch it back, all good.

Tuesday 10/24/2023

In the morning I messed around in the auditorium on some AV items. I replaced a bunch of AAA batteries in various things, made a list of problems, and emailed it to Gerald of IT. Then I prepared an instruction sheet on how to pair a bluetooth device with our sound system, for the AV meeting on Friday. Then there was the writers meeting at 11. I hadn’t written anything.

David M. had put out a notice that a painting by his son had won 2nd place in an art show sponsored by University Arts, an art supply store that used to be on University avenue but now is in Redwood City. Anyway, the art show sounded interesting so I drove up there. Actually I was more interested in just walking around this huge art supply store. So many kinds of paint and pencils and suchlike. Then stopped at the hardware store to buy more AAAs.

The promised delivery robot has appeared in our dining room. I tried to get a video of it in operation but it didn’t come out well, I’ll try again tomorrow. Anyway, it’s a pretty little cylinder about 24 inches in diameter and 40 inches high, with a screen on top, and open tray levels inside. It quietly rolls out of the kitchen carrying the plates for one table, rolls to the table and waits for a server to come by and put the plates in front of the diners. Then it rolls away. The only programming involved, as I see it, was creating a map of the dining room and tables so it would know where to roll to deliver to table 36 for example.

Monday 10/23/2023

Regarding yesterday’s play, Mrs. Christie? Another CH person, Sandy was there, and I asked her how it came out. She said she didn’t know; she had left at intermission too. Then tonight I asked Patty if she’d seen it and she said, “Yes, hated it.” Patty is not the type to leave a play early, but she couldn’t recall how it ended either. “Just more of the same.” So Mrs. Christie is 0-3. Well, 1-4 because Gretta the Curator liked it.

I took the standard walk, ending at CVS to pick up a couple of prescriptions. For some reason PAMF refilled one of my prescriptions, but I wasn’t short of that one, so now I have two full bottles of it.

Then down to FOPAL to process 5 boxes of computer books. Back for an early supper and out at 6:15 for the SWBB Open Practice and Season Ticket Holder Reception. Patty came along also. The team looks like it should be strong, three talented freshers, Hannah Jump back for a 5th year, plus Cameron Brink. Tara was in great form making jokes and talking about how excited she was and they all were. She said they were working on having the best year ever; that was their thing, every day setting out to make today another day in the best year ever.

Me, I’m going to savor the last year of the PAC-12. I was entering the schedule for the upcoming season in my calendar, entering the away games, Oregon, OSU, Washington and Washington State — and remembering trips to watch Stanford play at those arenas. And that is all over, decades of tradition and memories just discarded in the chase for TV money. I felt like crying.

Sunday 10/22/2023

Did my usual Sunday morning things. After an early lunch I drove out to Safeway to buy a couple of things, then down to the Mountain View Performing Arts center to see a performance of the play, Mrs. Christie. I did not subscribe to the complete season of TheaterWorks this year because I didn’t find much interest in the plays, including this one which is based on an unhappy period early in Agatha Christie’s life, when her first marriage was breaking up. It is known that at that point she disappeared for a bit more than a week, causing headlines and a search, and then turned up and resumed her life. The play runs two timelines in parallel, with Mrs. Christie interacting with her husband and his lover, simultaneously with a modern-day Christie fan trying to solve the “mystery” of her short disappearance.

Gretta at CHM had recommended it, and she’s an experienced actress and theater-goer so I bought a ticket. I did not like it at all, and I left at half-time. The production generally was polished and professional and the actors were doing their best with what the story gave them, but I couldn’t get into it. Maybe because I read Agatha’s autobiography a decade ago and remember what happens. She doesn’t say anything about her disappearance; but I do remember that afterward she divorced her first husband, got her career together, and later married again and was very happy in that marriage. Her second husband was an archeologist and she spent many happy summers with him on expeditions to Mesopotamia.

So, knowing that about her life, I did not enjoy scenes of domestic unhappiness and stress. I felt kind of “so what, why are we dwelling on this period, she had decades of much happier times later.”

The second plot, about the fan who gets hold of (actually, steals) a couple of pages from an unpublished notebook and wants to work out the mystery of where Agatha went during her disappearance, also didn’t engage me. I think this character, Lucy, was supposed to be funny and quirky, but that didn’t work for me; she just seemed trivial and her search seemed pointless. There were couple of characters introduced as part of the present-day time-line and they were clearly just there for exposition and to give Lucy somebody to talk to.

The whole first act, over an hour, just grated on me for all these reasons. At intermission I headed out to the lobby and asked myself, “Do I want to go back for another hour?” and the answer was a clear “Nunh-unh.” So I came home.

Saturday 10/21/2023

For fun this Saturday morning I walked across the creek into Menlo Park for coffee at Cafe Zoe. I’ve mentioned doing this a couple of times before, it’s a mile away and not on any of my normal routes.

At 1pm I put on my red docent shirt and headed off to the museum to lead the 2pm tour. About a dozen people, who seemed to enjoy themselves.

At 7:30 we had a dance exhibition by Danse Libre, a local volunteer dance troupe who like to recreate the popular dances of the Regency (i.e. Sense and Sensibility era) and the 1920s. They were very good and put on an entertaining show.

Bert was doing the AV for this one, but he called at 6, they were having a hard time getting their iPad to pair with our system. By the time I got down to the auditorium, they had worked out the problem, and all was well.

Friday 10/20/2023

Yesterday I found the whitefly infestation of my begonias had rebounded from when I sprayed them with neem oil a few days ago. I need more oil and a better sprayer, and I wanted to deal with this first thing. So I started by driving to Home Depot where I bought a small pump sprayer cheap, but couldn’t find the neem oil that was supposed to be in stock. So on around to Summerwinds for that, and home. 9 miles, all on the battery.

Now I could copiously spray under all the leaves of two big begonias. Lots of delicate little white flies flew up and died, mwah-ha-ha. I’ll repeat this in a day or two.

Then I edited the video from EOL session 2, yesterday. I’m getting pretty good at editing video. I was again pleased by my 2-year-old MacBook Pro. Once you have completed editing in iMovie, you export the video to a final .mp4 file. I have done videos on my old (2016) iMac, and I know that to export a one-hour video takes at least one hour. Same job on the MacBook Pro with the Apple M1 chip? Just over 15 minutes. Sucker cranks.

Anyway did that and uploaded it to Vimeo and distributed links to the videos to the people who cared, and it was barely 11am. Damn I’m good. Played a little guitar, at which I am improving. Had lunch. Did some other stuff.

At 3 I started putting together a mismatched set of clothes. The 4th floor has this month’s TGIF and declared it would be “Crimes of Fashion” day — come wearing clothes that should not be worn together. I wore my best fedora with a t-shirt, shorts, and sandals with socks. I was astonished by the eye-hurting combinations my neighbors had put together. Here’s a tiny sample.

Almost everybody who turned up — the penthouse was crowded, so maybe 70 or 80? — had dressed up, or rather down, or maybe sideways. It was amazing and hilarious.

Thursday 10/19/2023

Tidy the apartment, and off to the Shustek center in Milpitas for a day of cataloging documents. Steve and I worked through one entire box of various things. A notable entry was a complete collection of the newsletter of the New Orleans Kaypro User Group, from 1981-83. They put out a 4-page newsletter every month during that time, and somebody had saved them and donated them.

Another item was a lot of notes and careful schematic diagrams, by an MIT e student who in 1973 or so, was trying to reverse-engineer a “blue box,” an analog tone generator then used for getting free long-distance calls.

On the way home I stopped by Jean’s place, mostly to pick up my spare MacBook that I had lent her. She had taken it on a trip to Salt Lake where she used the Mormon’s genealogy study center to try to complete her family trees. I say tried, because she had all her notes on a USB stick and somehow during the trip home, it was wiped. Formatted empty. Disappointing, lost a good part of her work.

On my balcony the white fly infestation has rebounded from my spraying. I sprayed some more but the spray bottle ran out. I will get bigger guns tomorrow.