Monday 10/09/2023

First thing was the Resident Association monthly meeting. The agenda was packed, but I was the 5th item, asked to report on the auditorium upgrades. I’d prepared a 2-minute video to demonstrate what our camera can do. I’d meant to talk about the missing parts of the upgrade especially the big side-monitors, but Lennie, the RA prez, asked me not to. So I didn’t, but I primed Jerry to raise that issue when I opened the floor to questions. But the first person to ask a question, ahead of Jerry, was Joanne, who said, “what about the plan to have big monitors on the side?”

Also there was a presentation by the Vance Brown project manager describing what they have been doing to install a new emergency generator in the back parking lot. This seems to involve completely gutting the back lot down to dirt and building it up again. Major job, but needed so that the passenger elevators retain power in an outage.

Later I went down to FOPAL, stopping on the way to drop off the TiVo at Fedex for its return. Tidied up my section, counted all the books, and took pictures. There’s a guy who posts pictures of all the shelves before a sale. There are apparently people who like to browse the shelves from home before coming in. Don’t see it, myself. Less trouble to come to the sale and browse the shelves in real life. Anyway this took half an hour so I spent another half hour cleaning up the sorting room, sorting out a bunch of small boxes that people had dumped on our porch.

Back home, took one tech squad call. Played some guitar. Had supper with the Allens.

Sunday 10/08/2023

Pleasant Sunday. Watered the plants, and then repotted a jade plant. The story here is that a year and a half ago I attended a Channing House Board Retreat day (Day 3-107). Everybody got as a party favor kind of thing, a tiny little sprig of a jade plant in a little plastic pot. I brought mine home and stuck it in a 5-inch pot and it has been growing very happily on my balcony plant stand since. A week ago I picked up a larger, 9-inch pot and today finally got around to repotting it. Goodness knows how big it can grow now.

Next weekend is the FOPAL sale weekend, so this is the week we are supposed to get our sections ready. I thought I would take care of pricing and shelving today, and go back tomorrow to do a final clean-up and take pictures of the shelves as I’ve been asked to do. So I did that.

Later in the day I practiced guitar — my skills are coming back — and did a little writing..

Saturday 10/07/2023

Boxed up the TiVo to return it. On the way to the museum, I stopped at the FedEx office and — they are closed on weekends. So I will have to ship it on Monday.

Did a docent tour, group of 25 at the start, 20 at the end, nice.

Friday 10/06/2023

Took the standard walk and it was fine. Did my month-end accounting; the nest egg is still in good shape.

At 1pm I had a routine dermatology checkup. The doctor was pleased to find nothing that needed to be burned off. A year ago she did burn off a couple of things; not this year. No issues at all.

Before and after 1pm I struggled to install a Tivo. I have been unhappy with my Comcast, excuse me, XFinity, DVR. Its response time to the remote buttons has been very bad: for example, hit the pause button on a recorded show and you could count slowly to 5 before the actual pause would happen. Similar for other commands.

So when Martha, a neighbor, talked about using her Tivo with our Xfinity system I thought, cool. I had good memories of TiVo from the 90s and Oughts. Then we switched from the Palo Alto cable company, to DirecTV satellite; and had to change to the DirecTV DVR, which was OK. So I thought, hey, the TiVo box should have better response, and on the spur of the moment I ordered one.

In the days after I placed the order, I shit you not, the response time of the XFinity DVR improved a lot to where it was almost usable. How did it know?

So today I unboxed the TiVo and tried to set it up. It has a “guided setup” process that, I swear, is the lamest, most dim-witted piece of software I have ever met. Bottom line, it would not connect to any of our three wifi networks, so I could not complete the basic setup process. And the TiVo website support pages were badly designed and unhelpful.

I spent an hour in live chat with a support person and they taught me an undocumented trick with the TiVo remote that let me get around one of the snags in the setup process, but I still couldn’t make it work. Folks, I am an experienced tech support person and I threw up my hands. That box is just stupid. Whoever designed it should be fired.

This was a big disappointment. After all, TiVo has been selling essentially the same product for thirty years. They should have honed the support and the out of the box experience to a fine edge by now, but no. Probably the corporation has been bought and sold several times and all the original intelligence is gone.

In the end I called their support line and with only about twenty minutes of arguing got them to send me a return authorization and a shipping label. Tomorrow it goes back where it came from.

Thursday 10/05/2023

Thursday mornings I like to give the plants a shot of water before leaving. And I noticed that the white fly infestation on my big begonias is worse. I’ve been spraying stuff on these horrible little things for a while now.

So off to Shustek for a day of cataloging stuff, first documents, then a couple of objects. Finished cataloging the last of the documents in the Al Kossow collection. Al is a noted collector of stuff. Among other things, he created Bitsavers.org, an invaluable resource of old manuals (over 150K of them). A while back he donated all his remaining paper documents to the museum and we have been working through them slowly, cataloging and filing, for months. Today me and Dave Bennett did the last of them.

On the way home I stopped at the nursery on Middlefield and bought a spray bottle of Neem oil, and then spent an unpleasant half hour spraying the underside of each leaf on the begonias. Die horrid little flies, die.

Wednesday 10/04/2023

My only planned action today was laundry. Went for a shortish walk so as not to let my laundry idle too long. I had a call from Nancy who was running a small concert at 4pm on the 11th floor and wanted a microphone. I set that up. I stopped by on 11 during the concert and it didn’t appear the performer, a young cellist, used the mic at all.

During the afternoon I actually sat at my desk and wrote on the novel, and learned again the thing I’ve learned multiple times before: ideas come out as you are writing. Thinking about the next scene for days now, and not able to think how it should go. But actually sitting there typing words (and backspacing over them and typing other words) the ideas come, things I would never have thought of elsewise. It’s the writer’s curse. You just have to put your butt in the seat and face the keyboard; there’s no substitute.

Didn’t mention a thing I did yesterday: washed my dishes. Oooh, there’s a bulletin. But I have this small collection of dishes, plus the hummingbird feeder, that I wash very casually after use, in my sink. So I just took every utensil and dish I own, which is a small collection, down to the dining room on our floor, and ran them in the dish washer. Every couple of years whether they need it or not.

It might occur to a person that the sequence number at the top is counting toward 365 faster than the actual calendar is? Well, don’t forget this blog’s “year” starts on December 3rd. That was Day 1. This December 3 will be blog entry 5.001, start of its fifth year. Should I say my “transition to codger-dom” is finished?

Tuesday 10/03/2023

In the two hours before the writers meeting, I edited the video from last night’s concert into five shorter videos. One for each of four performances (cello solo, cello duet, violin solo, piano solo) that I uploaded to dropbox. Sent links to them to Nancy who had organized the concert, to share with the performers. Then I did a short, 2-minute video showing what all I had done with our new video equipment, and shared that with the AV team and other interested parties.

Then it was time for the writers meeting, for which I hadn’t written anything. The theme was “a day to live over or differently” and as you might expect there were some harrowing personal experiences.

At 3pm I joined Patty on the 11th floor where she was supervising the set up for the Heritage Circle annual donors reception. She wanted the lecternette in the middle of the floor and other changes. The reception actually started at 4, and it was fancy with lovely little shrimp cocktails and deviled eggs each with a little blossom on top, and other fancy nibbles all from our dining services.

The big announcement would normally have been about taking proposals for a new round of grants, but instead it was the announcement that various projects funded before had not been completed because of rising costs (including the auditorium AV upgrades) and this year they would skip a grant cycle and just use available funds to complete these projects.

At 7pm we had a movie; the first using our new projector. The movie was All Is True, Kenneth Branagh’s look at the final days of Wm. Shakespeare. Which were not happy days it seems. Rather uncomfortable indeed. Very slow play about unhappy people. Do not recommend.

Monday 10/02/2023

Took a complete standard walk for the first time in a bit. Then at 10:15 I went down to the auditorium to be available as John set up for his wife Francis’s book talk. He didn’t need any consultations.

Francis’s book is The Little College That Could, about how a lot of enthusiastic alumnae rescued her alma mater Sweetbriar College from destruction. The school was established in 1901 by the will of a woman who bequeathed her 3,000-acre(!) estate to be a college for women. In 2013, the then board members announced suddenly and with no warning that they were closing the school. It was never made clear why, as the school was not in financial trouble. Some of the people responsible were in the real estate biz, however. Anyway, the alumnae banded together, raised $12 million, filed a host of lawsuits, and forced the board to resign and be replaced by a new board dedicated to keeping the college open. Francis and another alumna wrote a short book about it which I can’t find on Amazon to link.

After lunch I went to FOPAL and spent 2 hours as usual. At 6pm I opened the auditorium for a concert by some amazingly gifted kids, a 12-year-old violinist, a couple of 13yo cellists, and a 15yo pianist, all playing heavy-duty classical music, Paganini and Chopin and such.

My part was minimal, just providing mics for announcements. However I wanted to try out our new camera and recording equipment so I recorded much of it. I will edit the video tomorrow to see what I got.

Sunday 10/01/2023

Left early for the museum, to buy some drinks at Safeway. Led a nice group of 15 or so on the noon tour.

In the afternoon, put in an hour on guitar practice. I am trying to be a bit more disciplined about this than other times. Basics. Scales and shit.

Saturday 09/30/2023

Nice easy morning, sittin’ around the apartment, practice a little guitar, kill time. After lunch I changed to my red docent shirt and went down to CHM to lead the 2pm tour. Nice group of 20+ people, did a good tour I thought and several people said it was.

Back to CH, change shirt, and up to the 11th floor to meet with a relative of Paul Pinsky, whose 80th birthday party organizer asked for AV help just 24 hours beforehand. Turned on the rolling TV, which had been delivered on schedule as I requested — kudos to our staff for creating a work order at 6pm Friday and executing it at 3pm Saturday. Set up the lecternette. When relative arrived, on time as scheduled, he was able to plug his laptop in and start running the picture show. I left while they were still setting up the party. Lots of grandkids around, ages 4-20 it looked like, and daughters in their 30-40s? Kids were all huge, made me feel tiny. That family apparently runs toward basketball size kids.

Had supper with Grace and the Allens. At 7:30 I checked the Pinsky party; it was still going but they had turned off the mobile TV, so I decided I would go put stuff away tomorrow. No idea how long they would continue.