Monday 12/25/2023

Didn’t do much. Talked to Laurel and Dennis. Put the first coat of clear on the 240z body.

Sunday 12/24/2023

Big event today was the official Channing House Christmas Brunch lunch, to which I had invited sister-in-law Jean. I went down and picked her up at 11:30. Came back, she admired my balcony garden, then we joined Carolyn, Edie, and Susan who I had invited to my reserved table of 5. CH brunch featured mimosas, very interesting, their version was more persimmon juice with persimmon seeds floating in it — and fancy Eggs Benedict with salmon under the egg. It was a good group, 4 interesting and highly intelligent women, plus me.

After I took Jean home, I followed up on a tech squad call I should have handled a day earlier but forgot. Helped Bille with her email issues on an iPad.

I was just getting ready for a solitary supper when an acquaintance, Helen, a 9th floor resident, called. She had sent an invitation to me and a bunch of other people to share our sack suppers (it being a holiday, the dining room shut down at 4) in the 9th floor dining room. I had ignored it at the time, but now she was on the phone saying, come on up. There were four others there and we had a pleasant supper and chat.

Saturday 12/23/2023

So what to do with a Saturday in the holiday season? I have no imagination. No, I did not go sort books at FOPAL, although I will confess I gave that a brief passing thought. I paid a credit card bill, I wrote several thoughtful emails, I practiced guitar — I am feeling the pressure of the coming date when I actually have to perform in public and it panics me when I momentarily forget a lyric — on the other hand, I am quite enjoying playing for my own amusement, I like the way I sound in the privacy of my room — and put in an hour on the 240Z model. Next step on that is to spray it with clear coat and then polish that.

So for lunch I felt like a change and did the terrifically imaginative thing of, I’m ashamed to admit, driving to the In&Out Burger place for a cheeseburger and choc shake. Well, it was a change. And good, actually. Then I walked a bit in the Baylands. That was about it.

Friday 12/22/2023

That rarity, an almost uncommitted day. At 9:45 I met with Ann C. to help her take her iMac down to her car, for transport to the Apple store. We (several members of the tech squad) have been fussing over this iMac for a couple weeks, trying to get her new Epson printer to print double-sided as it claims to do. In the course of those visits we had noticed that the iMac ran horribly slow, just taking forever to respond to anything. So she had a Genius Bar appointment. I didn’t go along, I only helped load it in the car.

Later she emailed the tech group that multiple geniuses had looked at it and claimed that it ran so slowly because the Intel chip — this was a 2019, the last year before the new Apple Silicon came in — couldn’t handle the current level of the OS. And she decided to buy a new iMac. I think when the new one comes, she will give me the old one. I will reformat it and install the last Intel-only OS version, and we can sell it through our gift shop. Some employee will buy it and get good use from it. Hell, I’m still getting good use out of a 2015 iMac. (Fortunately I don’t allow automatic OS upgrades, so it’s still sitting on an old OS version, and runs just fine. If I was in the Windows world, I’d be running Win10 still.)

Took a standard walk, despite some grumbles from the gouty foot. Put in a lot of guitar practice time. Spent a looooong time looking at AI tools for novel writing. There are several, and I’m going to spend some time trying out one or more of them.

Thursday 12/21/2023

Tidied the apartment. Did a little work on the 240Z. Practiced guitar. At 1pm, drove to the museum and led the 2pm tour. Really not much other than that today.

Wednesday 12/20/2023

It has been more than a week since I had a proper walk, and outside it was raining heavily. So I put on my walking shoes and went down to the gym and put 2.0 miles on the treadmill. My gouty toe was starting to hurt near the end of the 40 minutes, but it settled down soon after.

Next up was to drive to the other end of University avenue to meet with Leah Lin. Leah is a woman who is developing a clientele among seniors at CH as personal tech support or general personal assistance. She was recommended to me by Joanne T and Connie C.

The problem I want to solve is to have a younger, more available person to hold my medical PA, in case I am hospitalized and can’t communicate. The End of Life series we did a couple of months back sensitized me to this issue. You can need quick response at first, and possibly long-term and rather burdensome monitoring after. I talked it over with Leah, who comes across as the kind of responsible, smart person that Connie and Joanne described, and she is going to write up her understanding of the problem and what she would offer and send it as an email.

At 1pm was the monthly FOPAL volunteer zoom meeting. Last sale netted $18K, new ceiling lights being installed in the main room.

The rest of the day was open. I practiced guitar — my debut as a performing artist is exactly a week from now! — and worked on the 240Z model. This model does not have opening doors, yet it has a very detailed interior, which in the end will be visible only by peering through the side windows. I worked on painting chrome on the dashboard bits and wood color on the steering wheel, and such.

Tuesday 12/19/2023

Gout pain is almost subsided although the toe is still a bit puffy. Didn’t do much. The writers group cue was “that’s that, something is finalized” and I spent some time writing about the day I moved to Channing House (based on the emotional moments I wrote about on Day 198). But after fiddling with it for an hour decided I didn’t want to share that anyway. There were some nice essays by others, although to my surprise nobody else wrote about that particular transition. I thought several would.

After lunch I spent a very frustrating hour with Ann’s iMac. She has a new Epson printer which definitely should do double-sided printing, but neither me no two other tech people have been able to make it do that. The feature won’t show up in a print dialog, which probably indicates we have the wrong driver level, but… I don’t know. Fail.

Monday 12/18/2023

Took a walk, but cut it short at a mile because the gout in my right big toe hasn’t subsided yet. Going along, favoring my right foot, I almost tweaked by right knee. So headed back.

The Event Coordinators meeting at 10:30 is a highlight of the month. I get word of all the events for the next month so I can update the AV group spreadsheet.

A quick lunch then off to FOPAL in the very welcome rain. There I found ten (10!) boxes of donations to go through, which took 2 and a half hours.

Sunday 12/17/2023

During the morning, I finished editing together the Chorus concert video. You want to see it? Here it is, 45 minutes of earnest entertainment. Not good, mind you, but earnest. We try.

At 3pm it was time to set up for an event, a Sunday@Home by Alice, presenting all the bird pictures from her recent birding trip to Australia and New Zealand. She saw many many more varieties of birds than we saw on our trip, but then, she hired specialist birding guides and only went mainly to birding places.

I was mentoring Kass, my AV trainee. One more event and she’ll be able to do them on her own. Probably could now but not confident.

The in-house menu didn’t appeal so I got in the car and wandered over to Cal. avenue and had dinner at Palo Alto Sol, which is still an excellent restaurant. Pollo Guajillo, a house specialty.

Saturday 12/16/2023

In the morning I worked at editing the videos of the Chorus performance of Wednesday. I have two, hour-long, recordings from the two performances that day. I separated out individual video files of each of the main numbers, so I have a folder of AM clips and one of PM clips. Tomorrow I will put together a final video selecting the best version of each number.

At noon I went to the 11th floor to assist in a memorial for one of my 6th floor neighbors, Cindy. I thought this was to be a simple AV job, set up the portable mics and help one of her daughters show a reel of photos on the big mobile TV screen. But in fact they had announced it would be zoomed, and people would come in from outside. Oh sigh. So I ended up being zoom host. About 20 people signed in from outside the building. There was a pretty good crowd, 50 or more, mostly 6th floor residents and visiting relatives and friends. Cindy was a teacher and her husband a pilot for United; they lived in Palo Alto for many decades. He died around 2019, she downsized and moved into CH not long after. She had a lot of health problems this past year, and it was kind of indicated during the eulogy that she had voluntarily ended her life — spent the last month very deliberately saying goodby to everyone, then moved to hospice care and almost immediately died.

The memorial was very nicely conducted by a U/U minister and all the tech worked and caused no issues, so that was good.

At seven I picked up Patty and we went to the Bus Barn theater for Elf the Musical, which is a very silly play but wow, did they do a good job with the music and dance. There were at least 8 big production numbers, where the whole cast of 20 or so were singing and dancing, quite complicated choreography. Many costume changes. There were a couple of numbers where they had a dozen people wearing tap shoes and doing tap-dance steps. All this in a little box of a theater. Very impressive.