Lazed around until time to go to lead the noon tour at CHM. As often happens, the 2pm tour had been canceled for lack of a docent. As often happens I thought about being a hero and sticking around to do another tour. As usual, I decide Nahh.
Something I read online pointed me to a movie, Bob Dylan: the other side of the mirror, a documentary made up of all Dylan’s appearances at the Newport Folk Festival in 1963, 64 and 65. No commentary, just performance video. Turns out, it’s on Amazon Prime for $3.99. What the heck, so I showed it to myself. Good stuff.
That, plus an episode of Mr. Bean, brought me to 9:45, which is when there was to be fireworks from Stanford Stadium, following a MLS game. So up to the 11th floor and out on the roof. It was a nice fireworks show, and closer than the nearest ones will be on Tuesday. The onshore breeze made nice patterns from the smoke, too.
I went for the standard walk, first time in a week. Then I had not much to do until 2pm, but I filled some of the time writing a report to my AV team on my meeting with Tom and Gerald.
At 2pm I joined Ian and Gigi and Susan in the auditorium to help Susan practice for her First Monday book talk. It’s going to be quite interesting. Ian had signed up to do the AV but Susan and Gigi want it video recorded, which Ian hasn’t done, so we will work together on it.
When the book talk people cleared out, Bert came in, wanting to practice a zoom event. Bert has lots of ideas and likes to experiment. So instead of working my carefully planned checklist he wanted to plunge in and do things other ways. Eventually we got the results.
I met with Patty for supper a deux so we could talk over the state of the auditorium upgrade. Patty is part of the Heritage Circle committee that approved that grant a year ago. She gave me a new perspective on the situation. Basically reminding me that the HC approved the grant proposal, not a specific sum of money as a budget cap but a specific list of items to be accomplished. So I should make sure that we know what we want and have a plan to get it. She is frustrated with two other approved grants, where the staff have overruled and basically sidelined the resident committees that proposed the work, doing it staff’s way instead, and leaving the people who thought it up and argued for it, with their noses rather out of joint.
One case of that which rather shocks me is the approved grant for electric car chargers. The three person committee that planned and pushed that grant includes a guy whose resume includes a seat on the California High Speed Rail commission (not to mention many years at the IMF approving transit loans to national governments). To bypass his advice seems rather feckless.
So I tidied the apartment and was just about to head out the door for a day at Shustek when my phone rang. It was Joe, the cantankerous old coot (and he is all three things even looking from my age). His Firefox was doing weird things and he couldn’t get to his email, and must be my fault. I went and spent half an hour, and I am ashamed to admit I lost my temper with him. That was when he said I had promised to be there yesterday morning at 8 and didn’t come. See yesterday. His email was on the screen when I left. I got to Shustek in Milpitas at 10 exactly, then spent ten minutes writing an email to Bert, who runs the tech squad, explaining the situation and saying I can’t work with Joe any more.
After lunch I polished off the last of Sandy Fraser’s papers, so I had processed most of the 40+ boxes (Toni did a box or two one day) into 29 storage boxes. Yay me. Gretta was very complimentary on the achievement.
First thing I was to meet with Joe because somehow in working on his computer yesterday I had messed up the setup that he is absolutely habituated to, the only way he knows to use it. So he said last night, so we agre were ed I’d be at his door at 8am. I called his room, he didn’t answer. So at 8:05 I went down to the dining room and intercepted him just coming out. “It’s all working fine now,” he says. So I didn’t need to come by. Thanks for letting me know, Joe.
Next up was a 10am zoom meeting with Gerald and Tom of IT to go over issues with the current quote for auditorium work. It was only small things I was concerned about and we resolved most of them. The next round of the quote should be acceptable, although less than I had originally hoped for.
That meeting ended at 10:40, and at 10:45 I was due in the Auditorium for a Marketing Event. I was one of four residents to assist at a luncheon for prospective new residents. About 40 people were there, the majority having paid a fee to be on our waiting list. That’s a new thing, people put money down to have an assigned spot on the list, and to specify the exact type of apartment they want. So if a 2BR unit comes open, it is offered to everybody on the paid list who wants a 2BR, and only then to people who haven’t paid.
Anyway I was at table 4 with a pleasant couple from San Francisco. They know CH because his mother lived here; she passed in 2018. After a 20 minute marketing slide show we four residents, me and Sally and David G. and Helen, went on stage and answered questions from our marketing person, and then from the audience. It was all fun and good humored. Then we got lunch.
By 2pm I was back at home. Later I got a call from Peter asking for help planning the use of the zoom room in the conference room, so after supper we met there and contended with Zoom generally for an hour. Zoom really makes it hard to sort out all your settings.
I have resolved to rise half an hour early (easy to do after the solstice) and do some writing for half an hour before settling down to read the paper. I did that yesterday and again today. After reading the paper I went on down and did the round of machines in the gym.
At 9am I went down and set up for an event: a talk by Ryan somebody, about all the electronic resources available from the Palo Alto library website. There’s a lot. I had a tech failure in that the stage lights just quit about ten minutes before the 10am start. So Ryan was somewhat in the shadow during his talk. Later Bert showed me what button should be pressed, only I swear I pressed that same button myself several times. Go figure.
Following that I joined the writers meeting which had been delayed to not conflict with the event. I hadn’t written anything. The cue was “my first experience with death”. Several people wrote really affecting, striking essays.
At 1pm I had an appointment with Joe, the guy with the malware on his mac. Turns out I hadn’t fixed it last time, so I had another try. Different malware scanner. I apparently did something to mess up his setup though, because he called me at 6 to say that he couldn’t find Firefox any more. I’m to go help further tomorrow.
Then I was thinking about the mess at FOPAL where there has been a surge of donations and stuff piled everywhere so I went down there and did 2 hours of sorting. There were about five people working and it was quite a jolly crew.
Then I looked at the calendar and realized tomorrow, my normal laundry day, was quite crowded, so maybe I should do laundry tonight? So I started a load on the way down to supper and finished the laundry after supper.
After supper I realized that I should at least get a start on making a video from the presentation this morning. So I worked on that for a couple of hours, and in fact finished the job. An “extra value day” as Bill used to say.
At 8:15 I left to walk to the dentist. There the nice lady asked, did I remember to take my pre-med? Oh shit. I am supposed to take amoxicillin before a dental procedure to protect my artificial valve. I’ve only been doing this for the last twenty years. Small point in my favor, they didn’t send me a reminder text the day before like they have in the past. Anyway, they dispensed the amoxy and it was ok.
Next down to FOPAL where I spent 3 hours processing a huge pile of computer book donations.
In the afternoon I dealt with a tech issue. My buddy Bert can be really obnoxious when he gets a wild hair up his ass, as we used to say. In re the auditorium upgrade, he is fascinated with the technology of a “video wall” which he thinks we should have instead of a drop down screen and a projector. That wouldn’t be a problem except he took it on himself to send email, not to the AV mailing list, but to about 20 people most of whom are on the AV list, detailing his research into video walls. So I read up on them, it’s a stupid idea for us to have one because, duh, it’s a wall, and we have no place to put a 15-foot wide wall, that wouldn’t be in the way of all the other uses of the auditorium. I made a nice, even-toned, factual case, with lots of links to video wall vendors and such, quietly and politely explaining why I didn’t think it would work for us.
The morning was taken up with studying the vendor quote that the IT department has obtained for auditorium work. There are a number of problems with what they plan to, and things the vendor has not properly or completely specified. I spent a couple hours on that, partly consulting with Jerry.
After lunch I drove down to the local nursery and bought myself a coleus to replace a different plant that has been struggling in my living room. Hopefully this guy will feel more at home with my sporadic watering.
Then I printed a bunch of new pictures for my hall picture rails The old display which was big blossoms of one kind or another, had been up for 2 months or more.
Finally I looked at some prize-winning young adult SF novels. A big annual award deal was announced and thought I would look over the nominees for YA SF, because that’s what I’m trying to write. It was pretty discouraging. I read the samples on the Kindle pages of 8 nominees, and they were all really good. One, the winner, was good enough I actually bought it. (This one.) Two things that discouraged me.
One, all of them are written in first person point of view. That is, “I did this, I saw that, I said…” story telling mode. Back in the 90s when I was trying to write fiction and reading a lot of “how to write” advice, every single guru strongly advocated against first person, saying it is a common trap that newbies fall into. Now apparently it is the thing. In the story I’m working on, first, there are two protagonists, what would I do, switch between them, one chapter him, next chapter her? I’ve seen that done but it’s artificial. But also, I want to have scenes that take place where the protagonists are not present. You can’t do that in 1P. In 1P, the only way to report something that happened when they weren’t there, is to have somebody come and tell them about it. Awkward.
The other thing that stood out is how every single one of these award-nominated stories starts bang with strong emotion, danger, or violence. No messing around, no build up, no scene setting. I’m not good at the strong conflict ever, and need to build up to it. Maybe I should change genres, move to Cozy Mystery, where any violence is off-stage and the strongest emotion is wondering who did it.
In the morning I took a walk around and stopped at the farmers market to buy some apricots. Just apricots, no delicious pastries. After lunch I went down to the museum and led a tour of what was to be 16 Google employees, but was actually only 8. What a casual group, they really didn’t seem to know where the others were, or have a leader or organizer or anything. But I did the tour and it went pretty well.
A little after seven I walked over to the Lucy Stern theater for a Palo Alto Players show. This was a Harry Potter take-off called “Puffs” after the house that nobody wants to be sorted into, the Hufflepuffs. The large cast tackled this with immense energy and noise but I didn’t get any of the jokes. I am just not into the Potter-verse. I think I read the first book back in the 70s and I believe I saw the first movie, but probably on TV. Or on an airliner. People around me were laughing at what I assume were clever references, but it was all over my head. It took them an hour and a quarter to get to intermission, and I couldn’t leave fast enough then.
At ten am I scored big on the tech squad. Susan has an HP printer that stopped communicating with her mac some days ago. Two people from the tech squad have failed to fix it. Peter failed, then Craig tried and failed. So Craig asked me to try. And I did the thing. Actually all I did was follow the instructions in the printer manual and the on-screen prompts from the “HP Smart” app. However I had to do that three times, varying things, before the very involved sequence of operations actually worked. I am not a fan of the HP printers or their software. Nevertheless I succeeded where two others gave up. Further cementing my reputation as a Mac wizard with Susan, and probably Craig.
After lunch I went to the museum and led a tour for a group of college students from a university in Sweden. Of course their English was perfect, so no language problem. It was a big group and we had two docents, and my group kept catching up with the other group, so I would have to vamp and stall. I thought I talked more than other docents but apparently not this one.
As soon as I was back it was time to set up for the 4pm AV committee meeting. The main draw for this was the Gerald of IT came to tell us about the current state of the request to upgrade the Auditorium equipment. What’s currently in-plan is just a new, 4K projector and a new screen that rejects ambient light better; and a new camera to replace the old one. Plus some wiring changes and an upgraded blu-ray player to support the 4K projector.
Off to Shustek center for another day of sorting the Sandy Fraser papers. Almost done; next time will finish the job.
Edie had invited me to dinner to fill out a table with Lou and Alice. We ended up telling our life stories, since nobody was really familiar with the others. Lou has had a really distinguished career serving more than a decade with the IMF, and being on boards including the California High Speed Train authority. He gave a talk on that system and its lack of progress, a year ago now. Alice served various NGO development authorities and then at the IMF where they met. Edie’s career has been more local, but she has been a transit planner for local agencies and other governmental bodies. Me, just a humble “member of technical staff”.
When I came back from Shustek early at 3:30, there was an “ice cream social” going on, on the patio. There I ran into my next-door neighbor Carolyn and for fun I invited her to come along to tonight’s play, since I continue to buy two season tickets to the Bus Barn. She was pleased to come, so I had company to discuss the production. It was Sunday in the Park with George, a musical about the short life of George Seurat and his famous painting, which the actors recreate as a tableau at the end of the first and last acts. It was very well performed and the production was amazing given the constraints of the tiny theater. It’s not the most interesting story, and Sondheim certainly doesn’t write hummable melodies, but I enjoyed it.
Codgerville 
