Started with a round of the gym machines. Then I had an hour before the next thing so I went up to the 11th floor where I had the two Lecternettes (small amplifiers with mics) stashed, and took some pictures so I could make up an operations info sheet. On Friday I plan to share this with the AV crew.
I got a start on the info sheet, but at 9am I had to break off because I was joining an excursion in the CH bus over to the campus to walk around the Stanford Cactus Garden. About 20 of us trundled over there and walked around for an hour. There were not so very many blossoms but the light was good. Here are the pictures I took.
Back home I attended the tail end of the writers meeting, then finished the info sheets for the Lecternettes. Spent an hour going through the cactus pictures and picking the best and uploading them to smugmug, see above.
Took the standard walk. Felt kind of tired toward the end.
Wrote some actual text on the novel. Cute dialog. I was pleased.
Went down to FOPAL and processed half a dozen boxes of books. Picked up coffee and bread, and discovered that cherries have arrived in the store so I bought a bag, and am having them for supper.
I was surprised to get an email from Paul of IT saying, the two microphones you requested for the lecternette have arrived, come get them. I had no idea they were actually going to do that. I had already bought a cheap pair of wireless mics. Well, they had bought a pair of cheap wireless mics.
That’s actually good, because there are two of the little portable sound systems. Now they each have new wireless mic setups. I took them both to the 11th floor and tested them. I had already planned to demo the one new set to the AV group on Friday, now I will demo two. I need to make some instruction sheets, though. I will do that tomorrow.
For a long hour last night, around 3am, I was obsessing about the novel that I’m not working on. During that time I worked out a resolution to one of the main conflicts. For an hour this morning before lunch I wrote it all down in the notes section of the book file.
At 3pm I met with Sandy and she drove us a whole ten minutes to Menlo Park for a house concert. The performers here were the Keller Sisters. They were very entertaining, they did some sing-along cover songs, and their original songs had clear, effective lyrics.
In the morning I took care of some computer maintenance, installing upgraded OS’s onto both the MacBook and the desktop iMac. The latter, being an ancient 2014 one, is stuck on Caligula is it? MacOS 11.x. But it still gets security updates. It will be replaced like two minutes after Apple announces a new 27-inch or larger iMac. They have not done so but I live in hope. (The only way to get the new silicon with a 27-inch screen is to buy a Mini and a separate display.)
The MacBook is current hardware, it has been running Monterey (12.x) whose default background is a lovely abstract of a deep-ocean canyon that changes color with the time of day, shades of lilac in the daytime and deep blue-purple at night. Well, that’s gone, now I have Ventura (13.x) with the default background of a giant closeup of a California poppy, sort of, and I see that, yes, it also changes color with the time of day.
At 11am I went to a talk by a retired British doctor, actually a relative of my neighbor and fellow writer Prudence. He told about the British National Health Service, what it was like to practice under it, and so on. Quite interesting.
I bugged out of that early to attend a house concert in Oakland. This was the same venue on Rose Avenue where I went a month ago for Dirty Cello. The performer this time was Heidi Evelyn, along with a pianist, drummer, and a multi-instrumentalist Clint Baker, whom I had heard at several of the performances during the Redwood Coast Music Festival in Eureka last September. They did a concert of songs mostly from the 1920s, Bessie Smith songs like “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out”, and it was all good fun. I would like to see them perform at CH. I asked Heidi about that on the way out afterward and it might be possible to make it happen.
The drive back was tedious. I missed a turn and ended up coming through SF instead of going down 880. That was very slow, probably 20 minutes to crawl through the Bay Bridge toll plaza, and congested through the City. But home in time for supper, and then I consulted with Kass, who is running the audio for tonights concert.
That started at 7:30, the group is The Peralta Consort, a well-trained bunch of local amateurs including one CH resident. They played music of the French Baroque era, and I didn’t much enjoy it, so I left early. Not that they weren’t competent, they were; I was just bored. Give me Bessie Smith any day.
Went for a walk. Then I sat down to face my email. Somehow there were about 10 different emails in my inbox, each one standing for something I needed to do: pay a bill, give some info, read something, etc. Over about an hour I disposed of all of them, and felt very accomplished.
From 2007 through 2017, I used a different blog, This Page Intentionally, to write about whatever I was obsessing about at that time. For a year-long stretch in 2014 I wrote about the long process of restoring and upgrading my recumbent bike. In 2015-2016 I wrote about a software project. But at other times I wrote about philosophy and other things. I was looking at the old blog and decided to copy the best writings in it, to a single document. Which I did for a couple of hours today.
That was about it. Did some reading. Talked to a couple of people about this or that.
In the morning and at various other times I worked on processing the two videos of yesterday’s choir performances. This involves having iMovie churn for an hour or more generating an .mp4 file. Also worked on two other event videos that Lennie was having trouble with.
At 9:15 I left for the Shustek center where I put in a total of about three hours on Sandy Fraser’s papers. Got through two more boxes, only a dozen or so are left.
I left early at 2pm so I could attend the Ice Cream Social that CH dining services was putting on starting at 2:30. That was the first course of dinner. Then I attended a meeting of FOPAL section managers on zoom at 3pm. Later I delivered a thumb-drive with choir videos to Jerry, and one to Lennie.
At 6 I left for an event at CHM, a presentation by Kathy Kleiman on her book about the women who programmed ENIAC. I use one of those six women as a human interest story in my docent tour but she got to know all of them.
Extra value day is what my late Bro-in-law Bill Pawek called, a day of travel that started at dawn and didn’t let up until suppertime or later. Today was laundry day, and also the day when the CH Choir presented its Spring Concert in not one but two performances, at 10am and 7pm. I was running the audio, and also making a video recording of each performance, so that Jerry, admittedly a better video editor than me, would have plenty of material to work from.
I started my laundry at 7am, and put the second and last load in the dryer at 8:45. Then I went down to the auditorium to set up and fiddle around obsessively with the knobs and sliders until the performance at 10. It all went off pretty well to an audience of about 70, including a number of people wheeled over from Assisted Living.
At that point I should have gone and got my laundry but I forgot and went to lunch, and from lunch I headed to my haircut appointment on the 2nd floor at 12:30. From there I scooted back to the 6th floor and rescued my laundry. Somebody, probably Patty who was next on the laundry sign-up board, had heaped my dry load in my laundry basket, so I took that down to my room, and signed in to the 1pm FOPAL monthly post-sale Zoom meeting, only 3 minutes late.
That wrapped up at 1:30 so I had time to fold and put away the laundry before my 2pm zoom appointment with Gerald, the IT manager, to talk about the status of the long-delayed auditorium upgrade. The news there is good; they are finalizing a new quote, and we agreed on the priorities of what to do. Very likely we’ll get it all finished in July.
Then I had two hours clear before I had a dinner date with Edie and the Beelers — funny, that sounds like a 50s doo-wop group — with Edie and Leon and Margaret, better. Finished dinner at 6:20 and time to hit the auditorium to set up for the 7pm performance, which went off even better.
That was followed by a reception in the lobby sponsored by the 10th floor, wine and snacks and a number of people complimented me on the a/v work. Hey, I just turn the system on, it’s the singers who do the work. But it’s nice to be thanked.
Took a short walk in the morning. I had agreed to let marketing show my unit at 10:15 to a prospective buyer. An odd sort of a guy looked it over. I kind of doubt he will buy in.
At 10:45 it was time for the writers meeting. The cue this week was “my brush with celebrity” and it got a variety of responses. Among us we have people who have met Yassir Arafat, Joan Baez, and others. I’ll put my bit at the end.
According to my Google Calendar, at 2:30 I was to “setup HSG”. I cannot remember what HSG was supposed to mean. Anyway I didn’t set it up, so I hope it wasn’t important.
At 4pm it was Rhonda’s open meeting, with the subject the changes they have been making to the dining services. Gloria, the manager — who has been here 20 years, starting as a server under Sodexo — and Chef Mark told about the new software they have with difficulty been installing. The goal is to make full nutritional info available to us, but that meant changing out the software they had been using to plan meals. The main problem is that the software vendor loads the system with their recipes, but those aren’t the menus that Chef Mark wants to present, so they have to load it with other recipes, and that apparently takes a lot of time and trouble.
They also talked about the substitutions they make to standard menus as a matter of policy, for example replacing panko crumbs used for breading with gluten-free panko, or changing out margarine for either real butter or oil. And they showed menus from other local residences, like the V and the Terraces, showing that those places don’t have the same range or choice or the vegan option, or the detailed nutrition info, that we have.
Culling of the Troopers 1977
From 1975 to 1978 Marian and I lived in London, working for IBM weekdays and exploring London, and England generally, on weekends.
One weekend we went downtown early from our house in the suburb of Twickenham, hoping to see the annual Trooping of the Colours. (We just couldn’t stop ourselves from turning it into the Spoonerism, Culling of the Troopers.) It’s a ceremony held to celebrate the birthday of the monarch. The Queen would get to sit on her horse and watch the Horse Guards perform various evolutions while the band played.
We found our way to Horse Guards Parade quite early. There was nobody about, but there were bleachers set up, and since no-one told us not to, we sat in them. Those were innocent days; I’m sure security would be much tighter now. People gathered to sit in the bleachers. We kept expecting someone to ask for our tickets, but no-one every did. A passing shower caused lots of brollys to pop up. Eventually band music started and the Guards showed up and Her Majesty arrived.
The Guards trotted back and forth. I believe the Queen gave them a little salute with her white-gloved hand at some point. The band played. It wasn’t very interesting, so I looked around and took a couple of pictures of the other people in the bleachers.
Later, when we got the slides back from Kodak, we worked out who we had been sharing the bleachers with that day. Fourth head from the left, gray hair and glasses? That’s Prime Minister of England James Callaghan. Next to him, Kenneth Kaunda, President of Zambia. Lady with blue hat, don’t know, perhaps Mrs. Kaunda? The lady in the pillbox hat is Mrs. Callaghan. Next to her, his excellency Hastings Banda, President of Malawi.
And not far away, Pierre Trudeau, PM of Canada. Trudeau was the only one we recognized at the actual moment. But that’s four Heads of State all within 50 yards of us that day.
I had several things going on today, one of which was to do the post-sale triage and cleanup of my computer section at FOPAL. Ordinarily I would do that after lunch, but there’s more stuff in the afternoon today. So I decided to squeeze that in before the 10:30 Event Coordinators meeting. I zipped down to FOPAL and did my work and was back in plenty of time for the meeting.
Nothing too exciting to report; June is a slightly easier month for AV support than May.
Then at 2 I headed down to set up for the Channing House Choir tech rehearsal, preparing for their concerts on Wednesday. I plan to record those events so I needed to practice the camera moves and understand where the different singers and combos would be standing. Mary the director has planned a complex program supplementing the full choir (about 30 singers) with numbers from the Harmonica club, and from a flute-piano-bongo trio and a flute-violin-cello trio as well as an audience sing-along section. So that took until almost 5pm.
After supper I came back down. Nancy, our classic music impresario, had set up a concert by some local high school kids, a trio of piano, violin and cello, and a string quarter. These kids were very impressive, playing difficult music, Grieg and Mendelssohn and such, and doing it with what sounded to me like professional ability.
After watering the plants and failing to complete the NYT puzzle — they did a very tricky thing with the clues and I failed to figure out the double-twist — I drove down to FOPAL. It’s the middle of the sale weekend and I was right to check, my shelves were in a mess. I tidied them up and came back.
Not long after I headed out again for Stanford to watch a baseball game. This time I took along my clipboard and a scoring sheet and scored the game. Besides being the last home game of the season, and Mothers Day, it was a wild and wacky baseball game. Top of the first, the first two Arizona hitters reached base, and the third one hit a homer. 3-0 Arizona and nobody is out yet. The game went on like that. So many batters came to the plate on both sides, that despite them using the new 20-second pitch clock, it was 2:15 into the game at the end of the fifth inning. At that point the score was 16-9 Arizona and I was feeling the heat of the sun, so I left.
I’m glad I did leave because the game didn’t get any more sensible after. At the 4 hour mark, bottom of the 9th, Stanford hit a three-run homer to tie the score at 18-18 and they went to extra innings. Top of the tenth, Arizona hits a three-run homer to make it 21-18. Bottom of the tenth, Stanford scores two runs on a double. With two out and the tying run on third base — the last batter strikes out. Loss, 21-20. Football? No, baseball!
Mothers day is one of the holidays where we give the dining staff an early exit. No dinner service; only brown bag suppers that you can order ahead of time. As is our 6th floor convention, those who were in the building for supper brought their brown bags, along with bottles of wine, to the floor dining room for a picnic.
Codgerville 