Monday 09/25/2023

Took a walk. Went to FOPAL and processed books. Came back and had a meeting with Gerald of IT, to spell out how we want to do training on the updated auditorium equipment. Practiced guitar a bit. Explored ways to find sheet music on the internet.

Forgot to click “publish”

Sunday 09/24/2023

Typical Sunday morning, water the plants, do the puzzle, refill the hummingbird feeder. This is about peak hummer season, they are emptying my one feeder in about 3 hours.

Nothing on the schedule, decided to have Dennis over for lunch if he wanted, and he did. Prior to lunch I drove down to the nursery and bought some fungicide to kill a nasty white stuff on one of my big Dragon Wing begonias. White fluffy thready fungus that in this plant likes to grow on the underside of the leaves. All the internet pictures show it growing on top of leaves. Well, copper fungicide should kill it whatever it is. Yes, I wore a mask and gloves while spraying.

Also bought a pot for a jade plant that is over-achieving. Then to Safeway for some groceries especially a 10-pound bag of sugar for the flock.

Nice lunch with Dennis, Larry — who knew Dennis from way back — and my neighbors Edie and Carolyn.

Quiet afternoon. At various times during the day I did short spells with the guitar. I cn tell my fingertips are getting tougher but there’s a way to go. I remember the chords, though.

Saturday 09/23/2023

Two things today. At 1pm, I drove with two of my neighbors, Florrie and Kandace, to the Mountain View Center for Performing Arts — a very big professional auditorium — to see the Smuin Ballet company. A very impressive display of athleticism and flexibility.

Back home for a couple of hours, then drove with neighbor Doctor Margaret to the Bus Barn Theater in Los Altos — a very small theater — to see Significant Other. This was extremely well done. It’s a sad story about a young gay guy who is left progressively more alone as all his girl chums pair off with husbands, and he can’t find a partner for himself. All of the actors were just right, but the lead was especially well-acted.

Friday 09/22/2023

Went for the standard walk, yay me. At 10 met with Peter to go over the a/v requirements for the five-part, End of Life Planning series that he is producing. A series of workshops on all aspects of end of life, one a week through October. About the third own, they want to show the Netflix documentary Extremis. I thought, cool, I will get screen capture software for my laptop and I will use Peter’s Netflix ID to stream it and suck it up right off the screen.

Then I went down to Jean’s place and had lunch. She is planning a trip to SLC to finalize a lot of genealogical research she’s done over the years. She wants to borrow my old MacBook in order to have her existing database to refer to. Unfortunately that database is managed by Reunion for Mac, a genealogical app that… well I don’t like it. Mostly because it has no way to export its data in readable format. So if she is to see all of her saved notes and documents, she needs to have Reunion itself running on the MacBook. At first it looked like the only route was to buy another copy at $145. But I copied the app from her desktop machine to the MacBook using a memory stick. When launched it demanded a user name and activation code. Fortunately Jean is an experienced computer user and was able to dig that info up from her email archives. And we got it running.

So back to CH for the 3pm monthly meeting of the AV team. We got an update on the auditorium upgrade in process and settled a couple of other issues.

After supper I downloaded a screen recording app from the app store, and signed in to Netflix with Peter’s ID, and started Extremis playing. As soon as I clicked Record, the movie window went black. Stop the recording, the image came back. Netflix knows when you are recording your screen. So that’s that for Plan A. I have a plan B and also C.

Thursday 09/21/2023

Tidied up and watered the plants. Spent ten minutes abusing my fingertips on the guitar. I found the most amazing website, chordbase.com, which has chord sequences for hundreds of song and other useful guitar stuff, including an online tuning meter.

At 9 I had to make a choice: to drive to the East Bay and work at one of the two CHM locations, or not to do that. I opted not to go. I spent time printing three more pictures and putting them out on my hallway gallery. Then at 12 I skipped lunch and went down to FOPAL and did two hours of sorting. As I’ve often said, sorting is very satisfying. I skipped lunch because I knew that at 3pm there was to be the monthly ice cream social here at CH. I came back just in time for that and made myself a large and satisfying sundae.

At 5:30 by arrangement, Edie joined me and we went back down Middlefield (seems like Middlefield is the only street I drive these days) to Mike’s Cafe in Midtown. Nice supper and talk.

Wednesday 09/20/2023

Started the laundry early so as to be able to leave at 11am for various things.

Which included first, a stop at FOPAL. On Monday I had found two very valuable donations, things that were going for several hundred dollars on eBay. One was a copy of the Bell System Technical Journal for July 1978. This was the edition that had several articles describing the UNIX system, the first public announcement of UNIX. I had carefully put these in the High Value box, and emailed Nigel, the High Value manager. Yesterday he went by to pick them up and couldn’t find them. So today I stopped down there and searched the HV boxes and none of the books I’d put in were there. I was perturbed. Emails back and forth. Eventually Nigel found that the eBay sales manager had picked them up and was getting ready to sell them. So whew, and all that, but annoying.

On down to CHM where at 1pm my next-door neighbor Carolyn stopped by with her brother Doug, who is visiting from the East coast. Their father worked for IBM back in the pre-computer days. We walked around the parts of the museum we don’t go to on the tour, then they joined the 2pm tour which I led, and then we all watched the 1401 demo at 3pm.

Back home, I had a nap and then set up a mic for the monthly Birthday Dinner. Then up to the 11th floor to set up for a speaker coming at 7:30. This was Brian Neider who manages what used to be CAR, the support organization for developmentally disabled kids. Now it has merged with other agencies and is called Ability Path.

The auditorium equipment is supposedly being upgraded. I was in there to set up the mic for the birthdays and not much is happening. But anyway, events are now on 11, using the mobile TV/Zoom Room setup. This came off ok, although I think I messed up and it didn’t get recorded. So it goes.

Tuesday 09/19/2023

Out early, walk to PAMF (2.2 miles for the day) for the second blood draw, after I consumed the single tablet of dex last night. I have no idea what this is supposed to prove. The Sutter Health website notifies me of new test results and this one hasn’t come in yet.

That left me an hour to write something for the writers group. The cue this week was “music lessons”. I’ll stick what I wrote at the end. It was a good session, ten or eleven people had written, and all but one of them had similar experiences to mine, where they didn’t get have a good experience or learn anything.

Afternoon I helped Edie solve a silly problem with her Mac. And I took down the pictures that have been in my hallway gallery for several months and decided what to print for the next set. I printed one picture, 17×11, and the printer goofed up and did some banding and skipping. Didn’t quite ruin the picture because it only affected the left and right edges, so I cut it down to 14×11 and could still frame it and put it up. But then I had to clean the heads, and then I had to run a “power cleaning” which takes a long time and uses up half the capacity of the waste-ink-box. But after that the printer was ok.

The set of guitar strings I ordered two days ago arrived, thank you Amazon Prime, and I spent an hour re-stringing Karen’s guitar. Then I downloaded a guitar tuner app for the iPhone. Tuned it up and it sounds great! It’s a Yamaha, quite large, I think it’s Yamaha’s copy of the Martin “Dreadnought” style. With new strings it feels good and it has a very big sound. I played it for ten minutes and my left hand is sore. Not the guitar’s fault. Just out of condition muscles.

Monday 09/18/2023

Out at 8 to walk to PAMF. Dr. Marx has ordered a cortisol level test which involves having a blood draw, then 12 hours later taking a single dose of dexamethasone, and another blood draw. So I walk to PAMF for the first blood draw, then have a nice coffee and pastry for breakfast at Peets, and walk back.

At 10:30 it was time for the event coordinator’s meeting, where we finalize the calendar for the next month. Back to my room to enter all the events into our A/V calendar spreadsheet and schedule an A/V team meeting. Then to FOPAL for a couple of hours of book pricing.

Back in time for a quick nap and then Rhonda’s monthly open meeting. This is one thing that distinguishes CH from most senior facilities. Staff respects residents sufficiently to have monthly direct contacts, including things like, today, going over the Strategic Plan and how it is progressing.

Then Rhonda finished up by sharing a presentation she had given to the Lee Center residents last week. Called “road to Channing House” it was basically her autobiography. The initial motivation was a dementia program called the Golden Leaf, which among other things tries to build trust by having residents and staff share their “road” to where they are now. Rhonda led by example, but other staffers are expected to provide similar talks in coming months.

Anyway, her bio is quite impressive, with multiple degrees, first in financial management, which she practiced for a number of years as a consultant and as a manager; and then a masters in geriatric care. She met her husband the first day of college, and is still married to him. He’s a physicist and chemical engineer. They have one natural daughter and one adopted son.

Before supper I put together another event video, from zoom recordings of a memorial a couple of weeks ago.

Oh, I ordered new strings for Karen’s guitar. Lightweight ones, so hopefully it will not be too painful getting my calluses back. Do I want to practice enough to get my calluses back?

Sunday 09/17/2023

Did a little writing in the morning. At 1pm I brought the car around to be one of three CH carpools to Noises Off at the Pear Theater. They did a really good job on that show. Very entertaining and fun.

Evening, dinner with Karen and David M and Bob S. We talked a lot about the music of the 1960s, when all of us were in, or just out of, college. Or dropping out, in my case. I was (as usual) the only person at the table without an actual degree. It developed that Karen has a guitar that she hasn’t played in decades (took lessons a while then put it in the closet). She offered to loan it to me, and they brought it around after supper. So now I have a guitar in my apartment. Not totally sure if that’s a good thing or not.

Saturday 09/16/2023

A lovely unscheduled day. I walked in the morning to Cafe Zoe in Menlo Park. Very tasty zucchini/carrot cake.

Later in the day I actually did some writing on the novel.

At 7pm, walked over to the Lucy Stern theater to attend Matilda the Musical. I had seen this show in London, Day 1.078, and as you can see from that link, thought it “very silly” and also had a hard time following the lyrics. Well, the TheaterWorks production was just as silly (no surprise, same book) but was even harder to understand. This was due, at least mostly, I’m pretty sure, to a really bad sound system. I’m sitting in an excellent seat, G108, 7th row center. All the sound seems to be coming from high up to my left, and it is too loud and distorts on all the peaks.

The actors were all working really hard, well-rehearsed, sharp, great dance moves, great physical comedy. Can’t understand a word they sing. The whole long story that Matilda tells the Librarian? One word in 20, maybe. A shame. During the first big number I decided I would leave at intermission, and I did.