Wednesday 11/23/2022

So the big activity today was to lead a docent tour for 9 of my neighbors. This had been set up and arranged by Barbara B., who arranges museum outings and other such day trips. The museum entrance fee is paid by Channing House directly, and billed to the monthly fee of each person who attends. In order to keep the group small I had specified we would use the small bus, which holds 9 plus the driver. I’m doing a second one next week. There was a wait list on the sign-up sheets for both trips.

The bus left at 1. I led my tour from 1:30 to 2:30, then people had a few minutes to hit the gift shop or bathroom before the 1401 demo at 3. Everybody was very enthusiastic and complimented me a lot on the presentation.

My leg/hip held up very well. It’s almost better.

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Oh. The number in the title. Something is wrong. Somewhere back there I messed up. The official year of this blog ends on 12/2; 12/3/2018 was “day zero”. So today should be day 3.356 not 3.346. Oh well.

Tuesday 11/22/2022

Used the gym in the morning. The days I want to do it, Tues/Thurs early, are not well chosen. Harry and Susan and Larry are all in there. I am going to try going half an hour later, 8am instead of 7:30, in future.

Anyway, I found out which specific exercise twinges my injured hip. It’s the leg-lift, where you bring your leg up against a weight load. Others, including pedaling the cyber cycle, no problem. Also, this evening, I was walking around downstairs for several minutes not even thinking about the hip, so it is definitely mending.

The writers group met at 10:30. The cue this week was “a perfect day”. All I could come up with was what I had written for the same group, way back in July 2021 (https://codgerville.net/2020/07/08/1-219-writers-fopal-model/) so I read that again.

With nothing more on the schedule I went and got in the car, and drove down to the P.A. Cafe at Midtown, and sat at a table there for an hour plus, writing on the novel. Mostly extending the synopsis/outline and adding notes on a twist I thought up at about 2am this morning. There is just a staggering amount of work left to do. I get very daunted thinking about what has to be done to finish it.

Had dinner with Marcia and Kent and Sandy.

Monday 11/21/2022

Tried going for a walk. Nope, the hip isn’t ready. No pain or problem sitting, lying down, or standing; only when actually swinging the leg.

At 10:30 it was the Event Coordinator’s meeting. I noted all the events for December in the magic A/V spreadsheet and almost all are covered. So probably I won’t have to hold a team meeting this month, which will please everybody I think. Spent a couple hours in the afternoon emailing people and making schedules and stuff.

After the meeting I went down to FOPAL, where I found a couple of boxes of books to process, and spent an hour doing sorting just for fun.

And only now at 7pm do I realize, I meant to attend Rhonda’s open meeting at 4, and I completely forgot. Just blew right past it. And I was interested, she was supposed to present some of the pictures taken by the professional photographers last month. Crap.

Sunday 11/20/2022

Off at 11am to the SWBB game versus South Carolina, #2-ranked us versus #1-ranked them. We led most of the way but they tied it in the final seconds of regulation, and then they won in overtime.

Back to CH in good time to set up for a Sunday@Home presentation, resident Paul presenting his best pics from a couple of decades of nature shooting trips in Alaska. Really fine photography. I was most pleased by the fact that the whole zoom-hybrid meeting thing worked very smoothly, no glitches. Possibly the first time ever.

Saturday 11/19/2022

Only scheduled thing today was to lead a docent tour at noon. I actually spent an hour working on the novel, mostly making notes on different characters’ motives.

At 11am I slammed an ibuprofen and a tylenol, and by noon I was able to walk pretty freely, as long as I went slow and took shorter steps than usual. If I walked with my normal stride it hurt, although not as much as yesterday. I figure to be back to normal sometime next week.

The tour went ok, about 20 people.

Back at CH I got a tech squad dispatch for a person with Apple Mail problems. I don’t like Apple Mail. Turned out to be a tricky thing. She had bought a new iPhone with the latest iOS 16. iOS 16 is a major update that changed a lot of things. It seems that it added a new Privacy feature to the Mail app on the phone. If that is turned on, which it was on the new phone, Mail on the phone will not download any linked content in an email, such as images.

Somehow Mail on the phone magically transferred that rule to the Mail app on her MacBook. It stopped downloading linked images too, but instead of explaining why, it would just put up an obscure message about “some content could not be downloaded privately.” Which was the main issue the person had. Turning this off on the phone magically cured the MacBook also. It’s all juju, really.

Friday 11/18/2022

Since I had canceled out of the Baylands bus I had nothing on the day’s calendar. During the day I solved a couple of software mysteries. I have my app now on two different Macs, the laptop with the new Apple M1 silicon, and the old iMac with Intel silicon. On the latter the app behaved oddly in a couple of ways and I resolved those issues. The next thing will be to try to package it.

I edited the video for Dr. Margaret’s talk. Due to a blunder by me, nobody else is to blame, we lost the first 3 minutes of audio. The audience in the room heard it fine, but I had neglected to click one thing to send the room audio out to zoom, and of course it was the zoom meeting that was recorded. Well. Nothing to do about it now.

About 10am I went out for a walk, not sure how far I would want to go. Turned out, not far. The pain and stiffness in the left hip was annoying enough that I only went around a 3-block orbit. Later I walked one lap of our roof (840 feet or 1/6 of a mile if you follow the marked path). I think it is getting better but I’m going to be sore for a while longer.

Dinner with Patty and Leon and Margaret. Talked about the insanities going on a Twitter, with Musk trying to micro-manage the remaining coders. That is not how a high-tech CEO should operate.

In the morning I called Facilities to hang the new art. The guy came up in half an hour. Here’s my outside gallery now.

Thursday 11/17/2022

Took two ibuprofen before bed and slept normally. Thought my hip was normal until I actually tried walking down the hall, meaning to go to the gym. Oops, gimpy. Decided not to go to the gym. Also, later in the day, canceled out of the Baylands walk on Friday that I had signed up for.

At 9am I went down to check in at the nurse station on the 3rd floor. They are supposedly monitoring me after my fall for 72 hours. While I was there I noticed that from that lower floor, the Hoover Tower was framed by autumn foliage. I went back up and got the Nikon and the 500mm lens. The best composition was actually from the 4th floor. I had to shoot through a dual-pane window, though. Anyway,

By evening I was walking pretty normally, and I hope/expect to be fully normal by Saturday when I have a docent round.

Futzed around with a couple of projects. Then when it was time for Wanda to clean, I drove down to FOPAL, and was glad I did as there were 5 boxes of books to process. There would have been a huge pile by Monday.

On return, I picked up the large package of the painting I bought in Eureka. (Day 3.293) It was wrapped in four layers of bubble wrap alternating with cardboard. When I got it out, the question was, would I still like it? I do still like it! It will look very nice on my outside wall. I need to book facilities to put up a hook for me.

Wednesday 11/16/2022

Went for a the walk in the morning. Then got through a number of tasks. I did the laundry. I edited the video of the zoom recording of the Trust Seminar, and put it on a thumb drive, and left that in Lennie’s mail cubby. I called Kass and verified she was ok with running the movie on Saturday; then put the DVD for the movie in her mail cubby.

I read the “quick start” pamphlet for the IBM medicare advantage plan that starts on 1/1/23. Then I signed in to the website, which was a little unsettling. My current, and soon to be previous, Medicare Supplement plan is with the same company, United Healthcare, and when I try to log in to the special IBM web portal, it recognizes my name and password and logs me in to the AARP Supplement page. I guess I will wait until 1/2/23 and hopefully then it will go to the right place. If not, I’ll have to call customer support.

I signed up to do a docent tour on Saturday. I printed a couple more bridge pictures, it had been a couple of weeks since I changed my gallery outside. Speaking of the gallery outside, the museum in Eureka has shipped the painting I bought and it should arrive tomorrow.

At 1pm it was time for the monthly FOPAL zoom meeting. The sale weekend just past netted $19,000. Not bad.

At 4pm I went down to set up a microphone for use by the people running the entertainment for the monthly Birthday Dinner. They had set up an electronic piano in the doorway between the auditorium and the dining room. I was chatting with the couple of people there, while I turned to walk past the piano back into the auditorium. I caught my left foot in the cord, so I couldn’t swing the left leg forward for the next step. Falling forward I yanked my left leg, pulling the muscle in my left glute. Fell on the floor with a severe pain in the ass.

The nurses came and I found I could stand up and walk, with care. An hour later Dennis called to see how I was. The nurses had called my next of kin to report a fall.

At 7pm I was back in the auditorium to run the AV for Dr. Margaret’s talk on end of life issues. Almost everything went smoothly. We lost the first 30 seconds of audio on the zoom recording, but that was it.

So a busy productive day.

Tuesday 11/15/2022

Went down the gym early, just at 7, and found 5 other people there. Gym isn’t that big. Actually there was plenty of room; the real bottleneck is the third of the three computerized machines. Number 1 does 2 exercises, number 2 offers only one, and number 3 has 5 different exercises. Susan was on number 3, so I went and rode the cyber cycle and then Harry was on number 3, and the heck with it, I left.

At 8:30 I was down to the auditorium with Bert and John to do a tech walk-through of Dr. Margaret’s talk for Wednesday night. It’s going to be a good talk.

I went away for an hour and then came back with both my laptops, because I was to run the tech for a presentation on trusts and such, sponsored by the Heritage Circle. There were two presenters, each with a powerpoint on a thumb drive. I copied the presentations to mac #2 which shared its screen to provide the slides to zoom and the big screen. Mac #1 was the zoom host. The auditorium Zoom Room PC had recovered from whatever was its issue on Monday morning, and behaved itself.

Everything hung together and there was only one glitch. Presenter Jeff had supplied his own wireless clicker to advance his slides. Presenter Kimberly used it also, but had never used it before. Going to her second slide she clicked some button on that clicker, that made Keynote on mac #2 just close its window. Ooops. “Did I do that?” Kimberly said. I am scrambling to find Keynote and get it to open the slide file again, and go back to sharing its screen. So, 30 seconds of panic and we were back on track.

Anyway, a major 90-minute AV event that was almost flawless. Here’s my work area,

Clockwise from the bottom: Mac#2, sound board, Sound system iPad, Zoom Room PC, Mac#1, Zoom Room control iPad.

My view of Kimberly and the audience.

That was all the excitement for the day.

Monday 11/14/2022

First up was the Resident Association meeting at 9am. When I got to the auditorium at 8:30, David G. and IT staffer Paul were struggling with the zoom room box, the box that has made running zoom meetings so much more straightforward. Not today. Whenever they tried to get the box to join the scheduled meeting it would report an “unknown error”, always the best kind of error message.

As time ticked on to 9am, David G opted to do it the old way, pulling all the cables out of the zoom box and plugging them into his laptop. That worked more or less well to get the meeting started, although zoom attendees were complaining they weren’t getting sound, although I’m pretty sure they were, or at least, that sound was being sent out of the zoom host. Didn’t matter because then the wi-fi in the auditorium got flaky and the zoom app in David G’s laptop disconnected and closed the meeting. So we were down to auditorium only.

Which made it awkward for me, when, 15 minutes into the meeting, it was my turn to give my pitch for getting new recruits for the AV committee. Well, I gave it anyway.

Then I headed out for my 10:30 appointment with Dr. Lee, the urologist at PAMF. We looked at my most recent CT scan, as more informative than the more recent ultrasound, and he showed me the left kidney. Kidneys are shaped a lot like shrimps in general outline, although quite a bit bigger. Super-jumbo soft-shelled shrimps. Except my left kidney is like a shrimp santa claus with a huge pack of toys on its back, several times as big as the kidney proper.

He argued against doing an operation, mainly because of all the work I’ve had done on my heart and circulation. He just didn’t like the idea of general anesthesia for someone my age and condition, at least, for a problem as relatively small as a cyst. He recommended getting it drained again, as it took 18 months to refill. Well, at least 12 months. So that is what we will be doing.

From there I went to FOPAL and did the post-sale thing. Took a book count (50 books sold, or at least, vanished, from my section in last week’s sale) then looked at every book and put all the ones (two boxes worth) that had seen four sales, on the table to ship to the bargain room. Priced one box.

Bought coffee and cheese and bread and came on home.