Friday 10/07/2022

Went for the standard walk. Then followed up on a call from the Tech Squad. Joan has a new TV but wants her CD player to work through it as it did with her old TV. What I find is a huge (easily 70-inch) new Samsung TV that her son-in-law installed for her in an existing media wall unit. Underneath is a blu-ray player. There is a loose HDMI cable visible under the TV. This should be simple, I think.

Not quite. First off the tv almost exactly fits the media unit, with like 2 inches of clearance on either side, and I can barely get my nose over the top. And son-in-law has fastened it solidly so it doesn’t rotate or slide in any direction.(I think he glued it, I don’t see any screws.) Which is ok as earthquake proofing, but now there is no way to get to the back of the tv where presumably there are HDMI ports. OK I can just barely see them using my iPhone as a flashlight. And two, the cable seems to be too short to reach the ports. But I get down on the floor and turn the DVD on its shelf and look behind and there is some slack, which I push through the back of the media cabinet and now the cable is long enough, and mostly by feel I manage to connect the cable to the TV.

Now to make it work, we turn on the tv and we see the usual Samsung “smart tv” interface which I have tangled with before, trying to show a movie on the new Samsung that Stew installed in the 4th floor lounge. People, if you need a new tv, get an LG, a Sony, a Vizio — not a Samsung. Fine screen hobbled by horrible software. Anyway I walk Joan twice through how to find the HDMI3 source and her music plays very nicely.

Later I print a bridge picture and work on software. And then on fiction. Which brings me to

Fiction Is Hard part 999

Simple. I want a scene in which Ethan first hears of the alien ship. I write a nice opening, he comes into the kitchen in the morning and has some chit-chat with his mother and then he sees the Washington Post on the table with the headline Alien craft sighted? Unusual asteroid changes orbit in “impossible” way. And next he’s going to read some important exposition from the paper.

What, exactly? Here’s where the rabbit hole opens. I know the broad outline; the incoming object showed up as a moving dot, a couple of pixels, on some astronomer’s images. But I want Ethan to read out sentences from this WaPo article. It should name an astronomer and an observatory, a real one, and details of real telescope technology. So the question is, what observatory is likely to have spotted this thing? And what would they see? I go to the internet and soon am learning about NASA’s program and JPL’s program and observatories like Pan-STARRS and oh, here is exactly the kind of image I was thinking of,

But so many questions — and an hour has gone by and I have not actually written anything although I am inching closer to it.

In the evening we had a concert, ok stuff by a local guy.

Thursday 10/06/2022

Did my round of machines in the gym. During the morning I actually sat at the desktop machine and did some work on the novel. Not very productive work, but it was satisfying to have done it. I tell myself, see, if you like that little endorphin rush of accomplishment, you just have to write.

Met with Stew and Bert to talk about the sound support for an event Stew is planning for two weeks out. This is a TGIF party but Stew and his 4th floor people are going to stage a “wedding” between two stuffed animals. I’m sure it will be adorable.

Worked on software. Fed hummingbirds.

Wednesday 10/05/2022

Went for a walk. Ran my laundry. Printed a few bridge pictures. Fed the hummingbirds. Basically did very little.

Tuesday 10/04/2022

First thing after the gym and breakfast I headed down to FOPAL to complete processing donations and clean up my computer section. I did that, and took a pre-sale book count, and was back in my room by 10:40 just in time for the writers meeting. Not a great meeting. I had nothing to contribute and there weren’t a lot of good things from others.

At 1pm I met with Kass in the auditorium to show Amadeus. I mentored her in showing a movie using the blu-ray that is built into our equipment. As soon as the movie was started, I had to scoot out to my car and off to PAMF for a 1:45 appointment. This was a routine dermatology checkup. The nice doctor squirted cold stuff on a couple of pre-cancerous blips and that was that. Back to the movie.

The DVD ended and went back to its main menu at the 1:30 point, when it was clearly not over. Confusion. It appears that this long movie is a 2-disk set and we had been given only one disk. Sorry everybody, that’s all we have.

Later Pam, who had scheduled the whole thing, reported that, duh all you have to do is turn the DVD over, it is double-sided. We didn’t know that.

Monday 10/03/2022

Back to the daily grind of retirement. Went for a walk. Paid a bill. Watered the plants. Went down to FOPAL where I found 11(!) boxes of books waiting. Processed 7 of them.

Back home in time to join the “mixer” dinner. First Monday of each month, the mixer committee sets aside about 8 tables in the dining room. They have little laminated table number tags in a bowl. When the dining room opens at 5pm, you can go in and if you like, take a random tag, and go find that table, and have dinner with “new friends”. Well everybody at the table I picked knew each other quite well, but it was a nice meal.

At 7 I went to the auditorium to help Kass with the AV for a candidate night she was running. Fortunately Rich also had showed up and was already setting up the mics, so I didn’t have to do anything but listen to two earnest city council candidates.

Sunday 10/02/2022

Jan called at 8am to say he was ready to leave. That was earlier than I expected; he had preferred leaving at 9:30 to drive North and I had to talk him into 9am. But he was ready and so was I, so off we went.

We arrived back at Channing House just after 3pm, so it was about 6 hours driving, plus an hour in Ukiah for coffee. Well, half an hour for coffee, and half an hour driving in circles trying to find the Starbucks. Anyway. Home safe and sound.

US 101 is a very pleasant drive once you are North of Santa Rosa. The scenery coming through the Sonoma wine region was very nice, with vineyards up the sides of the rolling hills. The 2021 Prius Prime was a nice highway cruiser. I really am glad I got to try it because now I know I would not want one. That user interface on the big screen is just awful, so confusing and very very dangerous for a solo driver to try to do anything while driving. (And you know you would.) After San Francisco it was getting warm inside and Jan in the passenger seat spent at least 5 minutes stabbing at things trying to get more A/C going. It’s very “modal” in that if you have the controls for the audio, or the climate controls, showing, they cover up half of the map, including the buttons to zoom in and out. So if the passenger is trying to cue up a podcast or audio book, the driver can’t see half the map and can’t reach over to zoom it in or out. Just as well, because the tiny little +/- buttons are small as pencil erasers (on a 12-inch screen) and are hard to hit when you are trying to just glance down quickly and get back to the road.

Saturday 10/01/2022

Pretty much music all day. The first stop was the Eagle Inn, an historic building in fancy Victorian carpentry style that has recently been restored.

This band played standards and was ok but not great. On to the old art museum for Groovus, which was another version of Coots and Holland but with a bass player and a singer. Fun. Someone sitting next to us at the Eagle tipped us that there was a pizza by the slice place next to the Eureka Theater, which was next to the art museum. So we popped out for a slice of very good thin-crust pizza for lunch.

Back to the art museum for Then in the same venue for Katy Cavera and the Lost Boys, which turned out to be a pick-up band of Kata Cavera, a very personable guitar and banjo player, and most of the people from Clint Baker’s Jazz Band of yesterday. Anyway, good music.

While at the art museum I looked again at those ink-on-canvas drawings and picked one I could really enjoy owning, and emailed the artist about it. No reply yet.

At this point my butt was sore from sitting through three hour-long concerts so I suggested we go back to the hotel for a break. We met again at 4:30 and caught the shuttle back to the Eureka Theater for two more shows, a blues band and Tom Rigney with special guest, famous cajun fiddler player Michael Doucet. This was a good wrap-up to the whole thing.

Back to the hotel and then around the corner to the local restaurant for a late supper.

Friday 09/30/2022

Music didn’t start until 1pm so I had a lazy morning in my motel room, mostly reading. About 12 Jan and I walked around the corner to Katrina’s restaurant, a quite nice family kind of a place, for lunch. Then we took the car to the community center for the opening acts, as the free shuttle didn’t start running until 3pm.

Opening act, Cornet Chop Suey, was entertaining. Here’s a brief clip.

We drove to a different venue, the Veteran’s Memorial building, a 1932 structure recently renovated in spiffy 1932 art-deco style. We heard Clint Baker’s Jazz Band, a really sharp talented group with great musicianship. Unfortunately the auditorium in the Vet’s building had been restored with hard plaster walls and ceilings and the acoustics were very bright and echo-ey, not pleasant.

So we headed on to another venue, the Morris Art Gallery, another 1930s era building but with some interesting art exhibits that I got a brief look at. One room was a showing of works by Kay Harden, who does nature scenes using tiny little pens to make zillions of marks in ink on canvas. I really liked her stuff and who knows, someday I might buy a piece. Anyway the music here was Brian Holland and Danny Coots, who I went to see at a house concert just a couple months back. They also are really good.

It was now 5:30 and I noticed Jan looked a little bothered — turned out he had a headache — so we headed back for an hour’s break at the hotel. We rejoined for a quick supper at 6:30 and then got the hotel limo to drive us down to the community center for a great set by a group I’ve been following for more than a decade, Tom Rigney and Flambeau. They rocked out on their standard numbers and ended getting a well-deserved standing O from a large crowd. Here’s 5 seconds of them heading into “Orange Blossom Special”.

Yeah, I didn’t feel right recording any more. Look ’em up on youtube.

Tomorrow is a fuller day. However, we have decided to head home on Sunday. I’ve gone back and forth on this. To get home in reasonable time we need to start by, say, 10am, which would mean seeing none of the Sunday acts. Or staying the whole day and another night so as to have Monday for travel. OK, we have decided there’s nothing Sunday to keep us here. But tomorrow we will get pretty much a full day of music.

Thursday 09/29/2022

Watered the plants, had breakfast in the dining room, and at 9am joined Jan in the garage. Briefly familiarized myself with his 2021 Prius Prime and off we went. It’s a long damn drive, but a nice one. US 101 has been repaved from Ukiah on north fairly recently and it’s just a pleasant drive. I took the first 2 hours, up past Santa Rosa. We stopped for a coffee, then Jan drove a couple of hours. He’s 87, although still in pretty decent shape. Lunch in Ukiah? I think? And on to the finish, arriving just when the GPS had been saying we would for at least three hours, at 4:10.

(I am not as much a fan of the Prius Prime as I expected to be. The car itself is ok, somewhat bigger and maybe a little nicer on the freeway than my 2012. It has a huge screen but the user interface is … not friendly. A real mess for the driver to get anything done. Not great for the passenger, either, but at least the passenger can look at it long enough to figure out what it’s doing.)

Got checked in to our rooms and took a break. Then at 5:30 we went out to wait for the supposed festival shuttle. The hotel has its own limo and the driver was just hanging around the desk. She didn’t think the shuttle was running yet (turned out, it was) but volunteered to drive us to the first venue, a big community center on the waterfront. Got our festival wrist-bands which we have to wear all weekend.

The first band to play when they started at 6:30 was a rockabilly trio that Jan didn’t care for, nor me very much. So we got on the shuttle, which was operating, and rode around to the only other Thursday venue, the Red Lion hotel. There was a fairly amateurish dixieland group. We listened to them for a few numbers, then walked up the street to an Indian restaurant and had quite a decent supper. Walked back to the Red Lion and listened to a rather better dixieland group for a while and decided to call it a night. Shuttle back to the hotel and that’s it.

Wednesday 09/28/2022

Went for a walk in the morning. At 10, our head nurse Izzy came around to do my annual wellness checkup. She makes sure she has info on my medications; asks a few questions about abilities for activities of daily living; asks a few psych questions.

In the afternoon I tidied the apartment anticipating that it would be cleaned tomorrow as usual, but I wouldn’t be here — because, big excitement, I am going on a road trip tomorrow morning for a long weekend in Eureka. I expect I will probably blog from there also.

In the evening I ran a zoom simulcast of a lecture in the auditorium. This went pretty smoothly although I had a couple of glitches that were apparent only to the Zoom attendees and didn’t affect the presentation to the live audience.