Wednesday 09/07/2022

In the night, my right ankle started to hurt. Why? Who knows? But it was severe enough that I got up and took a couple of ibuprofen. It was still hurting, making me limp, when I got up, so I did not go for a walk early, which I had planned to do because of 97º heat forecast.

So I did my laundry instead and you know? By 10am the ankle was fine. Why? Who knows? I can only figure arthur itis, but I’ve never had arthur itis before; or maybe gout which I have had before but only in my big toes, not the ankle. But anyway it’s gone now so obviously nothing to worry about. (sarcasm)

Before the laundry I prepared two slides of powerpoint. This is for the Activity Showcase on Friday. The last Activity Showcase was 2019; it’s basically a volunteer job fair. All the many volunteer orgs at CH have tables and there’s entertainment (the chorus, also the harmonica group) and snacks, and we try to get people to volunteer for shit. I for the A/V team will share a table with Bert for the Tech squad, and behind us will be a big TV with a looping powerpoint slide show Bert had prepared, so these slides were to be added into that. Then the laundry, and fill the hummingbird feeders, and make a bunch of protein shakes, and work on the model car and it’s nearly lunch time.

After lunch, drive down to the Financial Advisors (not the Fiduciary, the older outfit) to sign a letter authorizing changing the name on some of the Schwab accounts to reflect the current name of the family trust. I see these people typically once a year, but everybody was friendly, how ya doin’ etc.

Back at the shop, Harriet emails, needs advice on getting iPad. I happen to know of one cheap, the one that I reset and cleaned up a few months ago (day 3.094 as a matter of fact) which is still kicking around the gift shop because Mary Beth hadn’t figured out how to price it. So after several emails, Harriet is coming to lunch Monday and to buy the iPad.

Detailed the Studebaker engine bay and glued on a couple more bits.

And in other model car news, I did something I had been thinking about for weeks. Some months ago I finished a 63 VW bug model, and it was one of my better jobs. So I am a big fan of Sarah-N-Tuned, one of three different car-restorer youtube channels I subscribe to. Sarah is currently rebuilding a 69 bug and painting it the same color as my model. So I packed up the model with a note and it is ready to send to her shop in Tucson. But I haven’t sent it, and may not. It’s a pretty juvenile thing to do.

This was an uncommitted day, nothing on the calendar. Tomorrow on the other hand, is rather busy.

Tuesday 09/06/2022

Went down to the gym this morning and ran the cycle of the machines. Tried to write some more on the aliens story but didn’t get much done; the story just keeps branching out in all directions, so I was trying to write one little scene but there was so much to figure out about what must have happened earlier to make this possible I just got lost. So I had nothing for the writers meeting, but fortunately lots of other people had written.

Then off to FOPAL to finish setting up my section for the upcoming sale weekend.

Later I took care of a bit of managing. There’s a simple event with no coverage. There’s a committee member who’s been pretty inactive. So I called her up and was pleased to find that she is still interested, and we arranged that we would cover the event together and I would show her how to do something she hasn’t trained on. Successful management!

At supper, Lynn, who lives on the 4th floor, asked me for help showing a movie on their screen. Stew, who is very active on the 4th floor and who led a drive earlier in the year to install a big-screen TV on the wall of their lounge, is away this week. So of course Lynn comes to me as the tech guru. So after supper I spent a few minutes figuring out how Stew had set up their DVD, and wrote up a page of instructions, and then at 7:15 met with Lynn and walked her through the process, so she is now a trained movie projectionist, more or less, for her 4th floor buddies. Teach a person to fish and they’ll use a lot of worms. Or something.

Monday 09/05/2022

Today I was responsible for the A/V of a book talk. The speaker was Dr. Patnode, who has lectured here many times. He doesn’t use any slides, just a whiteboard, so the setup is real simple. And he doesn’t want it recorded, so I don’t have to remember to start the zoom recording. So I managed to run an event without screwing anything up.

Prior to the event I walked briskly over to NY Pizza on Hamilton and ordered five big pizzas for the floor dinner tonight.

I’d been invited for lunch with Marcia and Kent, plus Connie Erica and Joanne, so that was very pleasant.

After lunch I went down to Fopal and ripped through 9 boxes of mostly crap. I need to go back tomorrow and tidy the shelves and do a pre-sale count, for the sale this coming weekend.

At 5:15 I went down and waited for the driver with the pizzas. In all there were 14 of us in the 6th floor dining room for dinner. It was very nice and sociable.

Sunday 09/04/2022

Usual Sunday morning. At 11:30 I started walking to Maples Pavilion to attend a Stanford Women’s Volleyball match against #1 Texas. Longer walk than I had estimated, but not too bad. The temperature was in the low 80s, not at all the scary heat wave that had been predicted.

I bought a general admission ticket, got a hot dog and drink and sat down to watch the match. It was pretty clear from the start that Stanford was overmatched. Texas’s defense was quite noticeably better. The first set ended 25-16. So I left, and got a Lyft home. Later I checked and, yup, they lost in straight sets.

Did some work on the Studebaker, which is getting pretty close to done. I’ll finish it next week. And a couple of hours of pleasant coding.

At 6 I was out the door to attend the second theatrical thing of the weekend, Hershey Felder as Chopin. Mr. Felder is a well-known pianist and he has been doing these, what I think of as tribute band productions, where he impersonates a famous pianist, performs some of their works and talks about “his” life and times.

The program said, 90 minutes no intermission. I said, “oh dear.” And yes, if there had been an intermission I’d have not come back from it. Well, it wasn’t bad, just not great.

Anyway, on to Labor Day.

Saturday 09/03/2022

Three meetings in the space of an hour this morning. I met with Grace in the lobby to help her with some photos on her phone. Then with Bert and David G. to talk about resident assistance for the staff Emergency Response Team. They expect power cuts this weekend (but in fact the promised dangerously hot heat hasn’t happened here, no doubt it’s tough in Sacramento but we have yet to break 85), and during the first couple of hours of any emergency, the front desk tends to get overwhelmed. So at Bert’s insistent lobbying, Rhonda and staff have agreed that selected resident volunteers will come to the lobby and set up an info table. We will monitor channel 3 of the house radio and answer in-person and on-radio questions, shielding the front desk person. Channel 3 is the channel of the in-house walkie-talkies that residents are expected to use. There’s a handset in every floor’s lounge with an instruction sheet.

Then off to the fifth floor for a tech squad call on Mary Ann who had various problems with email and facebook. Somehow she had acquired two Facebook accounts and two iCloud accounts, and wasn’t sure of the passwords for any of them… I won’t say I got her straightened out, but at least I clarified a few things.

Later I made a silly mistake with the Studebaker. I glued the body tub with seats and dashboard onto the chassis, failing to notice that a large section of the bottom of this piece shows through the chassis. I should have painted it flat black but didn’t, so white unpainted plastic glares through the chassis. I will have a ticklish job painting it, reaching around the driveshaft and other parts.

Had dinner with the Allens and Edie and then it was time to walk to Lucy Stern center to see the Palo Alto Players production of School of Rock. Here’s the review I posted to CHBB today:

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It’s a silly silly play but if you don’t go looking for depth, it’s a blast. I remember the movie (2003) and I saw a Broadway production in NYC. This was a really good effort, with a cast of 40 (FORTY!) and multiple fast scene changes on the relatively tiny Lucy Stern stage. The kids were all cute and talented, and the principals worked their butts off to pretty good effect. The music was satisfyingly loud, but not so loud that you needed earplugs. (As an A/V amateur I am in awe of the sound setup, with 40 people wearing wireless mics and multiple electric instruments to balance.)

Friday 09/02/2022

I took a shorter than usual walk, and picked up a prescription on the way back. Then changed to my docent shirt and went to the museum to lead the noon tour. There only four people, a family of mom, dad, 10 year old boy who has a Raspberry Pi, and granny. So a very intimate tour.

At 4pm it was time for the monthly AV team meeting. Nothing of great note there. I went down to dinner at 5:30 and sat at one of the two-person tables… and sat and sat. We’re shorthanded again it seems. After ten minutes without any attention I got up and drove to Town&Country and had a burger at Kirk’s.

Thursday 09/01/2022

Started the day with a gym session. Actually did enough to feel tired.

Initiated a custom order for a Chevy Bolt. Last night, I walked up Homer ave. to a Mexican restaurant for dinner. On the way I noticed a new Chevy Bolt in their red paint, a very deep candy-red, parked by the curb. It really clicked with me; that was a car I could like. So today I went back to the Chevy website and configured a Bolt, as I had done a couple times last week when I started shopping. This time when it couldn’t find any close matches to my build (it seems no dealer nearby has one with any of my three must-have features: adaptive cruise control, the upgraded sound system, and the red color) I clicked “submit custom order” and indicated my preferred means of contact was email. Shortly got an email from “Jessica” at Boardwalk Chevy, to which I replied, but she hasn’t responded since. I also got a text and a phone call, each from a different sales person, which I ignored.

At 6:30 I left to attend a talk at CHM. This was to celebrate the 50th birthday of Smalltalk, featuring Dan Ingalls and Adele Goldberg. A couple of weeks ago a neighbor, Florrie, had asked me about this talk; she had seen the email from CHM (she’s a member) and recognized the name Dan Ingalls. She and her husband knew him and his wife in Vermont in the 80s? Something like that. But she decided not to accompany me. Which worked out well because Ingalls didn’t actually come. Due to a “recent bicycle accident” they said, he had to attend remotely. So Florrie couldn’t have met him anyway. Also convenient because it left me free to leave early, which I did, because it was really boring.

Wednesday 08/31/2022

Went for a standard walk. Then faced a day with nothing at all on the calendar. Well, I had a verbal date with Grace to help her move some pictures on her iPhone, but I had forgotten to put that on my calendar. But she called me to remind me. Other than that, I did some reading, worked on the Studebaker, and worked a bit on my hobby software project. But that hit a serious snag. Back in 2015 I had used a spell-checker called hunspell. It was a lot of trouble to get hunspell packages for MacOS, Windows, and Linux (the app ran on all three). Now I tried to install the hunspell package and it definitely doesn’t work on MacOS. I do not feel like diving into compiling open-source software; I remember the hours of fiddling I wasted on it back then. So I put the project back in the metaphorical box and gave up. Now thinking about it, I might investigate other spell checkers?

Tuesday 08/30/2022

Went down to the gym at 7:30 and for the first time did the full program on the new machines, that is, two rounds of 8 exercises on 3 machines. Later I had the writers meeting, to which I contributed nothing.

Later in the day I went out to buy coffee at Peets, and since I was close with nothing to do, I dropped in to FOPAL and did an hour and a half of sorting. That is such a satisfying activity. I hadn’t done any sorting in a while, spending all my FOPAL time instead on pricing and shelving computer books. But I really enjoy the sorting.

Monday 08/29/2022

I had a date with Dave T. to get him to the Apple store to exchange his too-small iMac for one with a bigger drive. He’s quite limited in his ability to walk, although mentally clear and funny. So I brought the car around to the front and he got in, I put his walker and the old computer in its box in the back, and we drove around onto University and were able to park almost in front of the Apple store. They actually had a suitable iMac in stock which was a pleasant surprise, as he had to wait 3 weeks for delivery of the first one. We were in and out in 20 minutes, very nice service.

Back at his place I went through the process of installing the new one, a repeat of Saturday, and once it was started copying the old backup files, I left. I had lunch and then zipped down to FOPAL and spent 2:30 processing 8 boxes of books. Back at CH, about 4pm I was back to Dave T’s place where his new machine was almost ready to go. Just the usual fussing with re-entering your iCloud and Gmail passwords, which thank goodness Dave T. had written down. And it was all set.

Earlier Bert, the tech squad leader, had taken me aside and lectured me on how I really shouldn’t help people install new equipment, but should rather send them to an outside contractor. OK, point taken, I will try to avoid such entanglements in future.

Yesterday I put a few coats of clear on the body of the Studebaker. Tonight I sanded it with 2400 grit to take off some of the nibs and orange peel. Tomorrow I will give it one more coat of clear and that is going to be it for the body. Still have parts of the chassis to paint and assemble.