Monday 01/26/2026

First thing I drove down to FOPAL and in about 2 hours, cleaned out 6 boxes of donations.

Back home, after a quick lunch in my room and a nap, I went to the auditorium to set up for a rehearsal. The Channing House Drama group is a club of about a dozen residents who pay a professional theater person to organize and direct them in performing a program of skits and scenes. Today was their tech and dress rehearsal, and tomorrow they will deliver two performances, one at 10am mostly for people from the AL side, and one at 7pm mostly for IL residents in the tower.

My job was to equip this gang with microphones and stage lights, and to make a video recording of the final run-through. That took from 1pm to about 5:30pm. Then I had a quick supper and edited the video, and sent link to, to all the performers and director.

That’s done and I’m pooped.

Sunday 01/25/2026

Ah, Sunday ritual. Water the plants on the balcony. I am very pleased by the progress of a little cutting I was given by my across-the-hall neighbor Linda. It is a Plectranthus v. “Mona Lavender” (here is an online image of one). It started as a single stem about 6″ high. I stuck it in a pot and it is now a very healthy looking plant with dark green leaves with purple underneath. I am eager to see it blossom.

Then do the NYT big crossword. And then off buy fruit. On Thursday I am invited to a pot-luck dinner. This is a “Let’s Talk About Death over Dinner” party, based on a popular book. Since I wrote rather a complete and thoughtful chapter on death and bereavement in my book (available on Amazon, ahem), I don’t think I will have any surprising discoveries from this exercise, but ya nevah know. ANYway, my contribution to the pot luck is supposed to be a fruit compote and I wanted to get some good fruit that will hopefully be ripe when I do the prep on Thursday. I particularly want to get a pineapple that at least won’t make your tongue pucker up. Because I have tasted genuinely ripe pineapple (in Hawaii, of course) and it is just light years beyond what is usually served here.

So I went to Sigona’s in the Stanford shopping center and they did have some pineapples that were at least not solid green, some color change, maybe a hint of aroma. It’s sitting in a bag in my closet and maybe it will taste ripe by Thursday.

That brought me to lunch time, and I was sitting with Carol, who was talking about the drama group, which reminded me that the drama group is having their tech rehearsal on–OMG is it the 25th ALREADY? –tomorrow! And I remembered that I had promised their director that I would try to work out some custom stage light settings for her and had not done jack-shit about it. So into the auditorium to glare at our lighting panel which is capable of far more than we ever ask it to do. I know it can store combinations of lights as “scenes” you can call it by hitting buttons, but I had never done it. Fortunately Bert had printed out the manual long ago and stored it in a binder under the desk. So I spent half an hour with the manual learning how to program scenes. And then programmed in the lighting scenes that they will need I hope.

Which brought me to 2pm and time to get ready to go out on a date. Met Joanne at 2:30 and we drove to the 1st Cong. church to hear a chamber concert by the Ives Collective. I didn’t keep the program so can’t say what works we heard (three pieces, by Mozart and I forget who else) but they were expertly played.

Then we went to dinner a The Wild Seed, a vegan restaurant in Town&Country. Very nice supper, really excellent celery soup and a hawaiian-style pizza. And it wasn’t even 6pm so we wandered downtown and had dessert at Tong Sui, a new dessert place on Bryant. They serve a yummy coconut pudding with fruit in it,

So back home and settling down before 7:30 like a sensible old fart should do.

Saturday 01/24/2026

First up I reran the nozzle cleaning on the printer a couple of times and managed to get it to output an acceptable yellow. Finished printing the pictures for my hall gallery.

During a long quiet day I spent some time reading in philosophy-of-mind books, and an equal time looking through the SOFTWARE folder of my Dropbox, reading old programs I had written. I have done some good work. I was actually looking for a project I could revive and improve using Claude Code but didn’t see one.

About 2:30 Joanne texted and we went for a walk down to Edgewood market. This 3-mile jaunt was not really a good idea; it worked on the gout(?)-inflamed tendon in my right foot which became quite painful.

Quiet supper in the dining room and so to couch.

Friday 01/23/2026

Usual Friday morning walk with Joanne, this time up to Town & Country for coffee and shopping at Trader Joe’s.

Did some more reading. Did some practical things on the computer, and then set to work to print a new set of pictures for my hall gallery. And my trusty printer broke! I printed three pictures that were fine, then the next one came out too blue. I haven’t had a problem with printer color not matching the screen color since, oh, 2000? So I thought to do a nozzle check and what do you know? The yellow ink jet nozzle was producing no color. So of course the print came out too blue.

I ran the nozzle cleaning procedure a couple of times, no help. I tried to run the so-called power cleaning but it didn’t seem to do anything. So my printer is down, at least for color work. It could probably be fixed, if anybody worked on printers. At worst, by replacing the print head with the nozzles. But nobody does work on printers. They are cheap enough that any reasonable repair fee is close to the cost of a new printer.

I bought this printer in 2019, just after moving here (Day 328, 10/26/19). So you could say I’ve had my money’s worth out of it. But damn.

Anyway changed to nicer clothes and went up to the 11th floor for dinner at the Webster Street Grill. That’s a monthly event that Dining Services puts on. They do their best to emulate a fancy restaurant, multiple courses of fancy cuisine and wine. I had been invited by my neighbor Bob, and then he had invited Ian and Joanne to fill out his table. A good group, we chatted happily through the 2 and half hours it takes to serve a 6-course fancy dinner.

Thursday 01/22/2026

At 11 I had a zoom meeting with my financial advisors. Since oh gosh, 2000? I don’t know when we took them on, anyway long time, they were located in Los Altos, a 15 minute drive. Each spring it would time for our annual review (which Marian hated, she didn’t like all the boring talk about markets and brokers) and we’d go to their nice office just off Foothill Expressway. And I continued that. Last year they got too big and moved to San Jose. So I didn’t feel like driving 40 minutes and asked for a zoom meeting. No problem, Mr. Cortesi we do that all the time.

They are nice people and the numbers are nice, too. They run projections of all sorts and assure me that the Nest Egg will support me to age 100 no problem.

At 4pm I helped Stew run a planning session about future outings. For an audience of about 30 who showed up, Stew and the rest of the Excursions committee showed a variety of possible outings they could set up, and got reactions.

In and around those items I tried hard to get some reading done. I finally finished, well, skimmed my way to the end of, The Embodied Mind, which I do not recommend.

Wednesday 01/21/2026

First thing was a hike with Joanne and Martha. Joanne suggested walking the residential area of the Stanford campus. I had never been in those parts, the area on the West side of the campus which has some steep little hills and some huge old houses among trees. We put in a couple of miles and got back around 10.

Which was convenient, I could change shoes and drive myself down to the Museum for the opening of the new Volunteer Lounge. Here is the gathering of geeks before the grand opening.

Janelle, volunteer coordinator, cut an actual ribbon to let about 1/4 of that crowd at a time into quite a small room, say 10×20, but it contains a table and a coffee machine and the library of reference books and demonstration objects. It was pretty much a non-event.

Back home I was feeling pooped and spent most of the afternoon reading and nodding off. I did satisfy my intellectual curiosity on one point. I’ve been thinking about the Project Gutenberg proofreaders, the volunteers who pick off the scanning errors from books being converted to P.G. distribution. Back in the early 20-teens I put in many hours on that site and wrote some software for it. Recently I’ve been wondering if anybody had started trying to apply AI to that work. I spent some time reviewing my own code, then searching the forums at that site, and yes, there have been some experiments along that line. But nothing I want to get into any further. Which is good to know.

Tuesday 01/20/2026

First up, out the door at 7:10 to walk to a dental appointment at 7:30. Simple quick fill of a cavity next to a crown. No shot, just a quick buzz with the drill and pack in some filling.

Tidy the apartment for the housekeeper coming at 11. Call United Health Care to handle a stupid bit of billing. UHC split my insurance into separate accounts, one for medical and one for prescriptions. The fact that the monthly payment was from my bank by EFT, didn’t get transferred to the new, prescription policy. So now they sent me an email saying it was overdue. The customer service lady seemed distracted, I actually thought she might be ill or on drugs, but she managed to get it done. Or said she had; we will see when the bill gets paid or doesn’t.

So time for the writers meeting. Betty had to leave early so she made me host. I managed to get everyone admitted to the Zoom. Nice meeting, although I hadn’t written others had.

Meeting over, I went downstairs to meet my lunch guest, Harriet from basketball days. We have kept slightly in touch and I invited her to have lunch. I had also invited Joanne and my neighbor Carolyn, subbing for Patty who is more of a basketball fan but had to bail a day ago. Anyway nice lunch, good conversation.

Which led to 1:30 and time for Line Dance class. After which I caught the 21 bus down to Charleston center and FOPAL. Seventh work stint in the last 8 days. And I finished. There are no boxes of donations left in front of my section, all sorted and priced and shelved or put away.

Had a little trouble getting home, had a light supper in the dining room, and going to be a couch potato until I go to bed. Here was my commute problems, as I told them to Lou of the car-free group.

Tonight about 5:30 I was ready to come home from FOPAL at Cubberly Center. I walked out to Middlefield. Dark, and busy traffic on Middlefield.

Lyft had sent me a 20% off deal so I called a Lyft. I was assigned Jose in a red Prius C. I watched it approach on the map. It approached, and it arrived — on the map. Swear to Allah, there was no red Prius C anywhere I could see.

“Your driver is here, he waits 4 minutes”. So I tapped Contact Driver and then Call. Driver’s phone rang 5 times and went to voice mail.

I tapped Get Help, and that called Lyft Support. We’ll connect you to the first available… and hold music. I held for a couple of minutes and gave up.

I canceled the Lyft ride, incurring a $5 fee, and for fun opened the Transit app. OOOh there’s a bus coming at 5:59, and I have just time to walk a block to the Charleston bus stop. Which I do. And wait. Watching the traffic on Middlefield, and watching the little bus symbol on the app. 

The little bus symbol stayed where it was, around San Antonio, with a little number (of seconds?) on it that kept going down and then up again.

At 6:10 the transit app showed me the bus departed at 6:01 and now I could leave at 6:27.

There was NO BUS at 6:01, or any time between 5:50 and 6:20.

So at this point I could have tried Uber I suppose but instead I went to Waymo. The Waymo pickup was right next to the bus stop. It took another ten minutes — I was kind of looking for that 6:27 bus to show and would have had a real moral struggle to think about, if it had. But the Waymo was first.

So, a ghost lyft and a ghost bus. Just glad it wasn’t raining.

Monday 01/19/2026

Forgot to post. Took the standard walk first thing. Attended the event coordinator meeting, not as AV chair, John is doing that, but to propose a new event series. Got good feedback. Then met with Joanne and Prue, the latter is going to do an article about car-sharing and wanted picture of us with Fred.

After which, guess what, FOPAL again for a couple more hours.

Quiet evening.

Sunday 01/18/2026

Realized if I wanted to get some time in a FOPAL, and I did, I needed to do it in the morning. So at 7:30 I summoned a Waymo and off I went to there. I put in 2:30 and made some progress — the great wall of boxes is now down to 11, despite several being added to it over the last couple of days.

That got me back in time to meet Joanne for lunch with Prue, who wanted to get info on our car-sharing arrangement for an article in the newsletter.

I had time after for a nap, and an hour of guitar practice. Then at 4:30 we had a talk on the Chilean wine industry. No, seriously. A resident, Bill Pflaum, has a daughter who manages an 8000-acre farm near Santiago, Chile, where over the past 25 years she has been creating a winery. She’s a grad of Stanford Business school and initially developed the plan to add wines to the family property while in school. Interesting talk.

Saturday 01/17/2026

Somehow I kept busy in the morning. Went downstairs for breakfast, which I don’t usually do. Anyway, had an early lunch then headed out to the Museum to lead the 2pm tour. Good tour, nice crowd.

Back at 3:30 and then met with Joanne about 4:45 to plan some upcoming outings. It had gotten too complicated to get them all planned by emails. At 5:15 we met with the Rhudys, Roberta and Richard, and Sherry, for dinner. Nice dinner, talking about all sorts of things, including photography, which Roberta and Richard are top-rank amateurs at.

At 6:30 we two split for the Stanford campus to attend a concert. This was our first time in the space called the Bing Studio. The Bing Concert Hall has been there a decade, we’ve both attended events in the main concert space which seats near a thousand. But this was downstairs, a nice small room with a cocktail lounge vibe, small tables with 4 chairs each and a stage in the corner. Guessing maybe 150 people max?

The performer was Sasha Berliner playing vibraphone, along with a pianist named Paul Cornish. Their music was… well, there was a lot of skill on display. But it was the kind of jazz where you listen and listen and you can’t pick up a melody or any structure. It just goes a while and later stops. I’m very melody-oriented, and I just can’t imagine how these musicians memorize all their songs, 5-minute, 10-minute long pieces where I just can’t find anything that repeats, nothing to hang on to. There has to be a structure to it but I can’t find it. So we agreed it was interesting.