Wednesday 12/17/2025

Ordinarily Joanne would lead a hike on Wednesday morning but this morning there was light rain, and the Baylands trails, where we had planned to go, would be sticky. So she called it off. So I was able to reschedule two other meetings. First I met with Dennis and Ellen in the auditorium. They are planning a skit with the Channing House players, and they wanted to work out if they could have their act simultaneously on the projection screen.

Then at 11 I met with Stew and Lou and David Gr, to review some DVDs of rock concerts. We plan to put on a series of concert videos next year. DGr has a massive collection of rock history dvds, books, and recordings.

After lunch I got in an hour playing and singing, the first time since I had bronchitis. I’m feeling normal today for the first time in a week and a half.

After supper at 7pm we had a sing-along. Jerry commented that people had said there was no point in having a sing-along, everybody would be traveling, nobody would come. In fact, we had the biggest group ever.

Tuesday 12/16/2025

Took an early walk to deposit a check and my ballot in a local election. Tidied the room, sorted my laundry, then it was time for the writers meeting. A longtime member, Maryanne Simpson, had died two nights ago, and the group spent some time recalling her.

Right at twelve I moved out so the cleaning lady could move in. Started my laundry, had lunch, came back, changed loads. etc.

At 3, met with Bert and Craig and David G. to talk about liability. Staff has raised a question about the tech squad referring residents to an outside consultant, namely, my friend Leah Lin. What if we, or the consultant, somehow messed up a resident’s computer and as a result the resident got scammed. What? How is this in any way a possible event. But some response is needed.

That was about all there was to the day. Was invited to dinner with Dean and Ellen, mainly to talk about Australia, which I am really ignorant about but fortunately they also included Linda who does visit Aus. every year since forever.

Monday 12/15/2025

First thing I headed out for FOPAL. The big job was to do the post-sale triage. I triaged harshly because I was overloaded. I had set up a cart loaded with stuff about Ruby and about embedded systems, from that large donation. Neither section had sold much if anything. I looked through them again and realized they were almost all from 2003-20012. In other words, more than a decade old, many over 20 years old. So not a big surprise they didn’t fly off the shelves.

Drove to Safeway for a few items, then home. At 3:45, Leia Lin came by. This was her semi-annual check-in. We just chatted a bit. Then she was off and I went late to Rhonda’s open meeting, missing the main part which was to show the marketing plans for Arris the satellite.

Sunday 12/14/2025

Guess I’m still in recovery (Dr. Margaret made a point of telling me that as an old person I should expect to need twice as long to recover as I spent being sick, so two weeks in the present case) anyway I felt “few” and just moped around most of the day.

In the morning Peter and I went into the auditorium and tweaked the projector optics to make it somewhat easier to see closed captions on projected DVDs.

Saturday 12/13/2025

For a change of pace, I ate breakfast in the dining room. I woke up very hungry and had pancakes syrup and bacon for the first time in ages. Puttered around in my room, played some guitar for the first time in a week.

After lunch Joanne and I walked the mile to the Lucy Stern theater to see Georgiana and Kitty, the second of 3 plays under the title of Christmas at Pemberly, using Jane Austen’s characters to tell romantic holiday tales. We saw the first one last year (day 6.014). Very well done. Script has lots of snappy lines, the actors take advantage of that, sharp direction has so many little bits of business going on between different actors at the same time. Fun show.’

A few days ago I wrote a thinky essay for the AI interest group. Today David Greene wrote a thoughtful reply, and I have added a constructive thoughtful reply to that. A couple more rounds and we’ll have quite an intellectual thing going. Now to watch some mindless tv.

Friday 12/12/2025

Morning muffin walk with Joanne, always a delight. Got an email from Stanford Live, of a David Byrne concert in April. Checked with Joanne: yes. So I spent some time fighting a very difficult ticket website which rejected all three of my browsers. Finally was able to buy tickets using Safari on the iPhone. Now I want to learn to play some David Byrne songs myself. (This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco… )

6th floor monthly meeting at 4:45. Owing to the Employee Appreciation Party this afternoon, there is no dinner service tonight, just brown bags. At 5:30 the gang was going to picnic in our dining room after the meeting but I had other plans. Got my hat and coat and headed down to the garage, met Joanne, and we were off to Los Altos.

Tonight was A Christmas Carol at the Bus Barn, 8pm curtain. I had made a reservation at Roja in Los Altos, close to the theater, more or less in the blind. Turned out to be a good choice. Very nice food and sharp, thoughtful service. Only complaint with the place was the usual one, noise. Their interior is clearly Styled by a Designer, and it makes a good impression. Except part of the design is a hard cement floor… why does no restaurant like soft surfaces? When we left people were just reaching the level where you raise your voice to be heard, which is the start of a noise spiral.

Anyway, off to the old Barn for a very elaborate production of the Dickens tale. At least the third version I’ve seen, probably another 1 or 2 on TV over the years, but Joanne had never seen any. The cast was all good, Ebenezer was excellent, and all the complicated production elements came off beautifully.

Thursday 12/11/2025

Spent some parts of the day editing the video of the concert. Spent larger parts napping. At 5pm my temp was 98.6, so while high for me, not a fever. I was able to proceed with a commitment I had made last week.

UNAFF.org is a film library and annual festival of documentaries. The people behind it are a couple, Mischa and Jasmina Bojic and they bring a documentary to show at CH every month. Usuallly Ian runs the AV, but today he had a medical issue and last week asked me to stand in. I would have to host the couple to dinner, turn on the auditorium, let them run their film, done. I had scheduled three other people, Joanne, Martha, and Terry and booked a table. But should I actually show up and host? Doctor Internet said I probably wasn’t contagious if I didn’t have a fever, defined as +1.5ºF. So I was ok and I did host. It was a pleasant table, nice convo.

The film they brought was Tax Wars about the decades long effort to begin taxing multinational corporations. It was nicely produced and made good points, but IMHO ran about 20 minutes too long. Anyway, jobs done. And so to bed.

Wednesday 12/10/2025

Two things to do today, that is, two performances of the Christmas concert. I had already bowed out of performing, my voice is a wreck and when I try to sing, I cough. But at the last minute, i.e. yesterday about 8pm, Jerry contacted Craig and got him to perform on his harmonica in my place. So all I had to do was sit behind the AV desk and operate the video cameras trying to get good videos of my neighbors performing. Which I mostly did.

The 10am performance, mostly attended by people from the AL and nursing side, went well. Then I spent from 11:30 to about 6 just lying around napping and reading. Still running a degree-plus of temp. Didn’t feel like eating.

Evening show at 7 went even better. I have good video now on my laptop which I will be editing tomorrow or maybe Friday.

Watched a PBS documentary and so to bed.

Tuesday 12/09/2025

Writers group in the morning. It had been like a month since I contributed anything so I felt under the gun to get something done, so I did a little thing for the prompt “Winter memory”. I’ll paste it in below.

The afternoon was filled with the tech rehearsal for the christmas concert, the one I was going to perform in but now am sure I will not. Kay had requested that I be sure to mask up as she and others have travel plans and don’t need a cold to go with, and I totally sympathize. I wore a good n95 mask and also put on vinyl gloves so I wouldn’t be leaving an germs on the microphones. I took video and after supper I edited the video and put it up on dropbox to share, and notified all the performers.

So that was about four hours sitting in the auditorium, after which I had some supper and did the video work. Checking: temp 99.7, or 2 degrees above my normal. I am still sick, darn it.

Going to bed early.

Oh, here’s the essay. Any of you guys remember “the blizzard”?

Monday 12/08/2025

My eyes popped open at 6:30 and my first thought was, “I’m better”. The feeling of “being sick” or feverish was gone. Well not completely, I am still running about 1 degree of fever this evening, but I felt way better than yesterday.

Except for my voice. This whole infection has been deep in my throat, deep cough, soreness. And this morning I have a bullfrog croak, and it stayed all day. Talking I sound like Johnny Cash, so naturally I tried singing “I walk the line” and got 3 notes in an fell into a coughing fit. I cannot sing.

Tomorrow at 3 is the rehearsal for the winter concert and I let Kay the producer know that I likely would not be singing. Probably I can do the AV, if I feel no worse than I do today.

Went for a short walk in the afternoon; glad I did because it was the most spectacular beautiful autumn day, with the gingko and maple trees in full color, temp about 60f, brilliant sun shining through the leaves. Gorgeous.