Monday 11/18/2024

My goodness but the year is ripping along to its close. Anyway, I took the standard walk in the morning, then went to the Event Coordinators’ meeting. Then spent a bit of time updating the AV spreadsheet with the December events, from the draft December calendar. There is a ton of events, but thankfully almost all are concerts of various sorts, lights-and-mics jobs with no zoom complications.

I’ve mentioned the AV spreadsheet before, it’s a Google Doc with one row for each event. The members of the AV committee all have read/write access to it so they can enter their initials on the events they want to run, or check details of events. Because it allows anyone with the URL to edit it, I won’t put the URL here, for fear some nefarious person would do some mischief. But here’s a screen shot of December as it stands now.

See those little dog-ear triangles on the right? They show there’s a “note” attached to that cell. What’s in the note is a copy of the Event Planning Form that was submitted by the producer of that event, which has all the details, like number and placement of mics. If you have access to the real document, you just hover that cell with the mouse pointer and the EPF pops up so you can read it.

From there I grabbed some lunch and went to FOPAL to process 5 boxes of donations. And back in time for a quick nap and then it was Rhonda’s monthly Open Meeting. This time she presented a talk that she had given to, I think, the local chamber of commerce, on “the rewards and drawbacks of managing a retirement facility”. It was quite interesting, in part going over all the different agencies whose jurisdictions CH is under, with their conflicting requirements. (California dept of public health, Santa Clara County dept of public health, Cal/OSHA, Palo Alto City, Palo Alto Fire Dept — and that’s about 1/2 of the list). And the rewards being working with a top-notch dedicated staff and a bunch of smart, creative old fogies.

Sunday 11/17/2024

Just chilled around the apartment much of the day, amusing myself with the internet. Walked over to University avenue to eat lunch in a restaurant. In the afternoon, Ian gave his talk on how AI systems work, sort of. Nice attempt.

Saturday 11/16/2024

Had a rehearsal of RATCT at 10, so I spent the hour before trying to get better with the guitar on that song. We don’t sound terrible, but it needs more work. All right, I need more work. Alice and John are fine.

At 11, I met with Richard R, who is interested in being part of the AV team. We went over all the auditorium systems. He’ll be good.

After lunch I was looking at an open afternoon with nothing to do. At lunch Ian had said he was going to see “Fiddler on the Roof” at Palo Alto Players at 2pm, and I gave that a thought, but no, it’s 2 and a half hours and I just wasn’t that interested. So instead, a walk. Where? Well, I haven’t been down to the Baylands for a while. Alone? Well… On the spur of the moment I dialed Joanne’s room and she was in and said she would be happy to join me. So we drove down to the Baylands and it was a lovely day, the tide was in, and over a thousand Shovelers were sitting in a quarter-mile raft of ducks on the water. I couldn’t remember which duck they were, but a guy with binoculars was happy to identify them for us. I remember Shovelers from Baylands walks with Marian, but always as a scattered few among other ducks. But this was a massive crowd of them.

Friday 11/15/2024

First thing was to take the standard walk, and to my pleasure Joanne joined me for this. Next up, at 10:30, was to meet with Tom G, to review what he’d need to do to set up the microphone for the Birthday Dinner next Wednesday.

Which brings me to 11 am, where our little AI interest group met. Only Bert, me, and David G showed up. Both of them have been doing interesting things with AI sites, especially DG, who has had dozens of interesting chats with Claude and others.

From there I drove down to Mountain View to have lunch with Jean, who is looking very well for just having had her 97th birthday.

That was the planned activities. At 4:30 I went up to 11 for the monthly TGIF, but didn’t see anyone I wanted to talk to and nobody called me to join them, so I came away again. After a good lunch with Jean I wasn’t that hungry so I didn’t go down for dinner, either. Just went down to pick up a package: a new bedside lamp. This was to replace the one I got on day 5.338. Because it had only one setting, supernova bright, it was just very unpleasant when I got up in the morning. I was used to a 3-way bedside lamp that comes up dim when I tap it. This new one, a $35 cheapie from amazon, looks ok and starts dim.

Thursday 11/14/2024

Boarded the bus for a trip to the De Young museum at 9:15. 21 people on the trip. Not the usual luxury coach but a smaller one. There were two exhibits to see. One was a retrospective of the work of Tamara de Lempicka, the other the seven tapestries of the Battle of Pavia. Both were worth looking at. I spent a good amount of time peering at de Lempicka’s stuff. I had never heard of her before the announcement from the de Young a couple months ago, although she was a Big Deal in the art world from 1920 through the 1940s. She developed a style based out of Cubism, and specialized mostly in female portraits like this one.

Not only the striking compositions (she liked big diagonal lines that crowd the frame) but the amazing technique — look how she rendered the look of nylon stockings, which were a new thing at the time. There were lots of little sketches, too. I can’t imagine how you get this detailed shading just with a stick of charcoal.

The tapestries were harder to see (click the link for some pictures), but amazing for their size, seven tapestries each at least 10×15 feet, showing hundreds of soldiers fighting, with millions of tiny details of clothing and armor.

Back home just in time for a 3pm meeting of the Good Times committee, planning our next musical experience. The prior one was the folk festival featuring Joan Baez; what do we do for an encore? The schedule has it falling near Valentine’s day, so the plan is: love songs.

Wednesday 11/13/2024

That was about it. First thing I did my laundry, finished by 10. Then worked on the score of R.A.T.C.T. to reconstruct the fingering for certain chords. Here.

All those guitar fretboard grids? I did those.

Since we decided to change the key from C to G, for easier singing, that meant all the guitar chords change also. So now I get to practice those instead of the ones that I had like three quarters learned for the key of C.

Tuesday 11/12/2024

I had been asked a while ago to write something for the newsletter about AI sites that residents could use. Carolyn reminded me yesterday so this morning I wrote a short article on that. I looked at several, using Safari because I use that browser rarely and it doesn’t have any history for me, no old cookies from signing in to these sites before, so I could see what a novice user would see. I think, for the novice user of chatbots, that perplexity.ai is easiest to get into.

Got that mostly done by 10:30 and joined the writers meeting. Topic was change, and I had nothing to contribute. There were a couple of cute essays.

At 1pm I met with John and Alice to practice R.A.T.C.T. We agreed to change key, for easier singing. So afterward I used the MuseScore software app to transpose the music from C to G, and sent it to the others. We’ll meet again on Saturday, meanwhile I have to work out all new guitar chords from the ones that I was practicing the last week.

Monday 11/11/2024

Started the day with the monthly resident association meeting. David G ran it as usual; I helped him figure out an issue with zoom. This was followed by a Veteran’s Day memorial event, but it was planned and run by staff, not residents. The PA Fire Department sent 3 guys in uniform to present the flag and ring a bell.

Then off to FOPAL for the monthly post-sale cleanup, just an hour and a half this time. Back to CH with time for a short nap before meeting with Ian on the 11th floor to try out connecting his laptop to the big TV. Which didn’t work like it should. Why? Combination of Samsung TV being too “smart” for its own good, and an aged receiver. Had to move a cable and feed the laptop directly to the TV instead of through the receiver.

Practiced guitar a couple of times as well.

Sunday 11/10/2024

Started the day the old coffee shop in Midtown. Meant to do the big puzzle there, but the pen I had brought went dry two words in. Drove around the foothills a bit coming back, saw an old VW camper burning, on Alpine road at 280.

Just before 2pm Scott and June pulled up and they and Joanne and I were off in the Prius for SFJazz for the Boogie Woogie Festival. The Performing Arts Garage was full, but we had budgeted time well. Diverted to Civic Center garage and hoofed it back to SFJazz in plenty of time.

The show ran 4pm to after 7pm, excellent show although we all agreed not as great as last year’s. Walked back to Civic Center and told the GPS, “Go Home”. Unfortunately Caltrans had blocked off the southbound ramp and we had an uncomfortable 20 minutes of poking around the south of Market area trying to find an open ramp to 101. Driving in the dark on unfamiliar streets — no problem at all. Annoying but not a serious problem. Guess I don’t have to give up the keys just yet.

Back home, no supper, but a nice sandwich in my room and so to bed. Busy day tomorrow.

Saturday 11/09/2024

Walked to Cafe Zoe in the morning. Then met with Peter to clarify something about the use of the zoom room hardware in the conference room.

Practiced guitar several times. Emailed John and Alice re a time to rehearse RATCT, on Tuesday. Refilled the hummingbird feeder four f’n times. Otherwise, just chilled.