Friday 11/08/2024

Did damn little. Took a standard walk. Helped neighbor Dr. Margaret with a problem with her MacBook. Oh, changed my display of photos in the hall. I’ve been planning this for a while. Took down the pictures of Thames bridges, it’s been six months of stepping through all those bridge pictures.

What went up was a rather unique exhibit of photographs entitled “PLOOG”. Months ago I started this. Each morning I sit at my little kitchen table and take my blood pressure. While the machine runs, I look to my right and there at eye level, is an outlet, and plugged into it is the power adapter for the modernist table lamp. I started noticing how the early morning light through the window would cast interesting shadows of the Ploog on the wall. I set up the camera on a tripod and over a couple of weeks took lots of shots of the Ploog in different lights. Today I selected the 6 most interesting, printed them up large, and put them on my outside gallery. Here’s one.

Thursday 11/07/2024

Took it easy this morning. After lunch, went to the museum to lead a tour, a private tour for 30 people (only 20 or so showed up) which was scheduled for 2pm, conflicting with the normal 2pm tour. Fortunately they arrived a bit early so we got started at 1:45 or so. Just the same, Sandy Wu’s 2pm tour was on our heels that last bit.

Anyway. The Prius reminded me “Key battery is low” so on the way home I stopped at Ace hardware and bought what I thought was the right battery. Got home and opened up the fob: no, it wasn’t. Have to get the right one on my walk tomorrow.

Wednesday 11/06/2024

Woke up at 2am and pulled the phone over to me, went to CNN. “Trump on verge of victory” with 260 electoral votes. Spent the next two hours tossing and trying to process this.

Took a reverse walk at 7:30, 2 miles but going clockwise, so as to end up Mme. Collete’s for a huge delicious pastry. Then skipped lunch. Did some managing, organizing AV dates and such. Mostly sat around doing NYT crosswords out of a book.

At 1pm, as scheduled, I sat down in the training room, mirrored the screen of my laptop on the big TV, and proceeded to edit the video of Pru’s Monday Book Talk. I had told my AV team I would do this, inviting any and all to come watch and see how it was done, or anyway, how I do it. Nobody showed up. Not even Pru herself, who might have expressed an interest.

Well, here’s the video. Pretty interesting talk, some laughs, and a nice editing job if I do say.

Craig emailed to say that he was dropping out of the plan to perform RATCT. “This season I don’t think i will have much Christmas spirit” he wrote. I totally understand; at 3am I was pretty sure I didn’t want to perform then or any other time.

Tuesday 11/05/2024

Less than a month left in this blog’s year, which, faithful readers know, starts on the 3rd of December.

Yesterday at FOPAL, I picked out of the donations a stapled pamphlet, a summary of maintenance procedures for the IBM 1401 computer. I set it aside to bring home, meaning to pass it to the 1401 team at CHM. Except I forgot to bring it home. So this morning I drove back down there and looked for it, and it has disappeared. I can’t imagine it being thrown away, so presumably it will show up at some point. But damn I am getting unreliable. Or have I always been a forgetful, easily-distracted, dweeb?

Writers meeting, the prompt was “something that made you laugh”. I could only come up with one thing, a one-sentence post in a Reddit thread a couple of weeks ago, which made me laugh out loud and chuckle for minutes after. Unfortunately the whole topic was decidedly, um, adult. And although everybody in the group is extremely over 21, I still didn’t want to have to explain the context.

Practiced some guitar. The only thing I practice these days is RATCT and it is stressing my skills. I may just give up and only sing, not try to play.

It’s election day and I am not checking numbers until tomorrow. We had a pleasant concert by The Fabulous Jewel-Tones, an amateur women’s group that has been here once before. Despite that I am feeling alone and alienated. Two hundred friendly neighbors. It doesn’t help.

Monday 11/04/2024

Took the standard walk starting at 8am, so as to have plenty of time to set up for an event at 11. This was a First Monday Book Talk by my neighbor Prudence who wrote a series of middle-grade books about mice. I recorded it two ways, and will edit the video this coming Wednesday.

From there down to FOPAL to process only two boxes of donations and set up my section for the monthly sale next weekend.

Back in time and then at 4, I joined the poetry out loud group. And at 5:30 went down to meet with Jerry and Betty and Howard and Agnes for supper. Busy day, ending with good conversation and supper.

Sunday 11/03/2024

Thanks to the time change, I was up by 5:30, and was showered dressed and ready to do something by 7:15. So I decided to do a nostalgic thing, go and do my Sunday crossword puzzle in the coffee shop in Midtown. Drove the car down there.

After, drove up to the other end of town to the car wash and had the Prius washed. Even though it parks inside, it gets dusty, and the inside needed a vacuum. Took it back to the CH parking lot where I got out my bottle of Instant Detailer and my fuzzy rags and went over it. The polish job I had done in early January is holding up pretty well, but this put the glossy slick hand-feel back on the paint.

The replacement bed lamp arrived and I assembled it and set it up. Disappointment: the old one was a 3-way. This one, although it looks completely identical, is only on-off. Interesting also, that the two bulb sockets are made for the little halogens (G-9 type) what they had shipped were the same shape, but LED not halogen. That part is good, I’m sure they draw practically no current. But I miss having a “dim” setting for when I get up.

The rest of the day I just splodged around killing time.. Played a little guitar, watched youtube videos, read.

Saturday 11/02/2024

Reading my email at 6am I saw one from the Pear theater, they had one of their informal “Pear Slices” shows tonight with people performing music of the 1950s. On impulse I emailed Joanne to see if she wanted to go, and soon it turned out she did.

At ten I left for the museum, with a stop at the Congregational Church nearby, where they were having a craft fair, which one of my neighbors recommended. It was pretty good, stuff I had not seen at the usual street fairs around here.

Then on the museum to lead the noon tour, about 15 people. I had to rush because there was a live 1401 demo at 1pm. I left out several things I usually talk about, and managed to wrap up at 12:50, so yay, I guess?

Practiced some guitar, had early supper, met up with Joanne at 6:30 and off to the Pear, which is only blocks from the museum, so two identical runs down 101 in the same day. The show wasn’t that great, enthusiastic amateurs in what was basically an organized karaoke session, but you can’t spoil that music.

Friday 11/01/2024

There was nothing on the google calendar but I had an internal to-do list. First up, a walk. On return I spent a bit of time looking for things to do in Seattle, Christmas week. Found one thing, sent to Dennis and Laurel, except I used her old email. Called Romie to find out if her iMac was finally on the proper network, and it is, and now she can print. So that’s off my mind.

Then finalized the AV report to Rhonda on auditorium improvements. Two punchy pages of recommendations.

After lunch I sat and read a chapter of Nexus, a book Joanne loaned me that I need to get read and give back. It’s about the history of information in human society, and the part I read had an example that was chilling in the light of current events. He reviews the history of the witchcraft scare of 1580-1650, during which tens of thousands of people were accused of witchcraft, tortured, and executed. This really started with a book by a crank who spun an elaborate conspiracy fantasy about thousands of secret witches at black masses having sex with Satan. The fantasy was picked up and elaborated by others and became the new consensus reality. He writes,

Witch hunts were… a prime example of a problem that was created by information, was made worse by more information. … demonstrates that releasing barriers to the flow of information doesn’t necessarily lead to the discovery and spread of truth. It can just as easily lead to the spread of lies and fantasies and to the creation of toxic information spheres.

Fear of immigrants, anyone?

At 3pm I took a tech squad call from Gloria, who had some small email issues. Then out to Safeway, leaving the car up at the surface lot. At 5:45 met with Joanne, Patty and Caroline to drive across town to try out the new location of Kirk’s Steakburgers. This restaurant has been a Palo Alto fixture for decades, in various locations, but just last week they moved to a new place in Midtown. Had a good burger and shake and good conversation with people I like.

Thursday 10/31/2024

Took a walk, shorter than usual (hey, but 3.3 miles for the day) so as to be back by 9:30 when I met with Romie to have another crack at getting Bitwarden to work on her new iMac. I failed.

Then I wrote up the AV team’s conclusions that we reached yesterday and sent the draft to the team for comment. One point was the problem that because the auditorium has a flat floor, people in the middle and back can’t read the closed captions when we show movies. The bottom edge of the screen is blocked by the heads of people in the front rows. We said that somebody should try raising the angle of the projector, and if that helps, then a project to raise the height of the screen would be worth doing.

Later in the day Bert called, he had found the remote for the projector. Let’s try raising the angle ourselves. First we went to the Halloween party. The staff here really gets into this every year, with dozens of housekeepers, nurses, facilities and office people dressing up in very elaborate costumes. There must have been 200 people in the lobby, loud music, etc.

Bert and I grabbed Lou and we went in the auditorium and started a DVD playing with closed captions. The projector, which was new last year, is really a good one, and its remote works slick. You tell it to put a grid on the screen, and then you can tell it to shift the lens to move the grid left, right, up or down in pixel increments. We ran it up until the top of the movie image was right at the ceiling, at least 18″ higher than normal, and yeah, it was easier to read the captions from far back.

So back to my room to rewrite that whole section of the report. Then practiced guitar a bit and it was time for supper. I had made a date with Connie, founder of the writers group. I had written up an essay about the realization I had come to back on Day 5.321, the “pledge of release” etc. I had sent it to Connie asking for her thoughts. So she had some, and we met for dinner and talked about things. Her life experience has been very different from mine: she divorced fairly early, and lived as a single mother of four (she laughed and said all her kids were now 60 or older), not marrying again. She had remained friends with her husband and his second wife, and had helped to care for him when he got early onset Alzheimer’s, from which he died. Anyway she had an interesting critique of my writing and I will need to rewrite based on her input.

Oh, I forgot. This morning my bedside lamp failed. This was a space-mushroom shaped thing, a shallow glass dome with a shiny steel stem and base, which operated by touch. When I tapped it this morning, it didn’t come on. At first I thought the power was off, but I could see a pilot light across the room, so, no. Just the lamp had stopped responding to touches. Later in the day I took it apart far enough to see that all the electronics were in one little black box (literally). Something in that failed, and there’s no fixing it. So with a little internet searching I found a very similar, maybe identical, lamp and ordered it.

Wednesday 10/30/2024

Laundry day. In between laundry loads at 9:30 I spent half an hour with Romie’s new iMac trying to figure out why the Bitwarden password manager wasn’t working with the Safari browser, and failing. Also why she can’t run her printer, but I think I know that one. Try again tomorrow.

Apple introduced upgraded iMacs. They look to me like machines that if you order the right options, would be good for a decade or more. I wrote a guideline on what options to order and sent it to the CH tech mailing list. Unfortunately Apple still hasn’t announced a replacement for my 8-year-old 27-inch iMac. The new ones have a 23-inch screen and I just stubbornly want the big screen. An option is to buy the newly-announced updated Mac Mini, and pair it with a separate monitor. So I spent some time looking at “best monitor for mac” kind of websites trying to figure out the best deal in those.

And spent some time, at Kass’s request, editing the half-hour video of the appreciation fund show, down to 5 minutes so Rhonda can show it at a staff function.

At 2 it was time for the monthly AV team meeting. We had serious topics to discuss, how we wanted to respond to Rhonda’s request for reactions to two HC grant requests. The discussion was constructive and substantive, I’m very pleased with my team, and we have conclusions. Which I get to write up, oh joy.

We adjourned to the weekly 3pm Wednesday coffee and pastry break in the dining room, a nice little custom that dining services started a few months ago. There I sat at a table with David G and Kass, all three of us being owners of 27-inch iMacs, talking about what monitors we might buy.

Didn’t feel like coming down to dinner, had a PB&cheese and cup of bouillon in my room.