Tuesday 10/29/2024

During the morning I dealt with some management issues, emails to various people. And wrote a short essay for the writers group. The prompt was, “stuff” specifically, stuff you did or didn’t bring to Channing House. I wrote about my mid-century coffee table and the seagull sculpture that is always behind me in zoom meetings.

After lunch it was time to go down to the museum for the intro training to the new “Decoding Chatbots” exhibit. It’s nice, a lot of informative stuff. Scott was there too.

Monday 10/28/2024

Started the day with an early walk, standard distance, all functions nominal. Then off to FOPAL where I found 4 boxes of books to process.

Back home with time for a short nap, then down to the auditorium to set up for the Appreciation Fund show at 4pm. This came off just fine, no issues. At the party in the lobby following I ate enough snacks that I didn’t bother coming down for supper later. Pretty much read the internet for 2 hours.

Sunday 10/27/2024

Quiet Sunday morning. After lunch I set up the auditorium for a rehearsal of the Appreciation Fund party. I’ve mentioned this annual event a few times before: there’s no tipping here, so once a year the residents run a fund drive to get donations for an annual gift to all employees. Tomorrow there will be a half-hour show in the auditorium followed by a party in the lobby, with lots of solicitations and reminders to people. Usually over 90% contribute, many giving more than the recommended amount, which this year is $1300. (I gave quite a bit more. I mean, that’s barely $4/day.)

Today the people performing rehearsed and we worked out the tech details, who needs a mic and where, what’s on the projector when, etc.

In the afternoon I worked with the MuseScore app, figuring out the fingerings for guitar chords for RATCT and putting chord symbols in the sheet music. Soon we have to actually start practicing that song.

Saturday 10/26/2024

Morning I walked over to CVS to buy talcum powder. Why? Because the Dell laptop I was preparing for gift shop sale had a rubberized coating on the plate surrounding its keyboard, and this had degraded and felt gummy and sticky. Google “Dell sticky palm rest” and you’ll find lots of hits; it’s a common problem. And one internet post out of many had a solution: talcum powder. Spread it on, rub it in, wipe it off. And it made the rubbery surface much less gummy.

At 1pm I left for the museum and led the 2pm tour. Started with 15, picked up more on the way, ended with about 25 people. They seemed to enjoy it.

Had an early supper with Mary and Andrew, then at 6:30 Mary and I drove across town to St. Mark’s Episcopal to hear a concert by Lyyra, a female vocal group. They were pretty good. Some of the numbers (and some of the individual voices) were excellent. I wanted them to pick up the pace, have more rhythm, punch the lyrics more clearly. Despite lovely harmonies, the show as a whole seemed to drag a bit, some of the time. But who am I to carp?

Friday 10/25/2024

Today I spent some time fiddling with a PC. After I told Mary Beth, who runs the gift shop, about how Romie’s iMac was ready to sell, she mentioned that another resident, Dennis, had a Dell laptop to give away. So I went and got it, and decided the best use of it was to install Ubuntu Linux on it. I had to fiddle around a bit to make it work, including a rather arcane bit of tech to make the internal audio speakers work. I searched the internet for “Dell Ubuntu internal speakers don’t work” and got many hits, finally finding one that explained how to add two lines to a certain configuration file. This is not something the average user would know how to do — use the gedit editor in supervisor mode to edit a config file 3 levels deep in /etc. But I did, and when I rebooted, voila, the speakers worked perfectly. Anyway, there’s a nice laptop for someone, probably an employee, to buy for a kid to use.

My dinner tonight was at the “Webster Street Grill”, a special fancy dinner that our dining services stages every month or so. You pay extra for it. David G and his wife Helen had assembled a party for this and invited me. This was a six-course meal, the chef getting to show his stuff. It was pretty good, not every dish was four-star but not bad.

I had to leave a bit early; I had promised Sandy that I would check in with her in the auditorium as she was running a jazz concert. She didn’t actually need any help but appreciated the reassurance I guess. There were two musicians. Terrigal Burn on piano and Tamara Dunn singing. He’s mostly a musician; she has a day job, professor of immunology at Stanford.

Mr. Burn didn’t make a friend of me for sure. He didn’t arrive until 7pm (for a 7:30 show) and came with a cart full of his own audio equipment that he proceeded to put together, except he needed more power outlets, oh wait this will do, fuss fuss fuss. Tamara didn’t arrive until 7:15, so no time to do a proper sound check. And Mr. Burn then spends 2 minutes talking to the audience without a mic, until he notices that people are yelling “can’t hear!”. And she didn’t stay close to her mic, wandered around so her volume varied. Amateurs. Still, they were both quite talented and the music was nice, what you could hear.

Thursday 10/24/2024

Took the standard walk in the morning, since I didn’t yesterday. Then went to the 11th floor and inspected the “mechanical room” there, where it is proposed we might keep a mobile tv. There is space, but there are several drawbacks that would have to be corrected. I took some pictures and wrote a judiciously-phrased email with pictures, to the relevant staff members.

I finished upgrading Romie’s iMac, wrote a sale info sheet for it, and messaged Mary Beth who runs the gift shop about it. She hadn’t answered by the end of the day. In fact, people not answering my mail is beginning to bug me. I wrote to Connie, who I think of as a writing peer and a friend, three days ago asking her to review an essay I wrote on the “pledge of release” idea. She hasn’t answered, nor answered my polite note that I sent this morning. Something is not right.

Did some reading for once, two long New Yorker articles that Joanne had xeroxed for me.

Went out at supper time and walked around California avenue instead of eating here.

Wednesday 10/23/2024

First thing today was by prearrangement, I met with Romie to install her new iMac, replacing an old iMac that had gotten just soooo slooooow. Set it up and started it loading from the old backup drive. Then went to an 11am meeting with Rhonda, Gerald, and Bert to discuss AV requests for the next cycle of Heritage Circle grants. This got a little contentious, first because two of the grant requests turned out to be under $2K and Rhonda doesn’t think HC grants should be so small, they can be funded from the Gift Shop. And the other request is Bert’s idea of a “video wall” to supplement the projection screen in the auditorium. He’s been fascinated by video wall tech for a couple of years, and I think there’s nothing in it to benefit us at all. In the end, Rhonda punted to us, asking the AV team to come up with some firm recommendations. End of meeting.

At 1:30 I met with a lady from the Youth Community Services and handed over the old guitar to be a donation.

At 4:55, David M called from the auditorium where he was setting up for the evening lecture. No audio coming out of the system. I had no clue, I said, quick go find Gerald before he leaves for the day. By the time I got down to the auditorium the problem was fixed. Gerald saw that somebody had turned down the master volume in the software. We NEVER do that, so didn’t know to check. Who did it? Dunno. But one more thing to check.

After supper I was settling in to playing around with Romie’s old iMac, I have hopes that after I reformat the hard drive and install a later OS, it will not be so dog-slow, when the phone rang. Again from the auditorium, the speaker needs a charger for his MacBook, do I have one. Uh, yeah I guess. So I bring the charger for MacBook down to the aud. so the speaker can show his slides. Boy that’s a rookie mistake, going to give a talk and your laptop isn’t charged. Anyway I had planned to listen to the talk on Zoom but now I’m down there, so I sit in the back and listen. This guy was one of 49 or so architects working on the Apple HQ building and he had lots of pictures and statistics about what a marvel it is. Among many other amazing stats, the whole circular thing sits on rubber isolators and can move up to four feet in an earthquake. So I got my power supply back and came away.

Tuesday 10/22/2024

Today was an all-day outing to Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park — near Santa Cruz — also home to the Roaring Camp steam railroad. A record 40+ people had signed up so we had a big and very comfy bus. Took the steam train ride,

and afterward, walked the loop trail through the big trees. Here’s neighbor Martha for scale in front of the largest tree in the park.

Did a few email chores, had dinner, participated in the Tuesday sing-along in the lobby. Just another day in comfort city.

Monday 10/21/2024

Started my walk a bit early so I could meet Dennis at Peet’s in Town and Country around 8:30. That is almost exactly when I got there, and he was 2nd in line for coffee behind me. So punctuality runs in the family. We called Laurel while sitting outside feeding crumbs to the red-wing blackbirds.

Down to CH and to the monthly Event Coordinator meeting at 10:30. The usual secretary was away so someone asked me to make a voice recording, so I just started Voice Memo going. Afterward I discovered that the phone automatically makes a transcript of a voice recording, so I could send that to the chair, very handy.

Made myself a lunch of a sandwich made of leftover pulled pork from my BBQ dinner last night. Then down to FOPAL where I met with Henry at 1pm. He had volunteered to shadow me so he could do the computer section if I was unavailable. Super-nice guy, he has been doing LP record sales for some time so was familiar with looking things up online and pricing things.

Back to CH with no real time for a nap darn it, for Rhonda’s monthly open meeting at 4. She walked the assembled residents through the budgeting process for employee compensation, in all its many forms, stressing that this was 70% of our operating costs, while we have a goal of being an “employer of choice” in the senior residence industry.

Got a wee short nap and then a simple supper and it was time to set up for a concert. This was Nova and Daniel, Nova being a performer and a vocal instructor at Stanford, Daniel being a professional keyboard player, piano, organ, classical, pop. They put on a terrific show of songs by Cole Porter, really top-notch professional entertainment. They were happy to allow me to record it, so I spent the show switching among our 3 cameras to get good views and closeups.

Sunday 10/20/20224

Well, not so low, just unstructured. Didn’t do much all day. Well, put new strings on the new guitar because I didn’t like the feel of the ones the store had used. Probably identical, but new strings feel better anyway.

I have arranged to give the previous guitar, the Yamaha, to a kid in East Palo Alto. I contacted Mora, the director of the Youth Community Services, who I helped put on her lecture Wednesday evening, and she arranged for one of her people to pick it up this coming Wednesday. This evening I got an email thanking me from one Diego Torres. Little premature but shows a good spirit.

I went out on my own to a BBQ place and had a beer and some pulled pork for dinner. Now I might finally do some of the writing I’ve been promising myself to do all day.