Saturday 12/14/2024

Today was a blank on my calendar. I thought oh boy, I’ll get some reading done, and other stuff. Well the day just flew by and I’m not sure where it all went. I did get some reading done. I also restarted guitar practice for other tunes. Wrote several emails, which always takes time, to think and get the wording just right. Anyway, another day in the books.

Friday 12/13/2024

For my morning walk I was joined by Joanne, which is always nice. Then I settled in to edit the Holiday Concert video. That took a few hours. Here is the final result. Me and Alice singing RATCT comes at about 32:00. By the way an “American Masters” episode about Brenda Lee will be on PBS the evening of 12/16, i.e. Monday.

Today was employee appreciation day, when the staff have a party in the afternoon, get their annual bonus (“appreciation fund” donations from residents) checks, and go home early. Which meant there was no dinner service tonight. The sixth floor voted to have pizza, which I ordered. It arrived at 5:30 and much of the 6th floor gathered in our dining room to eat it. Three people were going out for other reasons, and two were sick, and two are just out of the picture on the left. But here’s a bunch of my neighborhood.

Thursday 12/12/2024

Today for the first time in several months, we had a volunteer work day at CHM’s Shustek Center in Milpitas. In the morning period we didn’t do a heck of a lot, except to exercise the volunteer-use PCs, which hadn’t been booted in months. Each one had to be fired up and get its Windows updates done. But mostly we just chatted with each other about what’s been happening with us and with CHM. Then adjourned for lunch at Eric’s, as of old. Then I had to leave instead of working the post-lunch period, because I had an event to run back at CH.

This was a performance by the Kara singers, a choral group sponsored by Kara grief support, a Palo Alto organization. I was thinking ho-hum more Christmas music but when they were warming up my ears perked up. This was a bunch of serious adult singers, well led and with sophisticated arrangements. They were really good. Unfortunately the only time they could give us for a concert was 3:30 on a Thursday afternoon, so only about 40 people turned up to listen, but the music was excellent.

I should have spent some time editing the video of the holiday concert but I didn’t. That can wait for tomorrow.

Wednesday 12/11/2024

Today the holiday concert was performed twice, at 10am and at 7pm. I ran the AV for both, plus I and Alice sang RATCT each show. We were 8th on the bill, after the group sing-along and before the “jazzy trio”. We did not suck, to my relief, and got nice applause each time. CH is a very forgiving audience.

In the middle of the day I went for the standard walk, so with all the nervous pacing around the auditorium my phone shows almost 4 miles of walking.

Tuesday 12/10/2024

In the morning, peeled off the Zio patch and later mailed it back. I have been feeling the PVC’s only occasionally, maybe 10 minutes, twice a day? So don’t expect any dire results when they come in.

Did a variety of little things, somehow there is always something to catch up with, and cleaned the apartment for the cleaner coming at 3. Then at 1:30 went down to warm up the auditorium for the tech run-through of the holiday concert. When it finally got to my part, Alice and I were — meh. I’m not posting a video. But the other acts were pretty mediocre too, so it all averages out.

Pulled off a bit of a technical coup, though. I was video recording the rehearsal, which wrapped up about 4pm. Back in my room I sat down with the record file and extracted separate clips, one of each of the acts. And put them on my dropbox public folder. And emailed the entire cast with a list of links to each of the performances. Want to see yourself? Here’s your link.

Had that all done by 5:25 when I went to dinner. Who’s a hot video tech? I’m a hot video tech, that’s who.

Monday 12/09/2024

In the morning was the monthly Resident Association meeting. No huge news there.

I had the feeling that this week my calendar was really really full and I was feeling stressed, but in fact, since I did my FOPAL work on Saturday, there was really nothing else going on today. Took a walk. Talked to Laurel about Christmas plans. Wrote some emails on various subjects. Where did the day go?

Sunday 12/08/2024

Watered the plants, did the crossword, then had a couple of hours to kill. Met relatively new resident David G2 (to distinguish from long-time resident David G)(not to be confused with David T, David T2, or David M) for lunch, and then the two of us drove over the hill (the Coast Range) to the seaside town of San Gregorio. I wanted to hear the farewell concert by The Quitters, a band I’ve heard several times including Day 0.259 and two years later, Day 2.222. They are retiring and this was their last show.

The San Gregorio Store is a small venue, and unfortunately I didn’t plan to get there early, so there was only standing room when we arrived. We stood for the hour of the first set, then we bailed.

Had supper with Mary R, the producer of our upcoming holiday music show (and by upcoming I mean, this Wednesday) and some others, and we talked about who needs music stands and who needs what kind of mics.

The play I went to last night was a musical version of A Christmas Story. This started out as a short story by Jean Shepherd. That was made into a 1983 movie that apparently is now considered classic and is re-shown every year: the tale of a 9-year-old boy who wants his parents to get him a Red Ryder BB Gun for Christmas. I remember having seen the movie. In 2012 it was made into a stage musical, which according to Wikipedia had a television production in 2017. I think I might have seen that, although I’m not sure.

Anyway the Bus Barn staged the musical with a big cast, all working really hard doing some clever choreography. There were a couple of problems. A technical issue was that, although I could see most cast members were wearing microphones, there was little to no amplification, and I couldn’t get the lyrics, even though I was sitting like 25 feet from the stage. The singing by the kids, especially Ralphie, were drowned out by the small (4-piece) orchestra. The bigger problem was, this is such a silly, shallow story. It only works if you can really catch the nostalgia vibe and get involved with Ralphie’s quest, and I didn’t. So I left at intermission.

Saturday 12/07/2024

First thing was to meet with basketball friend Harriet where we have met before, the coffee shop in Midtown. Re basketball she says a couple of people have asked her about me, hoping I was all right. That’s nice to hear. She said there is noticeably less fan energy now. I’m not surprised. I walked to Midtown (2.7 miles for the day) but Harriet drove me back. When I got out of the car I noticed this back-lit coleus(?) in the planter outside the door.

Looking ahead at my calendar, next week is just jam-packed with things, so I decided to get my FOPAL work out of the way today. I did that, got my shelves all ready for the sale. Then I bought a couple things at Safeway and went home.

Friday 12/06/2024

Took a walk but didn’t feel 100%, so cut it short. At dinner yesterday, Joanne said I ought to start attending the line dance class. This is one of about 6 different exercise classes at CH. There’s strength & balance, and seated strength and balance, and yoga, and pilates and probably some other thing. Line dancing is on Fridays at 10:30, so I went. The instructor does a great job. I am grossly uncoordinated for this, always a step behind what he’s calling out, but frankly so were a majority of the dozen people who attended. Anyway I didn’t trip or bump into anybody and got a mild sweat out of it, so I guess it was a success.

During the day I got back on Charity Navigator and got the contributions done that I had a problem with yesterday. Speaking of yesterday, here’s a picture of the Gunn High choir from last night.

Worked out the chords to “Grateful”. It is a very difficult song — have I put in a link to it? here — other songs I’ve worked on have a solid rhythmic “groove”, or at least a basic 1-2-3 or 1-2-3-4 time. So I can strum the guitar in that rhythm, and sing along. Try counting 1-2-3-4 to that video. The chorus, maybe, but the verse? No way; there’s a beat but it’s very loose and changes all the time. So there’s no strumming. Still, I love the message and want to sing it.

At 7:30 I will leave for a play at the Bus Barn, I will summarize that tomorrow.

Thursday 12/05/2024

No after-effects of yesterday’s long walk, so yay. Today was for getting some shit done. First project on the list was to try to get a usable video from Ian’s talk of Day 6.001. That event had several technical glitches and the video recording had some problems. But over 2 hours I managed to patch together an acceptable video. After that I did the monthly review of the Schwab accounts. The Nest Egg is in OK shape, recovered from a dip last month and just barely above where it was at the start of the year.

After lunch I worked on my annual charitable giving. I use the charity navigator site, which remembers all my donations from last year. I had some problems with their user interface this time, but got most of the work done. I need to go back tomorrow to finish.

I walked out for an hour doing a couple of errands. Then there was time for a nap, and then I met with Joanne at 5 to go out for an early supper. We went to Coconuts, a Jamaican-style place nearby. It was ok. Not super but could go back.

Back to CH in plenty of time for the 7pm concert, the Gunn High School Choir in their annual visit to CH. The leader, Bill Liberatore, said this was the 25th visit, they started coming to CH in 1999, and “So I guess I’ve been here longer than most of you.”

I got into the auditorium early, 6:35, to check in on my AV volunteer Tom, doing the mics. And the stage light panel wasn’t working. We’d had this problem before and I couldn’t remember what the magic was. I finally remembered, there’s a particular button that has to be pressed down, and it wasn’t. Did that, lights worked.

The 35 or so high school singers were just finishing a quick rehearsal. I noticed that the facilities guys had not replaced all the chairs, there were two big stacks of chairs that should be spread out on the floor to make the back two rows. And this would be full house, too. Shit. Do I want to schlep 20 chairs the length of the room? Wait, there’s all these cute young people standing around… I grabbed a mic from Tom and asked, could we have a few of you young men take some of these chairs and line them up there at the back? I was immediately reminded that I am a sexist old relic, when two young women (both taller than me) each grabbed a chair and headed for the back. Anyway in a couple of minutes the kids had added two full rows of seats at the back, nicely lined up and ready. And by the time the show started at 7, all those seats were full. There would have been a bunch of people standing (and grousing loudly) had I not taken proactive action. So I’m feeling good about myself on that account.