Tuesday 08/20/2024

In fact I did sort go back to sleep, drowsed until 6. Managed to write something for the writers group meeting at 10:30. The cue was “encounter with an animal”. I was sitting on my couch looking out to the patio where 5 hummingbirds were using the feeder, so I wrote about the different ways the hummers eat.

Right after the meeting I headed down to FOPAL where I found 9 boxes waiting. I processed 5 of them by 2pm, then headed back. There’s been a shakeup in housekeeping and I have a new cleaner and a new day — for five years it’s been Wanda and Thursday at 2. Starting today it’s Celina on Tuesday at 3. So I wanted to be here to meet her.

During the event on Sunday I had found that the ATEM video switcher was acting funny. I could describe in detail what “funny” means but who would care? Anyway in the night it came to me, why not just reboot it? So tonight before supper I went down to the auditorium and checked. Yes, still acting funny. Pulled the power, counted to ten, put the power cable back. No more funny, all good.

Power it off and on again. Doesn’t work every time, but works surprisingly often.

Monday 08/19/2024

Did a revolutionary thing: took the standard walk backwards. Not walking backwards, but reversing the route. After 5 years(!) of walking a 2-mile loop counter-clockwise, I walked the same route but clockwise on the map. Because I had a whim to have coffee at a different shop. Well it felt revolutionary. Such is the excitement in my life.

Then the monthly Event Coordinator’s meeting, settling the calendar of events. After which I practiced some guitar and then updated the AV committee calendar spreadsheet. At 1:30 I met with Mary to practice YGAF. We are starting to sound not too bad, mostly because she knows how to sing harmony. I just do the melody and she sings nice harmonies around it.

Before and after supper I edited the video from the Rhudy’s presentation of Sunday, while sampling some of the speeches at the DNC. I had recorded the PBS coverage, but annoyingly that recording stopped before the actual main speech, Biden’s. Maybe the convention ran long, I don’t know, but I only saw the latter part of that which was on live after the PBS recording ran out. That was enough anyway.

Writing this at 4am because I woke up to pee, and realized I had gone to bed without blogging. Wonder can I go back to sleep now?

Sunday 08/18/2024

Rushed through my Sunday morning stuff (water plants, do puzzle). Went and got out the car at 8:30, then waiting for everyone to assemble. This was the carpool group going to the Keller Sisters concert at the San Gregorio General Store, long-planned. There were 10 of us in the end, three cars. Joanne and Sandy rode with me. The concert was excellent, everybody enjoyed it. We got under way back home just after 1pm, back by 2pm.

Then at 3pm I went down and set up the auditorium for an event. It was a Sunday@Home, the monthly series where residents show off their accomplishments. This time my newest neighbors, Roberta and Richard Rhudy, presented some pictures they had taken on a recent week in Paris. The went on a tour which was mostly a workshop in Street Photography, shooting scenery and people on the streets and major buildings of Paris. They are quite skilled photographers, and had some really excellent shots to show. Also they are nice people. I had dinner with them and Stew and Kathy afterward.

Saturday 08/17/2024

Main activity today was to lead the noon tour at the museum. Peter came along. He’s a volunteer on our CH newsletter staff, and is doing a series of articles on residents who volunteer outside. I am the first subject. He already interviewed me, but he wants a picture so he came along to get a picture of me in my red shirt leading a tour.

Afterwards he very nicely said I lead a great tour, which was flattering.

Lots of email back and forth with people who are going to the concert tomorrow, or are dropping out, back and forth.

Before leaving for the museum I used an online site to strip the vocals from the recording of Carole King singing You’ve Got a Friend, and then to transpose it up from A-flat to C. So now we have audio of Carole King’s piano but in the key we want to sing in, for rehearsing to. The shit you can do with audio online is just ridiculous – and all free. Actually I’d be happy to pay that website’s owner, it’s so slick.

Ate supper early and then walked to Rinconada park where there was a concert on the lawn, a local group of women who perform under the name Blues Is a Woman (which is a line from an old blues song I think). Anyway they were ok but I left after half an hour.

Friday 08/16/2024

Took a shorter walk in the morning, then got in the car and took it to the car wash and then filled the tank. This in preparation for car-pooling to San Gregorio on Sunday.

At noon, picked up Craig and we went to the Dutch Goose, a beer and burger place, to meet with four other retired IBMers to talk about the 70s (and for some of them, into the 80s) when we all worked for IBM in Palo Alto.

The SFJazz streamed Friday Night Concert looks like it is of general interest so I am going to put it on the big TV on the 11th floor. I need to go set that up now.

Thursday 08/15/2024

Used to be, I spent nearly every Thursday at the Shustek center in Milpitas, accessioning donated objects. Back in April they had a problem with the building that put all that on hold. Today I went over there for a meeting where we volunteers were told and shown what had happened, and got a roadmap for the future.

Shustek center is a one-story office building, mostly open-plan with rows of metal racking, plus a few enclosed offices and storage spaces.. Back around Easter there was a day with a lot of rain and wind. The wind apparently blew over a cinderblock wall that was on the roof, masking the HVAC equipment on the roof from the street. The wall fell on a corner of the roof, which partly collapsed. That wouldn’t have been so bad, but it also broke a sprinkler pipe, which dumped a huge amount of water on the floor at that corner. Water moved across the floor, soaking into carpet. At that corner of the building had been a large amount of old computer stuff in a disorganized mass, which was the personal collection of a guy named Al — not museum property; they were kind of letting Al do his work there. A lot of Al’s stuff was on the floor, and got soaked and eventually had to be thrown away.

The museum stuff, rows and rows of shelving with boxes of documents and piles of media, was all raised from the floor, so once they had the humidity under control, it didn’t suffer, but a loty of stuff had to be moved very quickly. Then carpeting had to be pulled up and rather than replace it, they had a contractor scrape all the glue residue, sand down the cement floor and seal it.

The accessioning work area still isn’t usable, being full of stuff relocated from other spaces. Plus Aurora, the lead curator, has some vacation time coming. Likely volunteers won’t be back to work before October.

Back home by 3, when I took a tech squad call to help install a printer for one of my newest neighbors on the 6th floor, Sophia. Bert had started the install and ran into problems. I was able to get the printer going and sort out a couple of other problems she had with her quite new iMac.

Wednesday 08/14/2024

Went for the standard walk (3 miles for the day). Then settled in to a spell of computer work, at my desktop machine.

(The desktop machine is a 27-inch iMac, bought in 2015. Apple discontinued the 27-inch in 2022, and today it can’t be brought up to the current level of the OS. If I want a modern desktop with a big screen, my only option is to buy a big monitor, the Apple Studio Display or comparable from Samsung or LG, and drive it with a Mac Mini. I refuse; I want the elegance of the one-piece iMac. But currently iMacs only come as 24-inch screens. Today I read a rumor that Apple is planning a new, “iMac Pro” model with a thirty-inch screen, ooh boy. When? Oh, 2025, maybe. Or 26. OK, the old one still works, although it is a bit slow. Patience.)

The work was, to clean up a large folder in my Dropbox named Camera Uploads. For the past year plus, whenever I had a photo I thought worth saving in my permanent collection, I’d put it into Camera Uploads. I can do that from any of my machines because the Dropbox is shared among them all. The idea was that “sometime” I would go over these pics, sharpen and crop and tweak them, and put them in sensible topic folders in the Pictures folder. There were about 75 of them.

I spent about 4 hours today doing that: discarding some, improving others, filing them. Very satisfying work. Then I printed two more Thames Bridges pictures and updated the gallery outside my room. Didn’t do much else but it felt productive.

Tuesday 08/13/2024

Decided to walk to Cafe Zoe for breakfast, and to not wear my ear buds and listen to a podcast, but rather to think constructively of something to write for the writers meeting. I took a different route that added half a mile to the walk (3.3mi for the day). It worked, in that I thought of something that more or less fitted the prompt. When I got back about 9:30 I sat down and started writing but ran out of time and had nothing usable when the meeting started at 10:45.

Had lunch with some other writers to celebrate Connie’s birthday. I don’t know which birthday it was, but probably starts with a 9.

After lunch met with Stew to show him how I had used Keynote to make a lyrics file. He had found it extremely tedious. I showed him just a couple of tricks he hadn’t know of, like how to easily duplicate a slide. So now he is in charge of the lyrics file for the folk fest, editing the one that I produced.

At 3pm, met with Craig and we practiced our number for the folk fest, “City of New Orleans”. After three run-throughs we don’t totally suck.

Monday 08/12/2024

I took the standard walk this morning, it felt fine. I went down to FOPAL and did my post-sale triage, sending books that had gone unsold for 4 sale days, off to the bargain room. Only one box of donations waiting to process.

The hummingbirds have suddenly doubled their consumption, or I have double hummers, because where I was filling the feeder once a day, suddenly it needs refilling every 4 hours or so. My feeder is really old and damaged in various small ways. I stopped Petco when I was buying coffee but they don’t carry bird stuff like they used to. I could order another feeder, a pair of feeders identical to mine is just $15 on Amazon. On the other hand, I had been telling myself that I was going to get out of the hummer-feeding game after this season. So, no.

Back home I did some guitar practice. And then ordered tickets for the 2024 Boogie Woogie festival in November. I ordered 5 tickets on a whim. Two for Scott and June, one for me, two to offer around CH if I can get anybody to go with me.

Sunday 08/11/2024

In the morning before lunch, I prepared a Keynote presentation with all the lyrics for the Folk Fest. The committee has set the final list of songs in sequence, so I got the lyrics for each of the songs and put them in white text on a black background, max 6 lines per slide. This will let us project them on the big screen, while the black background means people can be on stage under the screen and not get a sunburn from the bright projector.

After lunch, I set up the auditorium and helped my neighbors Roberta and Richard rehearse their presentation for next week. That will be a “Sunday@Home”, where residents show their recent travels or other accomplishments. They went on a photography workshop tour of Paris, taking street photos. They are good photographers and have some really wow! pics to show.

Later I took a tech squad call to help a resident who thought she had lost her Apple password, only very fortunately it turned out she hadn’t, she had just mis-typed the password, from the grimy little slip of paper on which somebody had written it. So many people around have these handfuls of little slips of paper with old passwords, crossed out and re-written. The Apple ID ones are the worst, because you so rarely have to enter them, and the procedure for recovering a lost password is really complex.