Saturday 01/11/2025

Not much to do today. At 1pm I met with Ian in the auditorium and we worked through a problem with zoom room. At 3pm I met with Kay in the music room and we practiced a song for the Birthday Dinner — which is coming up next Wednesday, damn that rolled in quick.

Took a short walk, took a long nap. Typical Saturday.

Friday 01/10/2025

In the morning I went on the standard walk. Back in plenty of time for the line dancing class at 10:30. This is an exercise class that I decided to join because Joanne suggested it, and she is usually there. The class leader, Will, is very good at his job, gives clear directions and leadership. There are about 10 people of varying levels of dexterity. Dexterity isn’t the right word for “light on your feet and coordinated”. What would that be, podiatrous? Anyway.

Practiced some music, did some reading. Finally it was time to go downstairs and meet Joanne for a dinner date. We went to the Village Bakery in Woodside, a very nice little restaurant. Had a reasonably quiet table for two and had a long talk, a serious talk but a friendly one, over a very good meal.

Thursday 01/09/2025

For the first time in over a year, I think, there was a volunteer work day at the CHM warehouse on Yosemite drive in Milpitas. Just about the whole crew was there.

In the evening we had a concert by Steve Gill, a musician who has been doing free concerts at CH for 16 years. Bert couldn’t come and asked me to make a video recording. which is kind of presumptuous but oh well, I used it as an excuse to practice using the cameras. Sandy had signed up to do the mics, and she did, I stayed out of her way and just ran the cameras. Now I have to copy that to my computer and upload it somewhere.

Wednesday 01/08/2025

First up was to join a walk in the Baylands organized by Joanne. It included Martha, Susan H, Joanne The Other One, and Erika. Pleasant 2-mile outing over trails I have not taken before.

The rest of the day went to napping, reading (Life as no one knows it by Walker, on the new physics of Assembly Theory)(difficult read, as a tech writer I kept finding flaws in the presentation) and music.

Tuesday 01/07/2025

Took a short walk in the morning, mostly to pick up a prescription at CVS. I thought really hard on the writers group cue, “celebrations” and came up completely dry. So just sat through the meeting.

After a nap I practiced some music. I’m really feeling good about my voice and delivery. Drove out at 3 to do a couple of errands. That was about it.

Except that yesterday and today, I was doing a bunch of emails on our in-house AI mailing list. This is developing the idea for a ResBot. We have a website we call ResWeb (resident web) that has tons of info but isn’t that easy to navigate. We read about a group at SJSU who had built an AI to help students find their way through their website — asking natural language questions about courses, hours, and university events. Could we do something like that? Here’s the summary I put together,

Channing House has an in-house website we refer to as ResWeb. (URL is intranet.channinghouse.org, it is quite distinct from the public facing site channinghouse.org).  ResWeb is rich in info and we frequently refer residents to “check ResWeb” for something or other.

It would be nice to have a chat-type interface to ResWeb so residents could query it with questions like —

* what room for Mrs. Galenson

* which resident was a provost at Stanford

* what’s the number of the activity director in the lee center

* what’s for lunch thursday

* is there a video of that talk about housing in palo alto

* who runs the bridge games and what day do they play

— all of which are answered on ResWeb, at some level or other.

It appears that what would work for this is LLM access, augmented with the scraped contents of ResWeb (RAG or “resource augmented generation”). The LLM could be accessed via API to OpenAi or Anthropic, or probably more economically by implementing a local model such as LLama3.

So that’s the general idea. It appears all the tools and concepts and all the open-source libraries and components are available to make it work — but there are many organizational hoops to jump through to make it happen. Although claude.ai showed me what it said was the Python code to make it happen (and it was quite readable), I will never try to implement it myself, because if I did I would be stuck maintaining it. But I would like to see it happen. Especially if we could do voice input it would help a lot of residents.

Monday 01/06/2025

Started the day at PAMF at 8am for an echocardiagram. With that out the way I drove down to Peet’s coffee near FOPAL for breakfast. Their tables were full but no problem, took my coffee and goodies out to the car, more comfortable anyway.

Then into FOPAL to process 5 boxes of donations and set up my section for the monthly sale next weekend.

Back to CH in time for lunch. After lunch I attended the drama group’s rehearsal. Later this month I do AV for their performances of five short plays. Today I took notes on what would be needed for microphones (not much).

At 4pm I attended the Poetry Out Loud circle where people read out poems they like. I had selected a poem and read it also. But I need to read more widely in modern poets. I am formulating a plan to do that.

That was the day, pretty much.

Here’s the picture for yesterday’s lunch party.

Sunday 01/05/2025

Started the day by walking to California ave. Partly to walk through the street market, and partly to check out a new restaurant. But said restaurant is closed Sunday, so no go. I felt good so I walked home, where prior couple of times I’ve Lyfted home. Four miles for the day.

At 1 I met with Mary R to brainstorm on how to present “Annie’s Song”. There’s a long section between the 2nd and 3rd verse where John Denver just hums or sings “Oooooo…” I was thinking I should recruit a couple of backup singers to do the “Ooooo” part. Mary said no, I should just tell the audience beforehand, there’s a section of humming, and they should all join in. Audience participation. I will do that.

I have been asked to sing for the monthly birthday dinner. One day a month they do a happy birthday dinner in one quadrant of the dining room and it’s customary for one or two of the resident musicians to play for a few minutes at the start. I did it once sometime last year, and Barbara, who organizes these, requested I do one of the songs I did then. First ever request for a repeat performance. So I’m practicing that song and one other.

Saturday 01/04/2025

Today’s big event was to have lunch with my relatives. Sister in law Jean came, along with her house-mate Sally. And cousin Darlene and her partner Jessea came over from Oakland. I set us up with a table for seven, adding Patty, who knows Jean from previous meetings, and Joanne, who I thought would get along well with Darlene (and she did). Great comfortable lunch with stories going around the table. Everybody had a good time.

Jean and Jessea took pictures but not on my phone. Will add a pic when I get one.

Rest of the day just fiddled around. Watched a YT video on how to do funky strumming on the guitar and practiced that; I’ve got a song that needs a funky kind of rhythm. Also followed up on a suggestions from Joanne (the Other One) that we should get the Keller Sisters back for another concert (Day 5.223). Talked to Kay, then sent an email to the Kellers. We’ll see.

Friday 01/03/2025

Out the door early to drop the car off at the Toyota shop. Partly for routine 80K maintenance; partly to make the passenger-side windshield washer work; partly to investigate the batttery that the AAA guy said was bad. Regarding the battery, Toyota said it tests OK but was low on charge. This seems odd as I have made a point of driving in non-battery, ICE powered mode for several days. Makes me wonder about the alternator but they didn’t mention checking that. Hmmm. Wish I’d asked about that. They also found other things to do, e.g. replace the coolant because it has been ten years.

So I walked back from there to Midtown and had coffee and while I was sitting there, a rain shower moved in. So I got a Lyft the rest of the way home.

Worked on making a better score for “Annies Song” — the sheet music I have doesn’t match the performance from the record. Practiced that and a couple of other songs. Attended the Good Times committee meeting. The February show is pretty final. Going to be a good show.

Thursday 01/02/2025

Started the day with a checklist of five items I wanted to get done, and ended the day with all check off. Yay me. I booked the car for service. Its last service was in January 2024. When the AAA guy looked at the battery he noted it was dated January 24. I did not remember that, but it’s right there on the dealer invoice, I approved a replacement 12v battery on that service.

I spent some time finding a poem to read aloud at the poetry out loud group meeting on Monday. I’m not sure there will be one; this is Joanne’s event and she’s been away. But I’m prepared. The poet I settled on is Jane Hirshfield. These lines are not in the poem I plan to read, but I like them:

So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.

I spent a couple of hours re-stocking my hallway gallery. I took down the “Ploog” display that has been up since early November (Day 5.343) and put up instead my best “people” pictures, striking images of faces.

Came into the dining room for supper with John and Frances and Sophie and Mark, all perfectly nice people that I like, so we made a table of five. I regretted it. The other four spent the whole damn meal talking about Trump and what the Democrats should have done. Boooo-ring. I just kept quiet and left the table without dessert, complaining I was cold and needed to get a sweater. Which was true.

Got a package in the mail, some home-made candy. The return address was unfamiliar and instead of a name, just the initials CMJ. Who the… The card inside was very friendly remembering all the cookie recipes Marian had shared, signed Chris. FInally I remembered: Chris Johnson, our hairdresser for 40 years, who retired just after I moved to Channing House. I will have to reply I suppose.