Friday 07/05/2024

Took the standard walk, starting at 7:30, back before 9. Beating the heat, although in fact the forecast heat was not bad today.

At 9:30 set up the auditorium so Mickie could practice with her slides, for a presentation at the next RA meeting on Monday. To my surprise, Mickie, who is quite smart and with it, and who was at one point in her career, the mayor of Menlo Park, was not a skilled presenter. The presenter’s slides are shown on the big screen on the end wall. The presenter, if facing the audience, has her back to the screen. Mickie took the microphone off the stand and stood with her right shoulder to the audience, looking to her left at the screen, and read the bullet points off her powerpoint presentation. What?!? Oh well. Not my presentation.

After that, knowing there was a big backlog of donations at FOPAL, and having the day free once I had shut down the auditorium, I headed down there and spent 2:30 doing sorting.

Back home I set about answering several questions about the 11th floor equipment that had come up. That took a couple of hours. Not going to go into detail. Wireless mics, bleagh.

Thursday 07/04/2024

Thought to treat myself by walking to Cafe Zoe for breakfast. Disappointed to find when I got there that for the holiday they wouldn’t open until 11. Walked back through increasing heat, without breakfast.

At 3pm joined Mary and Kay in the Lee center main lounge to perform music for about 20 people. Mary and Kay do flute duets, sandwiching my performance. Did three songs, didn’t mess anything up, got a nice little hand.

At 6, we 6th floor people took our sack suppers to the 11th floor and picnicked there. Back to 11 at 8:30 for the 4th party and sing-along, and watching fireworks from all around the Bay from our 11th floor penthouse.

Wednesday 07/03/2024

Pre-holiday, forecast for high temperatures. Actually it was 85 on my balcony at 3pm and I sat out there very comfortable. In the morning did the standard walk. Practiced the one hard song for tomorrow’s performance. Lounged around, consumed internet media.

Tuesday 07/02/2024

Quiet day. Writers meeting, again I had nothing to read. Drifted down to FOPAL to sort, as I knew there was a big backlog, but there were too many volunteers sorting already so I only spent an hour and came away.

Multiple times in the day practiced the three songs I am going to do at the Lee center on the 4th.

Back last year (Day 4.274) I went with Jan to Sacramento for a weekend at the jazz festival. Jan wants to know do I want to go again this year, spend the Labor Day weekend at the Sacramento Hilton listening to music. Ki-i-i-i-inda? Sorta? Not really. Think I will beg off.

Got a very nice email thank-you from Ms. Althouse, the lady whose book reading I managed yesterday. She like the video I made of her.

Monday 07/01/2024

Took the standard walk, starting early so as to be back in plenty of time to set up for the First Monday Book Talk, event starting at 11 but setting up at 10. Event went smoothly. Trained Kass in the use of the video recorder and the camera. Got decent video of Ms. Althouse reading from her book.

Then drove down to FOPAL and somehow burned up 2:30 working on computer books. Back home, edited the Althouse video, and eventually uploading it to Vimeo.

Day of the infamous SCOTUS decision on presidential immunity; so angry and depressed.

Sunday 06/30/2024

Did my usual Sunday morning things — recently somebody said to me, “you’re really a creature of habit, aren’t you,” and I had to admit it was true. At 11, put on my red shirt and drove to the museum to lead a tour. It went OK.

Back home to practice some music. Only a few days until I have to play for the Lee Center AL crowd, but that is about the least demanding audience ever. Still, for no obvious reason I decided I wanted to sing “Swimming to the Other Side” so I need to memorize the chords and lyrics in a few days.

(Somehow neglected to hit the “Publish” button on this one)

Saturday 06/29/2024

Well, an uncommitted day, whatever shall I do? I walked to the downtown farmers and bought some ripe blenheim apricots. Then I decided to visit the San Jose museum of art, which I last visited in January 2020 — Day 1.060, also the day that I moved back into #621 after its upgrade. (Click the link for pictures – nothing has changed except the TV is newer.)

At that time I found the SJ museum moderately interesting. Today, not so much. There really isn’t much, just two large rooms, each dedicated to a single artist, and I wasn’t much interested in the works of either one. The best thing they had was the sculpture in the lobby, thousands of little metal pieces in a 3-D cloud.

But that trip was pretty much a bust. Plus two, $30 Lyfts.

Later on, after listening to an interview with a guy who was the touring sound man for a list of rock celebrities (Tina Turner, Prince, Van Halen, Jeff Beck, the Stones…) I was motivated to go down to the auditorium and check out all our microphones and try to adjust the sound as much as I could with our limited facilities.

Friday 06/28/2024

Took the standard walk (3.5 mi for the day) starting bright and early, back by 9. Then at 10 drove across Palo Alto to Gryphon Stringed Instruments where I had an appointment to do a little work on the guitar. I asked them to lower the “action”, the distance between the strings and the fretboard, just a little, which meant lowering the “saddle”, the hard strip at the bottom of the strings. This turned out to be a 20-minute job, and I was very happy with the result. It’s only a difference of maybe 1/32nd of an inch, but somehow it is easier to play every chord.

At 1pm I met with Mary R to practice another duet. Our first one was well-received, now she wants to do “You’ve Got a Friend” (see 5.206) and this was the first time we tried singing it together. We don’t have a date to perform so we left it that she would figure out when we would perform, and once we had a firm date, we would get serious about practicing.

From there I had a 2pm tech squad call, helping Nancy with an error message from Mac Mail. Too complicated to describe and anyway I didn’t fix it, though I think we can later. But in general 90 year olds have problems when they need to know their Xfinity password and their Gmail password and also the admin password for their macs, and all the passwords are jotted down, in a little paper notebook, and crossed out and revised over and over. Sheesh.

Thursday 05/27/2024

Had a meeting with Gerald of IT and Rhonda re various auditorium improvements. The added cameras will cost $17K and are “in-plan” and should happen soon. Two different approaches to the sight-line problem, where the closed captions on the bottom of a movie screen are blocked by the heads of the people in the front rows, are way too expensive and probably won’t happen.

Several people accosted me yesterday and today asking would I be sure to turn on the big tv on the 11th floor for the debate. It is not rocket science, people. But I did that about 2pm. Went back to check at 3:45 and some helpful person had turned it off again. Sigh. Oh, I suppose now (8:30) I should go turn it off. Probably somebody already did.

At 4pm I met with my AV committee to assign events for July. We chatted about this and that. Shared the news about the cameras.

Watched as much of the debate as I could stand in my room. Bottom line: Biden is too old, and Trump is a dangerous lunatic.

Wednesday 06/26/2024

Well today we had a scheduled power outage, from 9 to 2, in order to rewire stuff for the new emergency generator. As of now it should be functional, meaning among other things the elevators will continue to operate in a utility outage.

But that meant I couldn’t do my laundry at the usual time. I went for a standard walk instead. I managed to pass the time and did the laundry after the power came back. Nothing much else to say. Spent time trying to get an arrangement of “Swimming to the Other Side” in a key I can sing in.

There was a lecture in the evening, AV run by one of our more experienced volunteers, but there were issues, plus the speaker was, frankly, unprepared and disorganized. Fortunately I sat at the back so could quietly slip out after 20 minutes.