Saturday 04/27/2024

Started the day with a walk to Town and Country shopping center, for the sake of having coffee at a different place.

I was to meet with David G to help set up the AV support for a big birthday bash: Barbara Gordon’s 100th birthday. Barbara, who is a bright and with-it personality, has been resident here I think 29 years? Or so. Anyway there wasn’t much to do so I left him to get on with it and was just passing time in the lobby waiting for the actual ice cream social to start, when Joanne T invited me to go to a house concert with her. That pleased me a lot, and I happily agreed. So met with her at 3:30 and we went to a concert at a house off Alpine Road, jazz vocal and piano.

Got back about 5:30, and was just sitting down to try out a song on the guitar when the phone rang. It was Howard calling to remind me that I had agreed to have dinner with him and Agnes and Margaret, and they’re wondering where I am. Oh, right, be right down.

So left the table at 7:15 and up to my room to get my hat and my ticket and then off to the Bus Barn theater to see a production of Thornton Wilder’s By the Skin of our Teeth at 8pm. Which ran until almost 11. And so home and to bed.

Friday 04/26/2024

Felt fine this morning. Took a shorter walk. At 10 set up for the Buddies meeting. The Buddies is a club of IL residents who buddy up with people in AL and SN, visiting them regularly. I had never attended one of their monthly meetings before. Ian usually runs their AV but he is away this week. The group surprised me by its size, at least 30 people, and by how much material they covered. Three members of the Lee Center staff came over to talk about different aspects of care and how to interact with people with memory or other problems.

At 3pm we had a meeting of the AV group. There were only 4 of us, other people traveling and such. One way or another we got the May schedule covered.

In the evening I went to the 4th floor lounge where Florrie had invited a bunch of people to view a video of the life of her late husband, Tom Forrest. I’d never met him; apparently he died not very long before I moved in. But on the basis of the video I would say I wish I had known him, a really cool, inventive, artistic guy and apparently a pioneer in preschool education.

Thursday 04/25/2024

What a weird day. Woke up feeling sub-par. No fever, in fact the opposite, morning temp 96.7, a degree lower than normal. No other symptoms except just blah, no energy. Took a nice nap at 9am. Gave myself a Covid test: negative. At least the ear-ache was gone.

Felt more normalish by 11, so I meant to go to a FOPAL lunch thing at the Mitchell Park Community Center. This is an annual-ish deal where the library thanks its volunteers. I took the Palo Alto Link — municipal Uber-like system — down there instead of driving myself.

Got there at 11:30, scheduled start time. Made out a name-tag for myself, went in. Many tables, at least 15 tables each set for 6 people; big screen showing slides of happy volunteers; caterers laying out trays of whatever, noshes of various kinds. I look around at the 20 or so people there already and don’t recognize anybody. I sit at a table by myself and look at my phone for ten minutes. People keep coming in, but nobody I recognize. I ask myself, self, do I really want to sit with five strangers, through a lunch, hearing people talk about volunteers?

To which I answered, not really. So I got up and left. Walked the mile back up Middlefield to Midtown and had a sandwich at the coffee shop, and took a Lyft the next mile and a half back home. So I’m an asocial coward I guess. Not the first time I’ve run away from a social occasion.

So at 6pm I headed out again, this time in my car, to attend a thing at CHM. This was called Dial In, and it was a panel reviewing the very early history of social networks, specifically computer bulletin boards and Compuserve and Usenet. It was modestly interesting. I was a regular Compuserve user back in the day; I didn’t do much with BBSs.

Wednesday 04/24/2024

In the morning I went to the museum to lead a private tour, “25 seniors Menlo Park Rec”. Nice bunch of folks, near my age. Afternoon I did a couple of minor AV things. I felt a little bit under the weather later, and have a sore throat and an ache in my left ear. I haven’t had an ear-ache since decades. I used to get bad sinus headaches with ear pain back when I lived in the City or Daly City. Anyway, no fever. Think I’ll go to bed early-ish.

Tuesday 04/23/2024

After breakfast I finished editing Margaret’s video and did the things you have to do: make iMovie write it out; process it through Handbrake to reduce its size, upload it to Vimeo. Here it is, actually it’s a pretty fun travelogue.

I did all that and still had time to write something for the writers group. This week’s cue was “one of my favorite things” and I am looking all around the apartment for anything I can call a favorite, and I saw it. I’ll put the thing at the end.

After supper I had to set up the auditorium for a concert by a five-piece jazz ensemble. I had talked Sandy in being a trainee. The concert was IMHO pretty so-so, but it wasn’t a kind of jazz I like, no strong rhythms or singable tunes. Too subtle for this country boy.

Monday 04/22/2024

Took my standard walk. At 11 I met with Lynne to practice the song we will do together at the music fest on 5/10.

After lunch I went to FOPAL and did an hour of processing computer books, and a second hour of sorting.

After a lazy afternoon I flogged myself into action and edited the video of Margaret’s talk. That was a job, made difficult by the fact that I had forgotten to start the Zoom recording. Her screen display was a video, which she often manually paused to explain something. The zoom cloud recording would have given me the exact stream of her projected video with the pauses intact, all synced to her voice.

Instead, I had only the video from our camera showing her at the podium — and lucky to have that, thanks to Bert for turning that recorder on at all — and also her original video. I could put these together, but I had to guess where she had stopped the video to talk, and put in manual break points. There were other difficulties. But I persevered and it will look alright.

Sunday 04/21/2024

Nice Sunday morning. Drove to the coffee shop in Midtown at 8am to sit and do the big crossword. Back home, played some guitar.

At 3 I set up the auditorium for Dr. Margaret’s travelogue from her trip to Tanzania back in February. She has done a good job of editing her video and is a practiced public speaker so the whole event came off very well.

Except for the fact that Ace A/V Person, me, forgot to click Record so the zoom recording wasn’t made. Fortunately, Bert had been a busybody and turned on the AJA video recorder that I never use. So later I was able to go back and retrieve the video from there. So I will be able to make an integrated video presentation out of it.

Saturday 04/20/2024

Spent 8-9am finishing editing of the lecture video from Wednesday night, and uploading it to Vimeo. The took Margaret’s Macbook and had iMovie output her Tanzania movie, which she has been obsessively editing for a few weeks, as an .mp4 file. This will make it much easier to show it tomorrow, I hope. I set up a quick zoom meeting on one computer, and from another I shared the video and it looked ok.

At 6 I went to help Bert set up for a concert. This was an unusual one, a first of a kind for us: the Top Shelf Big Band, a 20-piece orchestra. Previous concerts have had at most five musicians — string quartets plus piano, or piano, bass, guitar, like that. Lemme tell ya, when a real big band cuts loose, the are LOUD. Sitting just off stage left as we were, my ears were ringing afterward like I’d been to a Grateful Dead show.

This gave us AV guys some real problems, mostly in providing mics for the vocalists. They had three singers who performed on different numbers. The problem was getting a singer’s voice to be heard over the volume of the band. If Bert turned the mic up far enough when the band was in full voice, then when the band got quiet the mic would start to feed back. We just don’t have the problems normally but tonight we looked like rank amateurs. Which we are, amateurs, at least, and tonight pretty rank. But the audience was pleased in general.

Friday 04/19/2024

Took a shorter than usual walk so as to be back in time to set up the auditorium for Margaret’s rehearsal. This was to practice showing her videos on Sunday. Some glitches I’d never seen before so it was good to work through them in advance.

After lunch I went to the Museum to lead a tour that I had been told was a group of 25 students from UC, but in fact was only a professor and 7 students, which was a nice size of group. All barely 20 years old, and some stunningly cute girls. So nice tour.

In the afternoon it was the monthly TGIF, this time sponsored by the 4th floor, with the theme, wear a hat. There were some truly strange hats, I must say. I wore my fine cashmere fedora I bought in Paris, which would look good with a tuxedo, but I wore jeans and a t-shirt.

Thursday 04/18/2024

Ordinarily I would spend a Thursday at one of the CHM locations, but volunteering has been suspended owing to a problem with the building where the Shustek center is. I don’t feel like going back to see if I mentioned this — a part of the roof collapsed and there was some water intrusion, no damage to the artifacts but the carpet has to be replaced.

So I gave an hour of time to help my neighbor Dr. Margaret with her various tech toys. I solved several problems for her.

At yesterday’s FOPAL zoom meeting, I heard about a “40 box donation” that had come in, so today I went down there and spent 3 hours mostly sorting. Good exercise.

Frittered the afternoon away in a lazy fashion.