Wednesday 03/06/2024

Today was laundry day so I did that.

Last night Kass was to run the Tuesday night movie, a DVD. In the afternoon yesterday I went down and walked her through the process. The DVD should have played, it had a few very light scratches and I cleaned it of all finger prints. We ran the first five minutes and all looked fine.

This morning I got an email from Kass describing the disaster. Ten minutes into the movie, the Tascam player stopped, and restarted itself from the beginning. And then did that again. Ian was in the audience so he stepped in, and tried to run the DVD with different hardware: a laptop that we keep in a cupboard with an Apple external DVD player. But he couldn’t make that work. So the movie was canceled and the audience went away.

This is not the first time the Tascam player has barfed on an older DVD. Maybe the third? Anyway something has to be done. I remembered that I have a Blu-Ray player that I took from the 11th floor when I replaced it a few months ago. It’s sitting in my closet. So let’s use that for older DVDs. I took it down to the auditorium where I found Ian just reproducing the setup that failed for him last night, and of course today it worked. But the old Blu-Ray also worked. It’s easy to set that on the AV desk and patch it into the projector with an HDMI cable. So we put that in the AV cabinet backstage and Ian will use it on Saturday when he is due to play an opera DVD. Those opera DVDs are all from the private collection of our opera enthusiast and are not in great shape, so that will be a good test.

Other than that I practiced guitar a lot today. I am trying to learn “If I Had a Hammer” which turns out to have a fairly tricky chord sequence. I went through four YouTube tutorials before finding one that looks learnable. Lots of practice time to come.

Tuesday 03/05/2024

Wrote something last-minute for the writers group. The topic was “independence”. I remembered when I tried a solo bike tour, back in ’97, with mixed success. What I actually learned about myself then was, that I didn’t enjoy travel for its own sake. All my enjoyment of travel came from sharing the experience with someone else. By myself, I didn’t care. So I wrote about that, cribbing from my old bike ride report.

Then to FOPAL to finalize my shelves for the upcoming sale. And back to practice guitar. That was about it.

Monday 03/04/2024

It was spritzing rain outside and anyway I needed to be in the auditorium before 10, so instead of the usual walk I went down to the gym and did 2 miles on the treadmill. Then to the auditorium to run the First Monday Book Talk. This featured Vickie Rozell (her family was very distantly related to the famous Pete Rozell) talking about publishing her father’s memoir. It was partly about her father’s childhood growing up in a semi-rural Compton CA, but more about the process of self-publishing a book. She wanted to encourage us oldsters to do that, self-publish our memories.

Then lunch with the speaker and some others, mostly from the Drama Group (see last week). They were interested because Vickie’s day job is with regional theaters, she both directs plays and teaches theatrical directing. So lots of chat about local theater.

After lunch I sat with Lynne and her ukulele and my guitar and tried to play some songs together. She wants to do that, reminiscing about how she used to have a ukulele group who would meet at various homes and play together “but they all died on me.” Anyway we have an idea of what we could perform together at the May concert.

Sunday 03/03/2024

An uncommitted day, oh my. Didn’t do much at all. Left the building to spend an hour at FOPAL. This is the week before the monthly sale, so I did a bit of work to prep my section. I’ll go back again on Tuesday I think.

Practiced guitar for an hour. Generally lounged around otherwise.

Saturday 03/02/2024

Started the day by going out for coffee with Lennie. This was by arrangement; I wanted her insight on dealing with the staff on the issue of the music practice room. That is a project that has been stalled for a year and I couldn’t get any info from the staff person in charge, who is a perfect example of a petty bureaucrat. Lennie was sympathetic and, as president of the Resident Association, had some insights into the workings of the staff. Anyway I like her company and it was a nice coffee outing.

After lunch I went off to the Museum to lead the 2pm tour. That went well, a big crowd at the start that thinned down to about 20 at the end.

I was feeling lonely so I called Edie and she was able to join me for supper and one-on-one chatting which was very nice.

Friday 03/01/2024

After the flurry of activity — I ran five (5) AV events in 4 days, six if you count chairing the committee meeting — Friday was completely uncommitted, which when I looked at the Google calendar earlier in the week, pleased me a lot. The empty day looked like a nice soft pillow where I could lay my head at the end of a busy week. Except when I thought of it as time to catch up on all the things I had put off.

Notably taxes. I’d put off filling in the tax man’s workbook until after all the 1099’s were in, but they were in now. So there was that. Plus, there was the video recording of the drama group performance that needed to be edited and put up on Vimeo. While I was working on that I got a polite email from Dave T. who organized the Tax Planning event of Tuesday, wondering when the video of that would be available. Oh shit, I had completely forgotten that. And there was the suggestion from the AV meeting, that we put the Green Room key in a key box at the AV desk.

Well I got all those things done. Drama video. Tax video. Walked to Ace Hardware and bought a magnetic key safe. And did about the first half of the tax workbook. Plus a half hour of guitar practice.

The monthly Channing House newsletter is out and the cover article, by Peter, is about the AV committee. He did a nice job, finding the history of volunteer AV back 20+ years. Anyway a picture of me is on the front page.

Thursday 02/29/2024

Took a standard walk first thing. One, because I didn’t get one yesterday, and two, because they were doing the annual fire alarm test, and the fire alarm warning horns and flashing strobe lights would be on for half an hour from 9am, while they verified that strobes and horns worked in every apartment, so better to be out walking at this time.

Then I spent some time organizing info for the AV team meeting at 2pm. There have been some problems where the Zoom link for events, posted in the daily calendar email, have not worked when clicked upon. Researching the causes was a deep rabbit hole but worth going over. Another issue was the Green Room key. This is a room behind the stage, nominally for performers to prepare or wait for cues, but also partly turned into a storage hoard by the gift shop volunteers, well, that’s another argument. But it is kept locked. I have a key, but there’s a key kept at the front desk that anyone can borrow.

Two excellent ideas turned up in the meeting, both from Alice. One, let’s have one of those magnetic key safes with a Green Room key attached to the AV desk. Two, there’s an easy safety net when a zoom link doesn’t work. Just go to zoom.us/join and type in the numerical meeting ID. No need to manually start the zoom app or anything. I will push for this to be added to the bottom line of every daily calendar.

In the evening I experimented with videoing myself playing and singing. Needs work — it was out of focus, as a photographer I’m embarrassed — but will be useful as a way to work on my performance. I can stand to watch myself; I have a pretty good stage presence and demeanor, and sing on key most notes. Need much more rehearsal.

Wednesday 02/28/2024

Today was the big day for the drama workshop group. They performed their package of one-act plays twice, once at 10am, to an audience of about 40, mostly AL people from the Lee center; and then again at 7:30 to a packed house, at least 75. They did pretty well, got some laughs, generally a good time was had by all.

The AV side of it was complex, they were using all 4 wireless mics and two hand-helds, plus a stage light setup, plus I had to hit the blackout button on cue at the end of each scene. Plus I recorded both performances using our camera, which meant trying to frame the action and follow actors as they moved around.

I was nicely thanked by all and sundry so that was nice.

Tuesday 02/27/2024

At 8:30 I went down and set up the auditorium for an event that was to start at 10. This was tax planning presentation sponsored by the Heritage Circle. As an event it came off very smoothly, about 45 people in the room and 18 more on zoom. No tech glitches whatever, pat pat pat.

The content wasn’t of direct use to me, although I learned a few things. I had not heard of Charitable Remainder Trusts before, for example. Handy for people who are older, living in a home that has appreciated a lot. Some other useful pointers but nothing I could use immediately.

So, lunch. Sat with Lynne and we strategized about how we would perform in the spring concert. Probably going back to my original performance plan, not sharing the stage with her.

Down to FOPAL for a 2:30 session of computer book pricing. Back for supper, and at 6:30 back to the auditorium, this time to support a woman who is giving a book talk next week and wanted to rehearse, and wasn’t free in the daytime. So Gigi, who organizes the book talks, said sure, come on over at 7pm and rehearse. It was a useful rehearsal, working out how to show everything she wanted to show on the screen.

Monday 02/26/2024

I took my standard walk and felt fine. Did some music practice. Then I went down for an early lunch and from that, went to the auditorium to warm the system up for the drama group, who plan a full tech rehearsal of their upcoming show — last rehearsed like two months ago. There’s a lot of setting up. They use all four wireless mics plus 2 hand-held ones. And they want a video recording, so I have to manage the camera during the skits. So that dragged on until after 3pm. Then I went up to my room and edited the video clips, breakout out separate videos for each of the 5 skits in the show. And sending dropbox links to the actors.

Had a very pleasant supper with the Allens and Dr. Margaret. She probably wouldn’t mind me calling her a salty old broad. Anyway, fun.