Sunday 04/07/2024

Today I went down to the T-Mobile store in Mountain View thinking I would exchange Jet Black Beauty for an iPhone 15. (“Jet Black Beauty” is a reference to the old Car Talk show on NPR. My last two phones have been black and both named Jet Black Beauty.)

Just into the store, which was busy, I was looking at the iPhone display and realized that, one, the iPhone 15 was only a little bit larger than the SE, which pleased me; but also that the iPhone 15 Pro, with a better camera, was the same size and like only $80 more. So while I was waiting for a sales person I made up my mind to get the Pro instead.

But the salesperson had to tell me that sorry, they had a black 15, but no black Pros. So I thanked her for her time and left, thinking I would buy one from Apple and take it to the Palo Alto store to have it baptized or blessed or whatever they have to do to make it answer to my account and number.

Then I thought some more, and checked MacRumors.com, and you know? There’s an iPhone 16 coming this fall. But the reason I need to upgrade right now is this stupid problem that I synced the phone to the computer and as a result iOS set aside a bunch of space for “synced data” so there’s no space left to install the new iOS upgrade. Why don’t I solve that problem, and then wait for the newer model?

So I googled the issue and it turns out that a whole lot of people have been having this problem, where syncing their phone adds multiple GB to their space usage, and there’s a lot of contradictory advice about what to do. But heck, if it’s syncing that’s the problem how about I don’t sync? I connected the phone to the computer and went through all the settings related to the phone and turned off every option that had to do with syncing. And rebooted the phone and hey whattaya know, there’s enough space for the iOS update and more besides. It can easily last now until the end of the year.

Other than that it was a normal quiet Sunday.

Saturday 04/06/2024

Whee, a day with no commitments. What shall I do? I decided to get the car washed, it had some light schmutz from driving in the rain, which bothered me because it hides the lovely shine from the detailing and ceramic coating of a few weeks ago.

I pulled out of the car wash place a little after 9 and headed for the City, destination MOMA, which I had last visited in 2022 and earlier in 2019. (Fun having a searchable diary.) I parked in the MOMA garage and spent 2 hours walking all the floors in the museum. Lots of stuff that I didn’t like. One spectacular piece is Big Pumpkin by Kusama,

and there was a Calder piece that was reflecting red nicely,

Back home, next activity. It is really time to replace my phone. This little S3 has been with me for years, I think I got it in 2019? It has scratches and scars but the real issue is storage. It is a 64GB one which was plenty of space until recently. I connected it to my desktop machine, and the OS suggested I could sync my music library from the desktop iMac to the phone. Sure, why not? Well why not is, that added 16GB of music to the phone and now it is nearly full and it can’t install the latest iOS update because there isn’t enough room. The easy fix will be to get a new phone with 128GB of storage, which is the minimum in an iPhone 15.

So I walked over to T-Mobile but they didn’t have a black iPhone 15 in stock. Supposedly they do have, at the Mountain View store, so I’ll go there tomorrow.

Friday 04/05/2024

The only scheduled thing today was to show up at Stanford Hospital, the Cardiac clinic way up on the third floor, to review my new CT scan with Dr. Amelia Watkins, the surgeon who stented up my dissected aorta back in 2020. I got there early for my 10am appointment but since Dr. Watkins was still in surgery, I was seen by her nurse practitioner. The conference was short: everything looks fine. My aorta shows up beautifully on the CT, a garden hose lined with a basketwork of wire stents, and it is just fine, no change. And no other anomalies to be seen. My renal cysts are still there but no bigger than before.

The NP mentioned that the reason they keep doing annual callbacks is that the stents have a possible side-effect, they can “crack” or break down. This was news to me. Well, they are in there now. But I guess I will continue to get a thoracic CT every year forever. Which is fine with me; it’s kind of reassuring to have somebody look at my innards every once in a while.

For being such a big brave boy who goes to a medical appointment all by himself, I treated myself to a coffee and a delicious pastry. And didn’t do much the rest of the day. Little guitar practice, some reading.

Thursday 04/04/2024

Frank had alerted me to a pile of donations waiting at FOPAL and I wanted to get a start on them before my usual Monday visit. However I had a date with Brian for 11am. So I left at 8am and went down there and did 90 minutes of work before breakfast.

Back to CH to meet with Brian, who has a piano in his unit. Mary R wants me to join her in singing a duet in June, and I wanted to practice it with a real accompaniment. So Brian obliged, playing along. He likes show tunes anyway and this is a show tune: An Old Fashioned Wedding from Annie Get Your Gun.

After lunch I met with Dr. Margaret and we spent 2 hours polishing up her video of her Tanzania trip that she will show here later this month.

Wednesday 04/03/2024

Did the laundry. Worked in 1.5mi on the treadmill. Reorganized my collection of guitar music.

Prepared the new exhibit for my hall photo display. When I first put picture rails out on my hall wall, I displayed prints of our 1976-era pictures of the bridges over the river Thames. That was a couple of years ago. So now I’m recycling that exhibit. But I found a really nice map of the bridges, and blew that up to 11×17. And reprinted a couple of the collection and started the display with the first 5 bridges.

Had dinner with Jerry and Betty and Kay and Mildred, all to honor Patty on the anniversary of her seventeenth year as a Channing House resident. Very pleasant.

Tuesday 04/02/2024

Nice morning with no commitments, since I didn’t plan to write anything for the group, so I took the standard walk that I should have done yesterday. And it felt fine.

Writers meeting. As I say, I didn’t write anything. The topic was “Surprise”. One person wrote about how her second child arrived very suddenly, and she gave birth on her mother’s living room rug. Yup, that’d be a surprise for everybody I guess.

At 2 I went off to the Stanford Imagining center near California ave for a CT scan. This was the third(? I think?) annual follow-up scan for my aortic dissection. I’ll see the surgeon to discuss the pictures on Friday. I suppose if there was anything concerning they might call sooner?

Since I had the scan and it’s been over a year since I had a physical — I had a “Medicare Wellness Exam” August 2023, but that is not the same as an annual physical, which the health care website is careful to stress — I went ahead and scheduled one, for June.

I also uploaded Susan’s video to Vimeo, so that task is done.

Monday 04/01/2024

This morning at 9 I opened up the auditorium and set up for Susan H’s book talk. She read from her memoire, Memories of a Mid-Century Girlhood. This was a wonderfully simple event, she sat behind a table on stage and read from her book. Period. No powerpoints, no zoom, just one microphone. Here’s a frame from the video, which I was editing this evening.

After that I went down to FOPAL and did two hours of computer book pricing and organizing. I picked up a pound of coffee and a loaf of bread and came on back. I paused to take a picture of this wall of wisteria on the end of the market.

Sunday 03/31/2024

Usual Sunday morning. Then at 11 I left for the museum where I led the noon tour. Good tour, 20 people and my chat went over well.

Back home, having missed the Easter lunch service here which I was told later, was really good. Being a holiday this was sack-supper day, I had picked up my brown bag in the morning. At 5:30 many of the 6th floor community met in our dining room to picnic. Nice time.

Saturday 03/30/2024

Took myself out to breakfast, a cinnamon roll at the Midtown cafe. Around 11 I spent an your helping Dr. Margaret add pictures to her video of her visit to Tanzania. After a nice lunch with the Allens and Carolyn I played some guitar, and again in the evening. Otherwise a day “frittered away” as my mother would say.

Friday 03/29/2024

It was raining, so I took a two-mile walk on the treadmill. Then I sat down to finalize my taxes. The preparation company had done a nice job, the federal and state returns plus vouchers for payment and estimated taxes, plus a form to authorize electronic filing, all uploaded to a Sharefile account. Sharefile seems to be thing for document transfer these days, I have Sharefile accounts with the financial managers, the tax people, and one other. So I went through there e-signature routine to authorize the filing and sign the returns, and that was pretty much it. Filed.

Well, an hour of clerical fiddling to print out the five vouchers (one for 2023 payment and four for the estimated taxes), and I made up stamped and addressed envelopes for all five, and wrote two checks for the payment and the first quarter estimate, and took those two down to the mailbox and sent them.

After lunch I helped neighbor Gloria to install her new TV soundbar. That took an hour.

At 5 I had a hasty supper and at 5:30 I drove over to the Congregational Church, where I met with #1 AV volunteer David M, to watch him run the Good Friday service. This was in order to see their setup and how they did pretty much what we do here, support events in the auditorium with a second, Zoom, audience. But their equipment is much nicer. Here’s a pic or two.

The Good Friday service was elaborately scripted, with different people reading verses of the Passion narrative, alternating with choral bits from the choir and once, a flute and soprano duet. It ended with all the lights being extinguished except for one candle on the altar. Then first the choir and then the congregation, all quietly exited in the near-darkness. The light of the world has gone out, see — come back Sunday morning to see what happens next. I told David I hadn’t realized that the Congregationalists had as much sense of the dramatic as the Catholics. He said it wasn’t usually so theatrical.