Friday 03/08/2024

Took the standard walk and felt fine. Practiced guitar. On Monday I will be among a small group playing for the people in AL in the Lee Center. Not a hugely demanding audience, I believe. But I practiced twice today and will some more on the weekend.

At 1pm I met with Lynne with whom I will share the stage on May 10. She plays ukulele. We have decided on “If I Had a Hammer” and today practiced together for the first time. She’s head of the harmonica group, a half dozen people who perform standards on harmonica as a group. She is an assured leader, not at all afraid to direct and correct somebody else. OK, no problem. One of her neighbors wandered in to listen and said we sounded good.

Then I took the guitar over to Gryphon Instruments where I had an appointment. I wanted them to install some kind of button or knob at the top end of the guitar, around where the neck meets the body, to accept the end of a strap. I’ve been using with a strap that kind of wraps around the head, in between the tuning knobs, but that isn’t satisfactory. So they did that in about 10 minutes, $15, very reasonable. We talked about adjusting the action to lower the strings, but they would need to keep the guitar for a day or so, and I couldn’t do that, see above about practicing for Monday. Maybe next week.

In the evening I went down and internet rabbit hole, exploring the world of automated music transcription. I would like Kay to play about 20 seconds of bridge on her flute during one of my songs. She says “I don’t improvise, give me a score.” I don’t have any skill at notating music or any music paper. But there must be a dozen sites and apps that promise they can convert audio into sheet music. So there went the evening, trying to find one that actually worked and didn’t want a prepaid subscription.

Thursday 03/07/2024

Tidied for the cleaning lady, then drove to the East Bay to spend the day in artifact work at Shustek. Aurora set me and Toni to work correcting the inventory of a mass of buttons. Not clothing buttons, but the kind of metal buttons with a slogan and a pin in the back, ephemera from long-gone trade shows and such. (On slogan I remember was, Burroughs Begs to Differ.) There were literally hundreds. They had all been cataloged at some point (back 10 years ago and more, I think). The catalog crew had put each button in a plastic bag with its barcode tag, and then put them all in boxes in piles. Now we get to reorganize the boxes up and repack the buttons so the bags stand up in lines. The goal is that a person looking for one particular object by its number and description, could reasonably flip through the contents of a box and be confident they had seen every one. I should have taken a picture. I will, next week.

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.