Wednesday 12/20/2023

It has been more than a week since I had a proper walk, and outside it was raining heavily. So I put on my walking shoes and went down to the gym and put 2.0 miles on the treadmill. My gouty toe was starting to hurt near the end of the 40 minutes, but it settled down soon after.

Next up was to drive to the other end of University avenue to meet with Leah Lin. Leah is a woman who is developing a clientele among seniors at CH as personal tech support or general personal assistance. She was recommended to me by Joanne T and Connie C.

The problem I want to solve is to have a younger, more available person to hold my medical PA, in case I am hospitalized and can’t communicate. The End of Life series we did a couple of months back sensitized me to this issue. You can need quick response at first, and possibly long-term and rather burdensome monitoring after. I talked it over with Leah, who comes across as the kind of responsible, smart person that Connie and Joanne described, and she is going to write up her understanding of the problem and what she would offer and send it as an email.

At 1pm was the monthly FOPAL volunteer zoom meeting. Last sale netted $18K, new ceiling lights being installed in the main room.

The rest of the day was open. I practiced guitar — my debut as a performing artist is exactly a week from now! — and worked on the 240Z model. This model does not have opening doors, yet it has a very detailed interior, which in the end will be visible only by peering through the side windows. I worked on painting chrome on the dashboard bits and wood color on the steering wheel, and such.

Tuesday 12/19/2023

Gout pain is almost subsided although the toe is still a bit puffy. Didn’t do much. The writers group cue was “that’s that, something is finalized” and I spent some time writing about the day I moved to Channing House (based on the emotional moments I wrote about on Day 198). But after fiddling with it for an hour decided I didn’t want to share that anyway. There were some nice essays by others, although to my surprise nobody else wrote about that particular transition. I thought several would.

After lunch I spent a very frustrating hour with Ann’s iMac. She has a new Epson printer which definitely should do double-sided printing, but neither me no two other tech people have been able to make it do that. The feature won’t show up in a print dialog, which probably indicates we have the wrong driver level, but… I don’t know. Fail.

Monday 12/18/2023

Took a walk, but cut it short at a mile because the gout in my right big toe hasn’t subsided yet. Going along, favoring my right foot, I almost tweaked by right knee. So headed back.

The Event Coordinators meeting at 10:30 is a highlight of the month. I get word of all the events for the next month so I can update the AV group spreadsheet.

A quick lunch then off to FOPAL in the very welcome rain. There I found ten (10!) boxes of donations to go through, which took 2 and a half hours.

Sunday 12/17/2023

During the morning, I finished editing together the Chorus concert video. You want to see it? Here it is, 45 minutes of earnest entertainment. Not good, mind you, but earnest. We try.

At 3pm it was time to set up for an event, a Sunday@Home by Alice, presenting all the bird pictures from her recent birding trip to Australia and New Zealand. She saw many many more varieties of birds than we saw on our trip, but then, she hired specialist birding guides and only went mainly to birding places.

I was mentoring Kass, my AV trainee. One more event and she’ll be able to do them on her own. Probably could now but not confident.

The in-house menu didn’t appeal so I got in the car and wandered over to Cal. avenue and had dinner at Palo Alto Sol, which is still an excellent restaurant. Pollo Guajillo, a house specialty.

Saturday 12/16/2023

In the morning I worked at editing the videos of the Chorus performance of Wednesday. I have two, hour-long, recordings from the two performances that day. I separated out individual video files of each of the main numbers, so I have a folder of AM clips and one of PM clips. Tomorrow I will put together a final video selecting the best version of each number.

At noon I went to the 11th floor to assist in a memorial for one of my 6th floor neighbors, Cindy. I thought this was to be a simple AV job, set up the portable mics and help one of her daughters show a reel of photos on the big mobile TV screen. But in fact they had announced it would be zoomed, and people would come in from outside. Oh sigh. So I ended up being zoom host. About 20 people signed in from outside the building. There was a pretty good crowd, 50 or more, mostly 6th floor residents and visiting relatives and friends. Cindy was a teacher and her husband a pilot for United; they lived in Palo Alto for many decades. He died around 2019, she downsized and moved into CH not long after. She had a lot of health problems this past year, and it was kind of indicated during the eulogy that she had voluntarily ended her life — spent the last month very deliberately saying goodby to everyone, then moved to hospice care and almost immediately died.

The memorial was very nicely conducted by a U/U minister and all the tech worked and caused no issues, so that was good.

At seven I picked up Patty and we went to the Bus Barn theater for Elf the Musical, which is a very silly play but wow, did they do a good job with the music and dance. There were at least 8 big production numbers, where the whole cast of 20 or so were singing and dancing, quite complicated choreography. Many costume changes. There were a couple of numbers where they had a dozen people wearing tap shoes and doing tap-dance steps. All this in a little box of a theater. Very impressive.

Friday 12/15/2023

Right big toe got sore in the night, onset of typical gout. At 8:50 I went down and checked and the zoom rooms were still inop. Gerald of IT wasn’t in yet, so I wrote him an email while waiting for the bus to load. That would be the bus to the De Young museum to see the De Young Open exhibit, where the museum invites every artist in the 9 Bay Area counties to submit a work. They ended up hanging over 800 pieces around 4 big rooms. Here’s about 1/4 of it,

Some striking things. I had to admire this photograph.

According to the notes in the program, the photographer was planning to shoot something in the opposite direction, when he turned around to look toward the bridge and the Marin hills and saw this sun effect, and the pelicans just happened to fly by. A once in a lifetime shot.

I had stupidly not grabbed a couple of ibuprofen before leaving, so it was quite painful walking around the museum.

Anyway, back to CH about 2:30 and the zoom rooms have been fixed, thank you Gerald. Practice guitar, take ibuprofen, have a nap, and it’s time to join the carpool to the SWBB game, v. Portland. Not a contest, really. Stanford jumped out to a 20 point lead early. Then slowed down and Portland came within 10 points, before Stanford woke up and ran their lead out to 30 points again.

Thursday 12/14/2023

Did my usual Thursday morning routine, of tidying up everything and general maintenance, anticipating Wanda’s housekeeping visit in the afternoon. Also processed the video from last night’s chorus performance. I recorded it using Quicktime on my spare laptop, and Quicktime makes a monstrous huge file out of a one-hour concert, 65GB or so. So I put the laptop to work processing it with Handbrake, which reduced it to 5GB. That just finished at 10:20 which is when I needed to leave for the museum to lead a tour at 11.

This was a private tour for a law firm. There was supposed to be ten people but only 6 showed up. Two were very experienced nerds, they’d been in computer hardware before they became lawyers. The others weren’t so techy. Anyway I gave them the bonus 90 minute tour and the seemed to enjoy it.

Back to CH in time to meet at 2pm with Alice who is giving a talk on Sunday. We went over how her slides would be put on the screen and out to zoom. She is quite knowledgeable and also quick (she reminds me of my late sister Joyce: very mentally quick, but very quick to judgement of anything that doesn’t meet her standards). Unfortunately the problem with the Zoom room from yesterday continued, so we couldn’t try anything out.

At 2:30 I left Alice and joined a meeting of the Good Times committee. This is the group that sponsored the 50s sock hop a year ago and the C&W night a few months ago. They are now planning “Strolling into the 60s,” songs of 1959-1963. The name, because The Stroll was a big deal then, and getting people to dance is an objective now. We got the candidate list of songs down to 30. So many many good songs from then.

At 4:30 I had been invited by Joanne L and Erica to a tasting of whiskies, believe it or not. Peanut butter flavor whiskey is actually pretty good, as is red-hot cinnamon whiskey. Even though I was sampling like tiny little splashes, that was more alcohol than I’ve had at one sitting in a long time.

At 7 we had a concert by the Gunn High School Chorus. They were very good, and cute, too.

The director, Bill Liberatore, is friends with several people who live at CH, and jokes that since their first performance here was 1999, he’s been at CH longer than most of us.

Wednesday 12/13/2023

Today was the day the Channing House Chorus presents two musical events, or rather, performs the same program twice, once at 10am and again at 7pm, the latter followed by a reception in the lobby. I was on AV for both. Other than setting up the microphones, my main responsibility was to control the camera to get a good video recording of both shows. Later I will edit them into one video to be posted on Resweb, our internal website.

An additional tech item was that we had planned to put the video and audio on Zoom, not for general consumption — Mary the Chorus Master was very definite that we were not going to encourage people to watch from their rooms, she wanted them in the auditorium — but so that the activity nurse at the Lee center could put it on their big screens for people in AL and SN, who couldn’t come across to the auditorium.

That worked great in the morning, the zoom had just four names in it, me the host, the zoom room PC which provided the camera view, and one for each floor of the Lee center. But when I came back in the auditorium after a quick supper at 6, I found the zoom room hardware complaining about something and it wasn’t usable. And the IT guys had gone home for the day. But I got good recordings of both shows and the audiences were happy, so it was fine.

Tuesday 12/12/2023

Today I managed to squeeze my laundry in between other things, and between other people’s scheduled washdays. (There’s a magnetic whiteboard in the laundry room where we put little magnetic pawns to reserve laundry sessions.)

For the writers group, with the topic of “Shoes”, I wrote about brake shoes. Found pictures of brake shoes through the ages.

Bert asked me to complete the installation of an Epson printer for Ann C. I failed to do this. Crazy weird stuff. Run the Epson installer package, it says it was successful, but it has created no files anywhere. Other odd things. Connect the printer by USB; but the Mac OS system report doesn’t show it as a connected USB device. I kicked it back. Maybe somebody else on the tech squad can figure it out.

Monday 12/11/2023

First thing was a call from David G in the auditorium. Trying to set up for the resident association meeting and the projector was not showing what it was supposed to show. I had no idea. He got hold of Paul the IT guy who reset something or rebooted something and the projector was working again — but the microphones were dead. A few minutes later he had everything online again. I have no idea what was wrong or what fixed it.

Anyway now time for the Resident Association meeting. No big news. Immediately after I left for FOPAL to do my day-after-the-sale cleanup. Two and a half boxes of books that had seen 4 sale weekends without selling, off to the bargain room. No donations to process, for which I was pleased.

After an hour break it was time to go downstairs to support the full tech rehearsal of the chorus, prior to their concerts on the Wednesday. I practiced zooming the concert, which I will do on the day for the benefit of the Lee center. And I practiced controlling the camera to get all the action, as I will do on the day to get a decent recording. After that it will be up to me to edit a final video from the two concerts, but that can wait for the weekend.

That all lasted nearly to dinner time. Shared a table with Pru and the Morrisons.