Quiet Sunday morning. Dining services provided a nice lunch. At 5 I brought the car up so the SWBB car pool wouldn’t have to trek the long basement walk to the Lee garage. The carpool was only me, Patty and Martha this time. The game was a non-conference one against Morgan State (Maryland), and Stanford won easily by 60 points.
Back to CH by 7:45 in good time to join the new years eve party on the 11th floor. Sat at a table for one round of Trivial Pursuit, when was the last time I played that? Peter and Al were playing Jenga at a very high level, I caught the end of the game:
Into bed by 10 to lie and listen to the explosions of illegal fireworks from east Palo Alto.
This morning my neighbor Dr. Margaret called me in to help her fix her antique clock. It’s a very tall “grandfather” — I think the right term is a “case clock” — easily 7 foot high that her grandfather got in payment for a medical bill, in England way back sometime. She had been trying to adjust the pendulum and disconnected the pendulum. There’s only one guy in the whole bay area who works on these and he’s booked out for months. So I provided the muscle and at her direction we removed the top cover that surrounds the works. Then we could see where and how the pendulum attaches, and it was fairly simple to reattach it. Then the clock starts the tick… tock… routine just like a grandfather clock should sound.
Later in the day I polished the clear coat of the 240z. That revealed a number of glaring flaws in the finish, but you only see them if you are like an inch away. I thought I knew what I was doing with this paint job but… I gave serious thought to ordering a new kit and doing it all over again. OTOH, once it’s done and in a nice clear plastic box, nobody will notice.
Got bored in the afternoon and went down to FOPAL and processed four boxes of computer donations. Later, had dinner with Patty and Stew and Kathy.
Took a standard walk in the morning, timed to let Wanda clean my room, and incidentally timed to pass between bands of rain coming through.
At 1pm it was time for the monthly AV team meeting. We tried headset mics. David G made a strong argument that we need more people, and I agreed to make a recruiting pitch at the next RA meeting.
At 3pm was scheduled a rehearsal for Dr. Larry who is to give a talk this coming Monday, yes 1/1. Larry is not in the greatest of shape, but is determined to give the talk. I assisted Ian in setting up. Ian will actually run it, but I need to be there also I think.
Ordinarily this would be apartment cleaning day, but owing to the holidays, that will be tomorrow morning instead. I got the Advance Health Care Directive signed, anyway. I had lunch with Kass to talk about a tech problem with a resident’s Mac. I put in an hour sanding the orange peel out of the clearcoat on the 240z.
I spent about 4 hours trying out three of the new AI writing assistants. These are web apps that intend to assist people writing books by providing an AI writing partner. Probably the most polished example of the three I tried would be Sudowrite. I won’t go into detail here, but I spent a lot of time on these and didn’t find any of them congenial.
Here is a link to the 8 minute video of my performance last night. (See the clip in yesterday’s post for an overall view of the setup.) Today several more people came up to congratulate me on this performance. It’s quite embarrassing, really, they say very nice things though.
Today was the day for the Channing House Musical Potpourri, at 7pm in the lobby. This was the conception of Mary R, chorus director. She roped me into it when she found out I was playing the guitar again.
I did the laundry; I went for a short walk and picked up a prescription at CVS, and I put in about 3 hours getting together a new Advanced Health Care Directive and some other end of life type papers. But mostly, I fiddled around killing time until 5, when I went down for an early supper, and to put out the sound system for the lobby so we’d have a mic.
Then back to my room to fidget until 6:30 when I took the guitar down and joined the other musicians setting up. I was surprised how nice this time was, just hanging out with musicians as they tune up and get ready. Here’s a snatch of video to show the room.
Here was the program, which Mary had set up in 7-minute segments: Sing-A-Long with Arlene (pianist, in the santa hat); Baroque Trio (Lou on recorder, Alice on cello, Kay on flute, in the center of the video); piano and clarinet duet by John and Francis; Sandy doing a reading from a story by Truman Capote; a cello/flute duet; then little ol’ Moi doing two songs on guitar; and the Jazzy Trio, which is Arlene, Stew and Kay again. Jerry video’d the whole show, and I expect he will give me a clip of my performance which I may share later on.
So, David, how did it go? Well you know, it went very very well indeed. I didn’t make any musical screwups, and the audience were smiling and singing along. And I got probably the biggest hand of the night. Afterward several people came up to me to congratulate me and say they enjoyed it. Part of that might have been just surprise, since I have never done any public performance of any kind around here, and suddenly I’m singing and playing the guitar in front of a crowd. But they seemed sincerely impressed.
No writers group today. I spent the morning hour going through and organizing my various end of life documents, especially the Advanced Health Care Directive. I need to change that and I see the current one was prepared by the attorney who redid the family trust after Marian’s death. I don’t want to go back to her, and I don’t want to go down to the one in San Jose I worked with a couple years back. Anyway I did a couple of other paperwork things.
Then down to FOPAL for the weekly processing of donations. And also for another 2 hours with Frank, going through computer-related stuff he has accumulated in the storage room. The quesstion was, what of this is worth saving to sell at the Vintage Computer Fest in August, and what can be recycled? We got through maybe half the boxes before I called a halt.
Back home for a nap, rehearse (performance tomorrow night!), dinner.
Big event today was the official Channing House Christmas Brunch lunch, to which I had invited sister-in-law Jean. I went down and picked her up at 11:30. Came back, she admired my balcony garden, then we joined Carolyn, Edie, and Susan who I had invited to my reserved table of 5. CH brunch featured mimosas, very interesting, their version was more persimmon juice with persimmon seeds floating in it — and fancy Eggs Benedict with salmon under the egg. It was a good group, 4 interesting and highly intelligent women, plus me.
After I took Jean home, I followed up on a tech squad call I should have handled a day earlier but forgot. Helped Bille with her email issues on an iPad.
I was just getting ready for a solitary supper when an acquaintance, Helen, a 9th floor resident, called. She had sent an invitation to me and a bunch of other people to share our sack suppers (it being a holiday, the dining room shut down at 4) in the 9th floor dining room. I had ignored it at the time, but now she was on the phone saying, come on up. There were four others there and we had a pleasant supper and chat.
So what to do with a Saturday in the holiday season? I have no imagination. No, I did not go sort books at FOPAL, although I will confess I gave that a brief passing thought. I paid a credit card bill, I wrote several thoughtful emails, I practiced guitar — I am feeling the pressure of the coming date when I actually have to perform in public and it panics me when I momentarily forget a lyric — on the other hand, I am quite enjoying playing for my own amusement, I like the way I sound in the privacy of my room — and put in an hour on the 240Z model. Next step on that is to spray it with clear coat and then polish that.
So for lunch I felt like a change and did the terrifically imaginative thing of, I’m ashamed to admit, driving to the In&Out Burger place for a cheeseburger and choc shake. Well, it was a change. And good, actually. Then I walked a bit in the Baylands. That was about it.
That rarity, an almost uncommitted day. At 9:45 I met with Ann C. to help her take her iMac down to her car, for transport to the Apple store. We (several members of the tech squad) have been fussing over this iMac for a couple weeks, trying to get her new Epson printer to print double-sided as it claims to do. In the course of those visits we had noticed that the iMac ran horribly slow, just taking forever to respond to anything. So she had a Genius Bar appointment. I didn’t go along, I only helped load it in the car.
Later she emailed the tech group that multiple geniuses had looked at it and claimed that it ran so slowly because the Intel chip — this was a 2019, the last year before the new Apple Silicon came in — couldn’t handle the current level of the OS. And she decided to buy a new iMac. I think when the new one comes, she will give me the old one. I will reformat it and install the last Intel-only OS version, and we can sell it through our gift shop. Some employee will buy it and get good use from it. Hell, I’m still getting good use out of a 2015 iMac. (Fortunately I don’t allow automatic OS upgrades, so it’s still sitting on an old OS version, and runs just fine. If I was in the Windows world, I’d be running Win10 still.)
Took a standard walk, despite some grumbles from the gouty foot. Put in a lot of guitar practice time. Spent a looooong time looking at AI tools for novel writing. There are several, and I’m going to spend some time trying out one or more of them.
Codgerville 