I met up with my friend Susan, who has a 2016-era MacBook Air that needs to be replaced. She’s been reluctant to do that, but has come around. I committed to get it installed and set up, but with the understanding that afterward, she would take any problems to the tech squad, I wouldn’t be her personal IT guy.
Then I took myself down to FOPAL to process the 6 boxes remaining from the other day. I used Lyft one way and Uber the other, because Joanne had plans for the car. This was not a problem in any way, just how the system is supposed to work.
We met up for dinner with relatively new residents Karl and Dee. Pleasant getting-to-know you kind of talk.
This evening the Palo Alto Players, semi-pro local acting group, came by, 6 people performing selections from Broadway musicals. In several cases, songs that they had performed when acting in some production of that show. Very skilled and entertaining.
First up, a long hike. Joanne had selected Windy Hill Preserve, the trailhead off Portola road back of The Sequoias, another large senior residence. I’d never done this. Joanne the Other One and her partner Erika joined us. JtOO did know the trail and led us out for 2 miles, when we agreed we had had enough. That was rough, it was mostly uphill for 2 miles and quite steep in parts. Then two miles out, turn around, downhill 2 miles back. I was beat, frankly. Took an ibuprofen and a nap after lunch.
While walking and talking, about restaurants, and I remembered Indochine, nice Thai place in Midtown. Joanne says, didn’t you take me and Patty there a while ago? Later, check blog, yeah, It was Day 4.155, in May 2023, 2+ years ago. Which is weird, I didn’t think I even knew Joanne two years ago. Must have just met her?
Anyway, at 3pm I met with John and Ian to talk about some details of two events that Ian has signed up to run. I wanted to be sure he knew about the repaired choir mics, and about how to get a zoom recording of a book talk next week.
Then at 4pm, it was the second session of the naming and branding of the new satellite. The prior meeting I learned the address of it a week before the official reveal. Now I know the official name and logo it will have. I’m under NDA on that like before. I will say the logo is pretty. The name… well, it has to have a name I guess.
Today was the day for a lecture sponsored by the Heritage Circle, with me doing AV. They had brought in a lawyer, John, who specializes in estates, and Jeff, a specialist in estate planning and giving, to team up for a presentation on “Talking About Your Estate With Your Family”. Each of the presenters had a powerpoint on a thumb drive. I got their presentations onto my older MacBook. The newer MacBook was Zoom host. The older signed in to the meeting and shared its screen. At the appropriate point I very smoothly, if I do say so, switched from John’s slides to Jeff’s slides. The whole thing went off very smoothly. I spent my time managing the cameras and think I did that well, also. When I edit the video in a day or so you’ll see.
As soon as they finished at 11:30, I shut down and headed for FOPAL, where I knew more than 10 boxes of books waited. I had ordered a grilled cheese sandwich to go, that was ready, off I went. Spent 3 hours there and headed back. I had under an hour before I was due to put the Stanford Webinar on “Reimagining Democracy” on the 11th floor TV at 4pm.
I was reading my email and here was one from the facilities staff. Did I want to change to a stall in the Tower garage? Wayyyy back on Day 143, a month before I moved in to CH, I had been given a choice of garage stalls, and I had picked one in the garage under the Lee center because it had a 120V outlet for charging the Prius. That has always been a bit of a pain because it is a long walk from the elevator through the basement, four different doors, to get to the Lee garage. When we started sharing Joanne’s car, and had no use for the 120V outlet, we put in a request to move to the much more convenient Tower garage under the main building. And I guess my name had bubbled to the top of the list.
So I, Joanne, and 3 other people watched the webinar, this one with a couple of journalism professors talking about the changes in journalism generally in this modern era and administration. Then I ran off to the Lee garage to get Fred, while Joanne went to the front desk to get a different garage clicker, one for the Tower garage door. I brought Fred around and turned in the clicker for the Lee garage. Then Joanne drove us around and down the ramp into the Tower garage and parked us in our new stall #32. Lots of room, easy to get in and out. Great.
For supper I made myself a sandwich in my room so I would have time for a wee bit of a nap before 7pm. At 6:45 we met again in the auditorium to watch the Tuesday night movie, Great Expectations from 1946. What a silly plot. But nicely made movie.
At 7:30 I went to the auditorium and set up the system to demonstrate the two problems we had with the sound board. A little after 8am Robert from ICS (the contractor for our av systems) came as scheduled and fixed our probs. Robert is a friendly guy and a good teacher, I learned a bunch.
Our first problem was that sometime a week or so ago, all our microphones seemed to get extra sensitive and loud and prone to feedback. This turned out to be due to our having accidentally pressed one button the sound board. Unclick that button, the problem went away and the mics were back to normal. Operator error due to inadequate documentation.
The other problem the so-called choir mics being too sensitive and going instantly into feedback, required him to make some adjustments in the rack of electronics back stage, but he also schooled me and Paul the IT guy on how the choir mics should be used and not used. Excellent session.
Then to the Event Coordinators meeting, which I’ve been able to skip for a while owing to John taking over the AV scheduling. But this time I needed to present the band I have booked for November, and ask for the $300 to pay them.
Out of there, I got the car from the garage and brought it up and picked up Joanne out front and off we went to Sequoia Hospital. I’d asked her along because, well for company of course, but also because although this was a quick and simple procedure, there was always the tiny chance that something could go wrong and I’d have to stay longer, in which case Fred would be stuck in the Sequoia parking garage. So she was a backup driver who could take the car home in the very unlikely event I had to stay.
So this was to drain my renal cyst, finally. There was a tiny bit of pain, the usual “little pinch” warning when shooting in some lidocaine as a local. Then some poking and pressing as Dr. Tamrazi inserted a needle that I never saw, but I’m guessing of at least a few inches length, and started aspirating. For this I am lying on my stomach, with my chin on my crossed arms, on the sled of the CT scanner. It took about 10 minutes all told, to draw out 1.2 litres (2, 600ml bags) of piss. In and out of the scanner ring for another image. “Did the balloon collapse?” I asked. “Yes, the balloon is collapsed” the doctor said, “See you again in a year or so, my friend.”
Joanne had brought a sandwich and a bottle of tea so we had a snack on the hospital patio and drove home. I was pondering how to work in FOPAL, which I couldn’t go to today, and my laundry, which should be done tomorrow, and finally figured out that I could do the laundry today and FOPAL tomorrow. So I ran my laundry in and around attending Rhonda’s open meeting, more facts and figures about the new satellite. The building has multiple apartments, but one of them is a “penthouse”, the third floor, which has 4BR and 5 baths, and a view. All us ordinary old folks are wondering what somebody would do with 4BR/5bath, oh right built in wine cooler etc. In retirement, mind you. And the rules do NOT allow live-in care-takers. If you need constant care-taking, you need to be in our Assisted Living section. However, unlike the present building, the Forest Ave building will allow pets. So I guess you could keep your 17 cats in one of the bedrooms… Not that there are a lot of cat ladies who can afford a $6.9M buy-in, which is what the penthouse will cost.
Usual Sunday morning stuff. Spent some time reading, trying to finish Mary Roach’s Bonk so as to give it back to J. At 2pm I, Joanne, and Sandy met up and got in Sandy’s car to go to a house concert in San Mateo. The performers were Bob Beach and David Jacobs-Strain. Nice stuff, slide guitar and harmonica, blues and country style, mostly original material.
Back at CH around 5:30. Not hungry, had a few snacks at the show, so being a hermit in my room tonight. Big day tomorrow.
Big event today was to join the No Kings demo. At 11:30 I joined Joanne and also Diana, a friend of hers, and we walked to the Town & Country shopping center where a couple of hundred people were gathering. At 12 we all started walking down Embarcadero toward Rinconada park. Except we three broke off before the park and returned to CH. Diana got in her car and went home. Joanne and I had a very quick lunch, then went up to the 11th floor at 1:30 for the Celebration of Life for our friend Pam, who died a couple of weeks ago.
I mentioned Pam several times earlier this year. When she started declining and moved to The Forum for rehab, and then when she moved back here to enter hospice care. I didn’t know her all that well before, just as a smart and sensible and witty neighbor and committee chair. You learn all kinds of things about someone at their memorial. She had a math degree and taught “information science” before it was called “computer science”. Then her father died of an inherited neuropathy, and then her sister died of it, and she realized she had it. She had married early but divorced and determined never to remarry or have children, for fear of passing the disease on. She worked for various high-tech companies in Australia and then California before retiring and moving to CH. She made it to age 78, an achievement, considering.
From the memorial we headed back down Webster street to Embarcadero and walked around the “democracy faire” that had been organized, along with the march, by Indivisible Palo Alto. Signed a couple of petitions. Walked back. Joanne then went off for dinner with old friends from her previous life. I had dinner with my 6th floor neighbor Bob and his visiting son-in-law and grandson.
Took our morning muffin ramble, Joanne and I. Talked about various things, including her intention to get a trainer and start working out. She’s been reading Peter Attia’s book Outlive, which emphasizes among other keys, lean muscle mass as critical “long healthspan”.
Well dammit if she can, I can. We talked about how difficult it is to be regular in exercising. I had a thing for a while, 7:30am in the gym, but dropped it in part because that early hour suits the schedules of a surprising number of people. Isn’t there another regular time you could use, she asks. So I looked over my typical week and I do see where I could block out M-W-F after lunch. Will experiment with that next week. Hold me to it.
Spent the afternoon reading more of Bill Gates’ book Source Code, and realizing when I read it before, I didn’t finish it. Some of the most interesting parts, 1975-76 when he and Paul Allen were implementing BASIC for the Altair, were new to me.
At 4pm, big deal in the Auditorium. Must have been most of the 190 residents there for the big reveal of our new satellite campus. I had been under NDA for a week because I was on a focus panel on the naming. Anyway, now it can be told: the buildings at 430-436 Forest Ave., 13 units, mostly 2bed-2bath, are now the property of Channing House, deal closed yesterday. Existing tenants have been asked to be out by 12/31; we will start taking new residents early next year. Management is very confident that the market exists to fill this building in the first year with people paying $1.5M to $2M to move in. It’s like downsizing to a nice condo with the added benefit of being a CCRC.
The staff and the Resident Association executive board have begun preparing plans to integrate the newcomers into our resident-driven culture. There is to be a panel of residents working on this, selected by the RA exec (my neighbors Sally and Donna) and staff. I have a feeling I will be asked to serve on this. Well, that’s why I unloaded the AV chair, so I could do other volunteer things.
Got a lot of shit done today. The big storage tubs I ordered came so I installed them in the Green Room. I had ordered 2-inch dry erase tape, and it worked slick as could be.
The one labeled “Dry Erase” contains one dry erase marker
There is room for eight more of these. We’ll see if there is need.
Then I finished editing the video of the App Fund Kickoff. Then I learned of two other event videos that were sitting in the Zoom cloud. I investigated with the sponsors of those events — one from last June — were they supposed to be made available? Yes. So I spent the hours from 1 to 5 editing two hour-long videos. But it was satisfying work.
Catching up on deferred chores and old mistakes. A couple days ago, Gigi, in charge of the Book Talk series, asked if we had video of the most recent one, which was a very nice presentation by Agnes and Ian on the book, The Worlds I See by Dr. Fei-Fei Li, pioneering AI researcher and Stanford professor. Agnes, herself a child of Chinese immigrants, spoke for 20 minutes on the part of the book where Dr. Li talks about her immigrant childhood. Ian, retired Cambridge physicist, talked for 20 minutes on the technical side of AI, then both answered questions for another 20 minutes.
Weeks previous we had the Broadway musical show. I hope I noted then that, owing to a literal slip of the finger, there was no video recording of it. But now, when Gigi asked about the video of the book talk, my brain mushed around and mixed them up, and I said no, that’s the show I didn’t record. No video. Now follows a flurry of emails between Gigi, Agnes, and Ian about whether they could reconstruct their talk, or at least put their scripts up on Resweb, etc. I’m feeling terrible for causing all this.
And then this morning I realize, wait a bleepin’ minute, it was Broadway I didn’t record. What was funky about the book talk was, that Ian would not let me do a zoom recording, he had to connect his laptop direct to the projector. So indeed there is no Zoom cloud recording, but I think — maybe? — didn’t I? — record it on the local disk. So I go downstairs and check and yes, there’s a nice video waiting for me on the AV hard drive. So I email them all, wait, hold the panic, it’s ok, I have video. Then I get to work and edit and upload the video of their talk. Here it is. There’s one major hack, in that I spaced out at the start and didn’t switch cameras after Gigi introduced Agnes. So the first 10 minutes of Agnes’s talk the video shows the front row of the audience, with Agnes’s voice over. Amateur.
Then I continue with the task I started yesterday, editing the video of the Appreciation Fund kickoff. And quickly find that certain performers (not me this time) screwed up with the microphone, so one whole musical number has no audio. So I drop that. Then I find that a certain other performer, who read a long funny poem, insisted on holding the mic her way, not the way I told her, which ended up with a broken up and mostly inaudible sound track for that. It took several tries through the day to get in touch with her, but I do, and at 4 I go down to her place and have her read the poem into my computer. Tomorrow I will be able to put that audio over her video.
At 4:30 I set up a mic for the birthday dinner entertainers. Six times a year there is a birthday dinner party for everyone with a birthday in that 2-month span. Joanne was in this one, and I was an invited guest at her table, along with Richard and Betsy, both with birthdays, and Roberta, Richard’s spouse. Here’s a panorama that Richard took of Roberta, me, Joanne and Betsy.
At 7:30 there was a talk by, sorry I forget the dude’s name, long-time Palo Alto archivist and historian, about some characters from Palo Alto History.
What a busy day. To start with, Joanne and I met on the roof at 9am to do a VO2 test. We’ve been reading about longevity and “health-span”, how long you remain in reasonable health. One important measure of general fitness is VO2 max (Wikipedia article), basically a measure of how much oxygen your body can process during sustained physical effort. Normally measured while wearing an oxygen mask and running on a treadmill, but it can be measured more casually using the Rockport Walking Test. Basically you walk a measured mile as fast as you can, and take your pulse rate at the end. Plug your age, gender, pulse rate, and the time to do a mile, into an equation, and read out approximate VO2 max.
I had set up a spreadsheet to do the calculations. What about the measured mile? Years ago residents had measured the walking path around the flat roof of Channing House, and found that six laps of the roof, plus another 200 feet, was a mile. So that’s what we did, walked that mile as fast as we could. Hard enough exercise that we couldn’t keep up a conversation. I kinda thought that I would pull away from Joanne but oh, no. She was maybe 15 feet behind me at the end, so our times were effectively the same. Here’s the result,
You can find many charts of “V02 max by decade” around the web, and no two are identical, plus I haven’t seen one that gave numbers for people over 80. Always the last column in the chart is “age 70-79”. However, for all of them, my 30.5 is at least 75th percentile for men, and her 26.4 is 75th or higher for women (95th percentile on one chart, “Oh, I like that one” she said).
Next was the writers group, supposed to be writing a review of an imaginary book you wish you had written. Prudence had the best one; she “reviewed” a murder mystery set in a senior residence, describing all the suspects and victims as recognizable CH residents.
Lunch. Then at 1:30 to the 8th floor lounge where Debbie’s Vision Support Group had a meeting to hear a speaker whose name I forget. I don’t normally attend this group but she had advertised it as having something to do with AI, so I was curious. That turned out to only be a recommendation to use Google Gemini for questions, ok. But he actually had a lot of interesting stuff about book readers. Did you know the Kindle app is able to read aloud? Its voice doesn’t have a lot of expression, but it will do it. Also Adobe Acrobat will read any PDF aloud.
Then I had an hour free until 3:30. I had committed to putting the Stanford Continuing Education web class “Reimagining Democracy” on the big TV on the 11th floor. So I did that. Originally this was going to be me and Joanne but a bunch of other people expressed an interest, and about 8 people showed up. And a nice little discussion after the class ended.
Then dinner and at 7:30, a jazz concert in the auditorium. Terrigal Burns piano, Tamara Dunn singing. They’ve been here before. Jazz standards well performed.
Codgerville 