Sunday 12/14/2025

Guess I’m still in recovery (Dr. Margaret made a point of telling me that as an old person I should expect to need twice as long to recover as I spent being sick, so two weeks in the present case) anyway I felt “few” and just moped around most of the day.

In the morning Peter and I went into the auditorium and tweaked the projector optics to make it somewhat easier to see closed captions on projected DVDs.

Saturday 12/13/2025

For a change of pace, I ate breakfast in the dining room. I woke up very hungry and had pancakes syrup and bacon for the first time in ages. Puttered around in my room, played some guitar for the first time in a week.

After lunch Joanne and I walked the mile to the Lucy Stern theater to see Georgiana and Kitty, the second of 3 plays under the title of Christmas at Pemberly, using Jane Austen’s characters to tell romantic holiday tales. We saw the first one last year (day 6.014). Very well done. Script has lots of snappy lines, the actors take advantage of that, sharp direction has so many little bits of business going on between different actors at the same time. Fun show.’

A few days ago I wrote a thinky essay for the AI interest group. Today David Greene wrote a thoughtful reply, and I have added a constructive thoughtful reply to that. A couple more rounds and we’ll have quite an intellectual thing going. Now to watch some mindless tv.

Friday 12/12/2025

Morning muffin walk with Joanne, always a delight. Got an email from Stanford Live, of a David Byrne concert in April. Checked with Joanne: yes. So I spent some time fighting a very difficult ticket website which rejected all three of my browsers. Finally was able to buy tickets using Safari on the iPhone. Now I want to learn to play some David Byrne songs myself. (This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco… )

6th floor monthly meeting at 4:45. Owing to the Employee Appreciation Party this afternoon, there is no dinner service tonight, just brown bags. At 5:30 the gang was going to picnic in our dining room after the meeting but I had other plans. Got my hat and coat and headed down to the garage, met Joanne, and we were off to Los Altos.

Tonight was A Christmas Carol at the Bus Barn, 8pm curtain. I had made a reservation at Roja in Los Altos, close to the theater, more or less in the blind. Turned out to be a good choice. Very nice food and sharp, thoughtful service. Only complaint with the place was the usual one, noise. Their interior is clearly Styled by a Designer, and it makes a good impression. Except part of the design is a hard cement floor… why does no restaurant like soft surfaces? When we left people were just reaching the level where you raise your voice to be heard, which is the start of a noise spiral.

Anyway, off to the old Barn for a very elaborate production of the Dickens tale. At least the third version I’ve seen, probably another 1 or 2 on TV over the years, but Joanne had never seen any. The cast was all good, Ebenezer was excellent, and all the complicated production elements came off beautifully.

Thursday 12/11/2025

Spent some parts of the day editing the video of the concert. Spent larger parts napping. At 5pm my temp was 98.6, so while high for me, not a fever. I was able to proceed with a commitment I had made last week.

UNAFF.org is a film library and annual festival of documentaries. The people behind it are a couple, Mischa and Jasmina Bojic and they bring a documentary to show at CH every month. Usuallly Ian runs the AV, but today he had a medical issue and last week asked me to stand in. I would have to host the couple to dinner, turn on the auditorium, let them run their film, done. I had scheduled three other people, Joanne, Martha, and Terry and booked a table. But should I actually show up and host? Doctor Internet said I probably wasn’t contagious if I didn’t have a fever, defined as +1.5ºF. So I was ok and I did host. It was a pleasant table, nice convo.

The film they brought was Tax Wars about the decades long effort to begin taxing multinational corporations. It was nicely produced and made good points, but IMHO ran about 20 minutes too long. Anyway, jobs done. And so to bed.

Wednesday 12/10/2025

Two things to do today, that is, two performances of the Christmas concert. I had already bowed out of performing, my voice is a wreck and when I try to sing, I cough. But at the last minute, i.e. yesterday about 8pm, Jerry contacted Craig and got him to perform on his harmonica in my place. So all I had to do was sit behind the AV desk and operate the video cameras trying to get good videos of my neighbors performing. Which I mostly did.

The 10am performance, mostly attended by people from the AL and nursing side, went well. Then I spent from 11:30 to about 6 just lying around napping and reading. Still running a degree-plus of temp. Didn’t feel like eating.

Evening show at 7 went even better. I have good video now on my laptop which I will be editing tomorrow or maybe Friday.

Watched a PBS documentary and so to bed.

Tuesday 12/09/2025

Writers group in the morning. It had been like a month since I contributed anything so I felt under the gun to get something done, so I did a little thing for the prompt “Winter memory”. I’ll paste it in below.

The afternoon was filled with the tech rehearsal for the christmas concert, the one I was going to perform in but now am sure I will not. Kay had requested that I be sure to mask up as she and others have travel plans and don’t need a cold to go with, and I totally sympathize. I wore a good n95 mask and also put on vinyl gloves so I wouldn’t be leaving an germs on the microphones. I took video and after supper I edited the video and put it up on dropbox to share, and notified all the performers.

So that was about four hours sitting in the auditorium, after which I had some supper and did the video work. Checking: temp 99.7, or 2 degrees above my normal. I am still sick, darn it.

Going to bed early.

Oh, here’s the essay. Any of you guys remember “the blizzard”?

Monday 12/08/2025

My eyes popped open at 6:30 and my first thought was, “I’m better”. The feeling of “being sick” or feverish was gone. Well not completely, I am still running about 1 degree of fever this evening, but I felt way better than yesterday.

Except for my voice. This whole infection has been deep in my throat, deep cough, soreness. And this morning I have a bullfrog croak, and it stayed all day. Talking I sound like Johnny Cash, so naturally I tried singing “I walk the line” and got 3 notes in an fell into a coughing fit. I cannot sing.

Tomorrow at 3 is the rehearsal for the winter concert and I let Kay the producer know that I likely would not be singing. Probably I can do the AV, if I feel no worse than I do today.

Went for a short walk in the afternoon; glad I did because it was the most spectacular beautiful autumn day, with the gingko and maple trees in full color, temp about 60f, brilliant sun shining through the leaves. Gorgeous.

Sunday 12/07/2025

Last evening I noticed that I was coughing, deep horky coughs like a cat trying to eject a hair-ball. But I didn’t feel bad.

Then during the night I woke up often, and coughed.In the morning my temp was slightly elevated, 97.8 versus the prior three days of 97.0; and I definitely felt sick. I emailed Joanne to call off the walk we had planned for this afternoon.

Kept feeling crappier. My temp reached 100.9 in the middle of the afternoon, e.g. almost 4 degrees above the typical morning temp. Although I don’t know what typical should be for the middle of the afternoon. Probably higher. But still, a serious fever.

I used one of my “Flu-Covid” test kits, it came up negative. So I just coddled myself and rested all afternoon. Called the nursing office to report my condition. Ordered dinner for delivery.

This is the first actual sickness I’ve had since returning from London on Day 1-80, February 2020. Never caught Covid, or anything else, in five years.

Saturday 12/06/2025

Not totally idle. At 10 I packed up all the Palm devices, 3 dead and one that worked, and took them back to FOPAL. I put the working one on the shelf with a $20 price on it. That’s for the original box, the device, a leather case for it, a dock/charger, manual, software CD.

Then we had a section managers meeting. Main thing there was it clarified for me how we should evaluate “high-value” books. I had been told they were “high value” if they were on Amazon at $30 or more. But no, the lowest online price, at ABEbooks, Alibris, wherever, has to be $30 or up. That will reduce the number of high-values I turn in, because I see a lot of books that are $35 on Amazon and/or eBay but $19 or so on other sellers.

Did nothing of note in the afternoon.

Friday 12/05/2025

Took a nice walk with Joanne in the morning. Passed the middle of the day quietly. Oh, I got one (out of 4) of the donated Palm devices to actually charge up and boot up. So I will put it on my shelf at FOPAL and hopefully sell it for $20.

At 2 I went to set up the auditorium for a rehearsal of our Christmas Concert. This was an optional rehearsal, so Kay the director said, any of the performers in the program could come, do their thing on the stage in any order. Since I was there with the mics all set and nobody there yet, I did my rehearsing by myself. Everybody else sounds fine, we got the mics at the right levels and so on. DG who is designated stage-hand, i.e. the guy who moves the mic stands to where they are needed, made lots of notes, and a good time was had by all.

I also helped Susan with another tech call. Her little external backup drive wasn’t doing its thing any more, and it has basically died. So I gave here links to where to get another one on Amazon, and she asked could I please send her to any other retailer than Amazon so I did that. Several people around here have sworn off Amazon as a matter of policy.