Friday 10/04/2022

First day in a long time with no commitments on my Google Calendar. I spent most of it in a blissful haze doing programming on my app. Yeah I know, it’s all wasted effort, but I got a lot done.

I was to meet with Lennie to train her in Microphones 101, so she could do an event on Monday. However when we got in the auditorium we found John and Francis hard at work rehearsing an event they are running, and having some technical issues. I had nothing to contribute to that. So Lennie and I had a verbal training session and will meet again tomorrow, I think.

At 3 I decided I didn’t want a nap after all, and drove down to FOPAL where I found 5 boxes of books to cull and price. Glad I went because if I had waited to my normal Monday visit there would have been a real mountain.

Thursday 11/03/2022

Did the round of strength machines in the gym in the morning. Tidied the apartment anticipating that Wanda would be cleaning it this afternoon. Put on my red docent shirt and at 11, brought the car around to the front, to pick up Dr. Margaret, who wanted to come along to the museum to hear my docent talk.

Led a group of about 16 people including neighbor Margaret on the tour. Got quite a nice hand at the end. Then the two of us had a late lunch at Cucina Venti, across the street. Very pleasant lunch and talk.

Did nothing much else the rest of the day.

Wednesday 11/02/2022

Went for a walk, the first in several days. Did my laundry.

At 2pm I went down to the auditorium and made sure I was ready to record video of the Appreciation Fund Kickoff. This was an elaborately planned event. This picture doesn’t do it justice.

The tables were decorated with fake bills and coins. There was plenty of wine and some really nice snacks from the kitchen (deviled eggs, cheese-stuffed little peppers, shown). There was a sing-along to familiar songs with new lyrics extolling the labors of the staff. Lots of labor and skill went into making it a fun event.

Afterward I had less than an hour until it was time to put on my red Stanford sweatshirt and my red fedora hat and head off to the first game of the SWBB season. I rode with Patty and Martha in Patty’s car. Every year Vanguard U. a small Christian school in Costa Mesa, comes to us for an exhibition game. Offers themselves as sacrificial lambs more like. The final score was 100-20. All 15 on the Stanford roster played, and 14 of them scored.

Tuesday 11/01/2022

Gym. Then did some desk work, bills, etc. At 10, sat down and dashed off 200 words for the writers group, which started at 10:45.

At lunch I was buttonholed by Florrie who wanted help with an iPad and iPhone. I really don’t want it to be thought that anybody can get a personal consult without going through the tech squad. But Florrie is nice and I gave in. We worked on how to get photos out of texts and into albums, and how to get Netflix on the iPad and such.

At 4:30 I started cleaning up for the evening event, a reception at Stanford for Buck Cardinal contributors to meet Tara Vanderveer. Polished my shoes for the first time in, oh, about a year? Put on slacks and a turtleneck and my sports jacket, also for the first time in, oh, three years? Drove over to Maples to see a practice, and then walked across to the Arillaga center for the reception. Decent snacks and drinks. Tara entertaining as always.

Monday 10/31/2022

First order of business was an 8am video appointment with my doctor. Background: for a long time I’ve had a benign cyst on my kidney. Following the various CTs and ultrasounds I’ve had for other reasons, the radiologist’s report always mentioned it and its diameter in centimeters. Back around the end of 2020 it was up to 15cm in diameter, over 6 inches, and I started noticing its effect, mainly in my appetite, and I had it drained (day 2.238, 8/28/21).

I’ve been noticing similar effects lately so I had requested an appointment. The earliest office appointment was in December but I could get a video one today. Julia and I talked about the cyst and my symptoms, and she ordered an ultrasound. After that I will probably go and talk to the urologist I saw before. It turns out there is a laparoscopic procedure to reduce such cysts. I hadn’t known that; I thought the only surgical option was to open the abdomen, which is more of an operation than I want to get into.

Anyway my appointment for that ultrasound is the 10th. And the instructions are, one hour before I have to drink 24oz of liquid and if possible not pee until after the exam. Oooookay then.

At 9:30 I met with Ian in the auditorium to go over something about projecting a Blu-Ray movie that he hadn’t known. Between that and the doctor I completely forgot to go for the usual walk.

I went down to FOPAL and processed three boxes of book — computer book donations are rather light this month so far — and did some sorting too by way of penance for not walking.

Sunday 10/30/2022

After watering the plants and doing the puzzle… actually not doing the puzzle, it was extremely tricky and I had to look at the solution to finish it … it was nine-ish. I had received a Tech Squad dispatch in the night. Carol with a printer jam. I like Carol a lot and knew she was the type to be up early on a Sunday, so I called her and she said, come on up. She had an old-ish HP laserjet with a broken paper tray (“but it works”) however she regards it with suspicion because “It was Ray’s printer” (her late husband). Anyway, she claimed it had started printing multiple pages from what should have been a one-page file. So not knowing how to cancel a job, she turned power off, and then it had a piece of paper jammed in it.

I pulled the paper out, and — only because I’d checked a youtube video before calling her — I knew to pull out the toner cartridge and check for more jams. There weren’t. Then we tested it and it was fine, actually it prints really fast and cleanly. I pointed to a button on top with a red X in a circle and I hypothesized that was the cancel button, so we printed a two-page file and hit the red X and sure enough, it canceled the second page.

My guess would be that the unexpected multiple pages were because she had accidentally printed the wrong file, or had accidentally set the print dialog to multiple copies. Anyway, problem solved.

At 10 I went to the Auditorium to join Bert as he was setting up for the big Appreciation Fund kick-off party coming Wednesday. (There is No Tipping at Channing House, but each year the residents (not the staff) run an Appreciation Fund drive, encouraging contributions from everyone to a Fund which is then disbursed to staff members at Christmas. Recommended donation, well, however much you feel you want to tip on one day, times 365.) Anyway, we worked through a couple of problems he was having projecting slides and a video.

He had a video of a dance group doing a very clever and amusing routine to “Stayin’ Alive” (here it is) except, the YT version has several inexplicable freeze-frame gaps in it. So I took it from him on a USB stick, and fired up iMovie and edited out the gaps and gave it back to him later.

At 2pm I met with David G. He had gotten a lesson from Gerald on Friday and thought he knew how to schedule meetings in the zoom room. Well, we tried several times and it didn’t work. But that killed an hour.

I’ve written about the miraculous Topaz AI for photos (3.278) so I downloaded the trial copy of Topaz AI for videos and tried it on the dance video. However it didn’t make any detectable difference that I could see.

Saturday 10/29/2022

The thing today was a day trip with Jean and Patty (Dennis had to drop out) to the DiRosa Art Center in Napa. Patty and I drove down to MV and picked up Jean, and then off by 237 and 680 to Napa, about a 2-hour drive.

This art center was created by Mr. DiRosa, who was a writer who got tired of the city life in SF, and moved to the quiet hills of Napa, where in the 1960s he had a successful grape growing operation. Not a winery, he just grew grapes and sold them to other wineries. Then he inherited some money. He also developed an interest in art, particularly the work of various California artists who centered around the art school at UC Davis (who knew that a campus known for agriculture was also a hotbed of art?) With his money he started collecting, and eventually built two gallery buildings as well as filling a 30-acre field with outdoor sculpture. The art he focused on is called generically, “California Funk”. It’s full of jokes and outrageous combinations of images. I took a few pictures, see below.

After having walked the place for an hour we went for lunch. Following the suggestion of one of the museum people we went into downtown Napa to a Greek place, the Small World Cafe, and had lamb gyros. Downtown Napa was full of parents and kids in costumes, apparently they had just had a Halloween parade.

And so drove back, about 200 miles round trip for the day.

Friday 10/28/2022

I started out for my walk this morning but felt very low. A severe case of the fuckitalls. I’ve been feeling this for a while. I cut my walk short and just hung out in the room.

Today was the CH flu clinic day. I got my flu jab at lunchtime.

In the afternoon I spent a while trying to work out a way to handle access to the three zoom rooms that staff have set up. Theoretically you can send an email to one of them with a standard Zoom invitation. The zoom room pc will theoretically note that and reserve itself for that meeting.

This works fine for Gerald, the IT staff guy. It doesn’t work for me or the other guy who’s tried it. Gerald suggested we install the Zoom add-on to Gmail, but that requires binding one person’s Google ID or Gmail address to that particular zoom account.

It occurred to me that when I set up the house zoom account I had to supply an email, and rather than permanently linking it to my personal email, I got a free email from Outlook.com. So I should be able (per the zoom documentation) to attach the Zoom Outlook Add-in to that email account. Then we could log in to Outlook and send invitations the same way Gerald does. But two hours of fiddling couldn’t get it to work. I suspect it is because the email account is a free one, not one linked to a subscription to Microsoft Office. But the damned software doesn’t tell you that; it just says “Installation failed” but not why.

Thursday 10/27/2022

Did the gym round in the AM. Went out to Safeway for a few items. At 11 it was time to go up to the 11th floor to meet IT staffer Gerald and Bert to talk about doing Zoom Room on the 11th floor. Unfortunately the big roll-around TV has been damaged. This is a large (75-inch?) screen on a rolling stand, to which the IT staff have added the “zoom room” equipment including mics, camera, and a PC. Alas someone recently rolled the upper corner of the TV into something solid, damaging the screen. It was kind of working, with a big black spot in the upper left corner and pretty colored lines going down from it, until I walked up and touched the black spot area. Then the whole screen went black. Ooops. They have ordered a new screen which is supposed to be here Monday.

Next I spent some time going over the info book on the new IBM health plan. It seems a pretty decent plan. However I have not yet received the promised ID card that I need to log on to their system, and to give to providers.

With Wanda coming to clean at 2, I headed out down to FOPAL and put in a couple of hours sorting.

In the evening was a presentation on Diego Rivera by neighbor Harry. David M. was doing the AV for quite a complex presentation, not only slides but videos. And although he protested that he had run the videos “a hundred times”, when it came time to show them, they first didn’t have sound, then too much sound, and generally the presentation was hashed pretty badly by my best AV guy. I felt awful for him. But I don’t have any suggestions, I don’t know what he was doing wrong.

Wednesday 10/26/2022

Went for the walk. Then I needed to hang around my apartment because I’d told my crew of bold AV people I would be available to consult (more like, sympathize) until noon, if they wanted to try out the auditorium zoom stuff.

Nobody called on me, but I got some very satisfying writing done. I saw a post on the writer sub-Reddit suggesting, to get your story going, just have your characters talk to you and write down what they say. Let them tell about themselves, say what they want, even ask them what they think should happen next. What you write isn’t going in the book, except maybe snippets of it, but it fills out the back-story and lets your imagination run.

So I tried that with “Emma and Ethan meet the aliens” (WHICH IS NOT THE TITLE), just started writing what Ethan said as if he were being interviewed. And later, Emma, too. To help things along I found pictures of them. Stuff just poured out. Well it is all based in internet searching I’ve done over the past two days, but still. I’m going to append those “interviews”.

At noon I picked up my neighbor Edie and we went out for lunch to the Sand Hill Cafe, a place I’d heard was very nice. I had suggested a group lunch to the sixth floor, but Edie was the only one to respond to the idea, so. Actually I’m glad of that because, in the end, the food wasn’t that great after all.

At 3:30 I went down to the Green Room with my recovered key (see yesterday) and picked up the powered speaker and met with Susan on the 4th floor for the group meeting to read T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. She had a phone app with various people reading the poem, she went with Viggo Mortenson (aka Aragorn from LOTR?). It worked, the group of 8 people plus me enjoyed the reading. I got some reading done. Well, everybody had their laptops open presumably following along in the poem. So mine was open, too. Just I wasn’t reading the poem

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I knew a lot of this, like Ethan was the son of state dept. employee and his mother was brazilian and he was good with languages, but all of the details, names of parents, anecdotes, childhood memories, where they lived? just came popping out of my imagination while I wrote. It’s kind of eerie, actually.

Chatting with Ethan

Yeah, Thomas Jefferson HS is my sixth school. No, seventh. Second high school, although in France they don’t call them high schools, whatever. Anyway my dad, Carl Brickton, is a diplomat; well, was a diplomat until he got this latest job, which is secretary to Ms. Coleman, she’s the Science Advisor to the President. Dad calls her She Who Must Be Obeyed, which I gather is a reference to an old TV series. Sorry, he was secretary to the Advisor. Now, after the whole Reethlin thing, I guess he has a new job, Official Liaison to the Alien Ambassadors. That’s me and Emma.

Me and mom and dad have been moving to follow his assignments as long as I’ve been around. He met my mom, Olivia, when he was serving in the US Embassy in Brasilia. She’s Brazilian, daughter of a diplomat that dad’s boss was negotiating with. They like to joke about how dad got notice of being transferred to Gambia by email the morning of their wedding, and couldn’t tell her until afterward, because the groom and bride aren’t supposed to talk on the wedding day. And she always says, “And serve you right for checking email on such a day.”

Anyway. So my 10th year of school was last year, in Paris, at the Lycée International. I had all American teachers, which was good because I could sand off the last bits of accent from my English so now I sound just like any US-born dude. But on the street my French was good enough that shopkeepers never took me for a tourist. I kind of have a knack for languages. French and English are my best, but mom and I sometimes talk the port-oo-gase just for fun. Although my vocabulary isn’t great, I mainly learned it from her lullabies and shit when I was like, a toddler. From the two years in Moscow when I was ten and eleven, I got an OK Russian accent. Again, not a huge vocabulary, but I could talk to people on the street and read a Russian newspaper.

For my dad’s new job we relocated from Paris to the D.C. area, specifically Alexandria, VA. They picked a pretty nice three-bedroom unit at The Curve, a big condo complex. It’s pretty convenient for TJHS, like 15 minutes by bike. Same down to the Van Doorn Street Metro station, if mom or I want to go to downtown DC. Dad doesn’t have to mess around with the metro, being a high-level bureaucrat type. A White House driver — not a real Secret Service agent, just a nice lady named Caroline in a snappy jacket — picks him up every day in a shiny black SUV. Caroline has a strong South Carolina accent, I call her “South Caroline”, and she has taught me some Gullah, which is just a mush-mouth Creole, but it’s fun to speak.

I am no way a computer expert. I’ve been using them since forever, of course, but for entertainment, and the sosh-meeds, and school research. I took a programming course two years ago and got a B. Along with a B+ in Art Appreciation, those are the low points on my transcript. So the stuff Emma does just boggles me, and what she tells me about bot-nets and ransom-ware and all, just sounds like bad science fiction, but she showed me it’s all real.

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Chatting with Emma

I do actually need glasses for distance, so I have to wear them if I was driving, which I’m not because I haven’t got a license yet. This year! I am definitely taking driver’s ed. I wear the glasses because I think they go with my look, well, such as it is. I don’t strictly need them for close work. Often you’ll see me with my laptop and my glasses are up on top of my head. Then I lose track of them and I’m looking all over for my glasses. It’s very amusing for my friends, ha ha Emma, you’re such a dork. You’re welcome, so glad I could entertain you.

I have always been fascinated with how things work. I was taking stuff apart as a kid. My mom has a load of embarrassing stories about cute little Emma taking the batteries out of the TV remote or whatever. And phones! I was just riveted by the phones. No phone was safe in the house once I was a toddler. My folks kept their phones, or my mom would put her purse with the phone, on the mantel or a high shelf. But sooner or later they would forget and leave a phone on the table or something. My dad says if I spotted it I would be like I was drawn by a magnet.

One of my earliest memories is of a toy iPhone that I got for Christmas when I was like, I don’t know, four? I think? I remember how excited I was when I opened the box and then how disappointed I was when I figured out it was a scam, just a toy with a screen that lit up when you pressed a button. I took it completely apart and played like I was fixing it. Yeah, they finally acknowledged the reality and gave me my own when I was nine. I remember I was the go-to phone maven of my class, any kid who couldn’t figure out how to download an app would come to me.

My dad teaches astronomy at George Mason U. in Fairfax, VA., and also runs the science program at the Rock Creek Park Planetarium, North of the Capitol. He doesn’t bring his work home, though. He’s actually a bit of a gamer in his spare time. He jokes about nearly flunking out of Notre Dame because he was so deep in WOW back in the day. When I was 12 and 13 I played some Fortnight, I could do an hour after I’d proved I’d finished homework, and sometimes dad would log in from his PC and we’d raid together. I didn’t play any of the space games like Eve Online because he dissed what he called their ridiculous physics and astronomy.

I mean to talk Ethan into playing Fortnight but that boy just doesn’t like to kill people, even virtually. I tried to show him Minecraft but he just didn’t see a point to it.

Anyway I hadn’t picked up much astronomy until we started figuring out the whole Reethlin thing. Then I had to really dig in to learn about the Solar System and how orbits work. But I gotta say, you can study orbits and satellite mechanics as much as you want, but nothing will prepare you for the feeling of a space launch. That is intense. Or zero G, either, but a rocket launch, oh, man.