Tuesday 10/25/2022

Did the gym round at 7:30. I had scheduled the auditorium at 9 for a practice session with the new Zoom Room setup. Before I went down, I got a note from Susan asking if I could help her get audio for a group, out of her iPhone. Sure, I thought. Just hook her iPhone to the little boombox speaker I used to present very impressive organ music at the “wedding” last Friday. That speaker is stowed away in the Green Room, a small room backstage of the auditorium. And I have a key, which is… where is it?

After I finished my practice session, which went very well, the new setup is much easier to use that what we’ve been doing for “hybrid” zoom events, I went back to my room to look for the green room key. I knew it had been in my left hip pocket on Monday, because when I was at FOPAL Monday, I had stuffed a couple other items into that pocket and noticed it.

It wasn’t there now, nor anywhere around. I searched the apartment. It’s about 9:45 now and I have the writers meeting at 10:45. I go down to the garage and carefully search the car. My best guess is the key fell out into the front seat, but nope. Digging around in and under the seat with a flashlight finds nothing but bits of lost food.

OK, maybe at FOPAL. I drive down to there, the Cubberly community center, and search the areas I was working in yesterday, and check everywhere that a found key might be posted. Nope. Back to CH. As I come up from the basement, I think, maybe I dropped it here, I think I will check the front desk. As I was describing it (three keys on a ring with a purple plastic tag) the front desk person said, “Oh yeah, that’s right here,” and picked it up off the desk in front of her.

The writers group topic of the week was, sins of your childhood, and several people had very amusing stories about being caught shoplifting candy, etc. I had nothing, but while listening I realized there was a period of near-criminality I could have written about. Maybe I will come in with that next week.

At 4pm the AV group met and portioned out the events for the next month. They are a good group. I was able to give them a report on the Zoom Room and specifically advise on how they should also practice with it.

Had dinner with Dr. Margaret and a couple of others. Yesterday evening, dining with Patty and the Allens, I had asked, what’s a good city to go and be a tourist in for a week or two? Diane immediately said, “Vienna”, which she thought was a wonderful place to spend time. Tonight, same question, Dr. Margaret immediately said “Montreal”. That’s where she went to med. school, I know. Joy said, “Seattle” which I immediately dismissed.

Monday 10/24/2022

Took the standard walk. Stopping at CVS on the way back to pick up a prescription. As usual CVS had texted me that my prescription SPI (spironolactone) was ready for renewal.

The prescription is for 90 tablets, a 90-day supply. CVS auto-refill occurs while there are still 34 pills in the previous bottle. OK, the prior bottle was filled on 7/23/22 (middle of the white label). Plus 90 days brings us about to 10/23, which would be now. But how come I have 34 tablets remaining? I have not skipped that many doses (not skipped any, as a matter of fact). So presumably I had 30-odd tablets already in hand on 7/23. At some point they got ahead by a month, but I don’t know when. (Paranoid much?)

Spent some time transcribing upcoming November events from the event committee’s draft calendar, into my A/V event spreadsheet. And began a trial experiment with the new “zoom room” facility staff has installed in the auditorium. According to what Gerald (IT staff) told us we should be able to send a normal Zoom invitation to a scheduled meeting, to a special email address, and it would automatically appear in the zoom room special control iPad. I created a meeting, sent the email.

Then off to FOPAL to process four boxes of books. And back for a lazy afternoon. At 3:30 I went down to the Auditorium and found Gerald setting up for Rhonda’s Open Meeting at 4. Had him check: no, the zoom room didn’t know about the meeting I invited it to. He found my email (the special email account is one he controls) and verified it had all the usual Zoom invitation stuff, but it hadn’t been recognized. I went upstairs and sent it again, this time with an Outlook Calendar Item (something.isc) attached.

Rhonda’s meeting was ok, she went over all the hot items from the Food & Dining resident survey, and what the Dining staff plan to do to address things. Hire more staff, is one. Fix the broken dish warmer is another.

After the meeting I checked with Gerald again. The magic address had received my second email but it still hadn’t recognized it for automatic booking. He put it in manually so I can experiment tomorrow.

Sent an email to the AV team reminding them of our meeting tomorrow afternoon.

Sunday 10/23/2022

Futzed around the apartment till 10. Put on my red docent shirt. Drove to Safeway to pick up 10 pounds of sugar for the hummingbirds, then down to the musem. Led a tour of 15 or so. Came home. Read a lot, and printed a couple more bridge pictures. That was about it.

Oh, finished my ballot. After eating a light supper in my room, I walked out to City Hall and dropped the ballot in the box.

Saturday 10/22/2022

For fun today I drove up to Hunter’s Point former shipyard to the Shipyard Artists Fall Open Studio day. I went to the Spring open day this March (3.149), and also way back in May 2019 (day 154, or 0.154 as it ought properly to be numbered).

(Parenthetically that day 154 post has one of my better musings on widower status ((double-paren, there really ought to be a single word for the state of having lost a life partner. There’s no reason any more to gender it. Once there were economic consequences, the situation of a widow was different, usually more pathetic, than that of a widower. But that’s not relevant now; and anyway, lots of people have life partners of their same gender. OK, there’s “bereavement” but I don’t like it. It’s a long, awkward word that sounds like you are avoiding the subject. Anyway, how would you call a bereaved person, a “bereaver”?)) and also that post recounted the first time I saw Carol Aust’s painting, “Eight Pelicans”, which I still regret not buying. I would have bought it but I dithered too long and lost it.)

ANYway, I took some pictures while I was there and put them in a smugmug gallery.

Friday 10/21/2022

Went for a walk. Back in plenty of time for another meeting with Gerald from IT in the auditorium to once again try to understand the Zoom Room setup they have created. It does appear to package all the complicated setup we have been doing, to create a hybrid event. Jerry, David M., David G., and I practiced with it.

At 3pm I went up to 11 and set up for my small part in the “wedding” of Prunella and Brewski, the 4th floor’s special edition of a monthly TGIF. A lot of people were really into it, and dressed up as for a wedding, several bringing their own stuffed animals as guests to the wedding of two stuffed animals. Here are a few pics.

Rhonda, CH CEO, officiated. The couple swore to stick together “until our stuffing falls out”.

Thursday 10/20/2022

Oh, only a couple of days until the date is 10/22/2022. That’ll be exciting. Went down to the gym first thing. Later I went out shopping.

At last night’s presentation, Dr. Margaret would have no truck with powerpoint or such. Instead she stood at a whiteboard and drew little sketches. In setting up for this event, we had a nice whiteboard but it turned out that (of course) all the dry-erase markers on it were failing. I scrounged around in the last 15 minutes before she started and found two adequate pens in the training room on the second floor. But I determined we would not be caught with dry pens again. She has another talk scheduled in November, and we have another frequent speaker who like to use the whiteboard.

So task 1 today was to stock up on dry-erase pens for the AV team’s exclusive use. I went over to Staples and found a nice set of what should be fairly bold markers. I also stopped at Ace Hardware and got two more rolls of wide blue masking tape, which we use to tape down extension cords and such.

If anyone wants to hear the talk, it’s here: https://vimeo.com/762443388

In the afternoon we had the rehearsal for the “wedding” on Friday. I can’t believe how elaborate a charade Stew is organizing. Anyway, I set up the mic and provided the recorded music on cue.

Wednesday 10/19/2022

Went for a walk while my first load of laundry ran. Finished the laundry and had lunch. Was impolite at lunch, sitting at the “open table” with others, but spent the entire time on my phone.

Why? Because remember I have these music pieces on the phone, for playing during Stew’s “wedding”. And one of them, the famous Canon in D, has about 3 seconds of silence at the start and I would like to trim that. So: you have your supercomputer in hour hand, it has a small audio file, you would like to edit this file, on your phone you also have your free copy of Apple’s Garageband app, which is an audio editor. Can you get a piece of music out of the Music app into the Garageband app? Well, there is an Apple support page that claims to show how, but in fact nothing it shows about Garageband matches what the Garageband app on the phone offers. So that was lunch.

Out of boredom I drove down to FOPAL. There were no computer books to price, so I did an hour of sorting.

At 7:30 we had an excellent talk by my 6th floor neighbor, Dr. Margaret. When the recording of the meeting is up I will link it here. She spoke about the physical effects of aging on the body, and she was both informative and very funny.

Tuesday 10/18/2022

Went to the gym in the morning. Veronica was training another resident on the machines so I only got one round. Did a couple of miles on the cyber cycle instead.

For the writers group I read a piece of the novel in progress, the piece I really wrote two weeks ago. But by exposing this work in progress, I hope to keep myself motivated.

Next job was to get the music for Stew’s pretend wedding under control. There are three pieces of music he wants played on cue, and possibly two others, depending on whether the person who is supposed to play those pieces on an actual organ, is able to.

Stew had found the music he wanted as Youtube videos, and his idea was to have them cued up on a web browser on a laptop connected to this little speaker. But that’s kind of a clunky interface, especially if YT decides to make you watch 5 seconds of a commercial when it is your cue to play the music. So I decided to download this music and if possible, put it on my phone.

Which I was able to do with quite a lot of video. There are dozens of “video download” apps and extensions for Firefox and Chrome. Unfortunately none of them work with YT. Google changed YT in the recent past to make downloading impossible, or more difficult. I was able to get around this to capture just the audio. Then moved it to the Music app on the laptop, and from there to the Music app on the phone. Then I went up to 11 and plugged the phone into the little speaker and it worked.

I also helped Grace with her iPhone.

For dinner, I had a table with Joanne, Patty, and Jerry. Nice group.

Monday 10/17/2022

Went for the standard walk. At ten, met with Jerry, Bert, David G and Ian in the auditorium, to have Gerald of the IT staff explain the new Zoom Room setup the staff have created, for running zoom meetings. I didn’t absorb some of the details. David G., who will be running a meeting tonight, stayed after and practiced, to good effect it turned out.

I headed down to FOPAL to process books, only four boxes but quite a few saleable books, including one textbook that is currently going for $300 on amazon and ebay. That’s always a fun find. I also fielded a phone call — whoever is nearest the phone and willing, answers it — and helped a guy who is downsizing and has, he guessed, about 50 boxes of books to donate.

Back to CH and at 2:30, met with Bert and Stew on the 11th floor to help plan how to do the AV for Stew’s pretend “wedding” this coming Friday. For their TGIF, the Fourth Floor is doing a pretend wedding between two stuffed animals. Gag me with a spoon. However, Stew has talked CEO Rhonda into “officiating” at the mock wedding and he is very concerned about getting the microphones and the recorded music (and the live music) to work right.

I ordered a B.L.A.T. sandwich and chef’s salad from the kitchen and ate in my room. At 6:30 I went down to assist David G with his event: two people from the League of Women Voters going over all the propositions on the ballot. The presentation of the props was ok. Technically the new setup worked very smoothly, all credit to David G. for absorbing Gerald’s talk and putting it to work.

Sunday 10/16/2022

About 10am I decided to go walk the California ave. market. Cal. ave. has opted to keep their on-street restaurant seating from Covid times; then the large and popular Sunday farmers market folds itself between and around these, so there is a really intense four-block scene. It was just fun walking along in it. I treated myself to a packet of medjool dates, which I hadn’t indulged in for quite a while.

Nobody wearing a mask any more of course.

Back at CH, at 4:30 we were to have a Sunday at Home talk with me on AV. This is a monthly series of talks by residents on their own knowledge or specialty. Today it was Ian, our retired nuclear physicist, who had put together a talk on how plants like sunflowers form spirals based on the Fibonacci series and the golden mean. This meant lots of slides which he wanted to manage from his own laptop.

So we did the simplest thing, I set up as zoom host, and he joined from his laptop and shared his screen. This worked fine. I managed to get all the things right: voices in the auditorium mics were heard by zoom attendees; zoom attendees when un-muted, could be heard in the auditorium, there was no feedback, everybody could see and hear. Oh, and I remembered to start the zoom recording at the beginning of the presentation. It was the FIRST TIME that I managed a hybrid auditorium/zoom event with no glitches!