Thursday 09/29/2022

Watered the plants, had breakfast in the dining room, and at 9am joined Jan in the garage. Briefly familiarized myself with his 2021 Prius Prime and off we went. It’s a long damn drive, but a nice one. US 101 has been repaved from Ukiah on north fairly recently and it’s just a pleasant drive. I took the first 2 hours, up past Santa Rosa. We stopped for a coffee, then Jan drove a couple of hours. He’s 87, although still in pretty decent shape. Lunch in Ukiah? I think? And on to the finish, arriving just when the GPS had been saying we would for at least three hours, at 4:10.

(I am not as much a fan of the Prius Prime as I expected to be. The car itself is ok, somewhat bigger and maybe a little nicer on the freeway than my 2012. It has a huge screen but the user interface is … not friendly. A real mess for the driver to get anything done. Not great for the passenger, either, but at least the passenger can look at it long enough to figure out what it’s doing.)

Got checked in to our rooms and took a break. Then at 5:30 we went out to wait for the supposed festival shuttle. The hotel has its own limo and the driver was just hanging around the desk. She didn’t think the shuttle was running yet (turned out, it was) but volunteered to drive us to the first venue, a big community center on the waterfront. Got our festival wrist-bands which we have to wear all weekend.

The first band to play when they started at 6:30 was a rockabilly trio that Jan didn’t care for, nor me very much. So we got on the shuttle, which was operating, and rode around to the only other Thursday venue, the Red Lion hotel. There was a fairly amateurish dixieland group. We listened to them for a few numbers, then walked up the street to an Indian restaurant and had quite a decent supper. Walked back to the Red Lion and listened to a rather better dixieland group for a while and decided to call it a night. Shuttle back to the hotel and that’s it.

Wednesday 09/28/2022

Went for a walk in the morning. At 10, our head nurse Izzy came around to do my annual wellness checkup. She makes sure she has info on my medications; asks a few questions about abilities for activities of daily living; asks a few psych questions.

In the afternoon I tidied the apartment anticipating that it would be cleaned tomorrow as usual, but I wouldn’t be here — because, big excitement, I am going on a road trip tomorrow morning for a long weekend in Eureka. I expect I will probably blog from there also.

In the evening I ran a zoom simulcast of a lecture in the auditorium. This went pretty smoothly although I had a couple of glitches that were apparent only to the Zoom attendees and didn’t affect the presentation to the live audience.

Tuesday 09/27/2020

Well not much of a day. In the morning I went down to the gym and did the round of the machines. In the half hour before the writers meeting, I hastily wrote a four paragraph reminiscence which I will put in below.

At 2 I decided to go out and fuel up the car and get it washed, assuming I would be driving it to Eureka Thursday. But as I was pulling out of the garage, Jan, the guy I am traveling with to the music festival, pulled in, and stopped to talk and make plans. He drives a two-year-old Prius Prime and although he is a gentle-spoken soul, clearly would prefer to use it. So ok, why not. We will meet in the garage to depart, Thursday morning.

Later in the day I used Google maps to print a nice page showing all the convenient restaurants to our hotel in Eureka. Eureka has a whole lot of restaurants! Also the Festival sent out their final program including info on their shuttle service. There are nine venues for music and the shuttle will run to all of them every 20 minutes. The nice thing is, one of its stops is our hotel, the Best Western Humboldt Bay.

Here’s the thing I quickly wrote for the writers group. The theme we were to use was “Ceremonies or rites”. I don’t think I have the pastor’s name right.

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Services at the Benston (Washington) Assembly of God church were usually pretty staid. Opening hymn, announcements, another hymn. Our pastor, brother Levin, would preach one of his soporific sermons. He had a rabbity manner and a thin, reedy voice. All I remember of his talks is his habitual phrase, “And so we find…” introducing some predictable and ponderous conclusion from a scriptural reference. Well, I was 12 or 13 during his tenure, and not a sophisticated literary critic. All I knew was, he was boring.

Then another hymn and a long closing prayer. When a few years later I was introduced to Catholic services I was very slightly miffed to find out that all their leaders’ prayers were pre-scripted and read from a book. Heck, at least the Pentacostals had to improvise their prayers.

Revivals were different. I can’t say how the pastor and the board of elders would decide it was time for the series of special services that comprise a revival; nor do I know how they found and booked the visiting preacher who would come in to lead these events. Maybe the Assemblies of God headquarters (in Springfield, Missouri) maintained a catalog from which you could order a revival preacher. All that was over my head as a quietly resentful teenager.

Revivals were deliberately exciting. More hymns, up-tempo ones like Power in the Blood. Louder praying before a sermon by a guy who was definitely not rabbity or reedy. The sermon would be emotional and designed to inspire guilt, to make you fear the after-life you were sliding toward in your willful disregard of your sinful nature, to make you feel as if you had profoundly disappointed the suffering Savior, that you had really hurt Jesus’ feelings by rejecting his generous call.

And then the Altar Call. If you aren’t saved, or if you aren’t “right with God”, if you want to ask his forgiveness and get “right with God”, if you need healing, if you are troubled in mind — come to the altar, kneel, let us pray with you. Five minutes or more of such continuous urgings and pleadings, the preacher’s voice rising above the congregation singing Only Believe or The Old Rugged Cross.

I was an annoying teenager; I could recognize a naked appeal to emotion and scorn it. Usually. But once or twice they got past my defenses. Once or twice I joined the handful of others who would “heed the call” and come down and kneel at the alter. And feel the preacher’s warm hand on my head, twitching as he called out “Jesus help this young man to know you! In the name of Jesus we call for your sins to be forgiven.” Look through my fingers folded in front of my face and know that the only thing I felt was deep embarrassment combined with guilt. Not salvation, not liberation. Just a great desire to get it over with.

To the best of my recollection my parents never followed up on this, never asked what I might have felt, or how I was changed, by my altar experience — for which I’m grateful. Life went on.

Monday 09/26/2022

Went for the walk in the morning. Afterward, followed up on tech squad call to help my newest neighbor, Lil, who moved in down the hall from me last week. She was having some trouble using her house phone. I pretty much straightened her out I think.

Then down to FOPAL to process 8 boxes of computer books. Five boxes of rejects to the bargain room, the rest went on the shelves. It took 2:20.

In the afternoon I had an email from Caroline, a staff member, asking if the AV team could support a memorial on the 11th floor, and the family wanted a zoom simulcast for remote family members. I told her I’d get back. We have never done this. We do zoom simulcasts from the auditorium. It would be pretty similar on 11, but with different equipment. I am very wary of over-burdening my volunteers. So I sent an email querying the team’s opinions. That took a while to compose.

Sunday 09/25/2022

After the usual Sunday morning stuff I thought about what I could do to get out of the house. I decided to walk over to Stanford and visit the Cantor Museum. I ambled around and looked at stuff and took a few pictures.

That was about all the excitement for the day.

Saturday 09/24/2022

Went for a short walk. Mostly just hung around the house doing nothing useful but feeding hummingbirds. I have three different projects I feel a need to work on, and just can’t seem to apply myself to them.

At 1pm I joined 5 others to go to a play at the Pear Theater. I and Lois drove, so two blue 2012 Priuses. The play was Bull in a China Shop, about the life and loves of Mary Woolley, while she was president of Mount Holyoke College, early in the 20th century. (Article about the play and the author who was a Holyoke alumna.) This was performed by the same cast as in Collective Rage which the same group went to a couple weeks back (3.273).

Friday 09/23/2022

Took the standard walk in the morning. Then basically idled the day away like a couch potato. Until 4pm when the AV committee met. A successful meeting in that we assigned all the upcoming events to somebody. That was about it.

Oh, on my walk I came to a decision. I’ve been way too timid about traveling. I decided that by gum, I am going to get some traveling done. Next year. In December I will choose book and pay for some kind of a trip in spring 23.

Thursday 09/22/2022

This started as an uncommitted day, but I was bored. So I checkedandsure enough, nobody had signed up to do museum tours today. So I signed up for the noon tour. I printed one bridge picture. Then changed to my docent shirt and went to the museum. I ran the noon tour. Then I decided to be a hero and also ran the 2pm tour. Got home about 3:30.

At 5, I met with Nancy because she had a musician she has booked, who wanted to see the auditorium. That was about it for the day.

Well, not quite. Back about 2005 I set up a website, tassos-oak.com, to showcase my wonderful writing. About 2012 I decided to let it go and allowed the domain registration to lapse. Some prick immediately re-registered it and loaded it with my content, presumably scraped from the site before the domain lapsed. I only noticed this a year later.

At that time I paid a lawyer to write a letter and the site was taken down. A couple of years later I checked and it was back up. That time I went through the DMCA takedown process of the hosting service they were using, and it was taken down again.

Just for fun yesterday I checked again and a sadly truncated scrap of the old site is back up under the old domain name. They’ve dropped the screenplays and ebooks, keeping only a couple of pages and two old, short essays. The only change to my original content is a link to an advertising consultancy.

So I did some research on DMCA takedown notices. I would really like to make these sleazeballs pay but that probably isn’t in the cards.

Wednesday 09/21/2022

Went for a slightly shorter than usual walk while my first load of laundry ran. Then finished up the other load.

At 1pm was the monthly FOPAL volunteers zoom meeting. The main topic this time was that there have been several instances of nice items growing legs and disappearing from the sale room. The Art section manager had set up a display of prints and a day later, somehow, a couple of them had disappeared. Some items that were in the high value boxes, where we stage books that are valued over $25 to be picked up and sold by the eBay volunteer group, also vanished. So the board has decided to put up a couple of cameras. The footage will be saved on a local server for a while, but only reviewed if there is a question about something vanishing.

At 3pm we had a talk by a resident, a rather new resident, Lou Thompson, whose career has been partly as a consultant advising the California High Speed Rail project. He reviewed high speed trains around the world. China has been building an amazing amount of HS trackage just since 2008. Then he reviewed all the stages the pathetic California HSR project has gone through. It has never been fully funded, or properly managed, or given adequate oversight by the legislature. The state is legally obligated to keep working on it because (a) the HSR Initiative we passed is the law and (b) we have taken and spent a lot of federal money as well, and would have to give it back. But the costs keep rising and the completion date keeps receding. He had no solutions. Good talk, well organized.

Talked Jan (pronounced Yon), who like me has a ticket to the Redwood Coast Music Fest coming up in just over a week. We will drive together in my car. He has a reservation in the same hotel as me.

Tuesday 09/20/2022

Went down to the gym for some exercise in the morning. Attended only part of the writers meeting at 10:30, because I was called to go down to the Auditorium for my Covid booster. I am now bi-valently protected.

There wasn’t much to do, yet I felt very busy, mostly trying to work with various people scheduling future A/V event coverage. I really dislike this stuff. Although it does keep me in touch with my neighbors. But I look forward to the day I can shed the job.

Actually I felt kind of depressed in general all day. Well. Whatever. At 4pm there was a piano concert, a father-son duo, playing on the two grand pianos in our lobby. They play pretty abstract jazz forms, kind of like Hiromi last week but not IMO as interesting. Afterward I didn’t feel like eating in the dining room. So I got in the car and drove down to Mike’s in midtown. I had a really delicious pasta dish and a beer.