Thursday 08/14/2025

Planned to go over to Stanford Shopping Center but it doesn’t open until 10, so to pass the time I took my music and guitar down to the new Music Practice Room. I practiced my two numbers for the Good Times show then just worked over some songs with the guitar.

Walked to the shopping center and purchased a new pair of jeans at the Levi’s store. Then, since there was an Apple store just down the aisle, I went and bought something I’d been thinking about for a while. All my music is currently on sheets of paper in a very messy 3-ring binder. I’ve watched John Morse play from an iPad. I asked him what app, he said ForScore. I’d been flirting with buying an iPad but was talking to Joanne about how I was looking at used ones on eBay and so on, and she said, come on, you have the money, get what you want. So today I walked into the Apple store and said, I’ll have a 13-inch iPad Air please. And walked out 5 minutes later with one.

Setting that up took an hour later on, but it works fine. Getting my various songs into it will take a little longer. Later I sat down to start the task the good times committee depends on me to do, get all the background videos for the numbers people will perform. And immediately ran into trouble with the first one.

At 4pm I attended a meeting set up by some other residents supposedly to give us advice on how to direct our political contributions in ways that might be effective. The self-taught expert they had brought in was a bit disappointing, although he did mention two interesting organizations, Movement Voter Project and SwingLeft.org.

Immediately after, at 5, I went to supper, a special birthday supper for my neighbor Brian. His friend Barbara had arranged a fancy party for about 25 residents, fancy to the extent that wine was provided, and special appetizers and a special dessert. Nice chat with a congenial table.

Wednesday 08/13/2025

First order of business was to join a party for a hike led by Joanne. There were four of us, Joanne, Joanne the other one, Erika and me. All three women are enthusiastic walkers. I tag along and try to keep my breathing from being too audible. We went to the Arastradero preserve and did a total of 3.5 miles in about 2 hours.

After lunch I turned to two chores from that list. One was that my kitchen sink wasn’t draining. I had this problem just two years ago, day 4.259, and I did exactly what I wrote in that entry, took off the p-trap, cleaned out a glob of ugly sludge, reassembled.

Also I discovered Monday that the freezer compartment of my little half-size fridge was looking like a scene from Frozen.

So I spent half an hour getting a cubic foot of snow and ice out of that. I am really puzzled by this. Two things. One, now that the freezer box is clean and open, I can see that it has no drain hole of any kind. It’s a plastic box, with a fairly tight-fitting door. So if the fridge did a defrost cycle, where would the water go? And two, why did it fill up with ice like that? Maybe I need a new refrigerator?

Anyway with those things out of the way, I practiced a little music and had a nice nap. After supper we had a lecture by a bright young woman who wrote a book about Sam McDonald. I had known the name only from Sam McDonald County Park, a big patch of wild redwood forest in the hills to the west. But he was a well-known figure around the Stanford Campus from 1900 to the 1950s, as well.

Tuesday 8/12/2025

Instead of wondering at the end of the day, “what the heck did I do today, I know I was busy but…” I am going to log it in detail.

7:30 took recycles down to the bins. Finished tidying up for the housekeeper.

8:00 my desktop machine won’t connect to our magical Clearpass wifi. I go into the Clearpass management page, delete the machine, add the machine back. After some more fooling around on the machine (curse you Apple variable IP address) it finally connects.

8:15 print the three how-to docs I hadn’t yet printed. And hole-punched them.

8:25 cut up the dead daphne plant and took the plant and pot down to the 3rd floor where there is a garden-waste disposal bin. Brought pot back and, because daphne died of fungal infection, I took the pot into the shower and scrubbed it with bleach cleanser.

8:40 futzed around trying to get a youtube video downloader to work. (I need to download videos for people to sing with in the upcoming good times show) The one I had used to, but now it puts up a message saying youtube has changed, we’re working on it. (There is kind of a continuous guerilla war between Youtube, trying to keep people from downloading their videos for private use, and a world of hackers trying to figure out how to fool Youtube. Youtube can’t win; in order to show a video, it has to eventually send those bits to the user’s computer. Hollywood tried for years to make DVDs uncopyable but there no such thing as an un-copyable bit.) Tried to install a different downloader, ran into mac install issues.

9:00 took how-tos and ring binder dividers downstairs. Got the IT guys to let me roll a small tv into the music practice room, as requested by Stew days ago, and I’d been forgetting.

9:10 reorganized the info binder at the AV station with new how-to docs and page dividers with labels.

9:30 to-do list looking much better, decided to write something fo the writers group

9:50 two-paragraph essay finished and sent. With an hour to the writers meeting, I am reviewing to-do list, which looks pretty beat-up.

Read a couple things I had set aside from my RSS feed. One was a recap of a new paper on alzheimer’s disease suggesting it might be associated with a lithium deficiency.

10:00 Ordered low-dose lithium caps.

10:10-10:40 Sandy will perform the South Pacific song “Wash that man right outa my hair” in September, but she needs the video with the audio transposed down. Spent this time finding a new video downloader.

10:40-11:40 writers meeting.

11:45 Patty had emailed that she was done with her laundry early so instead of waiting for 2pm, I quickly sorted my stuff and started the first load. Then left the room for the housekeeping lady. Had lunch. Worked on laundry, and in between worked on setting up an online repository for our AV documents.

!:30 laundry finished. Finished the AV setup and sent an email documenting what I had done, to the team. All the how-to’s I’ve written over the years, in one place, not dependent on my personal computer or email.

2:45 regarded to-do list and decided to have a nap.

3:30 resumed work on Sandy’s audio, downloading the video, separating the audio track. Then realized that I really wanted to do all this, and other things for the good times show, on my desktop machine, so moved it there. Ran the audio track through an app that changes the pitch, shifting Mitzi Gaynor’s voice down from the key of E to B-flat (she sounds like a drag performer, but that’s Sandy’s range). Put it all back together, put it where Sandy could get it, and sent her an email.

4:15 declared my day over.

After supper participated in the monthly sing-along in the lobby.

Monday 08/11/2025

Took the standard walk. At 10 set the auditorium up for a book talk, by a Stanford professor, about how the major nations handle talent, or human capital. He did not point it out, but it was clear that everything China, India, Japan, Australia did, or do, to create and foster talent to power their economies, is the exact opposite of what our current administration is doing. Well, never mind.

Then off to FOPAL for a couple of hours. Back home, after supper I made a to-do list of all the things I need to get done in the rest of this week. It is a whole goddam page long. Am I doing anything on the list tonight? I am not. But tomorrow, baby, look out.

Sunday 08/10/2025

Sunday morning stuff. My daphne is definitely kaput, darn it. Should I try to get a new one? Or plant something tough but boring, like a begonia. TBD.

Had a brainstorm. Wanted to have an online place to put all the good tech writeups I have done, so the AV team could access them, which is not tied to my name or user-id. But it turns out we had one all along. We had set up a free outlook email address, which is the user-id for our Zoom and Vimeo paid accounts. It turns out, that is automatically a minimal Microsoft membership, which includes 5GB of cloud storage. Perfect. So I started moving all those documents off my dropbox into that place.

After lunch met with Joanne and we made a Costco run. We each had a couple of things to look for. What a crazy place that is. Just insanely busy on a Sunday noon, huge parking lot 99% full, solid lines of people waiting to check out, you take one of their giant shopping carts and weave back and forth around the other shopping carts in every aisle. Crazy.

Later I figured out how the new mixing board uses its USB port and that finishes the docs. Now I just have to get all the files into the Microsoft cloud drive, and print them out, and make them known to everybody else.

Saturday 08/09/2025

First thing I spent 90 minutes in the auditorium exercising all the features of the new sound board. (This thing.) Well, except one. But I experimented with the Equalizer, which lets you tweak the sound of each mic, and the effects, to the extent that I figured out how to put a little reverb on a voice. And to play music from a phone into it via Bluetooth, and to play music from your laptop into it via a cable, and to play music off an SD card. The one feature I couldn’t try was that you are supposed to be able to connect to it by USB cable, but it takes a USB-B cable, not the old USB-A or the newer USB-C, so I couldn’t do that. I ordered a cable, so will try another day.

Anyway I got a start at writing up simple explanations of how to use those features. Then I put on my red docent shirt and went to the museum and led a tour. The crowd was very appreciative, which was nice.

Friday 08/08/2025

First thing was the usual Friday muffin walk with Joanne. Then I had an hour to work on the AV document I’m writing. Then the Line Dance class.

A neighbor who had become a friend, Pam, has been away for months, living at The Forum and getting rehab from a series of physical problems. She was scheduled to return to our Skilled Nursing section today at noon. She had emailed me asking me to help get her computer set up again. She had a MacBook that she took with her, leaving behind accessories such as her backup drive. So at 11:30 I went to the third floor where her apartment was, and got a nurse to open the door for me, and took all her computer stuff, mouse, keyboard, backup drive, USB hub, from her desk and carted them across to the SN wing. Well, Pam wasn’t there yet. There was no desk in the room assigned to her, but a coffee table that would work, so I set up her stuff as best I could and went away.

Did some more writing and editing on my document, then went back to SN at 3:30. Pam was there, and her friend Judy. So now I could put her MacBook in place and get her complete setup on her coffee table all ready to use, and a backup started.

However she then told me that during her latest operation, to fix a bone in her ankle, they had discovered bone cancer, very likely metastasized breast cancer, stage 4. Not a secret, she said.

This hit me fairly hard. I’ve worked with Pam on organizing events, she chaired the Event Coordinator committee meetings for a couple of years and did that well. Somebody dies here about once a month, but until now it’s never been anyone I knew well — just another in-memoriam card on the desk in the lobby, oh well. Pam isn’t dead but it doesn’t look good for her. She’s debating whether, after a recent series of health problems and two operations, she wants to start the oncology circus of radiation and chemo.

I had an early supper and met with Joanne again at 6:45 to drive over to Stanford to attend a concert by the Stanford Chorus. That was the first time I had been inside the Bing Concert Hall since about 2016 I think. It was a pretty good concert of a variety of pieces by a very large (at least 100 people on the stage) and well-trained group. Joanne, thank goodness, is strong, bright and vigorous, as am I, pretty much. How long, I wonder…

Thursday 08/07/2025

No, I didn’t go down to the gym. I did some writing, though, on the how-to document about using our new sound mixer board. Which is turning out to be a longer job than I expected, and not done yet. But several hours at my desk actually using my desktop computer. Did I leave the building today? No, actually I don’t think I did. Well, tomorrow I will, more than once.

Wednesday 08/06/2025

Joined a group walk organized by Joanne. Six people, two cars, drove down to the Baylands, walked 2.5 miles in about an hour, we don’t dawdle, baby. After lunch I cleaned up more photos. By cleaned up, I mean, I have a Dropbox folder where I dump any picture I want to keep. And periodically, like every six months or so, I go through them, maybe crop and straighten and tweak the color, and move the final image to a folder that makes some sense, like Channing_House_local or something.

And finished editing the many chapters of Joyce’s book. It wraps in 1995 with the description of the wreck she was in. She lived quite a bit longer. Anyone feel like writing an introduction or an Afterword?

Tuesday 05/08/2025

For the record I did not go to the gym this morning. I did go to the auditorium meaning to experiment with the new mixer board and get some pictures. I got the pictures but found a couple of issues, which I reported to our IT guy. But I can’t continue my writeup until those issues are resolved somehow. So back to clean up the apartment because it’s housekeeping day, and then spent some time working over some pictures. During the hours standing behind the table at the VCF I got interested in the women I was seeing. Women were (of course) a minority but they seemed to have a certain look. So I started sneaking candid shots with the phone. Phone camera is a great way to get candids, because, you know, everybody is always playing with their phone, right? Which happens to be an excellent camera. Here are a couple of the better ones.

Nerdy women, I love them to the bottom of my sexist old heart.

Then the writers meeting. And I went downstairs and was just going into the dining room with the Allens to sit down when I got a text from Joanne, saying, she was going to walk to the Edgewood market, did I want to join her. Well, yeah, so I told the Allens I had suddenly remembered a meeting, and zipped off to grab a hat and sunglasses and joined Joanne for what turned into a 3.5 mile walk. About 1:20 I remembered that I had a date with Peter and Brian for 2pm to teach them how to show movies. So we had to walk the 1.5 miles back faster than we might have done normally, but no problem, I can keep up with Joanne, barely.

So spent an hour showing Peter and Brian, who are the new self-appointed Tuesday Night Movie Committee, how to show a movie and run the sound system. Later I edited 2 more chapters of Joyce’s book; nearly done with it now. Then supper, and then to see the movie that Peter and Brian had picked to open with, The English Patient. Which is 2:45 long, so finishing at 9:45 which is my bedtime usually.