Wednesday 11/24/2021

Took a walk. Futzed around. Had a lunch of leftover pizza from last night.

Had my AV Committee meeting at 4pm. I ended up stuck with the big Holiday celebration with the CH choir and stuff. Well, Ian said he’d help. It will be a bid deal with at least 4 wireless mics needed, at least one rehearsal (probably two) and two performances. I need to talk with Mary, the director, ASAP.

Went down to the dining room, looked at the menu, came back up to my room to make a sandwich. Later got a call from the front desk, saying, “your birthday dinner is ready.” That’s weird as it isn’t my birthday. It was on the calendar that today was the November birthday dinner. They do one special dinner per month. You have dinner in the same section along with other people with birthdays that month. Everybody sings happy birthday. Gag me with a spoon.

In any case, I thought you had to sign up to get your name on the birthday dinner list. I certainly have not signed up for November, and have no intention to do so in December either. So I sat down to eat the rest of my sandwich.

Tuesday 11/23/2021

I did my resistance exercises at 7:30. I really like getting that out of the way before 8:15. It went well. Sometimes I have to just pause for a few seconds. I can’t say exactly why; just that my body issues a “hold up a sec” signal that is quite emphatic. Speculating, because of the beta-blockers, my heart really can’t speed up very much, so maybe I am sensing high CO2, where normally it would be taken care of by a speedup in heart rate. Oh well.

Knowing I will be showing the apartment to Jean for the first time ever on Thursday motivates me to keep tidying. I moved a large box of face masks, which I have been storing for the resident association, to the outside balcony. And applied oil to the coffee table which was looking quite dry.

The writers meeting was at 11. The cue or topic hint this time was “clan” and several people took that as meaning, describe your family thanksgivings. I had not written anything but afterward I sent the following picture to the writers group mailing list.

For those who don’t know, left to right, my mother Cecil, my niece Laurel, my nephew Dennis, me (age 18, high school senior), a child we will come back to, my father Emil, my sister Joyce (Dennis’s mother), sister Eleanor (Laurel’s mother). Also, Jesus. I don’t know who got up from the empty chair to take the picture; probably Eleanor’s husband (?Roger?).

I believe the smiling child was named Chris, and was being fostered by Eleanor. But I’m not really sure. Anyone? If it is he, do we know what became of him later?

Also, why was Joyce trying to look like Vampira Mistress of the Night? Put the knife down, sister.

Anyway several of the writers replied that it looked wonderful, nice traditional thanksgiving. Which made me snicker knowingly.

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Anyway I got bored in the afternoon and went for a bit of a drive up into the hills. Came back down to University Ave. and had supper in the Curry Pizza place. Chicken Marsala pizza and a beer. Burp.

Monday 11/22/2021

Did the walk. Then did a bit of tidying up of my balcony. When I bought the printer (which was day 0.328, just over 2 years ago) I had kept its big box. Well, it had five plastic bottles of ink and I left them in the box. On the back corner of the balcony. Today I moved the bottles of ink indoors and set the box aside for trashing.

(Two years along and the original ink supply is still above 50%. I had originally intended to print a fair number of photos on 8×10 and 11×17 paper, and have a rotating gallery on my outside wall, but never got around to it.)

Also back there: the air-brush spray booth I lavished quite a few hours on last year. This is the booth that I discovered, some weeks back, had been damaged. At some point it had fallen off the chair it was on, and then been replaced on the chair, so I only noticed the damage some time after it occurred. At that point I used some duct tape to patch it up; but since then the duct tape had dried out and peeled off (duct tape is shit and nobody should use it for anything), and again the box was falling apart.

Today I examined it carefully. Unfortunately the broken parts were not really repairable. It held together with hinges that turned on metal pins, and two of these hinges had broken in multiple pieces. (See the picture from day 2.124, the gray piece that makes up the floor had broken, along with the edge of the box it mates with.)

At first I thought of buying another $100 spray booth and using the good parts of that, along with the panels I had modified with extra plastic and velcro. But there there was no way of replacing just the broken parts, it would have to be a complete rebuild. It hadn’t been that much of a success when it was whole, so to hell with it. I added the broken machine to the pile, and put in a facilities call to have all this bulky crap sent to the landfill.

I can still spray but I will do it in the open air, not indoors in my little box. I can see how to do that. And for now, my balcony looks much better.

Anyway, off to FOPAL to process 6 boxes of computer books. Here I scored a coup: one of the donated books turned out to be the most valuable high-value book I’ve ever found. It is selling, used, on Amazon at $880.

I have now asked at various times, Carolyn, Eva, Joan, Pru, Mary Ann, Michele and Edy to join my table for Thanksgiving lunch, and all of them have plans to go to relatives. Makes me wonder who will be left to eat in the dining room here? Other than me, Paul, and Jean. Oh, ok, Elizabeth said that since she is only going to her daughter’s after 4pm, she’d be happy to sit and have some tea with us. So that’s four. I wonder what John and Francis are doing, I don’t think they have kids.

Sunday 11/21/2021

Sunday morning. At 1pm, SWBB would play at Gonzaga, and the only video would be a stream from a Spokane TV station. I intended to do something clever with Chromecast to show that on the 11th floor TV, but I was quite unsure about the details so I wanted to get a start at it.

I buzzed through Sunday morning, and ran into a hitch when the big NYT crossword took more than the usual amount of time. I took a short walk, and then I was up there playing around about 11am. Jerry came along and we both tried to get to the TV, me from the Macbook and he from an Android pad. The original Chromecast proved very flaky and unreliable. He said he’d heard that later ones were better, but we don’t have a later one. So I did the reliable thing, attached my Macbook by an HDMI cable.

But at 1pm that Spokane station didn’t go live with the game after all. I’m told they finally did, an hour later, show the second half of the game. But by then I had found that the Stanford radio broadcast, plus the live stats page, gave quite an adequate account of the game. KHQ Spokane can go stuff itself.

Stanford trailed by a bunch in the first half, caught up, and just squeaked out a win at the end. One of their best players was “unavailable” for unstated reasons. Now they are off to the Bahamas for a three-day Thanksgiving tournament. Jerry has paid for a subscription and will broadcast those games as Zoom meetings.

I took another walk before supper. I’ve been turned down by more people for my Thanksgiving lunch table; everyone it seems is going to their relatives. Well, Mary Ann says her kids are unsure of their plans and she’ll let me know tomorrow. Elizabeth isn’t going to her daughter’s until late, and says she’ll stop by and drink some tea but doesn’t want to eat.

See, this is why I don’t like to attempt hospitality. Too much stress.

Saturday 11/20/2021

The big meeting between Vanessa, the Channing House IT director, and members of the AV team, happened finally. Somewhat inconclusive. Vanessa is a sharp cookie who likes to dive into problems. That’s good. Her main concern just now is, she’s been directed to make it possible to have smooth webinars that use the auditorium and look professional and can be seen in the Lee Center as well as on TV within the building. A tallish order.

David M. came equipped with facts and figures on the system he recommends, a $500 box from ATEM. Vanessa was unconvinced. David M’s church has a multi-camera semi-pro zoom production and he is to make arrangements for her to see that system. She went away with I think a better understanding of the top issues on the 25-item issue list I had prepared, but no fixes were forthcoming.

In the afternoon two people had asked me to get the Stanford-Cal Big Game on the 11th floor TV. I made a mess of this, failing to realize initially that main PAC-12 channel was directly available in the basic Xfinity subscription that TV has. So I spent a lot of time trying to get PAC-12 via the Roku box. Duh. Anyway it worked.

I am trying to populate the 5-person table I’ve been promised for Thanksgiving lunch. There’s me and Paul, my neighbor and a very recent widower. And Jean has agreed to come. I have two more seats to fill.

The next four SWBB games are away, and not on any TV channel, only streamed. Ended the evening exchanging emails with Jerry and Stew about how to get these onto the 11th floor TV. I am all excited about the Chromecast device I discovered while flailing around this afternoon.

Friday 11/19/2021

Went for the usual walk. Back just in time for a 10am appointment with Nancy to try to get her printer running. Fumbled around with her mac and the printer and managed to hit the magic combination so MacOS could find it and yay, another success.

Spent quite a bit of time, like 2 hours, trying to reduce the number of emails in my inbox. There were only a dozen but each represented something I had to follow-up on. After lunch I helped neighbor Carolyn to get her printer going, and succeeded there, too, by simply rebooting both the printer and the mac.

At 4pm we had a special Zoom session supposed to be about new Covid regulations. And Rhonda announced what I had agreed with Carolyn she could not possibly announce yet: Santa Clara County is OK with allowing outside guests into our dining room! Lots of rules: have to show proof of vax, etc; have to make reservations beforehand; other things. But it will start next Monday and be in effect for Thanksgiving.

Who felt like a smart cookie? This guy, because I had already reserved a 5-top for Thanksgiving. I confirmed that when I went down for dinner. Called Dennis and invited him and Toni, but he wasn’t sure if Toni might have other plans.

Thursday 11/18/2021

The main activity of this day was a bus trip to San Francisco, to visit the deYoung museum.

I started the day with two rounds of resistance machines. Then tidied the apartment in advance of it being cleaned this afternoon. At 9:30 we boarded the house bus for the trip.

There were two exhibits of note. One, Patrick Kelley: Runway of Love, was about a guy who went from Southern Black kid to celebrated fashion designer in a short time, and died tragically young of Aids. There were 30 or 40 of his dresses on display and they were — different. Amusing, fun to look at, not really practical. Who would actually buy and wear one of these, I asked by female neighbors. Nobody. But they were fun to look at.

The second, Judy Chicago, a retrospective was a lot deeper and I enjoyed it a lot more. Judy Chicago had a long career as an artist and was a feminist when that was a new thing. I took a couple of pictures of pieces that impressed me.

Both of these are huge canvases, 5 or 6 feet high, done with spray acrylics, and aside from the striking imagery, I just can’t figure out (from my primitive experiments with an airbrush) how in the heck she did them. So, impressive on two counts.

At dinner Patty persuaded me that I should reserve a table for Thanksgiving lunch and invite some people. So I did and got “sorry, prior engagement” from the first I asked.

Wednesday 11/17/22

Was going for a walk but remembered in time that Facilities was coming to shampoo my carpets at 9am. Which they did, and were gone again by 10. Then I pretty much idled in my apartment the rest of the day. Sending emails trying to organize an AV committee meeting. Everybody has conflicts.

David and Helen invited me to dinner.

Tuesday 11/16/2021

First thing I went to the gym and did multiple rounds of the machines. Which was fine. Then I did some desk work, bills and records.

Last night I worked until nearly midnight on a thing for the writers group, which alas didn’t go over well. Too intellectual and too long for the audience. I mean, nobody booed or anything, but it just kind of landed with a thud.

Took an extra long nap after lunch. I had planned to drive 3 others to the basketball, but then David G offered to drive five of us so I rode with him.

This was Stanford v. Portland University. The Portland Pilots had clearly seen the Texas game and adopted the same pressure defense, and although they couldn’t execute it as well, they still slowed Stanford down. During the third quarter they pulled with 12. Then either they got tired or Stanford finally began to understand how to handle it, and we pulled away to win by 20. But my my my basketball is not a game of grace or finesse under that kind of defense. More like Rugby Lite. But three of the freshmen got to play and did very well.

Monday 11/15/2021

Went for the walk. Had to have a severe chat with myself. I was thinking, I have a meeting at 10, I don’t really have time for a walk, blah blah. Told myself severely to cut the bullshit and get going. And of course completed the walk and home about 9.

Meeting was of the Events Committee, featuring the introduction of the new online Event Planning Form. This took quite a while.

After that I drove to FOPAL and did the post-sale triage. This took 90 minutes of standing up looking at all 350 of my books and deciding which to keep for another sale, which to reduce the price one, etc. My back got quite sore doing that. Anyway, done. 55 books went in the sale last weekend. Of course most were priced at $2-3 so my section’s contribution to the libraries was around $120-150.

Back at home, there was a zoom meeting with Chef Tobias to respond to people’s questions about Dining Services. Generally the news was good. A number of things people had requested are being done or will soon be. Notably we have our liquor license and glassware has been ordered; as soon as it arrives it will be possible to buy wine or beer with your meal. Lots of requests for various menu tweaks have been acknowledged and will be implemented.