Saturday 07/26/2025

Worked on my estate documents in the morning. Only one missing item of info and I can put them to bed for another year.

Then drove down to Dennis’s place and he and I walked out to a local burger joint for burgers and shakes.

Returned to FOPAL where the volunteer Ice Cream Social was in progress. Ate some ice cream and talked to several people trying to line up support for the Vintage Computer Fest. Next Thursday is when we move 25 or so boxes of books down to the Computer History Museum and set up.

Came back and skipped supper, but spent a couple of hours working to organize the how-to documents for the AV group.

Friday 07/25/2025

First thing was a walk with Joanne for coffee and to get her muffin. Then I took care of several little errands around the place and before you know it it was 12 and time to meet her again for a lunch date. She had suggested lunch at the Menlo Tavern, which turned out to be a super nice place inside a big hotel in Menlo Park. For once she let me buy her lunch.

Now to work on a project I had agreed on with John yesterday: over the 4 years I’ve been AV chair I have written half a dozen how-to documents and he wondered if they were available, and where. Of course not, they were all mixed up in a single folder with dozens of other AV related documents. So today I was pulling the how-tos out into a separate folder, and of course I have to read them over and edit them. The first thing I did, partly before lunch, was to update and make even simpler, the instructions for using the 11th floor TV. And print it out and put it in the binder under the TV. But there are other write-ups more specifically for the AV team.

I got a bunch of that done, then I turned to a task that Joanne had talked me into. She was talking about how she had been updating and revising all her various estate documents and were mine in proper order? Did I have a Document Locater document for my estate binder? Well as a matter of fact, I do have exactly such a document, but now I had to check. Yes, pretty much, except there were a couple of things that were out of date. So I got those docs out and marked them up and I’ll edit and reprint them tomorrow.

Down to dinner rather late, which turned out to be fortunate, as I fell in with Mickie and a new couple, Karl and DeeDee, and we had a long getting-to-know-you conversation over dinner. Karl was a long-time employee of Amdahl and then Synopsis, so, a software guy. DeeDee was a counselor, social worker, then pivoted and became a programmer and then a tech writer at Apple. So, my kind of people.

Thursday 07/24/2025

Hit the gym at, would you believe, 6am. Two full rounds of the machines. I did this early because I had a date to walk out for breakfast with Joanne. We walked over to cafe Zoe in Menlo Park. There’s nothing special about Zoe, it’s just a neighborhood coffee place, but it’s a different and more scenic walk than our usual.

It’s irritating that I don’t remember what I did with the rest of the morning. I know I wasn’t idle… well, at 3 I met with John M who is maybe going to take over some of my AV chair duties. We get along well.

Then I took a tech call to help Mary Ann. Her vision is very poor, but she keeps an active email and writers-group presence. She has a Macbook that has been set up with screen zoom which would make the print big enough for her, but the problem is the keyboard — she can’t see well enough to resolve the symbols on the key tops. So she does almost everything with her iPhone, with the font set to almost the max available size. She had a printing problem that we pretty much resolved.

Wednesday 07/23/2025

Started the day driving down to FOPAL at 8:30 and worked there until 11:30. Got all the backlog cleared out. Then back to CH just in time to had Fred Forester over to his owner who was ready to leave on a date of her own.

A select few people who see that picture can say very precisely where she was standing. Well, three living people, is all. Because they’ve stood there, walked that ground.

At 3pm I met with Susan who volunteered to perform in the upcoming musical event, 9/19, when the Good Times committee is presenting a selection of broadway show tunes. She and I are going to try to sing along to the Supercallifragalisticexpialidocious scene from Mary Poppins. Today we practiced it a bit. If you try to sing along with the video of the movie scene, you basically can’t do it. My gosh they go at an incredible rate.

HOWEVER if you know what you are doing, any Youtube video has a settings icon which if you click it, gets a menu that includes “Playback speed” and click that and select speed 0.75 and hey, all of a sudden they are going at a rate a human mouth could keep up with.

Tuesday 07/22/2025

Hit the gym for one round of machines. Better than none. Then did some admistrative work for the AV team, but possibly I have a victim, excuse me, noble volunteer, to take it over.

Then with some time to spare I wrote a little thing for today’s writers meeting. Nothing special. Several much better essays in today’s meeting.

Did some more work on pictures from Joyce’s book. It’s as much trouble as the editing of the text, grumble grumble. But then I remembered to look in the big family genealogy book of Laurel’s that I got from Dennis a while back and never looked at. There I found some versions of pictures that were in Joyce’s book but printed much better, like this one of Joyce and Eleanor at ages 7 and 9, about.

Later in the day was the monthly Tech Squad meeting. Considerable discussion about the proposed new satellite campus, and whether the resident volunteers would provide tech support to the people there, a long 5 minutes walk away from 850 Webster.

After that I checked out the new music practice room, and took the liberty of moving a music stand from the green room into the practice room. Exciting times around here.

Monday 07/21/2025

Took a standard walk in the morning. At 10:30, the monthly Event Coordinators meeting. Immediately after I hop in Fred and go to FOPAL where as Frank had warned me, there were 16 boxes of donated books waiting. I hoped to process them all but I also needed to leave at 3:30 so I had to leave 4 boxes undone. I will go back on Wednesday.

Returned by 4 just in time for Rhonda’s monthly meeting. A recap on the satellite campus thing, still no precise details. And encouragement to take part in an annual satisfaction survey run by an outside vendor. Much nattering of questions about this.

Sunday 07/20/2025

Sunday morning ritual, water plants, do crossword. Also spent a couple hours trying to rescue some of the pictures from Joyce’s book. She included pictures, like this one of her in the high school prom dress she made herself.

I do not have access to the original Kodak print. All I have is the book, which was reproduced at a Kinko’s or some such service. I scan the page with the image and then apply the digital tools I have to try to clean it up and make it presentable.

Got through about 10 of them. I will eventually add them to the “Family Album” on Smugmug.com.

Anyway, at 12 I got together with Joanne and we drove “over the hill” to the San Gregorio General Store to listen to some music. Unfortunately we both wanted to be back to CH for a presentation at 4:30, so we could only stay for one set, and then had to leave at 3pm. But it was a nice outing anyway.

The presentation was by our neighbors Jerry and Betty. They took a lengthy tour in 2000, documented with a camcorder. Jerry has been editing the camcorder footage into a travelogue of this trip. Previously he had shown their time in Viet Nam and in Myanmar. This time it was India and Egypt.

Saturday 07/19/2025

Main activity today was to drive Fred over to the museum and lead the 2pm tour. This was “NVidia day”, employees of NVidia and families were free, so the place was really crowded. When I started my tour group was easily over 40 people, which is really too many, they just don’t fit into the small exhibit areas. I primed them beforehand that the spaces were small and if they got bored or couldn’t hear, just peel off and enjoy the museum, I won’t mind. Quite a few did, by the 3rd or 4th stop on the tour the crowd was down below 30. The remainder all seemed to enjoy themselves.

Friday 07/18/2025

In the morning, met with Joanne for a nice “muffin mosey” when we walk to her favorite bakery and she buys a very large bran muffin which it is her custom to share with her usual group of pals that meet for breakfast on Saturdays. She is walking normally to me eye, no walker or cane, although she says she doesn’t feel quite normal yet. Still, 4 weeks from a cracked pelvic bone, not bad.

At 11 was the AI interest group meeting. I walked them through a thing I had done with Claude.ai a week ago. Too complicated to write up here.

At 3:30 I met with Bert and Craig and Lenny to interview Leah Lin. I know Leah as the trusty person who has my medical authority. But this wasn’t about me, it was that I had suggested her to Bert, who runs our volunteer tech squad, as an outside support person. The tech squad gets calls sometimes that we can’t, or Bert feels we shouldn’t, handle. “We fix, we don’t train” is his motto. In the past he has sent some people to the Geek Squad at Best Buy, or to the Apple Genius Bar as appropriate. But Leah would come in and work with people here at CH. So we all talked to Leah about this and she impressed well, and Bert will be referring a few people to her and then we’ll talk it over again in a few months. So a good turn for a friend.

Thursday 07/17/2025

In the morning, wrote two carefully composed and highly thoughtful emails. Well, that takes time. They were so much on my mind that I didn’t go down to the gym, as I had sort-of planned to do. Later did some music practice.

After lunch, edited 3 more chapters of Joyce’s book. One very long chapter about her not-quite a year in the Poor Clares monastery, and a couple of chapters after. I appear a couple of times, she treats me very kindly. And again, she tells about things that I absolutely do not remember. To be fair, she was writing in the 1990s, about events of 1967-69. Maybe I would have remembered some of these things if you asked me in 1995. But now, when it is 50-60 years ago? Nuttin’. Could have been some other guy than me.

Although one thing was helpful to me. She says she and I moved into the apartment we shared on 25th avenue in 1967. I remember the place well, and I remember that at the time I was working for IBM, but still as a unit-record (punched card equipment) repairman. I remember that sometimes I would be on call, and a few times I got service calls and Joyce was highly indignant on my behalf at being called out late at night to fix some machine. I can also remember sitting in that apartment, at a big desk that she remembers we had Emil make for us, and studying the schematic for the 029 keypunch until I had it memorized.

Point being, this nails down a date I was kind of fuzzy about. I would have been not more than 18 months with IBM at that point. I knew enough to be useful, so it must have been more than six months, but by 2 years in, I switched to maintaining software. So thanks to Joyce’s recollection I can be pretty sure it was 1966 when I started with IBM.