Spent the morning reading poetry trying to find something worth bringing to poetry out loud. I found a couple of possibles but not happy with them, or with modern poetry.
After lunch I picked up neighbor Prue who wanted to see the CHM, and we drove (in Fred) to the museum where I did the 2pm tour. Quite successful; Prue was impressed.
Back CHM by 3:30; changed out of my red docent shirt. Then met with Joanne for a planned dinner outing. We went to Del Sol on California Avenue, her pick. I remember eating there several times in the old days but I hadn’t eaten there since well before Covid. Now they have a big outdoor seating area. But the food is still good.
On my calendar at 9am it said, Fred Up. That meant I needed to bring the Forester up from the Lee Garage so Joanne could drive it. She isn’t yet confident about getting it in and out of the underground garage. At 1pm I bumped in to her coming in the front door. She had ditched the walker for a pair of walking sticks, and been out with Fred to run some errands, and she’d gotten him washed and filled up with gas, too. So I put him back in the garage.
I spent several hours doing the OCR scan of Joyce’s autobiography. Then later I started printing out pictures of striped cathedrals for the next hall exhibit. But the printer, which otherwise works extremely well, was smearing ink. That doesn’t matter so much if I’m printing out some casual memo or something, but when it smears ink when printing an 11×17 inch photo it’s not good. For one thing I am running low on 11×17 photo paper and that shit’s expensive. The cure is to get inside the printer with paper towels and alcohol and to clean up under where the print head parks, where it gets a yucky build-up of ink. I was being very careful wearing vinyl gloves and all, and yet somehow I managed to drop a daub of ink on my carpet.
Which brought me to 5:30 and time to depart for a concert. This was one of Palo Alto’s free summer concerts, in a park about a mile away. I bought a burrito from a food truck and listened to the Sun Kings, a Beatles tribute band, as they ran through about 25 Beatles hits in an hour and a quarter. I don’t have a light folding chair I could take to one of these, so I was standing up the whole time, leaning on a tree. They were still playing when I left to walk home.
First up, we are back to our customary Friday morning walks. Joanne is still using a walker to take some of the weight off her pelvis, but she walks fast and smoothly regardless. We walked a one-mile circuit with a stop for coffee.
I was just having a nice nap at noon when Tammy called to remind me that I had agreed to join her table for the BBQ luncheon. I’m a doofus. Tammy is a casual friend, she moved into CH the same week I did. Anyway joined a nice group of people. The lunch was good, too.
I went through my photo collection and picked out the shots of two striped cathedrals, Orvieto and Siena, collected them in a folder and began improving them. With new AI-based photo tools I can take a slide I scanned 15 years ago and improve it significantly, for printing. I also spent a few minutes looking over Joyce’s autobiography. It won’t be too much of a job to digitize it.
At 5:30 the 6th floor gathered in our dining room for pizza. I had to leave early to set up the auditorium. I was the designated AV person to run a movie, The Gods Must Be Crazy, at 6:45. The Party Planners had decided, why I don’t know, to show this movie 6:45 to 8:30, before the official party at 8:30. They had gotten a DVD from the public library, but I opted instead to project it from my laptop, using Amazon Prime. This worked very well.
With the movie over I put my stuff away and went up to 11 where there was the official fireworks watching party. From our roof you can see fireworks shows in about 6 different Bay Area cities. I didn’t stay long. One beer and out. Not feeling social, I guess.
I had an appointment with my cardiologist at 11. So, a morning to fill. I felt like practicing my music but I have a rule not to do that in the apartment before 10, so as not to disturb my neighbor Carolyn, who can hear me in her bedroom. So there I am at 8am… I went up to the unofficial music practice room on the 9th floor and played there.
Then off on foot to PAMF, with a stop at Peet’s coffee first. Dr. Dibiase was encouraging. No issues, but she “strongly recommends” I take advantage of CH classes for strength and balance. “You’re well enough muscled now but you won’t always be.” To be considered.
After that I put Cecil’s biography together as a single file and sent it to the next generation to redistribute. Followed by a 3pm meeting of the Good Times group.
Over dinner with Bob, Bob, Andrew and Mary, we were talking about Siena, Italy. Bob had just come back from a grandchild’s destination wedding there. Three of us had seen Siena, and were talking about its black-and-white striped cathedral (here’s a random internet picture). I remembered that there was another zebra-striped cathedral I had seen, in Orvieto (another random internet picture). It’s time to refresh my picture gallery in the hall and I believe I will put up a bunch of our pics of those stripey cathedrals.
Took the standard walk in the morning. At 10:30 I met with Joanne and we were off for a nice outing in Fred Forester. We drove by various back roads to Half Moon Bay for lunch at a newish restaurant I had heard about, Fattoria e Mare. It was a nice looking place, and we were almost the only people in it so we got attentive service. The food was just ok, but it was a nice time.
We walked around the main street of HMB a bit. Joanne is still using a walker to take some of the weight off her hips, but she’s walking without pain. On the way back we stopped at the Pulgas Water Temple.
Practiced some guitar in the late afternoon. Dinner with a few other nice people. That was about it.
Tidied up for the housekeeper. Futzed around with Cecil’s book. I had thought about making a “real” book of it using Blurb.com, where I made a couple of books for the Stanford Fast Break Club, more than a decade ago. But after an hour of trying to use their book-creating software I gave it up. Terrible tool design. I think probably ai will just put all the text in a single file and call it good.
Writers meeting. About half a dozen pieces. I read mine. OK. Then after lunch and the housekeeper visit I did my laundry.
In the evening we had a movie in the auditorium, The Piano. Famous movie I had never seen. I’m sure of that as I would certainly have remembered it.
Monday is the day I usually go to FOPAL, and despite having spent 4 hours there on Friday I decided to go. How? Why not walk? So I walked what Google Maps says is 3.1 miles to FOPAL. I was annoyed that my phone showed only 2.6 miles. (Now shows 4.3, 10K steps.)
Did my work there and took a Lyft back. I had made a mental note that I should use the Transit app to find a bus ride home, but I forgot to do that. Next time.
Practiced some music. Slowly getting on top of the new songs. About 3 Joanne texted that she was ready for a short walk, so I joined her for a loop around the nearby park. Then I sat down to write something for the writers group. The prompt this week is, “what would you like you kids or young relative to know–about you or about the world?” so I wrote about the only piece of advice I ever give a younger person, go live abroad for a while.
Did some work for the Food & Dining committee. They had been given the bulk responses to the most recent resident survey, containing the comments provided to 14 questions, probably 500 different comments. Lots of data but little info. I put each group of comments through Claude.ai, which produced fairly readable summaries of the comments, with main points and action recommendations. That took a couple of hours.
Practiced some music. I’m working on adding some songs to my repertoire. “Daydreamin” by the Loving Spoonful. “Count on Me” by Bruno Mars. “We’re going to be friends” by Jack White. The old hymn “I’ll Fly Away”. Fun stuff.
Sat around and watched YT videos. Usual stuff. A day without leaving the building.
Day of self-indulgence. In the morning I walked over to the local farmers market and bought a basket of raspberries and two ears of corn. Then for lunch, I shucked one ear of corn, wrapped it in saran wrap, and gave it 2:30 in the microwave. While I put the raspberries in a bowl and poured over them the contents of 6 of the little coffee creamer things I had picked up in the dining room. So that was lunch: hot buttered corn on the cob and raspberries with cream. Or, “cream”. Whatever, it was good.
Middle of the afternoon I walked down to the Edgewood market. That’s a walk I’ve taken with Joanne a couple of times (and expect I will again in a few weeks). Hmm, looking at the phone I see I have got 5.1 miles, 12K steps, for the day. Not all on that walk, but, heck, go me.
At5:30 I was looking at the dining room menu for tonight when I remembered, there is a summer concert in the park series starting. Tonight at Mitchell Park, Petty Theft (Tom Petty cover band). Well, what the heck.
Rather than get out the Forester, I took Lyft for the 3-mile ride. Probably picked up at least a mile of that walking just getting from one end of the large park to the other and back. They had advertised “food trucks” but there was only one. I had a burrito, it wasn’t bad. But I did not have what everybody else had come with, a chair or at least a blanket.
So I stood around and listened a while and decided I wasn’t that big a Tom Petty fan after all, so I came on home.
Brought Fred Forester up from the garage at 8:30 and Joanne climbed in and we were off to Town and Country for coffee at Douce France. And a little grocery shopping at TJ’s. Then went and sat by the duck pond for a bit.
Last night late Frank from FOPAL had texted me, that there were eleven boxes waiting at my section. So now I grabbed a sandwich and went down there and spent nearly 4 hours processing all those donations. Longest I ever spent there — I record my time in a book on the way out and it is usually 1:30 or 2:00. This time 3:45, a record.
After supper finally got around to practicing some music.
Codgerville 
