Monday 06/16/2025

Took the standard walk alone, early. Quickly prepared a presentation for the Event Coordinators meeting. Went to the meeting, presented on the problem of old files of the entertainment committee cluttering the Green Room. One person volunteered to help, and people suggested a couple of others. Emailed those others.

Then got a text from Joanne: she had taken a fall in her apartment, was texting from urgent care. She had a pelvic fracture; she could walk with a walker but it would take a while to heal. (8-12 weeks, I read later). She had used the CH transport service to get to urgent care and thanks, didn’t need me to drive her back, just go on with your day.

Which I reluctantly did, 2+ hours at FOPAL processing computer books. Back to CH. Joanne showed up for Rhonda’s open meeting, with her walker. In some pain but determined to continue eating in the dining room. She will see the CH PT person tomorrow. But obviously not going to be leading 3-mile walks for a few months at least.

After supper I took pictures of the items in the Green Room that we had decided could be given away. Sandy will post these on the NextDoor app. Anybody want a good-quality audio cassette player? Or a Casio electronic keyboard?

Sunday 06/15/2025

Watered the plants; did the puzzle. Took a bit of a walk. Spent the bulk of the day scanning my mother’s autobiography. The scanning went quite smoothly, but the .rtf files need editing. There are scan errors–not a lot, Vuescan does good work, but even 0.1% means 2 or 3 typos per page–and formatting issues. So after scanning I started editing, and got through the first two chapters, about her childhood. I had forgotten that her father, Samuel Neill, was a mean son of a bitch, depressive, emotionally abusive. He’d get “black moods” where he’d go days without saying a word to his wife and kids.

Went down to dinner and found myself feeling like granddad, low and mean, suddenly not liking anything or anybody.

Saturday 06/14/2025

Thought about the job of digitizing Cecil’s, and maybe Joyce’s autobiographies. Have to pull out the staples. Don’t want to discard after, so — binder. How big? Measure them, both a bit over half-inch thick, so 1-inch D-ring binders. Rather than ordering from amazon, I got the car out and drove 2 miles to Staples. Then started the process, got through the first chapter, realized I was not doing it right. Will have to start over but it will go fast. Fastish.

At 11 met with Bert, Carol, Jerry in the green room to try to make sense of the immense amount of clutter there. Rhonda has agreed to refurbish this room but there’s a ton of stuff left in it by literally decades of amateur organizers. We identified a lot of stuff that could be given away or trashed. I went off and emailed several people asking them to take responsibility for one part of the mess or another.

After lunch met up with Joanne and we walked across to where the No Kings march would be coming through. Lots of enthusiastic people with clever signs. (I especially like “Trump: a Faux King Joke”) Walked with them down to Rinconada park. March was very well organized with traffic monitors keeping people out of the road and making them obey traffic signals. No sign of police whatever.

At the park there were lots of booths for various orgs set up. The entertainment or speeches hadn’t started. There were plenty of seats in full sun, but all the shady spots were taken. We decided not to wait and went home.

At 5 I took a shower and dressed in nicer clothes, and at 5:30 met Joanne and we walked to one of her favorite restaurants, Vino Locale. How much her favorite? She’s been going there, usually with her group of old friends, for years. She walks in and the owner says “Joanne!” and gives her a big hug. And the manager greets her and the servers do too.

Friday 06/13/2025

Went for a fairly short walk in the morning (although 3.4 miles for the day) with Joanne, who is back from a fast trip to Ashland. We walked to Town and Country for coffee and to shop at Trader Joe’s, then hurried back so I could pick up my sack supper before 10am. Sack supper because there was an employee party this afternoon, so no dining services for supper.

During the day Kass called me to help on the 11th floor. The fifth floor had the duty for the monthly TGIF party. Their theme was “Over the Rainbow” and they wanted to show the Judy Garland clip of that song on the mobile TV. We had practiced doing this before so I thought all would be fine but of course not. Kass could mirror the screen of her laptop on the TV but as soon as it started playing a Quicktime movie it would stall. We eventually figured out a work-around, never mind the details.

In the afternoon I finished the job of putting the family album pictures on SmugMug and notified the few people who might care.

At 4:45 I went up to 11 for the TGIF. They had already played the Judy clip and stopped the playback, but I was told it went fine. They had copious good snacks, and I really wouldn’t have needed my sack supper, but I ate that anyway, later.

At 7 met with Joanne and we went to the Stanford Theater. This is a restored old movie palace, this week celebrating its 100th birthday by showing movies that were first shown in 1925, with accompaniment by the mighty Wurlitzer organ. The movie was “The Crowd” which was actually watchable. Though very slow-paced and corny, there was camera work that must have been mind-blowing at the time, and really decent acting.

Thursday 06/12/2025

In the morning I went for a shortish walk. On Saturday there is going to be a “No Kings” march and “democracy fair” at Rinconada park. People at CH are talking about car-pooling the ¾ mile to where they would intercept the march. I figure that we don’t need no carpool for that, but I wanted to measure the distance. Up to Waverly, over to Embarcadero, down to the park, back to CH. Turns it to be less than 2 miles. So that’s settled.

At 11 I joined a webinar by Smugmug.com. Smugmug is the photo sharing site where we put a lot of pictures we wanted to share. I have rather neglected our collection there for the past few years. But I’m a paying subscriber, so they sent me the invite to the webinar to show off some improvements. It was mostly about changes in the way they handle photo sales. Apparently a lot of members sell their pictures to people who order via Smugmug. I don’t, so it wasn’t too interesting, but it got me thinking about Smugmug again.

Last Friday I mentioned looking at the family photo album I had put together back in 2001. At that time I scanned all the “kodaks” in the albums my mother had made for me, and I believe on of Dennis’s also. Scanned and fixed up in photoshop, and organized and commented. Now I think, hell, I could put this collection into a Smugmug gallery as a simple way of getting it back online and shared with the 2 or 3 people who’d care. So I started doing that. It’ll take a few more days to finish but I made a good start.

Wednesday 06/11/2025

First thing was to walk the mile to PAMF for a blood draw. I have a physical coming up and the doctor ordered the usual tests. Walking a mile before breakfast, bleagh. Had a nice brekkie after at Douce France. That’s Joanne’s fave coffee shop, I would normally go to Peet’s in the same shopping center, but she’s away in Ashland this week and I wanted to be able to text her and say I was texting from Douce France.

Back to CH in time for the Line Dance class. Between the walk and the zillion steps of the class I had 3.3 miles on the phone today.

Quick lunch and then down to the museum to lead a tour at 1pm. Private tour, 45 students from a local junior college. Split the tour with another docent, Nomi Trapnell. She was telling me her husband was a big cheese at IBM back in the day. If I understood right, he took over 360 software development from the famous Fred Brooks. ANYway, the tour group was all 18-20, all cute and attentive but oh lordy did they make me feel old. Telling them how exciting it was when personal computers first came out in 1975, shit, that was 50 years ago. Ask your grandparents about it, kids, they’ll confirm my story.

Back home in time for the monthly 6th floor meeting. This time it was a little party with wine and snacks because our co-chairs Carolyn and Edie are handing the responsibility on to a new person, Jean. Then down to dinner, and shortly after to a lecture. This was a talk by the head of the Museum of American History, which is just a couple blocks away. He talked about some of the odder things in their collection. Like a motorized hair plucker. If you wanted to prune your eyebrows with a vibrating motorized tweezer.

And at 8:30 I’m pooped and going to bed early.

Tuesday 06/10/2025

Tidied up the apartment in anticipation of it being cleaned at noon. Then headed out the door for the standard walk at 8am. Nice cool morning, nice walk.

Writers meeting at 10:30. Cue was “that teacher really didn’t like me”. I had nothing. I can remember a few teachers. One I thought was incompetent (and he was) but none that really disliked me. Some good essays from the others, though. Especially one from Dr. Margaret, remembering being one of 2 female med students in a class of 100, in 1957.

Spent some time studying the songs of Randy Newman, thinking I could find one that I could perform. “Feels Like Home” would be nice to sing but no way could I play the accompaniment.

Attended the Appreciation Fund committee meeting. The Appreciation Fund is a big annual thing here. By law and custom, there is absolutely no tipping or gifting from residents to staff. However, annually the residents organize a fund drive to collect money which is given to staff, in proportion to length of service, at the staff Christmas Party. It’s one giant tip for a year of service. The App. Fund committee starts organizing now for a big kickoff party in October. My friend Kass is the chair and asked me to attend. I have committed only to doing the tech for the show and party in October. But there are a bunch more involved in the project.

Monday 06/09/2025

First up, the monthly Resident Association meeting. No big news. Well, the official introduction of the serving robots with their new names. This pair of robots bring food out from the kitchen to the dining room. They’ve been with us about a year now. Last month the newsletter team ran a naming contest, and the team of impartial judges picked, out of over a 100 suggestions, Bonnie and Clyde. So today they were introduced at the RA meeting, then went to work. Here’s Bonnie at work at supper tonight.

I split from the meeting at 10 and headed down to FOPAL to do the pre-sale cleanup of my section. Back from that about 1, thinking I had a committee meeting at 1:30 but in fact it was 2:30 so I needn’t have hurried. This was the common area advisory group (CAAG), reacting to the tentative upgrade sketches we’d been shown 2 weeks ago. I talked them over with Joanne on 6.171 and with Bert and Patty a couple of other times. Today everybody in the 10-person committee aired their three top issues. Quite interesting. Pretty general agreement, though, that the architects have no clue how we actually use the common spaces we have now. We’ll see how much effect we have.

Sunday 06/08/2025

Typical Sunday morning, quite pleasant. After the usual stuff, I took an easy walk to Gambel Gardens. Took some flower pics on the way. The iPhone 16 is more of a camera than any of the generations of Nikons I owned.

At 1 a four-car car-pool formed up out front, and 15 of us went off to The Pear theater for the Sunday matinee. This was the annual Pear Slices, a festival of short plays by local writers. There were 8 short plays, or skits. All were amusing, two or three were really well-written and well acted.

Here’s the flowers.

Saturday 06/07/2025

Did a lot of little things in the morning, also paid a bill, played a little guitar. After lunch Joanne and I drove in her car down to SJ to visit Dennis. Had a nice long chat, lots of reminiscing, I learned some things about his early years that I hadn’t known, or had forgotten.

Back to CH and a quiet afternoon.