Friday 06/06/2025

I had moved my laundry day to Friday to clear room to go to that movie on Wednesday, so I started it early at 7, so as to leave room for a nice morning walk with Joanne. Back in plenty of time for the Line Dance class at 10:30.

I had put together a quick cheat sheet on my various relatives to prime Joanne for when we visit Dennis tomorrow. That led me to looking at the family photo album I created back in, I can hardly believe this, 2001. For some time it was online, and I could put it back online now. I should do that. Oh well.

But that led me to the shelf in the closet where I have paper copies of the autobiographies of my mother Cecil, my father Emil, and my sister Joyce. A couple years ago I scanned Emil’s autobiography and converted it to a searchable text file. It now dawns on me I could, maybe should? do the same for Cecil’s and Joyce’s.

I did a quick test today. At some point in the 90s, Cecil wrote a 10-page essay recounting her recollections of my childhood and the various problems they had raising me. I have an app, VueScan, which is a great scanner app for photos, but I knew it had OCR (optical character recognition) abilities. I used it to scan that 10-page essay and I was amazed how easy it went, and how accurate the OCR was. It made a PDF that was a perfect image of the document, but the actual text was in it also. I was able to copy and paste the text out of the PDF to a text file and check it over, there were almost no errors, except it got a little confused where Cecil had inserted hand-written notes. And fast. VueScan is one of the great apps if you have a scanner. So maybe I will do those other two books. It would take a few hours for each. Anybody interested in the files, if I do?

Anyway for the amusement of my relatives here is an embarrassing picture from my archives.

Christmas 1960. How many of these people can you name? Hint, I’m the dork in the middle.

Thursday 06/05/2025

And the blog year is half over – 183 days down, 182 makes 365. I spent the first couple hours of the morning editing the notes that Bert had taken of our conference a couple of days ago. He and I and Patty have many many comments on Rhonda’s (actually her architect’s) sketch plan for renovations. I tried to get them organized into readable form.

I spent a while trying to get my fingers to play the deceptively simple opening to “Stuff That Works”. Actually thinking about it now, the chord sequence is the same as the old hymn, “Amazing Grace”. My fingers had some trouble.

After lunch went to FOPAL intending to do sorting, as I know they are backlogged in that area. However I found four boxes of computer books waiting and spent the time processing them.

Back to CH. Helped Joanne install a new backup disk on her Macbook. Then spent some time putting together a sketchy summary of my family history. Which reminded me of my mother’s autobiography. A couple of years back, I used OCR to make my father’s autobiography into a computer file, but I never did that for my mother’s. Or Joyce’s. Maybe I should do that, as they only exist as a very few paper copies now. Hmm. Another project.

Wednesday 06/04/2025

First event this morning was to join a hike organized by Joanne. Five of us, me, Joanne, Martha, and Joanne the other one and her partner Erica, got in Martha’s car and drove to Edgewood park. Martha favors the trailhead off Cañada road. We walked a big loop, 3.3 miles total, and back to CH in plenty of time for lunch.

After lunch I finished editing the video of Bob’s talk. This was fun. For some of the photos he showed, I applied a “Ken Burns” effect, a slow zoom in or out, which made it more interesting. Also he had played two short music clips, songs from The Student Prince, but the audio of these songs was pretty poor. So I found the songs online and patched in better sounding audio. Finally, I changed the order of things. He had ended his talk and had his family come up on stage for a picture, and then had continued to answer questions for a few minutes. So I moved the part about the family portrait to the end and made it look like he had answered questions right after saying “thanks”. The video editor is the master of time and space; reality is what I say it should be.

At 5 Joanne and I had a new adventure: we went out to a movie. This was her idea, to see Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, a rom-com. Its run was almost over, 5:45 today in Redwood City was almost the last showing anywhere close. So we took a Lyft to Redwood City. I thought this was a perfect use for a Lyft, a local trip but we wouldn’t have to mess with parking, it would take us right to the door. The movie was sweet and nice, about a writer struggling with PTSD (of a sort) and a caring but unreliable boyfriend. The right couple get together in the end, awwww. Part of the fun was that much of the dialogue was in French, and with good audio (unlike the DVD a couple nights ago) both of us were able to follow it a bit. Joanne’s French is stronger than mine, but I could get a word in 10. Or 20.

Tuesday 06/03/2025

Note the blog year is almost half over, that will be on day 6.183. Day 6.193 will by my move-in anniversary. Given all that, I was busy all day, doing I couldn’t now say what, but it was all things I needed to do, or felt so at the time.

The writers didn’t meet, as there was a local power outage at that time. This was the first real test of the emergency generator installed last year at great effort and expense, and it worked fine, two elevators remained functional throughout. Later I learned that the writers meeting had taken place. I had assumed that with no power, there’d be no wifi, but I guess that too was on the emergency generator circuit, so some people connected by zoom anyway.

At 2pm I met with Bert and Patty to discuss further our response to the proposed upgrades. Also I tried the damn blu-ray player that failed last night, and damned if it didn’t work just fine today. Bert thought somebody had been messing with the TV and/or the receiver.

Started editing the video of neighbor Bob’s talk.

Monday 06/02/2025

First thing up was to do the AV for a First Monday book talk. The speaker was my newest 6th floor neighbor, Bob McLean. He moved in last year, a retired high school english teacher. The book he was presenting was a biography of Dorothy Donnelly who was a remarkable actress and writer around the turn of the last century, 100 years ago. The book had been written by Bob’s late wife. He did a good job of the presentation as you would expect of a long-time teacher, with lots of interesting pictures.

As soon as that was over I zipped off to FOPAL and spent two solid hours processing a bunch of books. Got back at 3:30 just in time to brush my hair and join Joanne’s Poetry Out Loud meeting. Nice poems to read and talk about.

That ended at 5 and it was off to the dining room for the monthly “dinner mixer”. As you come in the door you draw a table number from a hat, and sit with whoever draws the same number. I sat with Carol, Joan, and Alice. Although I know all three of them well, we agreed that the four of us had never sat at the same table before. So the mixer worked.

Back to my room expecting to join Patty on the 11th floor to assist her showing a movie at 7:30, but I had an email from another resident, Lee, saying that Bert had been helping her but he has a cold, could I please assist her? Simple problem, there is an offsite memorial for a long-time resident on Wednesday and she wanted to send the zoom link to the internal mailing list. Except the only copy of the zoom link she had was a printout. And zoom links are like 200 random characters long. But I kept paging through the material she had, and aha, she had received the same link in another email. So all she had to do was find that other email, copy the zoom link, and paste it into a new email. All complicated by the fact that she was using Yahoo mail on a PC, about which I know zip. But Lee is not an idiot and managed to do most of it herself.

Then up to 7 where I was confident the blu-ray player would show Patty’s movie. It was behaving perfectly for me after I fixed an issue, Day 6.159. And it didn’t work. Just like before, when the receiver is switched to the player as a source, the TV says it gets no signal. I am so fucking sick of that 11th floor media center. That 10 year old receiver is junk and the 1 year old Samung TV is a pain in the ass.

But 5 or 6 people were already settling in to watch the movie that Patty had invited them to see, what to do? I pulled the hdmi cable from the player out of the receiver and stuck it into a spare input on the TV itself. That showed the movie except that the sound broke up every few seconds so the dia ounded like th . Fortunately the movie was My Favorite Season and all the dialogue was in French. So everybody, about 9 people in all, sat and watched the whole thing reading the subtitles and nobody cared the sound was breaking up.

P.S. it wasn’t the old DVD disc, either. Patty just called me to say she played it on her personal TV and player and the audio is fine, no breakups. I’m fairly confident that the problem is the TV or the receiver again. The sound we hear is from speakers attached to the receiver (as normal in a “home theater” setup). The receiver is connected to the TV with an HDMI cable with ARC, audio return channel. So whatever sound the TV makes, comes to the receiver for amplification. All well and good normally. But in this case we had the signal from the DVD player going into the TV on HDMI 3, and the TV had to turn the audio around and send it out the ARC channel on HDMI 1 to the receiver. Somewhere along there is a glitch. Whatever, it’s all crap and should be replaced.

Sunday 06/01/2025

In the morning I took the car out and put gas in it for the month. (I’m really not using the car that much; I think very seriously about getting rid of it.) Then walked the Cal ave market and bought a bit of fruit. Got a bit misty-eyed at this. For years Marian and I would buy fruit at that market on a Sunday morning for the week’s meals.

After lunch I met with Joanne for a walk to the Palo Alto Congregational Church, which is a bit over a mile away on Louis @ Embarcadero. This was to hear a choir concert of 60s songs, sing-along and ice cream social. Been looking forward to this for weeks. Woopsie — it had been cancelled. Well, postponed to 8/31. We continued our walk to the relatively nearby Edgewood Plaza for coffees, then back to CH. My phone shows 12K steps, 4.5 miles for the day.

Coming out of supper I spotted Jerry, who had originally told me about the concert, and he was very apologetic. The director and pianist had both come down with covid 2 days before, and the news went out on the Congregational Church email list. Which we are not on, obvs.

Well we had a nice two-hour walk and coffee date, and made plans for next week. Joanne wants to see a movie, Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, so I got the info where it was playing and when, and made reservations. That’ll be Wednesday.

Saturday 05/31/2025

Sooo intellectual. Well, a bit technical too. This morning I walked to the main library (2.5 miles for the day) and spent a while going through poetry books. Have I mentioned “Poetry Out Loud”? This is a monthly thing organized by Joanne where half a dozen people meet, and each reads aloud a poem they want to share. And it is coming up on Monday and I didn’t have a poem picked. Problem is, I don’t read a lot of poetry, so I needed to get familiar with some poet other than Shakespeare and Byron. I only got through the poetry stack from A through about C and settled on Billy Collins for this month. Very safe choice, one of the best known poets around, but for good reason, he’s very readable and read-out-loudable.

I also spent a couple of hours trying to make headway in the book Abundance by Ezra Klein and some other dude. Depressing reading.

Mary Beth, the queen of the gift shop, gave me an old iPad donated by some departed resident’s family, to wipe and restore. I did another one a few weeks ago and came up to the same problem with this one: you can reset it to factory settings, erasing all data, but when you try to initialize it for a new owner, the firmware sends the hardware serial number to Apple. Apple looks to see if this is in any user’s Find My list, and if it is, says no no no, you have to sign in to iCloud.com with the owner’s email and password before you can continue. So now we are in an email loop with the relatives, saying, can you please resurrect mom’s Apple password? If you can, here’s the simple instructions for the one-minute process of removing this device from her Find My device list.

Yesterday Joanne told me that she and her buddies Sherry and Tita were going to the opera tonight, would I like to tag along? So I bought a ticket to Otello as done by the West Bay Opera company, at our nearby Lucy Stern Playhouse. Joanne and friends went out to dinner in her car. She texted me about 6:30 they were headed back. She swung through the parking lot and I hopped into the car and off we went to the opera.

So I have seen an opera for the second time in my life. The first was Romeo and Juliet at the Sydney Opera House in 2005, on a Road Scholar tour of Australia. This one was — OK. The performers and the staging and the orchestra were really good. Wonderful voices. The plot is just ridiculous, but I guess that would be Shakespeare’s fault, not Verdi’s. Verdi could have picked up the pace quite a bit, though, and put some more tuneful melodies in it. Well he’s dead now so that’s that. Anyway nice outing with a group.

Friday 05/30/2025

Nice day. Walked with Joanne for coffee. I brought along the drawings that Rhonda shared with the Common Areas group on Tuesday. I’m not supposed to do that, we are supposed to keep things confidential, but I am not worried about Joanne blabbing anything, and I wanted her insights, which she did have.

Later I worked on a video for Bert. When he ran AV for the Aurora Singers Tuesday, he recorded video but something was wrong with the exposure or white balance of the camera, and he didn’t properly mic them so the audio was very low. I took the video file and used iMovie to fix it up. Got the brightness up to acceptable level and also the audio up somewhat. He was pleased.

Spent some time with the guitar, working over old and new songs. I can definitely sing Guy Clark’s “Stuff the works” and it would definitely go over with the CH crowd.

At 5:30 I joined up with Joanne for a planned outing to dinner. We went to Tamarine, a restaurant on University ave that has been there for years but I’d never been to. Very nice dinner, good food, good service. Good company.

I thought I had an AV event to run tomorrow morning, but this evening I found out it had been cancelled. Sorry we forgot to tell you. Well no problem, now I have a free Saturday morning, and I have a plan to put it to use.

Thursday 05/29/2025

Nothing on the calendar except a Good Times meeting at 3. I spent the morning at my desktop machine, reviewing that novel that I am not working on. I read all the existing chapters and am trying to decide if there is any value in continuing. One reason to just trash it? It’s set in the near future, 2030 or so. And things are changing so fast in tech that the “near future” I could imagine now would probably look pretty silly by the time it got published.

Spent some time working on some new songs to play. Good Times committee is working on finalizing the list of show tunes and how to present them.

Felt like a beer and a change of scene so I walked out to a restaurant I’d not been to, NOLA, food of New Orleans. Had a pulled-pork Po Boy sandwich and a good beer. Came back and immediately fell asleep for an hour. Pathetic old man.

Wednesday 05/28/2025

Joined Joanne and 5 other people — Martha, Susan, Eva, Joanne the lesser and Erika — for a group walk. Just a short one, a quick drive down to Byxbee park and a walk around the Baylands, 2.5 miles.

I also fooled around with the 11th floor TV, trying to prove that I could connect a computer or a phone to it. But no. The only thing that works is an old USB-to-HDMI adapter. I had just bought a nice small new adapter that I was going to leave there for people to use, but with the new adapter, nothing gets through. With the old one, it works. I think I know what is happening; it’s the same problem as with the Blu-ray disc player. When I managed to configure that player to only emit a 1080p resolution, it worked. By default it tried to go to the modern higher 4K resolution, and that doesn’t get through. Same deal with the computer; the old adapter probably constrains the signal to the lower res; the new adapter tells the computer, 4K is the way to go, and it doesn’t work. But how am I supposed to get the average person with a laptop to play along? I need to supply them with an old adapter. So I spent a lot of time trying to find a USB to HDMI adapter that does not support 4K resolution. I found a couple and ordered them.

At 3 we held our monthly AV meeting and I told the gang that I would like to step down as chair. I’ll still do events but I want to off-load the administrative part. I had printed up a nice detailed job description which I distributed, and also sent by email to the several people who hadn’t come to the meeting. We’ll see who steps up; I have my eye on a couple of people.

I was a grouch at supper. I sat at a community table with two other people. And what I ordered really displeased me. No point in going into details; I just thought what had been served was inedible, not worth the effort of chewing it. I just silently dropped my napkin on my plate and walked out. Went and made a sandwich in my room. Hope I didn’t offend anyone with my behavior.

Came back down for a concert at 7:30: the Aurora Singers. Very large group, must have been 30 of them on the stage, local volunteers, all very enthusiastic, led by an even more enthusiastic director. Did a bunch of songs, the only one of which stuck out to me was “Count on Me” which I think I need to learn to perform.