Saturday 05/17/2025

The adventure today was to visit SFMOMA (museum of modern art) to see the retrospective of the works of Ruth Asawa. Joanne and I left at 9, and were parked and ready to go in at 9:45, but the museum didn’t open until 10. We walked around the garden at the Yerba Buena center across the street to kill time.

The exhibit was excellent, they covered Asawa’s career from college days — intricate patterned calligraphic drawings and watercolors — through her major career, making these intricate woven wire hangings, and later life with other things.

Had a nice lunch in the MOMA cafe. Then we drove to Golden Gate Park because I had a notion to see the rhododendrons in the Rhododendron Dell. Every road in the park was solidly lined with parked cars but we lucked into a parking space along one of the roads. It was well past peak rhodie season but we had a nice walk anyway. Back home to CH by 2pm.

Did a guitar rehearsal of the full program for the Lee Center, it comes to just the half hour I wanted.

Friday 05/16/2025

Started with our customary Friday morning walk which would usually be 2+ miles but somehow I’ve got 4 miles for the day. Anyway, back in time for the line dance class at 10:30. Left that early for the AI interest group meeting at 11. And left that right on 12 to meet Joanne who had decreed she would take me to lunch today. We went to Sundeck at Sand Hill Circle, a nice place in a business/residential complex a few miles away.

Was invited to dinner with Betty and Jerry and Mildred. Afterwards, worked on writing out a job description for the chair of the AV committee. I hope before the end of the year to be out of that chair and just an ordinary member of the AV team. Reason: I anticipate that in future years I will be tapped for other responsibilities around CH. I don’t mind doing a few AV events each month but the administrative part is getting tiresome after two? three? years.

Thursday 05/15/2025

My self-assigned project today was to clean up my pantry. This is a set of shelves and drawers to the right of my tiny kitchen area. It is old; the original 1960s woodwork from when the place was built. Here’s the pantry now, after cleaning and reorganizing.

It was really grungy and stained, and there was a lot of stuff that I had collected during the pandemic and no longer used. I scrubbed every surface and reorganized and threw a bunch of stuff out.

I was complaining about those drawers there, way back in 2019 when I first moved in. I noticed that the old wood of the three drawers had a nasty odor. I took the drawers down to the resident shop, sanded the interiors and coated them with varathane varnish (Day 251). I often think how I should pay Valet or somebody to rip them out and make nice builtins, but why.

Later I did some guitar work and some reading.

Wednesday 05/14/2025

Last night’s concert was fun, a bunch of high-school “merit scholars” (whatever that means) from the Community School of Music and Arts (which I’d never heard of), 13- to 18-year-olds, each performing some kind of solo, instrumental or vocal. All very skilled.

After the show I sat down and re-made the music concert video, to correct mis-spellings of two people’s names on the title cards.

First up today was a walk. Joanne is trying to establish a group walk on Wednesday mornings. This time the only other available walker didn’t show, so it was just us two. We went to the Baylands and had a nice 2-mile level walk. Very few bird species, just some seagulls and a couple of mallards.

After lunch I spent an hour practicing guitar and some songs. At 5 was time for the monthly 6th floor meeting. No big news. Then instead of joining the rest of the 6th floor at dinner, I instead had been invited by David Greene and Jane to eat with them and Barbara. Very pleasant dinner. David had long experience as a music journalist so I asked him about performance fees for amateur performances. Turns out he has a friend who is actually an attorney working in the intellectual property field. Based on what he’s heard this friend say, it’s not an issue. As long as nobody is getting paid and no admission is charged, nobody cares. The whole point of copyright and rights management and permissions is to protect the flow of money; no money, no concern.

At 7:30 we had an interesting lecture by a naturalist about biological mimicry. Good talk.

Tuesday 05/13/2025

Should have been the writers meeting this morning but something was wrong with the zoom link, nobody could get on. I took advantage to leave early for FOPAL where I did the usual post-sale triage of books that hadn’t sold. There were no donations to process because they hadn’t gotten around to distributing the donations that were held back before the sale weekend. There’s some disarray among the volunteers in that organization; I’m a little concerned. But I only see a corner of it.

Back home I decided to do some thinking and writing. A week ago Bert had stirred a pot with an email in which he suggested that several of the things we do are violations of copyright. He sent this to Sally, who is the current president of the Resident Association. He raised legitimate issues, although they are issues that have existed literally for decades without anybody complaining. Bert had to poke all the sleeping dogs.

Well for one issue: for years there’s been a tradition of showing an opera off DVD on Saturday a month. In the auditorium projected on the big screen. 20 or 30 opera fans show up. Of course technically this is a clear violation of copyright. That’s one of five similar or related issues, or sleeping dogs, that Bert had to poke.

So I wanted Sally to understand the details of this. Sally is a sharp cookie, a highly experienced administrator. (She’s only been president of three different colleges.) I am hoping she will figure out how to handle these issues and how to present them to our staff administrators, who are not aware (or seem not to be aware) of them. So I wrote a backgrounder, a survey of the different things that residents are in the habit of doing for decades that are technically violations of intellectual property law. I found a lot of good info and pulled it all together in a readable fashion, and sent it to her.

There’s a concert tonight, some school choir thing, which I think I will go to. Mind you, if they perform a song that is owned by ASCAP or BMI — and damn few songs are not — they should pay a performance fee. Except that music performed for educational purposes is exempt. Fine, around their school rehearsals. But this performance outside their school? Technically they should pay.

Monday 05/12/2025

Pretty much a day of being of service to others. Srsly. Resident Association meeting in the morning, I didn’t have much to do with that other than attending. Then I charged off down to FOPAL but for reasons, it was in a big mess after the sale weekend, and the boxes of donations, and anything else I would use, weren’t available. So I turned around and headed home, I’ll go back tomorrow or Wednesday.

After lunch I decided to tackle a long-standing problem of not being able to play DVDs or Blu-Ray discs on the 11th floor. It took an hour of debugging and analysis to figure out, but I solved the problem and now we can show movies there again.

Then I realized there was a video of a book talk that I should have edited and posted but had not, so I did that, which took the rest of the afternoon. I ate a sandwich in my room for supper. Not complaining, just reporting.

Sunday 05/11/2025

Usual Sunday morning frittering around. Picked up my sack supper — dining room taking the evening off for Mother’s Day. At 1:30 met with Joanne and we drove to the south side of Edgewood County Park and did a 3-mile hike. I had picked that destination hoping to see wildflowers, but the season has already advanced; there were few. A very nice walk anyway. Even though, halfway in, I stepped wrong and pulled a muscle in my right calf. Still sore now, 5 hours and 2 tylenol later.

Sixth floor met for picnic supper in our dining room. Nice.

Saturday 05/10/2025

Whoopee an uncommitted day on my calendar. In the morning I walked to Midtown for breakfast, and back. Three miles and a bit for the day.

Then I spent much of the rest of the day editing the video of the spring concert of last Wednesday. Including my own performance, here’s a link that goes directly to that. An hour and a half of that work was persuading the Midjourney AI to make a nice title card I could use between each act in the video.

I am seriously conflicted about my performance. Quite a few people praised me for it, nobody said anything bad. But the huge difference between what I hear in my head when I’m singing, and what I hear on the video… In my bedroom I can persuade myself that I’m pretty good, but my gosh from outside I am so far from any professional level of performance.

Anyway that was the day pretty much.

Friday 05/09/2025

Started the day with what has become our customary Friday morning walk to Toguy wn & Country, to shop Trader Joe’s and have coffee at Douce France. Back to CH in good time to make the Line Dance class, which is a darn good workout, frankly.

Had a quiet lunch in my room. Then at 1pm went to the auditorium to help set up for a memorial. I barely knew the guy being memorialized, Bruce Heister, maybe talked to him once. By all the reminiscences today he was super-organized, always planning and preparing, and his daughter Megan who organized the show certainly continued that tradition. With only a little help from me she had a zoom going with 25 or 30 remote people, two different slide shows shared on the screen, and a program of about 10 people sharing memories. It all went off smoothly and wrapped up in just over an hour.

That was about it for the day. I napped for a while, didn’t feel hungry so skipped dinner. Watched some TV, early bed.

Thursday 05/08/2025

At 10 I met with Bert on the 11th floor and we ganged up on the TV there. We managed to suppress the Samsung “Smart Hub” with its meaningless and intrusive home page, so the TV just starts up showing the Comcast tv programming. We played around with the Blu-Ray player but could not get it to play nice with the Yamaha receiver.

Then down to FOPAL to lead a private tour for 24 Educators from Monterey county. Took them all around, showed them the exhibits and the 1401 in action. Nice group.