Tuesday 10/07/2025

The writers group prompt this week was, “a friend who influenced your life.” I wrote a couple of paragraphs about how Scott redirected my life, by suggesting I should get IBM to transfer me from working in the City to the Palo Alto Development Center. Looking back, I cannot imagine what my life would have been if I had not taken him up on that. There I learned to program, and met Marian, and got married, and got to spend 2+ years in England. It was in England, working with IBM people from all over Europe, that I discovered I had a skill for technical writing, doing documentation clear enough that a bunch of Swedes and Britishers and Italians could understand. If I had stayed in the city, a completely different life would have ensued.

Got my laundry done in just over 2 hours. At 2pm I remembered to call the surgeon’s office. They had previously told me that I would have my cyst drained on 10/20, but didn’t know the time. Finally we connected and I learned the time, 1pm, check-in at 12:30 that day. OK.

The Lee Center, our assisted-living section, took over the auditorium today at 2 for an Oktoberfest. They had brought in an actual German-style band, with brass instruments, wearing lederhosen and so on. Served pretzels and such. Non-alcoholic beer. I stopped by long enough to have a pretzel, but wasn’t that interested.

Speaking of technical writing, we were to go and hear the Queen of technical writers, Mary Roach, talk about her new book, Replaceable You, about the science of replacing body parts. I brought the car up at 6 and Joanne hopped in and we drove off to Kepler’s. I haven’t been into Keplers in a while; it is doing fine. Just walking through the store to get to the place where the chairs were set up for the talk, I saw so many books I wanted to stop and look at. Ms. Roach was fun, she’s a lively character with lots of stories to tell.

Monday 10/06/2025

Book talk event at 11. And the projector quit working. Why? Nobody knows. Fortunately Ian didn’t really need his slides, so it went alright.

Then down to FOPAL to set up for the upcoming sale weekend. Got back at 3:30, and next thing was the Poetry Out Loud group at 4pm. I read a Sylvia Plath poem about being a hospital patient, “Tulips”.

Right after supper, a concert by Steve Gill and friends. He and they have appeared here regularly, every few months. Tonight doing a salute to Willie Nelson. OK.

Sunday 10/05/2025

After watering the plants and doing the puzzle I thought about the problem of storing stuff in the green room and I decided to go and look at the Container Store. I had looked at their web site but it isn’t the same. As an exercise in being car-free, I took the #21 bus, which picks up right in front of CH and drops right at the middle of the shopping center.

I walked all the aisles looking for a practical storage container that would fit a 17″ deep shelf and a row of which would look ok, and bought one, a gray canvas one. It was less than $20 so why not try it. The next #21 bus was 45 minutes out so I called a Lyft to get back. In time to get the tail end of our fancy new Sunday Brunch service.

At 3:30 I met with Joanne and we hopped in Fred and drove 5 minutes to the campus to attend a concert at the Bing auditorium. This was Roseanne Cash, with her accompanist and husband, guitarist John Leventhal. We talked later about how convenient it must be to be able to tour as a couple. Nobody has to stay home alone for weeks, and she doesn’t have to pay a touring band either, as Leventhal is such a great guitarist he is all the backing she needs.

Afterwards we drove into downtown (another 5 minute drive) and had dinner at Tamarine, a very nice Vietnamese restaurant. Swell evening all around.

Saturday 10/04/2025

Just took care of little stuff today. Did some accounting, the monthly record of the nest egg and pay a credit card bill. Make out a check to the annual Channing House Appreciation Fund drive — all the tips we are not allowed to give the housekeepers and cooks and servers each day, rolled up in one check.

Then out for a walk with Joanne, deposit a check at the bank, then have coffee, and I gave her a birthday present, this being her birthday. Then back to my room and spend more time shopping for storage units for the green room.

After lunch I went to the music practice room and practiced guitar for an hour, yay me. That was about ti.

Friday 10/03/2025

Back to our custom, Joanne and I had a nice walk this morning. Then at 10:30 I met with Helen, who has good design sense, in the Green Room to talk about how to manage storage in a not-ugly way. There are two sturdy shelves, about 6 feet above the floor, about 8 feet long, one on each side of the room. They are 17 inches deep. So we envision a row of similar storage bins or boxes or such. Now to find them. I spent an excruciatingly boring hour going through the web sites of the Container Store, IKEA, and Target, and didn’t see what I want.

Basically need a box that is 16 by 16, and maybe 12 or 14 inches deep. A line of those down the shelves would look good and be useful. It would help a lot if there was some kind of label area on the end, or a clip, where you could note the contents.

After a quick lunch I went down to FOPAL because Frank had texted that there were 6 boxes waiting for me. That was Thursday. When I got there, I found 9. I processed most of them. Got back about 4.

Had dinner with Craig and Diane and Gwen.

Thursday 10/02/2025

In the morning I did some AV tech stuff. One, I got some more stuff out of the green room. Then I sat down at the AV desk in the auditorium and found that the microphone drawer was in disarray. I spent 20 minutes getting everything out and organized. Then thought about a problem that appeared with our new sound board: that on the new board you had to set the input gain just above 0 or you got feedback. I remembered that the signal to the board came from the wireless receivers, which are in a rack backstage, and the receivers have an output gain setting. So I set all the receivers’ gain down and et voila, the mics are right when the controls are in the middle.

After lunch I drove down to the museum and led a tour for a group of 25 programmers, mostly age 30 and below, from the company Databricks. They were fun, interested. Also young. I am talking about what is, to me, very recent history, like the beginning of the web, in 1993? and realize that some of my audience wasn’t born then. Alright, as your parents.

At 7:30 we had a jazz concert by singer Thu Ho, accompanied by top-notch musicians, including pianist Adam Klipple. Nice show, good songs and music.

Wednesday 10/01/2025

First event was a Wednesday hike organized by Joanne. The usual five, her and me, Joanne the Lesser, Erika, and Martha. We went to the Arastradero preserve where we have hiked a few previous times. As we went up (and up and up) Joanne the Lesser commented on how I was not breathing as hard as she remembered from the first time we took that hike. Apparently slightly increased walking and also climbing stairs to the 6th floor has had an effect. Yay me.

Through the middle of the day I was working with various people on getting stuff out of the Green Room. A major win: Nancy of the Treasure Trove had already disposed of a complete rack of used clothing that was stored there. I thanked her and asked if it was ok to get rid of the two tired old clothes racks that were left, she said fine, so I did. We progress. Also worked with Mary Beth on persuading her that the Treasure Trove should fund a simple upgrade to the AV desk in the auditorium.

Patty had organized a dinner for Phil, a 6th floor neighbor who today moved to the 8th floor. She invited me plus Joanne and Sally who are the floor reps for the 8th floor. Nice dinner with nice people. Afterward we went up and viewed Phil’s new apartment which is very, very nice, nicer than mine for sure. A large one-bedroom in the corner, which is like mine, but with nicer carpet and some really fine built-in kitchen and office fittings.

Tuesday 09/30/2025

Spent the day communicating with people, mostly by email. Tidied the room for the housekeeper. Maryanne came by with her handwritten piece for the writers group. I had agreed to read it for her. Her vision is very bad and she has a lot of trouble reading her pieces, although they are well-written, detailed reminiscences. The prompt this week was “Freedom” and she wrote on the freedom of having gotten tenure as a teacher; how she was limited and constrained her first three years, then as a tenured (I didn’t know that high schools had such a thing as tenure) teacher she could bust out and teach Dickens and such classics her own way.

Composed emails to the people who are responsible for the boxes of stuff in the green room, proposing a meeting. I had a notion for how they could be better stored but I needed help. Later in the day, one of them, Donna, wrote back that in fact they had gotten a promise of a cage space in the basement for their stuff. That was very welcome news. More emails to try to make that happen.

Attended the Appreciation Fund meeting at 2pm. I had been asked to do what I did before, take an audio transcript, run it through an AI to generate meeting minutes. I did that; the newest version of Claude did a very nice job.

More emails to set up meetings with various people. Finally it was supper time and I decided to be a hermit, and had a sandwich and tea in my room.

Monday 09/29/2025

As Joanne was using Fred to take some of her buddies out to lunch, I had to get to FOPAL by other means. So I walked. It’s a bit under 3 miles (3.7 for the day). Only two boxes to process, but some interesting stuff. Anyway, I took a Lyft back.

At 2pm the Channing House Drama Club — the group who took lessons and directions from a professional and put on a program of short plays and skits back last January. The professional who they employed then has moved on. Today they met with Sarah Dean, the artistic director of the Pear Theater, and her choice of a person to guide the Drama Club, Efsun Sweet. She’s a nice woman who has coached drama at many levels, middle school, college, but never seniors.

I don’t intend to get on stage with them, way too much work, rehearsing and learning lines and all. But I will probably do their AV as before, and today I wanted to show the pros around our stage and green room and such. I was hoping they would agree with me that a certain collection of old scenery flats were junk and could be trashed. Alas they did not, but thought they could be useful. So darn, they have to stay.

Practiced a little guitar, did some desk work, whatever.

Sunday 09/28/2025

Channing House dining services have started a new thing, a Sunday Brunch service, a buffet, more like a smorgasbord layout, many choices of food. I missed it last week, but this week had made a date with Joanne. We got together at 11:30 and went in, piled our plates, started a table and were joined by Ellen and Prue.

Afterwards we sat in the lobby and reconciled our spending on Fred for this quarter, as per our car-sharing agreement. Because she’d paid for insurance and new floor mats, and I’d only bought gas a couple of times and one car wash, I ended up writing a chunky little check to her. The deal is working quite well, although talking over our schedules for next week, there was a bit of an conflict on Monday. Resolved by me deciding to take other means down to FOPAL.

At 1 I drove Fred down to the museum and led the 2pm public tour. This was one of those remarkable times when people just appeared magically. At 1:58 I was passing the time of day with one person, and the lobby looked empty. By 2:02 I had a group of over 15 waiting to start. I don’t know where they come from.

Quiet afternoon and evening followed.