Friday 11/21/2025

Less than 2 weeks remain to the end of this blog’s year. (Recall that it began with Day One on 12/2/2018.) So the seventh year is winding up. Am I a codger yet?

Took the customary Friday morning walk with Joanne, which has become a treasured ritual for both of us. After that I took an easy tech squad call, a Mac issue quickly solved by a simple change in the System Settings app.

At 11 the AI interest group met. We mainly talked about the earlier meeting with the folks from Stanford Robotics, and about how their goals don’t really align with ours: they have solutions they understand and want to promote; we have needs they don’t really have solutions for.

Spent the afternoon reading, playing guitar (badly; trying to learn new songs and I suck) and catching up on my youtube subscriptions.

Ate dinner my room, having the chicken tender and fries I brought back from yesterday’s restaurant lunch.

Thursday 11/20/2025

Today’s fun was for me and Joanne to drive to the City, to the de Young museum, to view the exhibit “Art of Manga“, and then to have lunch. Which we did, and it was very pleasant. The manga art is impressive but viewing acres of pen-and-ink cartoons with speech bubbles in Japanese, got a little wearing. Here’s a panorama of two of the 8 rooms, Joanne at extreme left.

I was disappointed that the artist of the one manga book I have read, Azumanga Daioh, was not represented among the featured artists.

Then we walked a few blocks over to Irving street and had lunch in the Foghorn Taproom. The food was good, and cheap, and we brought home extras for our respective lunches another day. It was cool, the N Judah stops directly in front of the restaurant, so I was watching it come and go from our table. Of course it isn’t green any more, and the wheels don’t shriek going around the bend at 8th, but such is progress.

Wednesday 11/19/2025

In the morning, Joanne had organized a hike with Joanne the lesser and Erika. We walked the Stanford Dish loop, 3.5 miles. I ended the day with 12,540 steps and 4.7 miles. Weather was perfect for a strenuous walk, overcast and breezy. And we saw the craziest sight:

This white Dish Network van came down the paved hiking path and turned up the service road to the giant dish. You maybe thought the Dish was for radio-astronomy? Seems like it’s for pulling in ESPNU for the campus maybe.

Had a nice nap after lunch. Then after supper we met up and drove to the Bing concert hall on campus to attend Morgan Freeman’s Blues Symphonic Experience. Which was… OK. Definitely not great. Some pretty good blues musicians on stage, backed by a classic string quartet (2 violins, viola, bass viol). A giant video screen above where Mr. Freeman, recorded, introduced each number, and where they showed a lot of various graphics. The sound mix was not good at all, too heavy on the bass, couldn’t hear the harmonica or the vocals; and the amplified string quartet didn’t add anything at all to the music IMHO. But the second half wasn’t bad.

Tuesday 11/18/2025

Massively overscheduled. First thing was to head out walking to the office of what might be my new doctor. This Dr. Chu, member of a group practice providing what is now called concierge medicine, old style family practice where you can get a next-day appointment, or if you are sick the doctor can come to your home to see you. There’s a price for that of course, you pay $500 per month to be a client. On Joanne’s recommendation I signed up for a “meet and greet” with Dr. Chu who gave a good impression, a confident and fatherly sort of guy who answered all my questions. He had a question about my insurance coverage, though, which I need to answer before the deal can go through. And of course the United Health Care website is down.

Back in time to do the cleanup for housekeeping day; then time for the writers meeting and of course I had nothing to contribute. I been busy, he whimpered. Then it was time to start the laundry which has to be done today because otherwise I’m out of socks. Grab some lunch while the washer runs, change loads, then go to the line dance class at 1:30.

Leave the line dance early at 1:55 to join the meeting of selected residents with the team from Stanford Robotics, giving them advice on what robots might or might not be able to do for us elders.

From that to the Car Free meeting at 3. From that back up to finish the laundry, folding and ironing and hanging up, then change pants, grab a hat and coat, and go join Joanne for dinner at 4:40. She is entertaining a long-time friend, Sue, who lives in Port Townsend but also has a place in SF, coming through to visit. We had a nice dinner at Pacific Catch in the shopping center, and then back to CH just in time to do this post, after which I am meeting them again to attend a movie in the auditorium — “The Sting” with Robert Redford.

Monday 11/17/2025

Yesterday Frank texted me a picture of 16 (sixteen!) boxes waiting in front of my section and I determined I would clear them out today. Joanne needed the car this morning, so despite threatened rain showers I headed out on foot at 8:00 and walked the 3 miles to FOPAL. There I worked from 9 to 3. About 2:30 Joanne texted, offering to come and get me, which I accepted. Still I have over 10,000 steps and 4 miles for the day.

Back to CH in time for Rhonda’s Open Meeting, where she talked about some numbers from the Leading Age conference, and the plans for two long-desired projects. One was to reduce the stress level of the in-house fire alarms, by reducing the volume from the horn in the ceiling of each unit, and the brightness of the strobe light ditto. This was a lengthy project because it required getting the Palo Alto Fire department to agree, and permits to be written. But now it is finally going to happen next month.

Project two the rebuild of the central 3 elevators, also long planned. A $2M project to begin around March and take several months.

The numbers from Leading Age were the anticipated growth in the demand for Senior Living units, totalling (if I remember) about 150K new units needed per year. The largest number of new units ever added in one year was 50K, and the current rate of building new units is around 20K per year. Think that over.

To me this makes it certain that, A, Channing House will have full occupancy forever; B, prices will go steeply up as wealthy seniors chase a shrinking pool of units — so if you are thinking about it, the sooner you buy in the better; C, if you can find a way to invest in the construction of senior living facilities, that is about the surest possible investment you can make.

Ate by myself reading a book, which was enjoyable.

Sunday 11/16/2025

Sunday rituals, plants, puzzle. Joanne called, her printer was misbehaving again. It’s an HP and she had replaced its color cartridge and the printer wouldn’t talk to the cartridge. We fiddled with it and finally, since she had bought two, just went for the next one and that worked. But the experience proved useful later in the day.

Drove down to the museum and led the noon tour. Nice bunch of people, good tour. Back by 1:30 which let me actually have lunch, because on Sundays now, we have a fancy brunch spread which they keep open until 2pm.

Napped, fiddled with this and that, then about 5:30 another person called me in a panic. She needed to print something and her printer wouldn’t print anything. Normally I would say, call the tech squad number and leave a message, but she was in a rush and I had worked on the same printer a few days ago on a legit tech squad call. And I’m a sucker. So after eating supper I went to her place and, heh heh, diagnosed the mysterious problem.

She would print from her computer and the printer would move the paper and you could hear the mechanism going back and forth as normal, but the paper came out completely blank. It was an HP printer. And she mentioned that she had just replaced the ink cartridges. Because I had seen that process earlier in the day, I remembered how each new cartridge comes with a little diaper wrap of green tape you are supposed to take off. I popped the cartridges out and sho’ nuff, she had not peeled off the green tape. Pulled the tape off, pushed the cartridges back in place, ta-daaa it prints just perfect. If I hadn’t seen the HP cartridge at Joanne’s place earlier, I wonder how long it would have taken me to figure that one out.

Saturday 11/15/2025

Morning, I walked to Town & Country, more or less for the hell of it. Did some reading. After lunch, more reading, played a little guitar (pretty much have the intro to “Proud Mary” down now). Read some more. Found out about a concert coming up in January and bought tix. Emailed a few people asking for suggestions on how I can recruit an apprentice video editor.

So, Frankenstein. Some elements were world-class, some were not. The acting was generally, good, especially Jacob Elordi as the monster. Visual effects: absolutely wonderful. The props, especially Victor’s early experimental partial bodies, and every element of the elaborately dressed sets — terrific. The things I assume were CGI, especially the wolves and the human bodies being hurled and tossed — terrific. The ice-bound ship, which I assume was part practical set and part CGI, was lovely. All these visual elements had rich, deep, credible detail.

Well, one visual detail was amusing to any fan of The Lord of the RIngs. At an early point Victor is given possession of a decrepit tower to use for his experiments. The first time I saw this tall weathered stone tower, I thought Orthanc! It was a visual double of Saruman’s tower in the LOTR movies. I kind of suspect del Toro might have done that on purpose, giving the evil scientist the lair of Tolkein’s evil sorcerer to work in.

So what’s your problem, David? Two issues. One, Science. Especially simple physics. So many things were shown that just could not be, like the monster moving that thousand-ton sailing ship. I don’t care how strong he is; if a massive vessel is raised up, there is an equal and opposite force down, which, assuming he was strong enough to support it with his body, would then be pushing down on the ice through his feet. In other words, he would have sunk into the ice before the ship moved an inch. Or when he helpfully pushed large wooden fence posts into the soil just by leaning on them. No. I’ve set fence posts. Strength is not an issue; it’s that he would have to weigh tons to be able to push down that hard without his feet coming off the ground. And all the “electrical” paraphernalia Victor builds and employs, the glowing glass cylinders that represent “batteries” and so forth. None of that made any sense at all.

Second issue is moral. (Spoilers here) At two different times, Victor saves his own ass by blaming the monster for a crime that Victor himself committed. At the end, Victor and the monster reconcile and the monster forgives his “father”, but for me the moral scales don’t balance out; Victor gets off free for two really cowardly betrayals.

Friday 11/14/2025

Took a morning walk with Joanne. Then puttered around until lunch. Following lunch we got in Fred with Lois, and went to the book sale at the Menlo Park Library. I bought a couple of books of poetry.

Back home I took a tech squad call to Susan whose new Macbook I helped install a few weeks back. It had developed a black area on the screen which on close examination was obviously a failure of the LCD screen. Diagnosis, warranty repair time.

After supper I participated in a sing-along session in the lobby. And so to bed.

Thursday 11/13/2025

Got a lot of stuff done. In the morning I compiled the video of last night’s talk on the Milk Pail. This was somewhat different from the usual job where I have the cloud recordings from Zoom, which exactly sync the display of the slides with the time in the talk when the slides are shown. Here I had the video recording off our cameras, and a separate folder of four short videos and about 25 pictures that the guy had shown. I had to drop those into the timeline and move them around to the right places. It took about 3 hours to get it all assembled but it was done by lunch time.

At lunch someone commented that there was a new technology for assistive hearing devices, replacing the T-coil that we use to send audio to people’s hearing aids. The person didn’t remember any details but before supper I was able to find it: Auracast, an extension to the Bluetooth standard, for broadcasting audio over radio to a whole room. I read up on it, then wrote up an explainer email saying we need to get ready for this, and sent it to the appropriate people after supper.

Between lunch and later I worked on selecting and printing some pictures to put in my hall gallery, which hasn’t been refreshed in months.

Now I am going down to Patty’s room where with Joanne and Mildred we will watch the new Frankenstein movie.

Wednesday 11/12/2025

Joanne had chosen the Baylands for the Wednesday hike. Erika and Martha signed on so we were a group of four. Just about 2 miles on a very dim cloudy day.

Steve, retired owner of the locally-famous Milk Pail restaurant, and the presenter for tonight’s talk, came at 5pm. Kass was free fortunately so we three sat around trying to make sense of his collection of pictures and videos, getting them all set up on my old Macbook, the one that works with the auditorium projector. Then dinner. Gloria, who sponsored Steve for this talk, had reserved a big table. I thought she would have already had a guest list set up but no, she was just winging it so I got included in the table.

So the talk went ok. We did not use zoom, but I recorded video off the cameras and will try to put together some kind of record of it.