Monday 10/07/2024

I had two hours before running an event, the monthly book talk, at 10, and I took care of a bunch of little shit. Made out the check for the annual staff appreciation fund and put it in the contribution box. Paid my comcast bill. Wrote another check for an excursion next week. Stuff.

The speaker for book talk was Dylan Penningroth, who gave an interesting talk. New AV team member Richard shadowed me watching how a zoom meeting was done.

From lunchtime until 4 I edited the video of the event of last Friday, the presentation on ballot propositions for this election.

At 3:55 I broke off to attend, for the first time, the Poetry Out Loud group, who meet to read their favorite poems out loud. I read one by Byron. I learned about some other poets I had not heard of.

At 5 it was time for the monthly mixer dinner. You go to the dining room right at 5:15 and as you come in, you pick a numbered tag from a hat, and that is the table you sit at. As usual, I ended up eating with people I knew, but one of them, Judy, was someone I had never eaten a meal with, so there’s that.

Back upstairs to finish editing and uploading the video.

Sunday 10/06/2024

Usual Sunday morning. After lunch, put on my red docent shirt and went to the museum to lead a tour. Had a big group, 25 or so, and they all stuck with me, so nice.

At 7:30 Stew, who organized the Folk Fest of a couple weeks ago, invited everyone who performed to the 4th floor lounge where he showed the 2003 movie, A Mighty Wind, a spoof of the folk singing days. I think I saw it when it was new, but didn’t really remember any of it. It’s really pretty funny, recommend it.

Saturday 10/05/2024

I had a nice walk over to Cafe Zoe. Got back to CH just in time for the 10am quarterly meeting of the volunteer Tech Squad. We talked about various consistent issues like Comcast nonexistent service.

At 4 I went up to 11 to set up for a party that resident Paul Pinsky is having for his large extended family. He on very very short notice requested the use of the mobile tv to show pictures to the party. Like on Friday, for Saturday. I set up the TV and a mic and went away as the party was starting to assemble. Later, about 7:30, I went up expecting to put everything away, but no, there was still like 35 people sitting around tables eating and yakking. So I’ll have to go put stuff away tomorrow morning.

In my mail cubby after supper I found a paper event planning form from resident Gloria, asking for AV support for an event on Thursday night, 5 days away. Some kind of lecture, unknown subject. I decided that I am not available, and put it out on the AV mailing list if anyone else feels like taking the event. I am tired of this last minute shit.

Friday 10/04/2024

Took a short walk then killed time until 11 when I left for the Museum to lead the noon tour. The parking lot was very full and I thought there’d be a lot of people, but it was all for a big event in the rental space upstairs. I had only 6 people on my tour.

At 3pm I took a tech squad call. A resident had forgotten the admin password to his iMac and couldn’t log in. This was the first time I used the procedure to use “Recovery Mode” of MacOS to reset a password. I think it works differently for different models — at least, there are variations in the different online websites that tell how to do it — but on this iMac it worked slick and easy.

There was to be a presentation from the League of Women Voters on the state propositions at 7:30. I had it in the AV schedule as simple mics-only. I was eating supper quietly when Kass, who was down for running the event, slid into the next seat and said, “Ellen says she wants Zoom and has slides.” So instead of attending the presentation and maybe leaving early, I was helping Kass set up and run it.

This was not easy as one of the presenters was not prepared. A key part of a zoom event with slides, is that the presenter with the slides needs to join the zoom meeting in progress and share their screen. This presenter arrived late, about 7:25 for a 7:30 show. Her laptop needed its power supply, it wasn’t charged up or doesn’t hold a charge, I don’t know, but anyway it has to be plugged in, which is OK but I have to show her where the plug is in the floor by the podium. Then she couldn’t get logged in. To her own laptop. I was dreading what I could see would be a long clusterfuck trying to coach her through how to actually join a zoom meeting, and share her screen, but at that point the other presenter said, you have it on a stick, right? So she produced a memory stick which I grabbed and stuck into my own personal laptop, and signed in to the meeting and shared my screen and there we were, all set to go at only 7:40.

The same presenter somehow couldn’t get comfortable with the over-the-ear mic we gave her, she was holding the mic in her hand, finally we handed her a real hand-held mic.

Amateurs. In the end the presentation was pretty clear and I understood the props better, as did most in the audience. There were very few questions after. So it was ok in the end.

Thursday 10/03/2024

Took what should have been Wednesday’s walk today, 8am, ahead of the warm temps forecast. Then did the monthly check of the accounts that comprise the Nest Egg. Despite paying $8K/month to Channing House, as well as other disbursements, the Nest Egg is almost 1% larger than it was last year at this time. So I’m not going broke anytime soon.

Printed up six big pics of Tower Bridge and put them on my outside gallery. That completes the Thames Bridges series that I have now shown twice. Next month I will put up something completely different.

Wednesday 10/02/2024

Did the laundry. Puttered around with pictures. Puttered around playing the guitar. I’m thinking I want a better guitar; I may go over to Gryphon Instruments and try some out. Bored with the CH dinner menu; took the car and went out for a gourmet treat — In’n’Out Burger and Shake.

I’m a dork.

Tuesday 10/01/2024

I had written an essay for the writers group several days ago, unlike my usual practice of doing it in the two hours before the meeting. See last Friday, 5.301. So I read it and it was nicely received. One other essay was really good, far better than mine, Susan’s wonderful description of the sound of the Good Humor truck when she was five.

After lunch I met with two people from Prime Fiduciary. The Heritage Circle committee is having them in next Tuesday to talk about fiduciaries, and this was a rehearsal so the two presenters could get used to our setup. It was a very useful, productive rehearsal.

Monday 09/30/2024

Took the standard walk, first time in a week, and it went fine.

Then cruised down to FOPAL where I found 4 boxes of donations, but this donation was of unusually high quality, so where I’d normally send half to the bargain room straight off, this time I only sent about a third, and it took 2:30 to the good stuff processed and shelved.

Evening, there was yet another candidate meeting, two city council candidates. One was Ann Cribbs, who I sort of know from way back, 98 or so, when she was the founder of the ABL. And she was here this year (5.229) giving us a talk on the Olympics.She’ll be fine, I’ll vote for her. The other was George Lu, and he presented himself well also. But the meeting was long and boring and I left before it was over.

Sunday 09/29/2024

In the morning I spent some time playing with the pics I took at the farmers market with the iPhone 16 yesterday. That camera is really, really good. Also I gave them funny titles: gallery.

At 1pm I brought the car around to take part in the three-car car-pool to the Pear theater). There were all told 15 CH residents that have season tix to the Pear and all use the same day (second Sunday) of the run. We comprised about a third of the audience.

The play was Once on this Island, apparently a well known musical that has had multiple Broadway stagings, and somebody reminisced that her granddaughter’s high school put it on. It’s nice. Not riveting, but nice. Doesn’t really have an ending. But the staging was unusual. The scene is a Caribbean island. They did it in the round, with audience on 4 sides, and in the middle the set consisted of an area about 20 by 30 feet square, piled with about 4 inches of beach sand. The actors were barefoot and everything happened on the sand, dancing singing, etc.

Saturday 09/28/2024

Nothing much on the schedule today until 5pm. I started with a nice walk to Mme. Collete’s coffee shop, then through the saturday farmers market taking pictures of fruit with the new iPhone (gallery).

The date at 5 was to the retirement celebration of Marshall Serwitz and Bob Sullivan, the financial advisors we went with sometime in the late 90s. A couple years ago they began a transition, selling their practice to Cerity Partners, a larger firm. Now the two original guys are completely out, and they invited their old clients to a party at the Los Altos Hills Golf & Country Club, which it turns out is just as posh as it sounds.

I put on my best clothes for this, including my sport coat jacket. I looked quite distinguished, I thought. Which was a good call, because when I got there I found 100 or so people dressed up as nicely or nicer than me. Quite a distinguished looking crowd — of strangers. Well, I knew Bob and Marshall, and said a brief “Hi” to them, and I chatted with Howard and Pat and a couple more people from their office that I recognized.

Then I found myself in my least favorite environment, a crowd of people I don’t know. I did have a conversation with a nice couple for a few minutes. Then I found out the schedule: there was a buffet line, and tables set for at least 150 people, and we were going to have dinner, and then there would be speeches around 7pm. Yeah, no. I had a coke and circulated a couple of times around the floor, and then I ducked out and went home. Late supper at CH.