The Friday visit to Dr. L goes well and, except for the start of a sore throat, he is pleased with the previous week of antibiotics and catabolic steroids. His last instruction before I leave is no running for another week or so and only light lifting.
Friday night at 7:30 pm, after I have indeed lifted weights lightly, I receive a telephone call and soon I'm on my way to Joe's apartment. We struggle, we push, we twist, and we swear, but we soon have Joe's couch down two flights of stairs and into my truck for delivery to a friend. ("Great Ray, no heavy lifting.") We get to Joe's friend's apartment a few blocks away and now we're struggling, twisting, pushing, and swearing as we try to get the couch up two flights of stairs and into his friend's apartment. A friend is visiting the recipients of the couch and after introductions are made, I say to the friend, "I know you from somewhere". And he responds, without missing a beat, with "Fire Island". And we smile knowingly and make idle chitchat.
Saturday I get out for a good bicycle ride with the neighbor. We head up to the dam, cross over, and come down the other trail. It's about 40 miles - a bit short of that - but close. I am very tired after the week of antibiotics and catabolic steroids and the sore throat, which is getting worse, but I feel good.
On Saturday afternoon I'm on the R1 ("Fastest production motorcycle on the planet","Winner of the open class shootout", and "The sexiest bike ever..." - Superbike Magazine) on my way to my contact at Boeing for her 30th birthday. There are other Boeing people there and I finally meet a person or two that I have known via telephone for years but never actually met face to face. It is a good party and I continually sneak around and take digital pictures of the participants.
Later, after a number of telephone calls, I'm on my way to K-Town to visit Person J_VKPI. Traffic is bad, so I exit the freeway in East LA and take Cesar Chavez over towards downtown and back over to the 101. By this time my throat is getting very sore, so we stop at a drugstore and buy throat lozenges. As we exit the store there's a panhandler asking for change. I offer him, instead, a throat lozenge and before you know it I'm popping one out of the blister pack for him. Person J_VKPI can hardly contain himself, but does, until we get back in the truck. "Why did you give him a throat lozenge?" And I respond, as if it happens everyday, with "Maybe he has a sore throat too but can't afford the drugs."
We head over to Westwood to try and catch a movie. On the way at the intersection of Wilshire and La Cienega in a closed showroom is a 1999 Ferrari Formula 1 car as driven by Michael Schumacher to the World Championship. I pull over and show Person J_VKPI all of the intricacies of the car as I drool against the showroom glass window. Eventually we continue on to Westwood. But Westwood is dead - there are very few people there. And we have missed all of the movies except for relatively late ones. We decide to head back to K-Town to a Thai restaurant on Hollywood Blvd. I decide to take Sunset from Westwood over towards K-Town and I take the curvey section of Sunset...um...fairly aggressively. Person J_VKPI is wondering why I am driving so fast and why I am pushing so hard around the blind corners, so I start narrating: "These long sweeping corners were well-suited to the old turbo engines - build the boost pressure up early so that by the time that you were down to the apex you were getting a huge kick in the back. You could just walk away from everyone down the next straight." and "See this guy ahead struggling to make the corner. Watch me stuff him down the inside." and "This one's a slow corner so you can easily get power oversteer out of the corner and it happens slow enough so that you can catch it." Finally Person J_VKPI says, "The speed limit here is 35mph around the corners. You're doing 65." And I turn to him and say, "That's 35 mph per person in the vehicle. I'm doing 35 and you're doing 30. Besides, you should see how I would be taking these curves on the motorcycle."
We make it safely to the Thai restaurant, have a reasonable dinner, and I'm walking back in my front door near midnight. I turn on the living room light and find Nopey curled up on the loveseat in between the remote controls for the satellite receiver and the amplifier. With his bad hips how did he get up on the loveseat? Well, I guess the fireworks are that scary. I make him get down and I shoo him back to the kitchen. I'll also be afraid to look at next month's satellite TV bill for fear of what pay-per-view shows Nopey ordered and watched.
Sunday I get up with a terrible sore throat and the start of a fever. I watch a motorcycle race and am back in bed by 11am. I get up to watch some of a car race and I'm back in bed by 2pm. Laying in bed with a throat so sore that I can barely swallow, I say to myself, "This is pathetic." And so I grab myself by the scruff of the neck and get out of bed. I lift weights lightly, jump on the mountain bicycle for a slow, sunny ride in the mid day, and take a refreshing shower. Person J_VKPI calls and says that we won't be rollerblading today, so I go on my own.
I always thought that at approximately 300,000 people, Long Beach is a fairly good-sized city. Lot's of people so that awkward meetings with people are highly unlikely. I was wrong.
It's 5pm on a sunny Sunday and I have just got on the path near the beach where people go to rollerblade. I look over to my right and see somebody that I know. We both wave to each other. It is Person Roy. I go over and pretty soon I am dragged into teaching Wendy, a friend, and Person Roy how to rollerblade. At first both of them hang on to me for dear life as they learn the balance and comfort zone of rollerblading. It probably makes a very interesting scene. But after a while I'm able to let go of each and they, more or less, get the idea of rollerblading. After about an hour of the rollerblade instruction and rollerblading on my own, I head for home. The throat seems a bit better, though I am physically wiped out from the day's activities.