Tuesday and Wednesday are filled with meetings at work. This is boring. I don't enjoy this at all. At one point I help a co-worker move chairs and get her laptop plugged in - a trivial act of kindness to which she replies "Thank you". Later in the meeting most people have left for a program all-hands meeting, but this co-worker stays because she has to make a presentation and I stay because I want to contribute and I want to help her (if possible). She looks at me and wonders why I am still at the meeting and not at the program all-hands. I say, "Because I'm you're friend". To which she seriously replies "You're not my friend". I don't say anything, but I'm actually hurt by this comment and it somewhat bugs me for the rest of the day and into Wednesday. On Tuesday night I help Person Ti_Ca with taxes and he's paid only $48 in US taxes (because he only worked a few weeks in 2013) but he's getting a refund of $300. How can this be? And on Wednesday after work I get in another heavy session with the weights and though my shoulder does not hurt, I ice it afterwards anyway. And later I tear apart the RC car connector and start to re-solder it for my own purposes.
I start Saturday with a good ride down to the old yacht club and back. After a shower I send my passport off to be renewed (it had been put through the laundry, had no pages left, and will expire in a year), buy some groceries, go car shopping with Person Ti_Ca, stop at the library to return and checkout more books, and then stop in at a local high school stadium with a big empty parking lot. I give Person Ti_Ca his first lesson in how to drive a manual transmission. Later I relax with the Los Angeles Kings ice hockey game and some reading and some television.
I get to work on Monday near 5 am to finish a few things before our trip to a Northrop Grumman subsidiary just south of Santa barbara. We're supposed to have four in our carpool, but when to drop out, the driver says, "Let's go to my house, pick up my motorcycle, and ride up". So we make the ride in good time and have a reasonable meeting with the subsidiary. Afterwards we both head back towards our home campus and then I ride on home without stopping. I have enough hours in today and riding up towards Santa Barbara on a near race motorcycle is hard on the old body. When I get home I relax for a bit and notice that the neighbors are installing the vinyl fence that I told them not to install. ("You'll get three years down the road and tear it down and put up a real wooden fence jointly with me anywa.") And they've installed the fence so that I will not have any room to trim back my side bushes - the fence is more or less against the bushes. I get in a good, heavy session with the weights to work off stress and to mend the body from the long motorcycle ride. After a quick shower I help Person Ti_Ca with homework and watch the Moto3 race where my favorite (younger) rider makes a horrible start but works his way up to challenge for the lead with two laps to go and gets pushed down to 5th in a wild scramble finish. After this excitement where I'm yelling, "Come on Alex. You can do it. Get there! Get there!", I have to put off watching the Moto2 race until Tuesday because I'm worn out.
On Tuesday after work I ride the motorcycle and meet up with Person Ti_Ca to look at a used Mazda3 hatchback. It's a clean car and runs well and the people selling it are nice. Should we trust them? When I get home I relax for a bit and watch the Moto2 race with some good action. Later in the evening it looks and sounds as if Person Ti_Ca is going to be giving me the silent treatment (because I bought wine from the grocery store), so late at night when I'm usually going to sleep I go walking for an hour to sort through things. When I get back home Person Ti_Ca is not giving me the silent treatment.
After a blah day of work on Thursday, partly due to not being able to sleep on Wednesday night from 2 am until 4:30 am, I go on home and lift weights. Since I lifted yeasterday, I drop the weights just a bit and do as many repetitions as possible for a great workout. I'm supposed to meet Person T_U at a sportsbar near where we live to watch the UCLA and Florida basketball game. But Person T_U gets to the sportsbar early and says it is too loud so I ride a bicycle over to his house to watch. (I'm not a basketball fan, but I should watch at least one game every ten years or so.) It's a see-saw game where Florida gets ahead and UCLA almost catches up and it goes this way the entire game. But Florida pulls away and wins. Person T_U is disappointed. Late at night I get back on the bicycle and ride home.
I watch qualifying for the Malaysian Grand Prix in ever-changing wet/dry/wet conditions before going out for a ride on the mountain bicycle. On today's ride I'm going the same direction as a latino man and his son, so I ride with the man for a while (as we leave the son behind). We've seen each other riding many times before but have always been going in the opposite direction, but today we are headed in the same direction. Luis, the father. has been in the US from Mexico for 10 years but doesn't speak much English. So I get to practice my Spanish with him. Eventually I get to my turn around point and I tell him I him I'll be returning home and he turns with me to go back and find his son. His son, Gustavo, is 11 years old and rides once a week also. After the ride Person Ti_Ca drive to Alhambra and Lakewood and look at cars to buy and then have lunch as Souplantation. I get down for a nap and then drive to El Segundo for an informal retirement dinner for a co-worker who has just retired. And then I get home for sleep.
Monday is a reasonable day at work and I make progress on some simulations. Just after a meeting a co-worker, who I've spoken with over the phone and exchanged emails with, intorduces himself and asks me some questions about work and actions from just before Christmas. I'm completely drawing a blank on the work and it takes my co-worker refreshing my memory with some charts. My mind must have been somewhere else during that week before Christmas. When I get home I have a good workout with heavy weights, trim the roses, spot water some bare spots on the lawn, and help Person Ti_Ca qith some homework. Person Ti_Ca has lost a memory stick of homework and a business project, but I'm able to recreate historical stock data for Person Ti_Ca in no time.