Tuesday and Wednesday are also very hot days in Long Beach with temperatures at 95F. I make good progress at work and then do what I can to stay cool at home. On Tuesday it's extra hot and I'm lazy so I just check the fluids on the Yamaha YZF-R1 and then do some work programming simulations at home as Person Ti_Ca goes off to take a statistics midterm. I also drink some Airborne vitamin C drink on Tuesday because I feel something coming on.
I have one of those desks at work that allows one to either sit or stand and work, so on Thursday I put it up, turn on some house music, put on rave beads, and start dancing as I'm working away. I try to draw people into my little rave during the workday, but nobody seriously obliges. But I do use the moving around to stay energized despite soemthing coming on and I am productive at work.
Friday is a blah day but I try to make progress at work. WHen I get home I lift weights and though they are the same weights as Monday and Wednesday, today I struggle makign the lifts. And afterwards my ebergy level is dropping sharply as I mow the front lawn and trim the roses. And a characteristic sore spot in my mouth has made its presence felt (which is what happens when I'm feeling under the weather).
On Saturday I sleep all the way until 7 pm and stay in bed until 7:20 - again I've missed a ride with the Long Beach Cyclery group. But I'm out the door by 7:40 for a two hour mountain bicycle ride and I actually feel quite strong after the first few miles. The first few miles were ugly to say the least. When I get home I run a couple of erands and now I'm down to "almost collapsing" at any minute, so I watch the qualifying session for F1 from Singapore and see Person Ti_Ca and his friends off to eat and socialize. I keep my distance from all of them in case what I have is contagious. And in the afternoon I get down for about a 90 minute nap. Hopefully the slow Saturday will kill off the cold or "under the weather" feelings as I have no fever at all.
On Sunday I get up at 6:20 am and everything hurts. So I sit back with blueberry muffins and watch the F1 race from Singapore. It's another exciting race throughout the field. After the race I get on the mountain bicycle and ride for two hours and I actually don't feel bad and I push at certain times. But I can tell I'm a bit sick. Person Ti_Ca and his family is taking his mother to San Pedro today since she is (probably) moving away from the area soon so I have a relaxing afternoon at home and try to get rid of the sickness. I used to get this type of cold/illness every February and every July, but it has been a few years since that pattern appeared. Maybe this year it appeared in September after ten days of very hot weather or I don't know why.
Monday is a blah day at work and I just struggle through it. When I get home I have a good session with the weights. So the physical sickness is going away and now I have to work on the mental/emotional sickness. I work on trying to get the encryption working for one of the websites but it isn't working out for me, so I give up for the evening and watch an old version of Modern Family and some of the football game.
On Tuesday I intend to go out cycling after work, but I'm lazy and just buy a bottle of wine from Tader Joe's as well as a gift for an intern at work. I do a few errands around the house and end up drinking most of the bottle of wine before the night is over. I feel well when it is time to read and sleep, but soon things change.
I wake up near 2 or 3 am and I cannot stop shivering. I put on a hat, a sweatshirt, pants, socks, and gloves and engulf myself in a down comforter and I am still cold and sweating and shivering. This is similar to the two events that I had previously in June 2009 and in February 2012. The first time that it happened I was shivering so much that I thought that I was having a seizure. This is similar. I take my temperature and it is 101 F. I try to sleep, but I toss and turn and shiver and stop and shiver and stop. I turn off the alarm when it rings and go back to sleep and end up getting out of bed near 10 am. My body temperature is still a bit high, but pretty close to normal. So I take a shower and go to work for 5 hours. This incident was just like the last two witjh extreme cold and shivering and a 6 hour spike in body temperature and then back to normal. No stomach or digestive problems or anything else. What could it be?
So I work for 5 hours on Wednesday and then go home and go for a 35 minute walk. It's important to move the body and keep the metabolism and circulation going even if one is sick.
On Thursday at work I get some of my own work done, but today there are many people who need my help. I sit down with each one and we work through their problems and I hope that they can solve them. A couple are left on me to solve as the others are not capable of solving them. When I get home I expect to struggle with the weights since I was sick, butI have a good session without too much struggling. At nigt I relax and go to bed early since I'm still missing some sleep.
I start north on the Los Angeles river on the road bicycle on Friday morning. I can't quite get the body moving and so I just keep trying to work through the difficulties. I cross over the dam and head south on the San Gabriel trail - fully expecting to take the Del Amo cutoff that would make a 40 mile ride. But I team up with another rider and we take turns pulling each other. When I get to Del Amo I realize I can't really abandon him and let him fight the onshore ocean breeze the last 8 miles to the ocean, so I keep going. At the end of the trail we thank each other for the pulls and hope to ride again someday. I go accross the ocean trail and back up the Los Angeles reiver trail to get home. I don't quite know where the other rider went when I made my westerly turn to ride along the ocean trail. When I get home I don't feel too bad considering the illness and how I started the ride, so I edge and mow the lawn and then trime the roses. A cool shower and a few minutes of laying down on the bed help me recover from a surprisingly productive morning. Person Ti_Ca and I go have pizza for lunch since I say, "I haven't had a good marinara sauce, gooey-cheese pizza in a long time". After some grocery shopping I return home to take care of some financial matters including re-assigning some automatic withdrawls to a new Visa redit card that I just got because the last one was again compromised. It seems that I get fraudulent charges on this Visa card every two years and need to have a new card and number assigned.
Saturday starts with MotoGP qualifying from Aragon. It's looking to be a fun weekend of motorcycle roadracing. I take the mountain bicycle out and it takes many miles for the legs to get "come in". I go down to the end of the ocean trail and start running into another walk for breast cancer awareness where the walkers disregard the rules of staying on just a portion of the trail (i.e., one the portion marked for walkers and runners rather than bicycles). So at the end of the trail I turn around and head back up the Los Angeles river and add some extra miles on. When I stop at my Del Amo exit there is another rider stopped there taking a rest and I stop and talk with him for a bit. It turns out he's Salvadoran and so we talk about the places that I've been in El Salvador and how dangerous it is now to visit El Salvador. I might see him on one of these rides soon and ride together with him and his friends. THis was a weired ride because usually during these rides I just ride along with no incidents, but today there is one police car and two ambulances with horns blaring in separate incidents somewhere along the ride. Is today a dangerous day or something? I told Person Ti_Ca that we would go to the Huntington Library gardens on Saturday near noon but he doesn't come out of his room until 1pm and then he doesn't say a word about the trip. So I assume it has been unilaterally cancelled.
On Sunday I start north on the Los Angeles river trail fully expecting to stop at the Del Amo cutoff for a maximum ride of about 40 miles. I feel slow north on the river trail and when a couple of groups of riders go past, that I would normally join in with, I am sure that I am going to stop at Del Amo. I feel a bit better after corssing over the dam and coming down the San Gabriel river trail and soon I hear a rider behind me holding my wheel. He passes me and I tag and then after a few miles a faster rider comes past both of us and we tag on to him. He's pulling pretty fast and I'm not up to pulling right now, so I just enjoy the fast pace from the back. We're approaching Del Amo and I can't let these guys go to the ocean without me, so soon I'm past Del Amo and taking turns at the front. The really fast guy (the third to join) drops off the back but the original guy and I take turns pulling each other to the ocean. We stop at the end, thank each other for the pulls, and simultaneously say, "I hope we ride together again". I ride along the oceand go back to a more relaxed pace and make it home for another 57 miles. The MotoGP and the Moto3 races are wild events with rain having just fallen with a drying track or rain starting to fall at mid-race. So they make for entertaining viewing. I spend some time looking through clothes (usually gifts that people have given me over the years) and take some of them to the Goodwill dropbox. And I tell the lady, "Most of these might be a bit old but have never been worn". I plan to continue some closet cleaning in the next few weeks.
On Monday I'm up at the usual time near 5:30 am and get ready and ride the motorcycle to Marvin Avenue elementary school in west Los Angeles for a UCLA volunteer day. I get assigned a UCLa student as a task leader and we go lay out the tools and paint and grid for the project. (The entire school is getting a map of the USA painted on playground, a counting ladder in the shape of snakes, a compass, a grid to plot graphs and add number on, and a multiplication table on steps of a staircase.) The first disaster strikes when I go to shake up our can of paint and find that Alejandro, the UCLA task leader assigned to me, has loosened the top of the can of paint. We're immediately in clean-up mode. First disaster averted. The real UCLA volunteers arrive an hour late (just about like last year) and we assign them striping and chalking and taping and painting tasks. It goes slowly at first, but then picks up steam. As we make progress somebody spills a 6 inch blob of paint on the cement (outside of the grid, fortunately), and one stduent has the great idea that she can make the blob of paint look like a stallion (since it's the Marvin Stallions). So off the record I give her permission. Second disaster averted. Finally it is time for the UCLA volunteers to leave the and the map, compass, counting snakes, and grid are finished. The stairs are a disaster. Michael, the overall school project manager who is a co-worker of mine, Kathleen, and I go eat free Subway and plan our strategy. But when we get to Subway Kathleen has a flat tire. So Michael and I change the tire (disaster number three averted) and finally decide that the stairs are so bad that we have to go paint over all of the multiplication tables on the steps and let someone else come back another time to fix them. So Michael and I go back and put two coats of paint on the steps (because one coat didn't quite cover up all of the lousy numbers) and then we are done. Throughout this process we keep the principal of the school informed and we finally call him over to show him that we have neutralized the lousy job and it will get done right shortly. Michael and I finally get to leave at about 5 pm. I was onsite from 7 am until 5 pm - most of that time, actually, cleaning up the stairs disaster. (Disaster number 4 attenuated but not completely averted.) Because I am so tired, I am very aggressive on the motorcycle ride back home - pushing and shoving cars out of the way (figuratively) and riding in places that I shouldn't ride. But I'm so tired I just want to get home. I am a complete vegetable when I get home due to the may hours of lifting and bending and carrying and painting and striping and etc.