I have difficulty sleeping on Monday night into Tuesday. So I get up a bit late and take the mountain bicycle out for the loop ride. This is almost 30 miles on the 60 psi tired mountain bicycle and givs me a good workout. I like to try and challenge road bicycle riders on their faster bicycles and 110 psi tires and see if I can beat them. After a quick shower I ride the motorcycle to two different financial institutions to liquidate my positions and get checks to be passed along on Friday. There is a bit of confusion because the money is held in a trust, but everything works out. When I get home I start shredding all of the paperwork associated with these institutions and I figure I'll update Excel financial workbooks on Wednesday or Thursday. There's another phonecall from the employment agency and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the employment agency are crossing wires and it is still not clear that I can attend Wednesday (tomorrow's) meeting and get paid for it. Throughout the afternoon I try to clean up paperwork and continue to simplify my life (and for thos who have to deal with my trust when I am gone in 50 years).
I start Wednesday with a run but I pull up lame after one mile. Usually it is my left calf and right hamstring that gives me trouble, but today it is the right calf. The exact same pain as in the left calf. I think this is the first time on the right side. I end up walking back home in pain but then stepping into the garage and working the abdominals and lower back to get in some sort of workout. Afterwards I ride the motorcycle to CSULA to help out the two teams and try to make repairs to one of last year's projects. We're making progress on the repairs but they are not finished yet. When I get home I relax for a bit and work on websites.
I start Thursday with a ride all the way to the Santa Fe dam and back for about 56 miles on the road bicycle. I struggle at times, but it is still a good ride. I do some grocery shopping and get ready for a 2pm teleconference. Except that I am mistaken and the teleconference for JPL was cancelled. So I go out and mow the lawn and hand throw some fertilizer on some spots in the front yard that need a bit of help. And later in the day I receive word that the hospital website that I put together is going to be taken away from me and given to somebody else. I along with two other people who put in a lot of work to get the current site ready for an August 3rd deadline and demonstration are pretty livid. There is no justification for the change. And I'm just going to sit back and wonder how long the new people will take to build the site (i.e., completely re-do our effort).
I try to forget about the business decisions and who is building the site and how long it will take. It is out of my hands. I get in a good weights workout on a rain-threatening Friday, buy some supplies for Saturday's Halloween party, and take care of financial business at the bank. When I get home I polish the headlights of the world rally car (that had become a bit foggy), partially clean out a closet and pile up some clothes for donation to Goodwill, and finally have lunch/dinner while watching another twist in this year's presidential election.
I have a heck of a time sleeping on Friday night. I certainly get in some very deep sleep for a few hours to start. But then I wake up before 2 am and cannot sleep. I read for a while and then go work on a National Football League statistics website and make good progress. By now it is almost 4 am and I am finally able to sleep again. Reluctantly I wake up when the alarm goes off a bit after 6 am and I get out on the road bicycle ride. It isn't a great ride and it isn't a bad ride, but I get in 45 decent miles and call it quits. After the ride I do paperwork and errands around the house and finalize my costume for a Halloween party at Frank and Jeanine's house tonight. The Halloween party is a bit smaller than usual but I catch up with Frank and Jeanine and their two sons as well as other people that I see at the party. I've gone as the QRcode man. I've pasted a mess of QR codes onto my light jacket and pants and let people scan me with their smart phones to see what websites they get to.
I start Sunday with the wet but drying Malaysian MotoGP race. These are the same conditions that were present when I attended in person in 2009. And I note the crowd is estimated at 95,000 people. That is much more than the estimated 60,000 people when I attended and every single seat, every single bus, and every single mode of transportation was full. But it's a fun race with good action! After the race I take the mountain bicycle for a two hour ride to the old yacht club and back home. Today there are some road bicycle riders that I stay up with for the rush up the Los Angeles river. After a shower I drop off some older clothes at Goodwill and go grocery shopping. (Some of these clothes are so old that I am almost embarassed to have homeless people wearing them. But they are warm and in good condition.) By the time that I leave the store there is rain that has begun. I missed the rain during cycling by only 30 minutes. I go work on a website where I had a good idea to make it work at 3 am this past morning and I hope to try it out Wednesday from CSULA.
Monday starts slowly as usual. At mid-morning I go lift weights where I've increased the weights just a little bit again and have a good workout. Near noon I'm on the motorcycle to visit a different financial advisor to set up a charitable trust and then drop off a library book on the way home. In the afternoon I go out and do a single exercise for a bodypart that is laggig ebhing (in my mind) once every 30 minutes. This is kind of a shock workout where you overload the lagging muscles for the entire day. By early evening the bodypart is getting pretty tired but I keep doing my best and hope that I am not too sore on Tuesday or Wednesday. I also figure out some weird Javascript that was holding back some of my work and I push on with the new knowledge.
It is cold on Tuesday morning so I wait a bit before cycling and I still put on my winter cycling shell for the first time this autumn/winter season. I have a good mountain bicycle ride to the old yacht club and back - only slightly delayed by police activity due to a suicide by hanging along the beach at a lifegaurd tower. On the way back up the Los Angeles river I catch a guy and we take turns dragging each other along. Except that he's on a very expensive Colnago road bicycle with carbon fibre wheels and high pressure tires and I'm on a soft tired mountain bicycle that cost one tenth of his bicycle. When I get home I give the bicycle a good cleaning and then catch up on some paperowrk and a wild Moto3 race from Malaysia where three separate multi-bike crashes take out half of the field. At 5:15 on the motorcycle headed for a hacking event in downtown Los Angeles. I arrive at the incubator facility for the hacking event to find a note posted saying that today's event and next week's event are cancelled. But at least I found the place in the old warehouse district which is now turning into tech incubator places. I walk around the facility and see digital marketing companies, robotics companies, and solar energy companies. And I have always lvoed the warehouse district. I need to come back up here with a bicycle and ride around and check everything out.
Wednesday starts with a walk and attempted run, but the right calf threatens to act up again. I turn back for home and work the abdominals and lower back before getting cleaned up to ride to CSULA. We have fruitfull meetings at the campus and I work with a student from last year to fix a project that went south just after the quarter finished.
On Thursday I'm lazy and don't go cycling. Instead I lift weights and then go to a LongBeach Human Trafficking Task Force meeting. And then I return home to clean the house a bit and work on some web programming. On Friday I get out for a 48 mile road bicycle ride. I'm a bit slow at the start but then crank along nicely. After a shower I go visit a financial advisor and take a drug test for the NASA JPL work. I think this is the first drug test that I've ever taken. When I return home I relax for a while and then walk over to the First Friday event because The Potential Lunatics are playing. It's just a two person punk group, but I like their energy, their original music, and their fans. I meet a guitarist from another group and I give him my email address so that he can let me know when his shows are coming up. And then I walk back home.
Saturday is wet and foggy and I work the abdominals and lower back since I have no time for a bicycle ride. I'm soon on the motorcycle to get back up to CSULA to visit the forensics lab and to talk with law enforcement personnel about the requirements for one of the senior design projects that I'm helping out on.I leave CSULA at 1pm and by 3pm I've visited an AT, done some grocery shopping, washed the moturcycle, trimmed the roses, and waxed the motorcycle. Now I'm tired so I relax for a bit and catch up on election predictions and stuff. And start changing clocks back for the return to standard time.
It feels good to have the extra hour of sleep though I spilt the difference and just take 30 minutes extra. Still I get out on the road bicycle ride earlier than usual. It is dry in Long Beach but gets progressively foggier and wetter as I apporach the Whittier Narrows dam and then go beyond to the Santa Fe dam. I've picked up a rider and when we get to the Santa Fe dam he thanks me for the pull and is incredulous that I started in Long Beach and now have to ride back to Long Beach. But I go through good and bad periods as I ride back home for a total of 56 miles. I take time to wash and brighten up the road bicycle before taking a shower. I fix a website that somehow got broken even though I did not touch it for months. And then I work on some more propeller aerodynamic data for one of the CSULA teams. In the afternoon I watch some football and then get down on my hands and knees to wax the rims of the 2002 Yamaha YZF-R1 which is starting to show its age.
I start Monday with a long walk adn then go visit a brand new doctor. She takes me early and I give her my history and we decide on a course of action. I go get my blood drawn and am surprised when they tell me some of the results will be available online later today. After the doctor I get the World Rally Car washed, return a book at the library, and do some grocery shopping. I relax a bit and work on some things until it is time to ride the motorcycle up to Culver City to talk with some web developers (who have been given the task of working on the child abuse application and removing it from me and Jorge). The developers have gone way out of control and we have to tell them that it has to be "dumbed down" in order to sell it to social workers and hopsital workers. I can see that the developers are disaapointed because they put in a lot of good hard work only to be told to dumb it down. Afterwards we have a quick debrief and the leader finally realizes that what the developers put together is nothing like what we showed the hospital administrators in August and what they have been expecting and publicizing. And I tell the leader that she better find out what the hospitals want becasue we don't want to have to develop the website for the third time. After I ride home I look at some of my blood test results online and see many good things but my red blood cell count, hematocrit, and hemoglobin are low. How can this be? I'm doing all of this cycling and running on no red blood cells or oxygen carrying capability? I email the doctor and suggest we take immediate action since low red blood cells (etc) is no place for a cyclist/runner to be.