Content-type: text/html Ray Manning

Monday, January 14, 2019 8:02 PM

New Year Start


When I wake up to go cycling on a cold and windy January 1st, Joe is not back from his partying. I leave him a note in case I miss him and get out for a very windy ride. The extra strong wind makes it a good workout! When I get home I warm up with a shower and go back to work on the finanical prediction algorithms. Near 11 am Joe finally comes back home. He's had fun at two different clubs and met up with his friends. He grabs some quick leftover pizza for brunch and gets out the door to drive home to Redlands (before post-new years traffic starts up). The rest of the day is a fairly lazy day with some ice hockey and football on television.

I wake up on Wednesday near 4:30 am and cannot sleep. Thus I get up at 5:30ish and start my day. It is 39 degrees outside so the pre-planned "wait until 10am to go cycling" is a good plan. Instead I pay some bills, review some finances, and work on the crime mapping algorithm. I keep getting closer and closer and hope to make the final breakthrough in the next day or so. Before 10 am I get out on the road bicycle and crank along with the wind, against the wind, into a side wind - I don't really care. It's a great ride. I rush through a shower and go run errands including more vitamins, a stop at the library (the previous books weren't doing anything for me), and a stop at the CVS pharmacy. When I get home I change clothes and start hard-pruning the roses to eliminate slow growth shoots and concentrate future growth on the most promising shoots. I get about halfway through the effort and stop since my back is getting tired (from all of the up and down and bending over). I still have a couple of days to finish the hard-pruning before the rains comes on Sunday. I also get a call from my health care provider indicating that I need to get a CT scan of my shoulders and upper back since my upper right shoulder blade looks abnormal. This isn't consistent with my left shoulder being the most painfull of the two shoulders. But I schedule the appointment and start loading my ammunition of my current symptoms compared with their scans.

Thursday is cold again and I get out for about an hour run/walk. After a warming shower I go back to work on the crime mapping effort and make the major breakthrough that I needed. The dataframe needed an index in order to access it properly. Now I just need to make the informational popups look pretty and the map will be ready for release. Before noon I get to the monthly Long Beach Human Trafficking Task Force meeting and then I come home and finish hard-pruning the roses. I ride the motorcycle down to Irvine to have a nice dinner with Person Ch_C. It's cold out and I think that we both avoid going home to avoid the cold. Finally I take leave and ride home at 98 mph in 40 degree weather as I try to tuck behind the windscreen of my Yamaha YZF-R1 to avoid the wind. It's not as cold as I expected.

Near 2 am on Friday morning I wake up and I'm cold. Did the furnace fail? No, it is running. So I grab another blanket and lay it over the top of me and have a deep sleep until just before my alarm goes off at 5:55 am. I lay in bed for a while and then get up and start working on a "skeleton" Long Beach Human Trafficking Task Force website since they've dropped the ball and don't have a website. Ater two hours of work I get on the mountain bicycle and ride and on the way home I pick up a rider from Michoacan, Mexico. Of course I use the "I'm from Michoacan too" joke that changes to "Oh, I'm just kidding. I'm from Michigan". We ride together up the Los Angeles river and though Jose speaks no English as he visits his brother here, I'm able to, more or less, keep up with him in Spanish. But I find Thai words coming into play and I have to correct myself - specifically words for "home" and "friend" and "travel" and others. And I finally tell Jose that I speak more Thai than Spanish. After the ride and a warm shower I pick up some supplies at the grocery store and then wash the Yamaha YZF-R1 and mow the backyard (along with picking up leaves). For once my trash bin is full with rose clippings, leaves, and grass trimmings. I guess the neighbors will not be able to use my extra trash bin space as they usually do. I start back in on the human trafficking website and I'm to the point where a skeleton is available and is almost ready for a draft viewing. I take a break and go wax the motorcycle and stand back and remark that it almost looks brand new! (Except for almost 17 years of daily riding and the wear and tear expected of that usage.)

On Friday night into Saturday morning I wake up twice with nasty leg cramps on the inside of my left thigh. In both cases it takes quite a while to massage and relax them out so that they don't come back. When I wake up I'm not going to budge, so I sleep late. Am I coming down with the flu which has just made its outbreak this year? I walk for an hour to the ATM and the grocery store and then finish waxing the Yamaha YZF-R1 rims, touching things up, and polishing the windscreen. Except for the fact that it is within a month of 17 years old, it looks brand new! After a warm shower I put on warm clothes and continue working on the human trafficking website. There's a possibility that I can present the site to the core team on Friday and so I want to get it finished and have someone play with it before that meeting. Late on Saturday there is heavy rain and a few strikes of lightning and loud thunder. I go stand out on the porch and watch, listen, and smell the heavy rain.

I start Sunday with about an hour run/walk. I'm slowly progressing to more running than walking. But I'm taking things slowly so that I don't re-injure anything. After a warm shower I finish off the human trafficking website (at least for the Friday demo if it happens). And then just relax with reading and football games. It seems that none of the football playoff games have turned out the way that I wanted them to.

On Monday I lay in bed for a while after the alarm goes off to listen to the light rain falling. When I get up I walk to the grocery store for some supplies and then tidy up the human trafficking website. Near noon I get out and lift very light weights to get started again. I haven't lifted weights (intentionally) since 20 November. Even with the light weights my left shoulder hurts like heck! So I'm glad that I'm going to get a CT scan tonight and to see a physical therapist soon. I ride the shiny, almost new motorcycle to the medical facility and get on with it. It takes two hours of waiting but eventually I get the stent put in and I go under the scanner before and after a dye injection. And then I ride the motorcycle home and veg out with the college football game.

I sleep well into Tuesday and get in a good mountain bicycle ride for almost two hours. There's a headwind on the way home so I get to push and get in a good strength workout. After a shower and an errand I pull the lower fairing of the 2002 Yamaha YZF-R1 fairing off, strip the old thermal tape off, clean up the inside of the fairing, and apply new thermal aluminum tape. This time I've added some glue to the process because the pure tape approach seemed to not last long the last time. So I let the glue dry and re-install the fairing and polish up my fingerprints from the operation. I go inside the house and finish off the human trafficking website. (Finish off? I keep adding more stuff for a possible Friday demo. I really need to quit adding stuff and put the additions on a "future lien" list.)

My legs are tired on Wednesday morning from Tuesday's bicycle ride and from crawling around the motorcycle, so I don't get out riding at first. Instead I finish the mapping for the human trafficking website - I knew it was a simple fix that I just needed a break from. At mid morning I go ride the mountain bicycle down around the aquarium and back home. After I get a shower Person M_Fl comes to visit and we hang out for a few hours. Later in the evening I catch up on some finances and other things.

Thursday is a weird day. I've woke up at about 3:30 am from the deepest sleep where I feel that my body has been repaired and recovered from the previous day's activities. And then I cannot sleep. I doze off a time or two until 5:15 am on Thursday morning when I cannot sleep anymore. I get up near 6 am and start working on the crime mapping application. Just after 9 am I drive to AAA to get an International Driver's Permit, pick up food for a later lunch, and buy a bottle of wine for the day. I get in a decent workout with the weights where the left shoulder still hurts a lot but not quite as much as on Monday. (I'm still waiting for the results of a CT scan from Monday where a "weird density" spot was seen.) I immediately ice the shoulders after the workout and setup up a "growth guide" for the new carnations to prop them up during their current growth spurt. After a warm shower the wine bottle is opened and I work on the crime mapping effort. I've finished off the crime mapping time series (plus or minus a sub-standard x-axis fromat) and turn my attention to the correlation between each crime reporting district and it's quintile ranking. Somewhere along the way I call my hosting company and try to get an extra elections email account set up but this requires the domain owner to fix. (Another person OWNS the domain, but I HOST it and write all of the code for it. So it is confusing.) During all of this effort I've bought new chemical-resistant gloves and gardening gloves but I haven't found robust, sturdy gloves for rose trimming to prevent my fingers, hands, and forearms from being sliced up. But I find them on Amazon and I'm already looking forward to the springtme growing/blooming season. By 3 pm it is time for lunch and a break from some good mental and physical activities for the day. And then have a very slow day for the rest of the day. After a break I make great progress on the crime mapping algorithm and just have to tidy up a bit and I can publish it.

I sleep well in to Friday morning and delay my bicycle ride to hopefully see a SpaceX launch from Vandenburg Air Force Base carrying Iridium satellites. But when I hear an airplane from Long Beach airport go overhead and cannot see it, then I know the fog is too thick to see the launch. Thus I start out on the road bicycle ride at 7:40 am and have a great cranking ride! When I get home I spread a non-toxic weed killer around the roses and rake the leaves from the big tree in the backyard. Finally a warm shower allows me to run some errands and then work on some updates to the human trafficking website. The crime mapping website is ready for display, so I let it sit for a day to make sure that I am not missing anything. On www.nextdoor.com I hear that little league tryouts are starting and I contact the little league president to see if I can help sponsor a child or two that would not be able to afford to play. And this starts the ball rolling.

I sleep a bit late on Saturday and get out for about an hour run/walk. I struggle a bit with energy today but at least my Achilles tendon and calves give me no trouble. SInce its raining I drive to the Soroptimist's First Annual Human Trafficking Forum and Fare in Downey. The forum is well run even though I don't really learn anything new since I'm already "up to speed" on human trafficking. I run into my Fair Trade friends and hang out and listen and then take leave. When I get home I notice that some fast food debris has fallen onto the World Rally Car hood scoop so I clean it off as quickly as possible so that it doesn't stain. And then I relax with the football playoff games, answer some online questions about the crime mapping application, and exchange voice mails with the little league vice president (who's probably very busy today because rain has postponed their first tryouts of the season).

I feel a bit lazy on Sunday morning so I decide that I'm just going to ride the mountain bicycle for an hour or so. When I start riding I see a rider ahead of me and I speed up and catch up to him and we have a nice conversation all of the way down to the aquarium where he is going to meet other riders. I continue on past the aquarium and soon a former co-worker, Dave, has caught up to me and we chat as we ride to the end of the ocean trail. Dave still works at Northrop Grumman and fills me in on the work environment as well as his two kids in college. He says he has about four more years before he can retire. He also mentions that a third of the Northrop Grumman space employees are eligible for retirement and that the company is getting worried about losing that domain knowledge. I turn around and head for home and it ends up about a 100 minute ride - better than the 60 minutes I intended as I felt lazy. I update a couple of websites and and prepare a mass mailing for the Fair Trade Long Beach campaign and relax with the football playoff games.

I wake up on Monday with no rain falling and think that I might be able to sneak in a ride. But before I can get out of bed the rain starts. I get up and and send out the Fair Trade elections mass emailing. (This always takes a bt longer than usual because I'm paranoid about making a mistake and making the Fair Trade organization look bad. So I double and triple check the database of subscribers as well as the script itself.) Today I have a Red Bull in the morning. It's the first Red Bull of 2019 and the first since I don't know when - it has been a long time. It tastes great - I LOVE Red Bull! I make super progress on the animated GIF for the crime mapping application. It takes a long time to generate each GIF, so I let Python run and generate the crime maps for each month of the last five years. Near noon I get in a good session with the weights though the left shoulder hurts like crap on certain lifts. After lifting I stay in the garage and clean up the two SPD pedals on the spare bicycle for when a visitor wants to ride. Throughout the rest of the day I kick around some ideas on the next projects to work on (seeing that it is supposed to rain quite a bit in the next four days and I'll have lots of time to work on the new projects).