On the first day of February I get in about a two hour ride on the mountain bicycle - thinking some of the roads and trail may be wet and/or sandy after Thursday's heavy rains. While riding I run into my former neighbor's son and we have a little chat as we ride along together for a few miles before separating paths. After a shower and food I ride the motor cycle up to CSULA and meet with my team. There is still chaos and I'm not sure if it is going to straighten itself out. Late in the afternoon I get a call from Sam of the Long Beach Little League and they have at least one kid who wants to play but his mother cannot afford it. They know I've offered to pay for a kid in this situation, so I set up a meeting with Sam on Monday morning to meet him and give hime some money for registraton fees, equipment, and other stuff that the kid will need to play.
I'm a bit lazy on Saturday morning since it is very rainy and windy. I get out to the ATM and buy supplies at the grocery store and then read websites for a while. At mid-morning I get out and lift weights. The bench press still hurts the left shoulder like crap so my bench presses today are sissy efforts. But I feel no pain in either shoulder from other lifts and this is progress. After a shower I start working on websites and the Climathon business plan, but still have a relatively slow day.
I get up and do a few things around the house since everything is very wet outside. When I see a break, I take off for a 60 minute walk (carrying an umbrella just in case). As I'm one block away from home there is some rain starting to falll but not enough to unfurl the umbrella. But by the time that I finish taking a shower the rain is coming down very hard - thus perfect timing for the hour long walk. I go back and work on some of m stock market prediction tools since I'm on a bit of a hold on other projects. I mess around and then relax with the Super Bowl and commercials. I certainly ignore the halftime show since there is nothing in it for me. And then watch the rest of the game but the outcome doesn't really matter because it's not an F1 or MotoGP/2/3 race.
I get up and work on Karl's website for a while. When the rain looks like it will subside, I get out for a brisk walk just short of an hour. After a shower I go to a coffeehouse near me and work on Karl's website and meet a team manager/organizer for the Long Beach Little League. I've agreed to sponsor a child who wants to play but doesn't have the money. I meet Sam near 2pm and we have a nice 30 minute discussion about the Little League, what we do for livings, and other things. And I give him some cash for an extra kid to play Little League baseball. Sam will send me the schedule of games and I tell Sam, "Don't be surprised when I show up with water and Gatorade for the kids". It turns out the money pays for a complete uniform in addition to league fees, city fees, umpire fees, and a few other things. I'm excited for the first game sometime in March. I g on home and keep pounding away on a Javascript timing issue on Karl's website. I'm really close and need a bicycle ride to solve this problem. But that won't happen for a day or two based upon weather reports.
I wake up before 4 am on Tuesday and cannot sleep so turn on the light and read one of my books. After a while I go back to sleep and am shocked to later look at the clock and see 7:30. I get up quickly in an incoherent state and get in the car and drive to the grocery store to pick up supplies. When I get home I have some caffeine to get started and then, at mid-morning, go out to lift weights. I'm still lifting with light weights after taking so much time off but I put the bench press off to last hoping that the other exercises have warmed up the muscles in the left shoulder. This appears to work. After the workout I get a shower and spend extra tie srcubbing the shower seat and doors clean of residual soap scum - they look beautiful and transparent now. I mess around with some emails and eventually have lunch of vegetables and rice near 2 pm. And kinda waste away the rest of the day.
I sleep very well on Tuesday night into Wednesday morning. When I get up it is cold, so I drive to the grocery store to pick up supplies and mill around a bit until I go cycling. Because it has rained so much and some of the trails may be wet and muddy, I take the mountain bicycle. The first two gates that I come to are locked and I have to take surface streets to find an open gate to the Los Angeles river. But I get in a decent ride along with a stop to take a picture of the snow-covered mountains in the background - the snow level down to 600 meters now. And I note as I ride home that the gates that were locked 90 minutes ago are now open.
Thursday is a blah day. I get up and go walking for an hour and grab a shower. I attend the Long Beach Human Trafficking Task Force meeting and absorb the "goings on". Afterwards Person M_Fl comes over to visit and we hang out and talk aboutt hings. Later I ride the motorcycle down to Irvine to have Korean Tofu with Person Ch_C. After dinner we talk for a long time until I have to go home. It is cold - 45 degrees F and 100 miles per hour on the motocycle is quite the wind chill.
On Friday I'm lazy and don't go cycling. I get to CSULA near 10 am only to be told that nobody alerted me that we wouldn't meet until noon. This team is very chaotic. At the noon meeting the various teams give their statuses and afterwards I tell me team to note that others are starting to build stuff and we haven't even ordered parts or materials yet. Think we're behind. THere's a plan in place to catch up and have an emergency meeting on Tuesday at 2 pm. Hopefully I get a notice if the meeting changes time or is canceled. When I get home I lift weights and only have to drop to a ridiculously low weight on the bench press because of the left shoulder. It's lagging behind in recovery. And at night I try to straighten out paperwork and get some mass mailings ready to go out for Fair Trade Long Beach.
It's raining on Saturday morning, so I do not go cycling. Instead I pack everything up and go to the Smart City & Future Work hackathon being held at CSULB. I intended to go after cycling, but it's raining. I meet up with friends from last year's Climathon as well as Ruby and her friends. Ruby and I work on a portal to help mass transit as related to mental health. I start coding away and soon it is time for lunch and I continue coding away and soon it is time for dinner. After dinner Ruby and I look at what we have and we say we've duplicated the complete mta.net process (in just a few hours of coding) but where do we go from here. We're stuck. We talk for hours until I need to go home. I've been at the hackathon from 8 am until 9 pm and the day passed like nothing. But, unfortunately, we don't know where to go from here.
It's raining on Sunday morning, so I go do some grocery shopping and work a bit on the hackathon from home. When I see a break in the clouds, I get on the mountain bicycle and go for a good ride. It's only the thrid ride in February due to all of the rain and it feels SUPER. When I reurn I wash the bicycle of mud and road grime and lube the chain and apply guide stakes for the carnations since they are growing well but tending to tip over. And then I call Ruby and we both agree that we are stuck. So I'll skip the remainder of the hackathon and she'll meet up wth her other friends and help them out. I'lll probably tidy up the website (and app) that we built on Saturday for the hackathon so that it is ready in case we find a way past our impasse.
I celebrate National Karen Day with a very cold (38F) road bicycle ride as a start. During the ride I catch up to a rider who is an 80 year old retired aerospace engineer from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. We name-drop a few names until we finally find one in common. Roy says he's been enjoying his 15 odd years of retirement and rides every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a fair distance. When we get to the bridge along the San Gabriel trail he says he's at his turn-around point and so we wish each other well and hope to see each other again soon. After a shower I run some errands and spend a fair amount of time on National Karen Day reading about the Karen people in Myanmar (formerly Burma) and then about generically stateless people. Stateless people may be refugees from other countries or even people born in a certain country without papers and their own country's government does not recognize them as citizens. Later I work on tidying up the Smart Cities work from the hackathon in case we figure out a break through and I clean up the roses and relax. I go out in the early afternoon sunshine warmth and spend time cleaning up the roses and de-weeding the rose beds. When I come back in the house near 1:30 pm, I realize that I have not eaten anything yet today. Thus I take a break and have some vegetables and bread and condiments to try to get the blood sugar level stabilized.