Tuesday is 5 degrees warmer than usual so I'm out the door for a good mountain bicycle ride near 7:30 am. It's a good ride with a stong headwind all of the way up the Los Angeles river. In the disatance I see a rider and I make a strog and persistent effort to catch up to him. I soon realize that it is my friend Rudy and I make a last push to catch up to him so that we can ride together for a couple of miles and catch up on our lives. If I can believe it, my FitBit shows that I was at maximum heart rate for 25 minutes as I chased down Rudy. Back at home I take a shower and start painting the internal frames of the windows. The first frame takes an hour to do. But then I have the methodology down, so the next 2.5 windows (one window is half size) takes 1.5 hours. I clean up the painting supplies and try to work on writing up the crime demographics. I keep taking short breaks to look at the freshly-painted window frames and they look beautifull! Later in the day I take down two more blindes for tomorrow's painting effort.
I start Wednesday by painting three windows. I make a quick grocery store run, lift weights, and then try to finish writing up the crime demographic effort.
I start Thursday slowly, but get on the road bicycle for a strong 60 kilometers. After a shower I clean the bathroom, grba lunch, and then paint two bedroom windows. As I wander aimlessly in the afternoon I take down two more sets of blinds for future painting and then go meet Yann, a French foreign exchange student from the Climathon, for dinner. We talk about our projects and the cultural differences between France and the USA and our recent trips. When I get home there are desperate calls from Ashley abot scraping web assets since she's on the hook for a political website and the bosses keep giving her the run around. Really? There's only 50 more days until the first caucuas - are they going to wait until the last week and want something put together? And I have a long call with Ruby and Joseph who finally are having an existential discussion about some of our efforts which have gone nowhere.
I have a productive Friday. I start with an hour run/walk that goes well (though I'll expect to be sore on Sunday and Monday). AFter a shower, run errands to the gas station, Home Depot, post office and grocery store. I drop things off at home and hang the blinds from yesterday's painting - giving the paint almost 24 hours to dry/cure. Then I'm off again to the lbrary to eturn a book and get a new one and then I pick up lunch for later. Back at home I trim the neighbor's rose bush (which nobody seems to tend to) and then I paint two more windows. ANd I follow this up with raking leaves in the backyard and the second shower of the day. Now I'm tired so I relax with lunch and some television. I do no coding yesterday or today to give it a break and let ideas bubble along in my brain. Except that one hour before read and sleep time I start working on a Markov chain representation of crime demographics and quit when an appropriate break point arrives.
I sleep below average on Friday into Saturday - based upon my own feelings and the FitBit evaluation. (It turns out the the FitBit evaluation of both sleep and workouts is similar to my own own subjective evaluation. I've been at this long enough to know how my body responds and feels.) I read some news and start work on the framework for the Markov chain representation of crime and then, seeing that my legs are tired from Friday's run, I ride the mountain bicycle for about two hours. It's very cold this morning, but I enjoy the ride. Ater a warming shower I pick up lunch and afternoon supplies on the motorcycle and then do some basic paint touchup of windows that I've painted and I clean the gears, chain, and chainrings of both bicycles for future rides. In the afternoon I watch the football playoff games but in the back of my mind is a general formulation of the Markov chain process for crime predictions. Typically I will obtain these general formulations and then code and tune them up to obtain good results.
I start Sunday slowly with a walk to the grocery store. Back at home I work to gather and reformat the crime statistics into a format suitable for a Markov Chain analysis. Just before 10 am I get out on the mountain bicycle and just ride down to the pier and back for 90 minutes of riding. Still wet, I take down the giant front window blinds and then go take a shower. I'm able to paint the inside of the front window with the football playoff game in sight. Today I rush things a bit - I usually let the paint dry and cure for 24 hours, but today I'm putting the blinds back up about four hours after painting. And then I go back to coding while the second football playoff game plays in the background.
I stay in bed untl 7 am on Monday morning with a bit of a sore throat. I start the day working on the Markov chain coding and fine tuning the previous crime demographic study so that I can get that online. I make good progress on the writeup and realize I need slightly different results, so I go back and re-compute some simulations. Near noon I get out and lift weights with an extra set thrown in. It feels good to lift except a left bicep strain that I have to work around. I clean and lubricate the garage rails and rollers and feed the carnations and paint the dining room windown frame. I finally havve lunch near 2 pm and then put the dining room window blinds back up. Because I am letting a Python script run for many iterations, I am a bit bored and end up watching bits and pieces of the college football playoff game. It's just a circus - both bands play their fight song after every play. But it passes the time. Later I read and go to bed.
I have good sleep on Monday into Tuesday morning and start working on an idea that I had on Monday night: Separate out a smaller portion of the city of Long Beach to try some demographic studies on before unleashing it on the entire city. So I work on segregating city council districts, police reporting districts, census tracts, zipcodes, and voting districts so that I can experiment on a small section first. At mid morning, not enthused about a bicycle ride, I go for about an hour walk and stop in at the grocery store to top off supplies. Back at home I rale leaves and paint a few boards on the "relatively new" gate that possibly were not treated or primed as well as they should have been when built about five years ago. After a shower I take an old laptop running Windows 7 and upgrade it to Windows 10 to give to a friend, continue work on the "segregation" effort, and start looking around the house for items that I can take to Goodwill or Salvation Army in the next few days. One item I finally select is a gym bag that my parents gave to me as an undergraduate in 1978! The gym bag did not see much use and is still in reasonable condition, though it is 40 years old. And I can even remember what my high school gym bag looked like that I was using when they bought me this one. Am I getting senile? NO! NO! NO!
I start Wednesday slow to let the day warm up. I send out an unsolicited email to CSULB professors who are working on the homeless issue and offer to share a lot of the data that I have. I also receive word that a data science and training site want to use my latest crime article on their site. Sure - why not? At mid morning I jump on the mountain bicycle and ride for just short of two hours. After a shower I paint the kitchen window over the sink. It's a small window but it's a pain because there's a lot of reaching and stretching and contorting to paint it. But it's done and needs some touch up, but it's 95% done. In the afternoon I get word that a non-profit dealing with human trafficking victims wants to work with us so I try to gather my pitch together for a phone call. In the midst of these activities, I continue to look through rooms and closets to see if there are unused items for donations to Goodwill or Salvation Army. I open up a small closet and find a beautiful crystal "wave bowl" by Baccarat. I cannot remember who gave it to me or how I won it, but a quick web search indicates it is worth $500. I guess it will NOT be donated. And I also find a Chinese tea set of unknown giver/receiver status though I have not tried to determine its value yet.
I sleep well into Thursday morning but have no physical motivation. I get up and start working on the crime subset problem so that I can try out different algorithms on a subset of data before proceeding to the citywide levels. I get in a walk to the store, spread powdered weed killer around the roses and sideyard in advance of tonight's rain, and then paint the window in my office that looks out over my street. This is a pain because the desk and computer cables are in the way, but I get it done with some very weird body contortions (with some touch up to follow). As the paint dries I go back to the crime subset problem and I also take stock of the data that I have available in advance of the hackSC event coming up at the end of January. And I continue jumping between tidying up the kitchen and the painted window area so that both areas are clean for "final assembly". I now have one internal window frame to go and it, unfortunately, is partially hidden behind a very heavy bookcase with a ton of books and technical papers. How am I going to paint this window? Maybe I'll just paint around the obstructions and get the rest in the distant future. Late in the afternoon Person Ch_C comes to visit and we have a long talk about our lives.
Late on Thursday evening and into Friday morning I keep waking up with pain in my right foot. I know that I have not fallen and I did not twist my ankle, so I'm a bit puzzled why the foot is hurting. When I wake up, intending to go for a run/walk after the night's rain, my right foot still hurts. I immediately jump on the Aleve and then realize that maybe it got strained during the window painting with the climbing over furniture and body contortions to reach the window frame. The Alevel helps and after an hour or so of coding, I start out on a walk with no real pain or discomfort. Back at home I skip the last window to be painted - partially hidden behind a heavy bookcase - and start in on doorframes. I start with the front door to the house which is clear to get to and it looks beautifull when I finish. I waste some time during the day because I don't want to do any coding and I decide that I'm going to figure out how to paint this last window partially covered by a bookcase. I grab one end of the bookcase, the lighter end, and am able to move it away from the wall to give me some operating room. I go over to the very heavy end of the bookcase, the end carrying many engineering textbooks and well-reknown papers such as the original Craig-Bampton paper, and take a few deep breaths and give it everything I've got to move it away from the window. I'm super excitied! I trade off moving then ends of the bookcase until, with some heavy lifting, I am able to get enough space to be able to paint the window. I remove the blinds, tape off the window, and am well-suited for painting the window on Saturday or Sunday. And hopefully I'll be able to reverse the process and put the muilt-tonnage bookcase back in place.
I sleep late but get out of bed and almost immediately jump on the orad bicycle. It's cold today but I get in a good 65 kilometer bicycle ride where I pull riders all of the way up the SanGabriel trail because there's a nasty headwind. And then I get to today's turn around point and head for home. AFter a shower I try to drop off some items at the Salvation Army, but they don't accept donations at this location anymore. So I drive to Good will and they are happy for th donations. Back at home I paint the last remaining window and mow the back yard. Later in the day I re-install the blinds for the window and I'll move the bookcase back into positon tomorrow.
I start Sunday by going north on the Los Angeles river against a nasty wind (rather than face it coming home). This is a good thing because the wind really beats me up on the way north and I find myself almost crawling home. I deweed the roses, grab a shower, and then paint a door frame. Today I try one of those painting pads rather than a brush and it seems to go quicker and produce as nice a finish. So I'll stick with the painting pad for a few more door frames and give it a longer trial. Throughout the day I go back to the article and code I wrote a week ago related to crime demographics and try to compare why the newer, subproblem code is not working well at all. I'm able to duplicate the previous code, so I'm glad that I did not mess that effort up and possibly have to offer a retraction of the method and article. But why dosn't the newer subproblem work?
I'm just wiped out on Monday. I start working on the crime demographics and then before noon i paint the outside and inside trim of a door frame and the inside door frame of a closet. This inside trim is hard because I don't have much room to maneuver around and because it has the original "summer sand" color that I painted it back in 1990 or so. Nonetheless I get the inside done and quit for the day. AFter lunch I lift weights and skip the biceps since my left bicep is hurt. Instead, I bring some very light weights inside the house and every couple of hours do 40 bicep curls to try and start rehabbing the ligament, endon, or muscle that is strained.