On Monday night into Tuesday I wake up at 3 am and cannot sleep. After a while I turn on a light and continue reading for an hour or so. And then fall back asleep. I'm lazy (and itching) on Tuesday morning but get out for a good one hour walk at mid morning. When I get home I trim the front yard, trim up some bushes that have come roaring along with growth, and sweep up some parts of the driveway which collect debris. After a shower I notice that my allergic reaction has spread though the itching comes and goes. I finish off the non-profit taxes and get them bundled up for mailing tomorrow. And then have a relaxing afternoon as I ponder what can go wrong next with my health.
I have trouble sleeping again from Tuesday night into Wednesday morning. The light comes on and I do some reading and eventually get back to sleep. In advance of my previously scheduled physical exam, I had hoped to go walking in the morning. But I just hang around the house and drive to my 8:30 am appointment. The doctor notes my recent tail of woes (i.e., death of brother, death of Person T_U, broken ribs, and ear infection) and continues with the wellness survey. When she examines my ears she is the first one, from three previous ear examinations, to say that the left ear drum looks the right color and is porbably healthy, but obscured by goo. I take this as promising that I will recover my hearing once we solve the infection problem. She also notes that the three previous exams were probably directed towards a bacterial infection, the most common one, but we need to consider a yeast infection and a fungal infection with different drugs to attack the infection. We also note the amoxicillin allergic reaction and I INSIST that we put that in my file that I am allergic to amoxicillin (partly because I did break out in an itchy rash and partly because I believe that amoxicillin is useless). We agree to perform specific blood tests and maintain that I must meet the ENT specialist again next Wednesday. AFter the four tube blood draw, I drive on home with stops at the library to return a book, the post office to mail off non-profit tax returns, and the grocery store for supplies. Back at home I finally get a muffin at 10:30 am and straighten a few things out before having a very good workout with the weights. I then re-adjust the motorcycle chain which is coming to the end of its adjustment length/capabaility. And I water and feed the carnations as they approach their prime growing season. A warm shower gets me ready to relax for the afternoon and just take care of little things around the house.
Here's the second day in a row where I wake up at 2am or so and cannot sleep and end up reading for about an hour. I get out of bed at 6:25 am on Wednesday and check the news and the stock markets. After a while I grab a shower and go to my doctor's appointment. This was scheduled a while ago with my primary care physician before the ear infection started. So I go through my tail of woe starting way back with the broken ribs from the fall against a concrete planter in Bangkok. I get some optimism when she tells me that she can see part of the ear drum and it is the right color (as opposed to a color indicating damage). But most of the ear drum is still covered with "goo". And she tells me that the antibiotics that I've used are for a bacterial infection and it could be a yeat or fungal infection. So this may take a while to fix. After the appointment and blood draw, I return a library book, mail off the non-profi tax returns, do some grocery shopping, adjust the chain on the Yamaha YZF-R1, and get in a good session with the weights. I'm not motivated today and do not do any painting or coding.
I have incredibly deep sleep with lots of dreaming on Wednesday night into Thursday. At one point I've had a dream that I can hear again with my left ear and when I wake up I check and am disappointed that I cannot hear again. In the morning I get out for a good two hour mountain bicycle ride. Back at home I deweed the roses and carnations before a warm shower. Later in the day the tree people call and want to trim the trees. So they come by and I hand each worker a Gatorade as they're starting to provide extra incentive. This company is fast and efficient and cleans up after themselves very well. But its interesting that whereas last time all of their workers were Tongan, today they are all Mexicano.
I start Friday with a 35 minute walk before a shower, breakfast, and a motorcycle ride up to CSULA. We make good progress at the meeting but I don't think the students realize how much work is still left to be done. So I suggest we put together a list of everything that we need to do to get the vessel into the water and to get the final report and presentations finished this semester. After the meeting I down to the central Long Beach public library and get three new bookes to read. Back at home I mow the lawn and try to consolidate some of the tree trimmings. A second shower of the day gets me relaxing in the afternoon. On friday night I prepare a Fair Trade Long Beach mass mailer and then start working on a generic neural netowrk for future use.
It is supposed to rain on Saturday, so I start the day by doing some grocery shopping and then painting baseboards in one bedroom. I've procrastinated in starting the baseboards, but once I get started it goes fairly well. After painting I get in a heavy session with the weights where I've increased the sets for each exercise. A nice warming shower is welcome and then I cook vegetables for the week. In parallel I clean some of the hardwood floors and straighten out the room where I've painted baseboards. I take some time out to eat lunch and watch some telvision and then I go back to the neural network that I started developing on Friday night. Though the weather reports showed morning showers, there isn't anything significant in the morning. And when the weather report shows no rain in the afternoon, the rain comes down in buckets. A couple of times I go outside to watch the heavy rain come down, listen to it, and smell it. We certainly need the rain.
Another typical day for me as I'm productive in the morning, have a down period in the afternoon, and then work on things at night. I start the day with a good two hour mountain bicycel ride and a warming shower. I immediately get down on my hands and knees and crawl along a room painting the baseboard. When I have a bit of an an "oopsie" and get some paint on the hardwood floors, I just keep going. Because I know I can let the paint dry and carefully scrape it off the polyurethane finish with an X-acto knife. And now I relax with some television viewing. As night falls I get back into productive mode as I try to get a neural network give me continuous outputs as opposed to the discrete outputs it is providing. I'm puzzled and I'll figure it out soon.
I start Monday morning with a 52 minute run/walk. It has been a while since I went running so I can expect leg soreness on Wednesday. After a shower I pick up supplies for paintint at Home Depot, grocery supplies, and go to vote. I am the second voter at our new process where we can vote at any voting place (as opposed to the old days where we had to vote at out designated precinct). The voting goes smoothl and I hope that there are no bugs in the system. Back at home I'm back on my hands and knees painting the baseboards. This work is a bit difficulty because you're crawling along and trying to maintain nice lines between the white baseboard trim and the walls of various colors. By 12:30 I'm relaxing - I'll go "clean up" the baseboard paint with an X-acto knife later after it has hardened (because it comes off the polyurethane cleane if it has dried and hardened). I check out the hammering that the stock market has taken on Friday and today as coronavirus concerns blast the markets downward. Nothing to do but sit back, hold on, and put up with the volatility for now. Person Ch_C comes to visit late in the afternoon and brings me a pre-packaged salad because he knows that I am sick. We have a nice conversation and a nice visit.
I wake up late on Tuesday and jump out of bed and onto the mountain bicycle. I'm demoralized from the ear infection and tired, so I just ride for 90 minutes to the Long Beach Pier and back. At home I deweed the roses and carnations and grab a nice warming shower. I then start painting the baseboards of the dining room. Today, for some reason, I just don't have it and keep making mistakes that I'll have to touch up later. But I finish the dining room and vow to take tomorrow off from painting because my body hurts from crawling around on all fours as I move along the floor and paint the baseboards. I send out a mass mailing for Fair Trade Long Beach and then relax for a bit before getting back down and cleaning up the dining room paint job.
I start Wednesday slowly thinking that I'll lift weights a bit later. But the day is bright and sunny so I jump on the mountain bicycle and ride for bit short of two hours. I kill some time and then ride the motorcycle for my two week followup appointment about my ear. When I check in, the receptionist says, "You're appointment is for March 26". I disagree with her and tell her to check the notes file because it was a two week followup appointment. The doctor from last time is not here today, so they relent and squeeze me in to see a different doctor. I like this doctor because he listened to my tail of woe before starting the examination. And he's aggressive when he's trying to vaccuum out the "goo" from my ear. He keeps stopping and asking if it hurts and I say it doesn't hurt. ANd he keeps saying, "Most people would have stopped me a long time ago because this hurts - we're right up againt the ear drum". And when he's finished I just tell the doctor that I used to play ice hockey so most things don't hurt me. He understands this because he did his residency near Detroit and we share some Michigan stories. But best of all, besides him stuffing my ear full of an anti-fungal gel, he listens to me when I ask for prednisone and listens to my reasoning and gives me the medicine. He doesn't like to try two different things at once, but I convince him to give it a shot. And even better, he's a bit familiar with FOrmula One so he says he's going to try his best to make sure I can hear for my trip in 19 days. When I get home I paint half of the baseboard in my office and put the office back into a useable shape.
I start Thursday slowly but then get rolling. I get in a good session with the weights with no pain anywhere. (Though I'm protecting a left bicep strain with lighter weights for biceps exercises.) I then pull out the chainsaw and do some cleaning up around the yard - things that were too detailed for the tree trimmers from last week to do. It's a wwarm day, probably going to be a record high for this date, so I'm sweating up a storm from the lifting and trimming. After a cooling shower I get down on my hands and kness and continue painting baseboards. I was going to take this day off from painting, but I wanted to finish up my office as well as start on the living room. But I can see the light at the end of the tunnel for the baseboard painting.
I start Friday with a 50 minute run. Today I even throw in some surges and find later that I've stayed in the red zone for heart rate for about 50% of the run. After a shower I ride up to CSULA and we have a productive team meeting. Afterwards Blake, a CSULA machinist and technician, stops me and shows me his "hobby" of making horn speakers. And he's picking my brain for ideas and so I share with him ideas on acoustic simulation, pressure fields, pressure measurements, and some other ideas that he hasn't thought of. It's a great sharing experience for both of us and I can't wait to see and hear what he builds next. I rush on home after the one hour conversation with Blake and mow the lawn and finish cleaning up the yard. After a cooling shower I relax for the evening. The neural networks that I had been making great progress on will have to wait until Saturday. Though here's another day where an hour before read/sleep time I start playing with the neural networks and making progress on MY data as opposed to canned data.
I start leap day with a good two hour mountain bicycle ride. I wanted to take the road bicycle out for a longer ride, but this turns out to be a good ride since there's enough wind on two legs of my ride to push me into the red zone again for a good workout. After a shower I start a Python simulation and ride the motorcycle down to the main Long Beach library branch. I return the three books, which I've completed reading in the last week, and take out four books. I rush on home, catch up on some email, and then get down on my hands and knees to finish painting the baseboard in the living room. Everything is look beautiful and I'm making decent progress without overdoing it. I take the early afternoon to relax with some television and then later I start working on covariance and crossvariance based selection of training and testing data for nueral networks. I can see where this is the way to go even if I don't fully understand it yet.
I start Sunday with some hesitation, but get out on the mountain bicycle ride for a ride similar to yesterday's. There's some wind that makes the rde challenging as rain threatens to come in and the wind provides for a good workout. AFter a shower I ride the bicycle (again) to the store for some supplies and then come home and paint a closet and small hallway. I'm starting in on the only carpeted areas of the house and have a new edger tool that seems to do very well. On the last stretch of today's painting I make a couple of errors that need to be cleaned up - nothing catastrophic - so I call it quits at a convenient point in order t avoid the foreseen and upcoming catastrophe. Right near noon I take time to relax and wach some ice hockey and golf as I mull the corssvariance and covariance neural network ideas. Sometimes it helps to just let the ideas bubble along in your head before you get the EUREKA moment.
I miss some sleep on SUnday night into Monday morning when I wake up and cannot sleep. Just go read for an hour and let it pass. When I wake up I do not go for the intended run. It's okay, I ran on Friday and cycled on Saturday and Sunday, so the legs can have the day off. I walk to the grocery store for supplies and work on the statistics and covraiance (and cross-variance) of the neural network with my data. I'm restless, so I go lift weights and all of the lifts are good except that I come up short on bench press - maybe a result of the prednisone. After lifting I paint the inside of the front door and the fireplace. I only have my bedroom baseboards to finish before turning to other things. Early in the afternoon I continue to ponder and work on the neural networks as well as get more data to use.
I have trouble sleeping on Monday into Tuesday, so I get up at 4:30 am and get out the door at 4:48 to go run. Today I want to run longer, so I take my time and keep telling myself to ease back the pace. Until disaster strikes. Coming to an intersection where there is a street light, I stumble about four steps and land on the right side of my face. I get up quickly but there's blood pouring out of my forehead above my right eye. Every few seconds I dab the forehead with my hand and there's a ton of blood. There's nothing to do now except turn back and run/walk the four miles home. Fortunately I have a shirt and a shell (i.e., windbreaker) on, so I take both off, put the shell back on, and use the very old Chupacabra shirt to keep pressure on my right forehead and reduce the bleeding as I run/walk home. At home I immediately put ice on the area but the bleeding continues. I finally add some Neosporin and apply cotton balls and tape to the area to aplly constant pressure. Do I drive to an emergency room or dial 911? I alternate sitting and standing for an hour with the pressure applied before the bleeding sort of stops. I'm not dizzy, I can balance, I don't have blurred vision, and I don't have a headache. But there's blood all over my face, my neck, my shoulder, my mouth, my hands, and my right kneee. I take a shower and try more ice, but the bleeding starts again so I'm back to cotton balls and tape for pressure. After another hour I drive to Ralph's and pick up grocery supplies and medical supplies - hoping not to have to go to urgent care or emergency. When I get back home I don't have any bleeding so, what the heck, I get down on my hands and knees and do some baseboard painting for 40 minutes. Afterwards I try the ice again but the bleeding starts over. So I'm back to cotton balls and tape for constant pressure.
Bad things, like bicycle flat tires, come in threes. This was number three after the broken ribs last November and the monthlong ear infection. I've stumbld and fallen twice in four months, so I decide that I need to do some balancing exercises and agility exercises to be less clumsy. Throughout the day I'll balance on one foot and then the other and I do some stretching, but don't dare take the pressure of the wound. The swelling is up and I'd like to ice it, but I cannot. I'm afraid of how my entire body is going to feel on Wednesday and Thursday morning. At least I already have the ear follow-up apoointment on Thursday morning where I can share my latest problem with the ear, nose, and throat doctor and let him shove me off to emergency.