I start with a blah day on Wednesday 1 April. For the last couple of days I've felt really down and depressed. I start the day walking to the grocery store for supplies and then spend time working on the Cat Blaster. Near noon I jump on the motorcycle and go for a ride just to recharge the battery and keep everything moving. When I get home I trim the roses and carnations and bring more into the house. After a break for lunch with some telelvision, I get out and lift weights and grab a warming shower. And relax during the evening with a bit of web debugging.
I start Thursday with an hour long walk and a shower. At 9:15 am my in office visit with my ear doctor has been changed to a telephone interview and we have a nice conversation though I tell him that I haven't made any progress in the last four weeks. He offers up some anti-fungal ear drops and I agree they might be worth a try. And then I tell him that I made good progress during that nine day course of prednisone, so why don't we try some more. He thinks this is a great idea so he prescribes a two week course (with slightly lower dosages to minimize my non-existent side effects). After the phone interview I jump on the mountain bicycle and repeat Tuesday's ride up the Los Angeles river. But today the wind is in the opposite direction so I'm just cranking along nicely on the way out and then struggle with a great workout on the way back. After a quick shower I ride the motorcycle to my pharmacy where they take my temperature and monitor everyone very closely for six foot spacings. Good for them! Back at home I watch some telelvision and then get a notice via email that Long Beach will be starting their redistricting effort for city council districts. So I start putting together my portfolio because this seems like a fun thing to do (along withat that gerrymandering hackathon that I did a couple of years ago).
I'm lazt on Friday so I don't go cycling. I go run some errands and then work on the pure Javascript mapping part of a new application. I break for lunch and then watch some television. At mid afternoon I get in a good workout with the weights and cleanup and deweed the roses and carnations. Later in the day I continue working on the mapping portion and get it working. So I hand it over to the front end developer for integration.
I'm out the door for a decent 80 kilometer road bicycle ride on Saturday morning. There are drops of rain falling in the last two kilometers but nothing serious. After a shower I have an 11am Zoom teleconference about the new app. People are all over the place and I keep saying, "It has to be simple for users so that they want to use it and we can't keep adding extraneous stuff so that it never gets built". Some people are on board with this, but unfortunately the leading member of our team cannot stay on track. I take a break and cook and eat lunch - neglecting all of the texts and calls coming in after the telelconference - and then I lay out a simple plan that we can execute and at least get a Beta app finished in time to deploy. Later in the afternoon I mow the lawn and drop some weed killer and fertilizer in some troubling spots in advance of the expected rain this week. I keep working away on the app with one teammate and then quit when I'm tired.
First thing on Sunday morning I'm up working on the app because I had two good ideas to enhance the app's use throughout the night. At mid morning I take a break and go ride down to the Long Beach ocean bicycle trail just to see how far I can go before the Covid-19 signs tell me to stop. When I see the signs I turn around and ride home for a good 80 minute ride (to recover from yesterday's long ride). After a shower I have a call from an app teammate and there are major changes. I ask when the changes cam from the customer and it was 20 hours ago. And I blow up! "There were changes that the customer wanted 20 hours ago and you never told Jorge (the other developer) or me? When were you going to tell us?" After this conversation everybody, except Jorge, is scared to call me so I just put my head down and work. I work on the app from 7 am until 9 pm with just four total hours of break time for the bicycle ride, an episode of Shameless, and some trimming of the roses. Finally I go to read and sleep after I've accomplished what I can.
On Sunday night into Monday morning I wake up at 3 am and cannot sleep. I know this is 6 am east coast time on the first anniversary of when my brother died, so this is right when he was getting out the door for the bicycle ride that he had the heart attack on. I do not sleep the rest of the night. Near 7 am I get up and work on the app and am pleased that everyone is afraid to call/text me. During a break in the rain I walk to the grocery store for supplies including a big bottle of wine. I get home and have a very good session with the weights and I realize I need to increase the weights more for the next workout. After a shower I start drinking the wine and cooking vegetables and rice for the upcoming week and don't even think about the app. Instead I work on putting together a one page introduction of who I am for the upcoming Long Beach redistricting effort that I want to be a part of. By 5pm the bottle of wine is empty. I grab some tasty vegetables and rice for dinner and wish that my brother was here enjoying my terrible cooking as we watch silly videos or movies. Later I look over my redistricting introduction and will revise it tomorrow in advance of Thursday's resdistricting videoconference. And finally I watch some television before going to bed to read and sleep. I'm out of library books now since the library is closed, so I've pulled a book from the distant past to re-read for entertainment.
On Monday night into Tuesday morning I wake up at 1:30 am and cannot sleep. I read more of the "old book from the distant path" and eventually gget back to sleep. I slep late until after 7 am and go for a one hour walk before the rain begins. Throughout the day there are some very heavy deluges of rain along with lighter rain. I work on refinining my redistricting resume as well as the Covid-19 app. I take a break to spackle along the crown moulding of my bedroom and the paint the crown moulding as an experiment. The new edging tool will not work well here (though it did work well when painting baseboards against a carpeted surface), so I resort to painters tape. And the results are very good and I have a path to finish painting the crown moulding in the next few days. Late at night I give up and send an email to a fellow geek for help since neither of us understand the intricate Javascript that a previous co-hacker wrote (which is extremely efficient but very difficult to understand or to modify). And jst as I'm turning out the lights for sleep my co-hacker has a solution that I will try in the morning.
I'm up near 6 am on Wednesday morning and implement my co-hacker's solution. It's nota perfect format match, but its good enough for now. And I certainly let him and the team know of our appreciation for his diligence. I make the app more consistent across the pages and enhance its functionality. I see that the sky looks blue towards the south so I get on the mountain bicycle to ride. I feel drops of rain within the first mile and at five miles the rain is very strong and the wind is howling. I stop under a tree and wait for the rain to subside and end up crawling home like a whipped dog with its tail between its legs (and because the sideways flow of water through the treets is so strong that I think it might knock me down). I cannot remember the last time I aborted a bicycle ride though I remember a few instances in Chiang Mai, Thailand and Chiang Rai, Thailand where rain was a factor. Regardless, I get home and strip all of y wet clothing off as quickly as possible to get into a warm shower. After the shower the blue skies are back, so I walk to a store for supplies and then spend the afternoon bundled up in extra clothes and working on coding - though mostly for redistricting ideas rather than the Covid-19 app.
Thursday and Friday are more days of rain - very heavy at time. But specifically on Thursday in rains continuously throughout the day. I cannot remember the last time this has happened. And I see later that we broke a record for six consecutive days of rain in April. The old record was five days in 1983. I get in workouts with the weights on both days and work on websites and have webinars and telelconferences. The Redistricting webinar is good but I believe that I will be disqualifed from consideration since I made a donation to a city council candidate above the allowed limit last year. On friday I walk to the grocery store for supplies and note that the store has a "No one allowed to enter the store without a mask" sign near the entrance. I certainly have my mask on. And then I see a shopper in the store who is wearing a mask around her neck - it's not even covering her nose or mouth. Really?
I'm up a bit after 7 am on Saturday morning. The combination of not being able to go out, overeating, and general boredom have tossed me into a minor depression and this leads to a bit more sleep and staying in bed in the morning longer than I usually would. But I jump out of bed, mask up, and ride the mountain bicycle north on the Los Angeles river trail until a convenient turn around point and come home. I've masked up with a blue Habitat for Humanity bandana rather than one of the "surgical masks" to help prevent fogging of my cycling shades. I'm so happy that all of the river trail gates are open and excited to ride again. After a quick shower, I put on BOTH the surgical mask and a separate pink Habitat for Humanity bandana to ride to the store for a few supplies. When I get home I move things out of the way and paint the last long strip of crown moulding in my bedroom. And, while I'm at it, I paint the baseboard in the sliding door closet in the kitchen that I missed when I was on baseboards. It's only 11:30 am and its already been a productive day. Late in the day I work on the Covid-19 app and make more progress.
I'm out of bed at 6:10 am this morning. I see an email has come in that is completely the wrong decision to make on the Covid-19 app because it is contrary to what the customer expressed interest in. So I put together the continued effort and then send out an email expressing a counter-argument ("Because it's what the customer liked!") I take off north on the Los Angeles river trail at 7:20 am on the mountain bicycle. I see some of the usual faces riding and running and wish them a Happy Easter. I get to a convenient turn around point and head for home. After a short break and re-hydrating, I pull out the lawn equipment and edge, mow, and sweep the lawn (and surroundings). Today I have to empty the mower bag more often since all of the recent rain has caused a jungle to grow in my yard. But I get through the effort and the green grass looks very appropriate for an Easter Sunday! After a shower I stream a youtube video from Saint Barnabas church in Long Beach of the 9 am Easter Mass. Why? Why not? I follow along and pay attention and recall the Mass itself and the readings from my childhood days. If nothing else, I hope I carry around the "patience and forgiveness" themes from the Mass into my ordinary life.
I start Monday by putting together an adminstrators statistics page for the app. A page where the customer can go and view a graphical display of day-by-day requests or inventory and the cumulative logs. I still have not heard how the team is going to proceed. At mid morning I load up the weights and lift a bit heavier today. The bench press is a struggle but the other lifts go well. After a shower I stay quarantined and watch television and work on the app and start in on a new effort - an optimal market sector strategy for stock/mutual fund trading. This will take some time, but it looks like fun.