I start Friday with a good 60 kilometer bicycle ride though it takes all of the way down the Los Angeles river before I get into a decent rhythm. I trim the roses and cool off with a shower in preparation for a very hot day. I watch the Moto2 race from Austria which also has to be red-flagged and restarted due to a nasty accident. Early in the afternoon as I'm preparing lunch I drop a glass and break it. That's three of the eight new drinking glasses that I've broken in about a year. But today is not finished. Late in the afternoon I catch my foot on an extension cord and tip the room fan over - breaking off a blade in the process. A five-bladed fan does not run well balanced with one blade missing (even after I've tried to glue it back on). What's going on here - a broken glass and broken fan in the same day? (Granted the fan was probably 25 years old and the plastic fan-blades were probably brittle, but still.) Thus I do my best to stay cool in the late afternoon and early evening as the temperature reaches 95F in Long Beach.
It's a warm night throughout the southland but I sleep fairly well. My fitbit indicates that I have more deep sleep and a ton of REM sleep during the night. I'm out the door for a recovery mountain bicycle ride at 6:20 on Wednesday morning. Today I have a decent ride and only towards the end do I tire and "want to get on with it". After a shower I take the car out and buy a new fan (to replace the fan that I broke yesterday) and do some grocery shopping. It's already hot today near 10 am, so I grab a Lyft ride to the motorcycle dealer and finally get my repaired Yamaha YZF-R1 back after two months at the shop. I talk with the mechanic, who I've known for 15 years, and we both agree that it is time for a new bike. I ride the bike home and it feels good to ride again - after two months of NOT riding perhaps the longest NON-riding period in thirty years. I finally finish trimming the bedroom and on Friday I'll be able to roll the paint on the last half of my bedroom. (And it will take another effort to perform touch-ups, but I can see the finish line.) I get in a second cooling shower and catch up on news and market activity and Netflix for the afternoon.
No bibycle ride on Thursday. Instead I walk for 70 minutes, trim and water the roses and carnations, and finish painting my bedroom. After cleaning up the painting equipment and cooling down with a shower, I inspect the bedroom and see that it will need some touch-up (mostly because I rushed the painting today and because I'm going a darker shade of blue). I catch up on the news and markets and watch some Netflix and ice hockey games. And lay out the tasks that I want to finish this weekend.
It's warm when I start cycling on the road bicycle at 6:20 am. I get in a decent 60 kilometers though I crawl the last few miles. I cool down a bit and touch up the bedroom paint and move the heavy furniture back into place. There's still more touch-up to do, but I can get to it with the furniture back in its desired positions. I'm running out of energy but go out and mow the front and back yard - with water breaks as needed. And then I cool down with a shower and try to stay cool during another hot day.
These are difficult times indeed with the heat and (uncharacteristic) humidity for southern California. I still get some good sleep and jump on the road bicycle for another ride. I'm tired from riding and the heat, so I stop a bit short of 6o kilometers today. At home I get my typical post-ride protein/milk shake, trim the roses, clean up the bicycle, and grab a shower to cool down and rinse off my cycling clothes. I gulp a ton of water and even take water with me as I run my errands. I get new books from the library and then recycle old electronics and chemicals (seeing that the recycling facility has just re-opened after many months closed). On the way back home I stop in at the grocery store to buy some food supplies but more to but cleaning supplies that are needed. I watch incredibly exciting MotoGP Q1 and Q2 sessions - promising an exciting Sunday race. And a super close Moto2 qualifying session has my two favorite riders on the front row for Sunday's race. The remaining hot and humid day is spent inside cooking and preparing food for the upcoming week and continuing to slowly straighten out my bedroom towards its completion.
I have trouble sleeping on Saturday night into Sunday morning - tossing and turning awake from 3 am until maybe 4 am. So I sleep a bit late and don't get out the door to go cycling on a recovery ride until 6:52am. It's a decent ride though I crawl home the last couple of miles. I grab a quick shower to cool down and watch a wild and thrilling MotoGP race from Austria where the last corner decides the first three positions. And one of the riders that I like wins his first MotoGP race. Later I cook pasta for lunch and watch the recorded Indy 500 as I fast forward through advertisements and boring parts. For the rest of the day I'm a vegetable since I'm tired from three bicycle rides in three days and the excessive heat and humidity. Very rarely do we get high humidity in Southern California, but there's monsoonal flow coming up from Mexico that brings the humidity.
I start Monday a bit late, but work on trimming the roses, watering the roses and carnations, trimming a bush in the front yard, and putting my freshly painted bedroom back together. I have to touch-up the area near the crown moulding, but I can get to it with the bedroom in its nominal state. I take a quick rinse-off shower and check out the markets and the news. Today I poke around for some ideas to work on whether they are related to demographics or graph convolutional neural networks or other. Near noon I watch the Moto2 race and its exciting and a thriller until AFTER the checkered flag has falled - the winner being docked one place for exceeding the track limits. But my two favorite riders get 2nd and 4th. I watch some interesting documentaries on Netflx to contnue to poke at ideas to work on. Late in the afternoon I lift weights for the first time in two weeks and it goes as well as can be expected. Another shower cools me off to relax for the evening.
Tuesday and Wednesday are kinda blah days. I certainly get out for a long walk one day and a decent mountain bicycle ride the other day. And I spend a fair amount of time still poking around for ideas to work on.
I want to go riding on Thursday morning but the spirit isn't willing. Instead I get down on my hands and knees and deweed and degreass the rose beds and the carnations. It feels good to play in the dirt! Afterwards I feed and water the roses and carnations and take a cool shower. I spend the rest of the morning checking up on the markets and news, poking ideas around, and preparing the dining room for subsequent painting. When I started the entire painting effort with the exterior window trim back in October 2019, I guessed that it would take until October 2020 to do the exterior trim, the interior doorframes and window frames, interior baseboards, and all of the interior ceilings and walls. Provided the weather doesn't turn hot and humid to drain my energy, I'm probably on schedule for October 2020. Plus or minus all of the interior doors themselves. And if I'm still around in 15 years or so when the painting needs to be done again, I'll probably just hire somebody. This is the third time I've painted the interior of the house and that's enough for one lifetime. Thus at 11am I start painting the corners and edges around trim of the dining room and my office since they are both the same color. I make a lot of progress but will still have some edging work to do around the baseboards before the rolling begins.
I sleep well in the cooling weather after the nasty heatwave of the last two weeks. During today's 60 kilometer road bicycle ride I feel very strong and keep thinking about adding kilometers on to the ride, but I don't. I take the extra energy and go out and top of the roses to promote growth in the fall season. And cool down with a shower and work on a website for this year's CSULA senior design team.
I stay in bed an extra half hour on Sunday - maybe a bit hungover from the physical twisting and stretching of painting back on Thursday. But I get on the mountain bicycle and have a good ride to the end of the ocean trail and back home. After getting cleaned up I do some grocery shopping and start cooking stuff (that I didn't want to cook when the house was so hot inside). The F1 qualifying from Belgium is boring so I hope the predicted Sunday rain materializes. After relaxing a bit I get into a groove and finish the CSULA project website and send it off the faculty advisors for suggestions before we give it to the sutdents.
I'm a bit lazy on Monday and Tuesday and I even sleep very late on Tuesday as I just feel a bit under the weather. Nonetheless on both days I work in the garden and work on house painting. Both the dining room and my office are ready for rolling - probably Thursday since I'm tired of painting and will concentrate on cycling and CSULA on Wednesday. ANd I manage to get in a good session with the weights on Tuesday afternoon and ice the shoulders afterwards as a preemptive strike.
I get out the door on Wednesday and have a good 60 kilometer bicycle ride. For the last couple of miles two riders join me and want to talk about my Enve wheels and if I've had any problems with them. Since they and I know a lot of riders who bought other wheels and don't like them. After a cooling shower I move things around a bit in the two rooms to be painted tomorrow and then have a slow day.
I start Thursday with a nice cool mountain bicycle to the end of the ocean trail and back. I make a quick stop at the Long Beach pier and run into a guy who I talk with a bit. He's a software engineer that does something for non-profits. So I give him my number and say we should hang out in a socially distanced manner and share geek stories. Back at home I relax for about an hour and then start painting the dining room and office. It's a lot of up and down and twisting and stretching around all of the furniture which is moved to the center of each room. But I finish and clean up the painting equipment and take a shower to cool down. This was a long painting session so I just lay on the couch with ice water and watch television for a bit because I'm wiped out. At 4pm I have another Zoom conference with CSULA people. And then I water the roses and carnations in advance of the extreme heat coming this Labor day weekend.
I just have it in my mind that I'm going to ride on Friday. So I get out the door and after a few miles of warming up from the two previous rides ad painting the two rooms, the legs start to feel good. So I just keep pedaling along and decide to quit at 60 kilometers. I grab a quick shower and do some grocery shopping to prepare for the extreme heat that we expect this weekend. I slowly move some furniture back into place and then have two back-to-back Zoom meetings for CSULA that take up the noon to 4 pm time period.
Again on Saturday I have it in my head that I'm going to go cycling though it would be the fourth day in a row. I get out early on the mountain bicycle to the end of the ocean trail and back home. Because it is going to be very hot today, there are many people out riding bicycles, skating, and walking/running. And a ton of people who don't have any semblance of rules or order and just go wander wherever they want and put everyone else at risk. But I manage to get in a good ride and avoid collisions and only tire at the end. After trimming the roses I cool down with a shower and relax on the couch with Formula One qualifying from Monza, Italy and the first mountain stage of the Tour du France. My legs are tired and I keep moving them around and elevating them and stretching them throughout the day. Today we reach 95F in Long Beach - which is very hot for us. But at least it is dry and I don't even try to start the air conditioning until after 2 pm. And then I find that the air conditioning is only blowing warm air so it looks like the AC unit has given up the ghost. When I get ready to go to sleep, in a very hot house, I try to start the air conditioning system and it starts and blows cool air. What the heck happened?
On Sunday near 2 am I wake up and turn the air conditioning off and open up windows to let cooler breezes in. And I hope the AC will re-start later on Sunday. Since I've ridden bicycles the last four days, I take Sunday off from riding. Instead I go for a 70 minute walk and water the roses/carnations and get cleaned up and buy a few supplies at CVS. The Italian Grand Prix is weird since there's a yellow flag and then a red flag and penalties handed out and a surprise podium. I'm literally in tears as the winner does his interview and podium celebrations since he's one of my favorite drivers, his first win, and the team's first win since 2008. There are tears streaming down my cheeks! In the afternoon I take care of some CSULA business as we try to get the semester kick-started virtually and then I just stay cool as today is the hottest day in Long Beach in many years and my AC is working.
I was inttending to ride on Monday morning, but it got in my head that I should update the crime statistics scraping to Python. So I work from 6:30 am until 11:30 am converting to Python and have the effort finished. I get out and trim the roses and have a very good session with the weights. It's not time to increase the weights yet, but maybe soon. Though neither shoulder hurts during lifting, I still ice both shoulders afterwards. And cool off with a shower. Today is warm but humid. During lunch I watch an old documentary called "Street Fight" about Cory Booker's run for mayor of Newark, New Jersey. It's entertaining. And then I go back and make sure that the newly derived crime statistics file using Python works with the follow-up statistical analyses programs that were previously written. And then I get restless so I pack up some books to return to the library and ride around on the motorcycle to get it some mileage and see if its going to start leaking oil again.