Content-type: text/html Ray Manning

Monday, March 8, 2021 8:02 PM

Almost springtime


I start Tuesday with a good bicycle ride to the old yacht club and back towards home. THere's construction along the ocean bicycle trail and I see a lady coming towards me and she's looking over towards her movie set friends in the parking lot and runs into a plastic traffic bollard. Fortunately she does not fall but I stop and make sure that she is okay. And she admits to being more embarassed than anything else. Shes okay since she didn't fall so she rides towards the movie set and I start back towars home. I hear her friends, who were laughing when they saw her run into the bollard, yelling "That guy was really nice 'cuz he stopped when she had the accident". I just turn to them and toss up my hand and yell back at them "It could happen to any of us". But really? They were laughing at her when she had a potentially bad accident? The rest of the day is slow until my "Geo data processing and voter turnout" webinar at 4pm. One of the presentations is very good by a man who did work for Bloomberg and I try to absorb what I can.

I'm out of control on Wednesday. I start working on the cement mill simulation and scraping of assets for that recently-viewed website that I liked the look and feel of. I'm scraping the assets so that I can easily build a website for someone or some business with a similar look and feel. I just keep plugging away on both of these tasks and pretty soon it is 1pm. I take a break t get in a good session with the weights and all of the joint aches and pains are gone since I've had a week off. After a late lunch I just keep coding along with a couple breaks for television.

Thursday starts in the most bizarre fashion! I wake up at 3:07 am and cannot fall back asleep. Thus at 3:39 am I get out of bed and continue scraping assets from a website that I like the look and feel of. By the time that the sun is coming up I think I've scraped all of the assets for the basic pages that I want (or need). I get out the door at 7am for a road bicycle ride and within two kilometers I'm on the ground against a curb and my right knee is bleeding. Nothing hurts too bad and the bicycle is functional, so I continue off on my ride. During the ride I keep imagining the bicycle breaking and falling apart from the accident but it does well and I feel strong throughout. I guess I managed to protect damage to the bicycle via my right knee and right elbow. Probably the adrenaline of the accident keeps me going, but I pull riders most of the way up the San Gabriel river trail into a decent headwind for the morning hour. Eventually I turn for home and get passed by many police and ambulance vehicles with sirens blaring. At Del Amo and Paramount the road is closed and there is a nasty accident. I ask a police officer if I can ride on the sidewalk because I'm bleeding and I just want to get home. But he gives me a good alternate path through some alleyways. This accident at Del Amo and Paramount is nasty and I still hear a helicopter overhead about two hours after I passed through. But when I get home from the ride there are just a few scratches on the bicycle and my right knee and shin is covered in coagulated blood. Do I go clean up? No! I first pull out a weedwacker and, bloody leg and all, clean out weeds from the rosebeds and sideyard. Afterwards I clean up in the shower and see the Alfred Hitchcock "Psycho" scene of blood draining down the shower drain. When cleaned up the knee doesn't look bad and I start coating it with Neosporin and get to the grocery store for more Neosporin and other supplies.

It's barely 11 am on Thursday and I've been awake, on the ground, and bloodied up for seven hours. I take time to read the markets and the news and figure it will be a very slow day. Certainly more coding and scraping, but I'm coming to convenient stopping points for both.

I'm too lazy to ride on Friday morning and maybe just hung over from the body hitting the ground yesterday. I tidy up and parameterize the mill simulation and get in a decent workout lifting weights. Though the lifts are harder today which reinforces my thought that the body is still recovering from yesterday's terrestrial impact. After a CSULA Zoom meeting I lose motivation and kinda pass the day away waiting for a Saturday morning ride. I do a bit of coding converting the previous California Assembly District race algorithm to handle a Long Beach City Council race. I don't complete the conversion but I'm especially curious how the results will be on a smaller scale (i.e., smaller number of voting precincts).

I start Saturday with a good mountain bicycle ride. The right knee scar is a bit stiff as I start but after a few kilometers its flexed out. And certainly after the ride and a cleanup I keep putting Neosporin on the scar throughout the day to prevent infection and to help the healing. I run a couple of quick errands and then just have a fairly slow day. I certainly do a bit of voting strategy coding, but nothing intense. I think I just need a more or less mindless day today.

The next few days are a blur of cycling and lifting weights and coding. I've figured out an idea on what to use the new scraped web assets for so I'm busy scraping everything that I need, adding content, adding pictures, and putting the new website together. During Wednesday's ride I've started a bit early because we're supposed to have rain today. And I make it home dry. Just a bit after getting home I hear a massive thunder boom and some rain starts coming. At noon I go see my dentist to look at a white spot on my gums that I've had for a long time and that we keep watching.

Friday and Saturday are very productive days. I make a lot of progress securing a domain, phone number, email, and social media accounts for the new idea and have a CSULA Zoom meeting. I have a good session with the weights on Friday and mow the lawn. And on Saturday I have a good bicycle ride, run errands, clean up both bicycles to shiny new, and work on the roses and carnations. I bring the first rose blooms of the season into the house today. And I get a late call to help a friend with his cement plant data and we work on that.

From all of Friday's and Saturday's activities I'm worn out on Sunday. I stay in bed for almost an extra hour and work on my friend's cement plant data some more. It's a chilly day and I'm feeling cold so I actually turn the heater on. I check out the first MotoGP test session of the year and it won't be long until both Formula One and MotoGP/2/3 are back racing. So I'm excited. But Sunday is a lazy day.