I have trouble sleeping on Monday night into Tuesday morning. Thus I just get on the mountain bicycle and go out for a timed ride up the Los Angeles river and back to home. At home I can't help myself. I put the long ladder against the side of the house, put on my construction boots, and climb up to see how the scaping of old paint will go on a tall ladder. I'm certainly very cautious climbing up and down the ladder as well as reaching over to the side. This was just a trial but the top of the backside of the house is probably one third scraped now. I also take some time to dismantle some old phone boxes and wires on the side of the house for a landline phone that has not existed for twenty years. Since I have the tall ladder, I can reach up and unhook the wires leading to the house (tomorrow) and spool up the wires and get them out of there. After a shower I try to book a specific Covid-19 booster shot and the website keeps crashing and I'm caught in phone-tree circles. Finally I start making progres except the guy on the phone takes about two minutes to input the answer to each question that he asks me such as "Have you ever tested positive for Covid" or "What is your birthdate?" Finally I just give him my first and last name and tell him I'm showing up at 11:45 am and I'll take care of the rest in-person because this is taking too long. He doesn't want to let me do that, but I just insist with "I'm showing up at 11:45 am. Thanks for the help and goodbye". Do I have an appointment or not? I go run errands to the ATM and to pick up lunch and Home Depot (for stucco patching compound) and the library and finally I get to my appointment at 11:40 am. They see that the paperwork is not filled out but both this administrative assistant and the nurse are very nice and we get things taken care of and I get my booster shot. Back at home I watch a disappointing MotoGP race and then just rest from lack of sleep. And I've set my timer for one hour increments to put ice on the vaccination site for five minutes every hour to prevent injection site soreness.
I expect to just walk on Wednesday morning the day after my booster shot but I feel good so it turns into a run/walk. It's probably sixty percent running but I do stop at sixty minutes rather than continuing longer. I stop shorter because I'm motivated to get the paint scraped from the back of the house. Thus I put on safety glasses, my construction boots, and knee pads and climb the ladder to continue scraping paint. (I use the knee pads above the knees where a rung of the ladder typically causes some discomfort.) I just keep plugging away at scraping, move the ladder, scrape, move the ladder, etc so that I'm not doing something stupid like reaching way out from the ladder that might cause a fall. Finally the top third of the area is scraped and more or less ready for paint. Since I have the tall ladder, I want to remove the two old landlines that have not been used for twenty years. But the footprint between my house and the neighbor's fence is only five feet and I'm worried about the pitch of the tall ladder. So I take the ladder and set it up against my garage with the same pitch and see if it feels safe. It does! So I move the ladder over to the side of the house and squeeze it in between my house and the neighbor's fence and carefully start clipping landline wires, wire guides, and wire positioners until the landlines come down. I climb down the ladder and grab some stucco repair compound and fill in a small hole that was used to mount the landlines. (And no need to paint over this spot repair since it is so small that nobody will notice.) The landlines have come down down but are stuck in tall bushes, so I grab my tree trimming pole and use it to lever up the landlines out of the bushes and I make my way towards the "parent" pole at the very corner of the yard. And then I pull out my six foot step ladder to tie the landlines off at the pole on a climbing rung and snip them. Now I just have sixty feet of two landline cables, a telephone junction box, and another fifteen feet of landline cable laying in the backyard. I'm tired and put everything into a safe place and I'll clean up the backyard of landline remnants later. After a shower I get to the grocery store and, of course, forget to pick up the milk that was the main reason for the trip. But I'm tired so I put on some warm clothes and relax after the morning's activities and watch the final Moto2 race of the season. And I'm a vegetable for the rest of the day due to all of the activities and maybe due to the booster vaccine.
I am so physically hungover on Wednesday night and into Thursday morning from recent activities: three bicycle rides, one run, one session with the weights, scraping paint up and down the ladder, and a Covid-19 booster shot. On Thursday I can barely get out of bed but I take some Aleve and get out the door on the mountain bicycle for a "best effort" ride. It goes better than expected and I'm cranking away nicely down to the old yacht club and back to home. But there's no way I'm climbing on a ladder today. I get a nice warm shower and walk to the grocery store for the gallon of milk that I forgot to buy yesterday. And back at home I clean up the backyard of tons of landline cable and electrical interface boxes. (The electrial interface boxes go into the electrical recycle box for a future "environmentally sound" recycle effort.) And I do a trivial amount of painting (off the ladder) where I've made some stucco repairs. Climbing up on the ladder and finishing the painting at the top of the house has to wait until Friday. At late morning I put together notes of everything that I've done health-wise for a telephone interview with my primary care physician. This includes all of the anti-fungals drugs I've taken, the Covid-19 booster, results of lipid blood tests, and the CD4 and CD8 blood test results. As well as a curious effect of the latest anti-fungal two week treatment that has raised my blood pressure by twenty points and it doesn't seem to be "reverting to the mean" following the end of the treatment. I also prepare a thank you note for the neighbors across the street who lent me their tall ladder in a bit of Tagalog and English that I plan on attaching to cupcakes for their friendship when I return the ladder.
I wake up early on Friday morning. As I start to read the news I see a fire truck and paramedic truck pull up to the school teacher's house across the street. I keep an eye on what is going on and am relieved when I see her walk out on her own power and then get strapped to the gurney by the paramedics. Throughout the day I keep an eye on her house to see if there is anything that I can do. I grab some food and then climb up on the ladder and start to paint the top of the house. I just work my way slowly along - being careful on the tall ladder. As I finish the effort it appears there might be some shadows in today's painting (where I might have starved the paint). But later, when everything is dry, it looks pretty good. The top looks a little "less refined" than the bottom two thirds, but nobody will notice except me. I clean up the neighbor's ladder and fold it up and get it ready to return on Saturday. Since I'm feeling a bit chilly and not like riding up to CSULA, I let the team know that we will, unfortualentely, just have a Zoom meeting today. And the students understand since some of them got boosters and are also feeling chilly. The day passes by with some rest and we have a decent CSULA meeting where I let the team know that I'm not seeing the effort or pgrogress from all of the team members that we expect and that they need to get going.
There's a moment or two when I wake up on Saturday and think of taking the day off from cycling. But reason prevails and I get out on the road bicycle for a good 80 kilometer ride. The morning ride is much chillier than last week's ride when we had Santa Ana winds heating up the whole area - so it seems like most cyclists started later today. But I finish strong and its a good ride. After a quick shower I run errands for Thanksgiving food shopping (to avoid shopping this coming week), picking up lunch, and a stop at a bakery to buy the neighbors across the street a half dozen cupcakes for letting me use their very tall ladder. When I get home I see no activity at the neighbor's house so I put the cupcakes in the refrigerator and wait for them to be visible. After the morning's activities the remainder of the day is fairly slow. I finally catch a neighbor coming home and I return the ladder and bring over the cupcakes with the Tagalog word for "thank you" that I've printed on the box as well as some other words of thanks inside.
I start Sunday slow but soon I'm on the mountain bicycle for the traditional Sunday "recovery ride" down to the old yacht club nad back to home. I notice that the cycling totem, the bicycle counter that Long Beach installed a few years ago to count the number of cyclists who have ridden past, reads only 22 on this cold day. This is the lowest value that I've ever seen. (It resets each night at midnight.) Back at home I stand in the sun for a while and then pull out the stucco patch compound and spend fifteen minutes filling in a crack in the garage stucco. And then I finally get a warm shower. Today is supposed to be a warm day so after the shower I open the windows and doors in the house and let the warmth seep in. It is looking promising that I can reach one of my little "teaser" goals - not needing to use the heater before 1 December.
Monday is a fairly blah day. It's a planned day off from cycling or running, so I work on some small coding projects and read the news and markets in the morning. At mid morning I take the Yamaha YZF-R1 out for a ride to keep the battery charged and the lubricants moving around. And then I get in a decent session with the weights - each superset of reps being fairly difficult today. After a shower I do some minor stucco repair of cracks in the house and garage, watch a few recorded programs, and have long phone conversations with a couple of friends throughtout the day and evening.
I'm jumping onto the road bicycle at 6:18 am on Tuesday morning. It's chilly today, but I get in a good 75 kilometer ride. At one point I've passed a group of rides and two of the riders hang onto my rear wheel until we get one kilometer from a popular turnoff point. And then they try to blast past me. I stick with them for a bit but by the turnoff point they've gapped me. I continue on with my ride which goes in a different direction and finish well. After a shower I get to the grocery store to pick up supplies before the Thanksgiving rush starts, continue repairing cracks in the house and garage stucco, water the carantions, and then start reading the news and markets. The stucco repairs are ready to be painted tomorrow after yardwork. In the middle of the afternoon I have a telephone appointment with my primary care physician. And I run down the list of recent developments. She's happy with the results though I don't feel as happy as she does. I don't express this opinion, but I just have a bit of work to do before another blood test checkup that we schedule for March 2022. Late in the day I go outside to see if I can see the contrails and traces of the SpaceX launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base (as I've seen in the past). When I first get I'm just checking to see how cloudy it is and it looks promising. I'm staring up at the sky and I don't even realize that the neighbors two daughters and their friends are sitting in the car three meters away from me smoking marijuana. When they open the windows to say Hello and ask what I'm doing, all four come out and we look to the west and northwest in hopes of seeing contrails. I have the NASA TV live feed playing on my phone so we see the launch and hear the stages of the launch but we can't see a thing. It's just too cloudy. We only stay outside for five to ten minutes until the first stage has separated and has landed back at VAFB. I apologize to the four neighbors (and friends) to get their hopes up and then to be disappointed due to clouds. And then I go inside the house and go to sleep.
I'm out the door a bit after 6am on Wednesday to run/walk. Today seems like the easiest run/walk in a long time so the run portions are longer. Eventually I'm back at home after a good 75 minute run/walk. I warm up a bit inside the house and then go edge and mow the lawn and trim the roses. Finally I take a five minute break and then paint the recently repaired stucco. As I'm painting, like last time, I'm thinking "This sure seems a lot brighter than the surrounding non-painted surfaces and I hope it blends better when it dries". Now I'm tired so I get a nice warm shower and relax a bit and go check the paint. If you know exactly where to look, you can see a slight discrpeancy in the brightness of the color, but its good enough. It's probably because the surrounding non-repaired area was painted in 2009 or so and is just a bit dingy. The retired schoolteacher from across the street comes over again for more computer help and I get her on her way. And get to have lunch after 1pm. The rest of the day is slow since its the day before Thanksgiving and I'm just staying home and away from crowds and madness.
Except that on Wednesday afternoon I'm tired and bored, so I violate one of my life's principles. Namely, I go to the grocery store on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. I do this because I'm bored but also I just want to observe the desperation and panic in the shoppers' attitudes. I only pick up a few items and get out of the store rather quickly. And the sense of desperation and panic that I thought that I would witness does not materialze.
Friday is a planned day off from cycling or running. I start by changing my burner phone number and the associated phones and apps that are tired t the old burner number. I take some time at mid-morning, as the sun is warming te day up, to adjust the gate, trim the roses, and rake the leaves that the lawnmower won't reach. And then I spend a fair amount of time dealing with my web hosting company and they get back to me later in the day saying that they don't offer the services that I need. I take some time to lift weights and work off the stress of probably having to change hosting companies. And then just relax. Late in the evening I start poking around for different database libraries to use and I find two - one that is a major rewrite of my Pyathon backend and one that would be very similiar to the current Python backend. I try to use this latter library and find that it is installed on my hosting company's servers and I can make it work with minor modifications to my Python (for a simple test case of printing out all of the entries in the database). So I think I'm in business despite my web hosting company be of no help to me at all.
I stay in bed for thirty minutes and then get out the door for cycling at 6:30 am. It's chilly this morning! I get in 65 kilometers today on the road bicycle. During the ride I consider adding in anotther ten or fifteen kilometers, but I decide against it. At home I warm up with a shower and watch some of a college football game. This is so boring - do I relaly have to listen to each team's fight song played in between every play? I get out and paint the repaired stucco and find a few more cracks on the side of the house that I patch with stucco and can paint in a day or so. I'm sure most of these cracks will come back due to our shifting soil, but it's okay. I make a bit more progress on converting a trial Python backend to the new database library and by the evening I've workled on t in two different spurts and have most of it running. I'll keep checking it throughout the weekend for trasnfer over to other websites. I sure wish my web hosting company would have told me about this substitute database library a month ago. MSNBC is having a daily program covering the Men's World Chesss Champsionship match, so I've got the series ready to be recorded and will catch up as I can.
It seems like I sleep well at the beginning of the night and than wake up near 4am and cannot sleep. Perhaps I fall asleep for a bit and perhaps not, but it's not good sleep if I do. When the alarm goes off at 5:30am I spend fifteen extra minutes just taking nice deep breaths and finally get out the door for a bicycle ride at 6:30am. I just do the "recently traditional" Sunday morning ride down to the old yacht club and back to home. It's a chilly ride but a good ride. At home I trim the roses and apply more stucco repair compound to some deep cracks. This is it - I'm going to paint on Monday and there will be no more stucco repair for a while. After a shower I get to the grocery store for supplies. When I return home I finally take the window fan out of the bedroom window (since the nights are so cool or cold now) and vow to keep the heating system off for another couple of days to get to 1 December befre activating it. The day is nice at 75F so I can open up the doors of the house and let the warm air in. I take some anti-pain medicine just for an accumulation of little aches and pains and have a quiet day watching football.
I start Monday slow in the chilly weather with a day off from cycling or running. I read the news and the markets and at mid-morning I get in a good session with the weights and then paint over the recently repaired stucco. I walk around the house and notice a couple other small areas that could use some stucco repair, so I take the most visible one and patch it. After a shower I catch up on the chess world championship programs and later watch the football game. I've got all of the websites back to functionality and take some time to decide on the next enhancements.