Content-type: text/html Ray Manning

Friday, December 31, 2021 8:02 PM

End of 2021


Tuesday is the first big rain of the rainy season and I've planned this day off from cycling and raunning/walking. Instead I sleep about thirty minutes later and get up and write a tutorial for my CSULA students and also, pretty much, finish the Python/mySQL processes that I had to update. As I'm working away I figure I should launch documents in a modal window, so I'll get to that later in the day. In the early afternoon I get out and have a good session with the weights and catch up on the world chess championship. The current world champion, who has dominated this match, wins the game and retains his world chess championship. THe challenegr had made some novice-like blunders that were just inexplicable.

Wednesday morning is 37F and I'm out running/walking before 6:30 am. I feel a little bit of something bad happening with my left calf, so I walk those periods of time off. But I still get in a good, chilly 75 minute run/walk. Back at home I adjust the gate since it always sticks after the first big rain of the season (and again early in the summer as everything is getting so dry). And I continue hard-pruning the roses. After today's effort, I just have three rose bushes left to hard-prune for the year. In past year's I would wait until January and then go wild over one day to do the hard-pruning. But it's easier to stretch it over three sessions and I think this should become my new normal. After a shower I ride the motorcycle and the new battery is so strong that the motorcycle almost starts before I even push the START button. Back at home I slightly re-write some of the Python/mySQL code to make it more modular and there's just one thing left to do - how to make a modal window resizable. There's some documentation on how to do it but I guess I'm not doing it right. But great progress over the last two days is satisfying. And then I watch a few Netflix shows.

Thursday is a pseuo-heatwave as I start a mountain bicycle ride at 6:40 am at 40F. I wanted to ride longer on the road bicycle, but it didn't happen. I have a cold but good ride down to the old yacht club and back to home. After a warm shower, I go run errands to te ATM, Target, and the grocery store. And then settle in for a relatively slow day that includes more Netflix and the football game. I've told the students NOT to send me their draft semester report on the night before it is due. The report is due tomorrow (Friday). I get the draft on Thursday at 5:35 pm. I do a quick read-through and it needs a lot of work. So I go back and watch the football game and help work on the report for an hour before bedtime. As I'm getting into bed for reading and sleep there is a light rain. Unexpected, but welcome since Friday was not going to be a cycling day.

The pavement is very wet on Friday morning but there is no rain. I walk to the grocery store because I want some blood sugar and I buy some cinnamon muffins. And work on the CSULA semester report for two hours before sending it back to the students. I bet I spent more time on the report than the accumulated time of the five students. This is not going well. I have to look deep inside myself to see what I can do different for the spring semester. I also spend a fair amount of time getting ready to convert the non-profit website, developed back in 2017, to a new and cleaner website. I've found a simpler and cleaner theme that I like with all of the assets present for free. So I download it and start converting it to the non-profit information and pictures and scripts. Well after noon I get out and workout the abdominals, lower back, and core muscles, finish the hard-pruning of the roses, clean up around the house, and get a shower. And after a couple hours of the news, I go back to working on the new website.

Saturday starts a bit late but I have cold but good ride to the old yacht club and back to home. I take a quick shower and pick up supplies at the grocery store. I have high hopes for progress on various fronts today but it doesn't happen. I do get out and trim the sideyard bushes, otherwise it's a lost day.

Sunday also starts late but I have a cold (40 degrees F) mountain bicycle ride up the Los Angeles river trail. When I get to the bridge that I turn around at, I hear a whole gaggle of ducks honking. Across the bridge that catch basin (or spillover area) from the dam, which is usually a dry grassy field, is full of water and full of ducks. Usually it is quiet today, but the ducks are honking away enjoying their new playground. Back at home I do some preliminary work on possibly helping out another political candidate with mathematics. And I watch some football and some recorded shows from the last few days.

Monday is a semi-planned day off from cycling and running. I get up and start pounding away on the Python process to apply it to congressional districts since there is an open race that I might be able to get involved with. By the end of the day I have the entire seven step process working and providing trial results. But I could use the 2020 census data. And I continue making the updates to the old non-profit site. A few more days and it will be finished. Well after noon I get out and add a lot of weight and drop the reps for a good workout with the weights. It goes better than I thought that it would with the higher weights. Looking back on my records, these are the highest weights I've lifted all year - which probably just means I was being lazy with the weights more than anything else.

I sleep horribly on Monday into Tuesday morning and the planned road bicycle ride is scrapped. I walk to the grocery store for supplies and then mow and trim the lawn. I also lay down some fertilizer - with the belief that fertilizer during the off-growing season helps the grass get ready for next year's growing season. After a shower I keep enhancing the congressional district office with a better display of results in anticipation of the new congressional district shapefiles (as a result of the 2020 census). Throughout the day I take time to stretch the shoulders and legs and prepare for a Wednesday bicycle ride.

On Wednesday and Thursday I get out for a 65 kilometer bicycle ride and a heavy session with the weights, respectively. With the weights I throw in an extra set and the last rep or two for each set is a real struggle. After Wednesday's bicycle ride I go down to the man public libray in Long Beach and get four more books to read. And on both Wednesday and Thursday I have slow afternoons. Though on THursday with the rain steadily coming down throughout the day, I take some time to stand out on the front porch and smell, watch, and listen to the rain come down. I'm glad that I have a relatively new roof on the house, but it still feels good to be out in the rain. On both Wednesday and Thursday I continue working on the new congressional district mapping as well as a new website for a non-profit agency. I'm making ood progress on both.

Christmas eve and Christmas day are blah days. Both days see rain in the morning so no cycling. I do get out for an hour long walk on Christmas eve and I lift weights on Christmas day. For the weight lifting on Christmas day I increase the weights again and the first set is a struggle and the second set (for each exercise) is a beast. It feels good, but its not the same as cycling or running. This Thursday, Friday, and Saturday stretch is the first three day period of no cycling since March 2020 (when I fell during running and the cycling helmet wouldn't painlessly go on my head). I spend both of these days coding away on a number of different tasks, help out the retired schoolteacher across the street again with her WiFi and phone, and watch some Christmas football.

I have perhaps the worst night of sleep ever on Christmas night into Sunday morning. I finally get up to damp streets at 5:30 am and do some coding and tidying up websites. at 8:30 am I get on the mountain bicycle and ride down to the old yacht club and back to home. It feels good to ride after missing three consecutive days. Back at home I take some Aleve and relax with football and work a bit on a steganography-based secret messaging process.

I sleep very late on Monday to make up for the last two nights of porr sleep. I start working on websites and notice that a convolutional neural network that I started running yesterday has run overnight and is still running. Near 10am the power suddenly goes out. I get dressed and go for a relatively short bicycle ride with intervals thrown in. I haven't done intervals for a long time and they hurt, but they feel good. As I recover from the half the intervals near the aquarium I greet two young men who are vacationing in Long Beach from Minnesota and Texas and then I greet a family vacationing from Guatemala. They are excited that I've been to their country and we talk about a few things. I like to welcome tourists to my city since people have always been nice to me when I travel. I get in four more intervals back up the Los Angeles river and that will do it for the ride. At home the electricity is still off, so I take out the old disk brake pads at the rear of the motorcycle and put in the new ones. The old ones were almost completely gone! I have a bit of trouble getting the pedal brake line pressure back up but it seems to be okay. I'll ride cautiously the next few times out to make sure my installation is sound. I bite the bullet and step into the shower for a cold sponge bath (since the electricity is still off). And after getting dried off and laying down on the couch to read, the electricity coems back on. Really? It couldn't have come back on ten minutes earlier and given me a warm shower? And I get back to work on the non-profit website that should be finished tomorrow. Later I extract more substance abuse center information for the state of Florida and geocodethe complete set for a side-trackked effort.

I sleep horribly on Monday night into Tuesday. What's going on here? Regardless I am out the door at 6:22 am for a decent run/walk of 65 minutes. I keep this one a bit shorter after yesterday's intervals on the bicycle and my left calf/Achillies tendon is feeling a bit weird. At home I drop down more fertilizer on the front yard and some troublesome spots on the backyard and then I rake up the leaves collecting underneath my big tree. I want to pick them up before they get rained on and "attached" to the muddy ground. I get in a warm shower today since I have electricity restored and then start my errands. I get to gas station, Home Depot, the post office, the library, the auto parts store, and the grocery store. Back at home I try out a new electric tire inflator and I get the motorcycle and car tires dialed in to good air pressure levels. And then I start coding until I finally take a break and eat lunch after 1pm - I have eathen anything yet today. I'm running out of steam and answer some CSULA questions and work on some Florida maps for a side-trackked effort.

I sleep late on Wednesday and should get out for a quick bicycle ride before the rain comes. But I just go work on the demographics and the website. By 10:30 am I've finally got the demographics to work conceptually and just need to increase the number of iterations in the neural network to get a better trained neural network. (I tried out the effort with a small number of iterations to see where it was going wrong the last day or so.) I also finish off the website including new pictures. I'll sit on it and think about it for a day before I fully deploy it and replace the old website format that we've used for almost six years.

I start Thursday coding again because it is supposed to rain all day. It'e been bothering me that I can generate nice maps with my offline Python scripts related to deep learning or demographics, but they don't "play well" with the framework and feel of the basic website. Thus I spend a lot of time on Thursday morning chasing down .js and .css conflicts and finally have the maps so that they are almost a drop-in to the basic website look and feel. When the rain slows a bit I drive to the grocery store for supplies and have a heavy session with the weights. I repeat the previous heavy workout but add in a "rep out" set for each bodypart where I've dropped the heavy weights and just do as many reps as I can. It's a great workout. I then start cleaning the hardwood floors and this takes three periods of time throughout the day as I was parts of the floors and then let them dry as I do other things and repeat. At 4pm the rain is still coming down - we certainly need the rain and fortunately we'll have the next week to dry out and go cycling or running before any other potential storms come in.

I'm out of bed at 5:50 am on Friday and after seeing the streets a bit too wet to cycle, I go backto bed and read for a while. Near 7:15am I get out and have a good ride down to the old yacht club and back to home. Since we've had so much rain and the beach area sand can build up, I ride like a sissy around corners. Back at home I spray down the bicycle with a cleaning spray and rinse it off with water. I grab a qucik shower, run over to CVS, and help the retired schoolteacher move a microwave oven from her car trunk to her kitchen. I tell her that I am in a hurry today but we get the microwave running and hopefully she knows how to use it. At home I finally deploy the brand new non-profit website. It looks good. I expect a bug or two and I'll fix those as they appear. And then I update the copyright portion of four different websites for 2022 though we are a day short. After this effort I scrap the old list of things to do and start a new one. As I'm working along I update all of the various website copyright information from 2021 to 2022 (twelve hours ahead of time) and take a creative break to adjust the brakes on the mountain bicycle that have become badly out-of-tune over the last couple of weeks. And then kinda have a slow new year's eve.