I start Tuesday with a chilly and foggy mountain bicycle ride to the old yacht club and back to home. A longer road bicycle ride just wasn't in the cards. After a shower I put together the list of things to do this week and start cutting up the vegetables and preparing the Thai curry for later today. I'm not especially motivated to work on the Python/mySQL problem - I'm close to being finished with just a couple of indices or pointers messed up. So I again spend some time watching Netflix series.
It is very foggy on Wednesday morning and I get out for a seventy minute run. I'm happy that my left calf did not mis-behave during the run. After a shower I do some web work and start running errands - returning a book to the library, getting out to the plant nursery to talk about spider mites, buying some new causal shoes, stopping in at the Home Depot, visiting an ATM, having a long meeting with my financial advisor and considering some moves, and shopping for groceries. Back at home I unpack everything and put it away and watchsome Netflix.
When the alarm goes off I make the mistake of looking at the weather on my phone. It indicates very dense fog. I don't want to ride in the fog so I turn over and go sleep late. When I do wake up the fog, if it was ever there, but my motivation is gone. I read the news and the markets and then mow the lawn, spot fertilizer the front yard, and spray the junipers with the spider mite formula. The plant nursery people said that my junipers looked very healthy and robust from the photots that I showed them, but they are getting very old. I know they are at least 34 years old and the plant nursery people are surprised they have lived this long. And yet they look so healthy and robust! I don't want to lose them to spider mites so I'm going on a vicious attack over the next few weeks. After the yardwork I get cleaned up and expect to lose the rest of the day. But I continue with the Python/mySQL programming and make super progress. The programming is fairly intricate and complex but I get it working by the end of the day. Is it the most efficient? If I was the electric company with 12 million database records, it would not be adequate. But if I expect to get 10000 records, then it will work. And if sizes get larger than that, then there will be money for a real Python/mySQL programmer to make the system more efficient.
On Friday I start the day with a good 65 kilometer road bicycle ride. I feel strong after a couple of days off from riding. I trim the roses, get cleaned up, do some grocery shopping, and finish off any little problems that I had with the recent Python/mySQL effort that I've been working on. Late on Friday I have a Zoom meeting with my CSULA team - the first of the new spring semester after the long winter break. I do see some progress. We have a two hour Zoom call and I get a number of action items to debug weird behavior that the team sees when running their code. I guess I'll get to it on Saturday morning.
On Saturday morning I push the snooze button three times and finallly get out on the road bicycle ride. It must take me 20 kilometers to get warmed up and be able to start cranking along. And then I start to die 10 kilometers from home. I just keep turning the pedals over and finish with a good ride. Today there are many riders out with special jerseys so there must be some sort of asian lunar new year ride going on today. When I get home the warm shower feels good. And then I start work on the CSULA effort. There are some puzzling things going on that I cannot explain, but I contribute and try to compact the code and show that it gives equivalent results for short and intermediate runs and does not blow up for longer runs. I sure hope that the team studies my long, detailed emailed message and compact code to learn. I pay some bills to end the spending for the month and by noon I'm feeling good about my progress, physically hungover from two long rides in two days, and possibly coming out of a little bout of depression from the last couple of weeks (or maybe longer).
Sunday is supposed to be a slow recovery ride and that it is. I ride down to the old yacht club in chilly 45F weather and just spin on back home. The lages are hungover from god rides on Friday and Saturday. I'm happy to be home and trim the roses, do a lot of tidying up of small items, and get a warm shower. Despite being January we expect about 71F today so the heater gets turned off (as it has been recently for evenings lately) and I open up the house and hope for 71F winds to warm up the house. I take care of some pictures and posts and then settle in for the two football playoff games.
I'm up very early on Monday and plan out some things that need to get done. Before 8am I decide that I want to revisit a shock analysis program that I was converting to Python a long time ago. I just get going and keep plugging away and before I know it the time is 12:30. I take a break to walk to the post office to certify mail some state forms for a non-profit. And when I return home I grab lunch and keep working on the Python conversion. At mid-afternoon I get out and lift weights for the first time in a week.
I'm up early on Tuesday morning and wait until there is enough light to get started cycling. I start out well, have a slow patch going up the San Gabriel river trail, and then miraculously gain a ton of speed after my turn-around point. I'm passing a mess of riders and they try to hold my wheel but cannot. And then I slow a bit before my turn-off point and a South Bay Wheelmen rider goes flying past me. A humbling experience. Nevertheless it is a good ride and I quickly stuff a blueberry muffin down my throat, get a shower, and take the Yamaha YZF-R1 out to Cypress to meet up with Person Kai_V. We have a super discussion about work and family and life and philosophy and the future. Person Kai_V is level-headed and logical and fun. We take our leave and we're already texting by the time that I get home on the motorcycle. I grab a lunch near 3 pm, watch a Netflix episode or two, and then go back to the Python shock conversion effort. I'm just working away and talking with Person An_Ph and finally get to sleep.
I'm out the door on Wednesday at 6:20am for a good seventy minute run/walk. Today I feel good so I do more running than usual and if something hurts a bit or threatens to hurt a bit, I just "walk it off" and then resume running. I check out the roses which are showing healthy growth for this time of year and do some grocery shopping. Back at home I get the laundry done and work on the Python shock effort. I finally manage to the work that I started back in January of 2020 and I try to pick that back up and use that effort. The rest of the day is slow and I mix up coding with Netflix and the news and the markets. The markets looking like they are starting to pick back up after a nasty January correction.
I turn off the alarm and roll back over for extra sleep on Thursday - I'm tired and I know that the temperature is down near 41F and not as conducive to cycling as desired. I finally get out the door for a mountain bicycle ride up the Los Angeles river before 8 am. It's a struggle all of the way up the rier trail and then it goes by rather quickly back towards home. I guess there was just enough of a northerly wind to make the difference. I get in a warm shower which feels good and make a quick tripto the liquor store. At home, with the liquor opened, I help out the CSULA students and read the news and tanking markets. All of the gains of the last two days are disappearing. I oke around at various projects throughout the day until late afternoon where I take the time to add some extra water to some bare lawn spots and to re-spray the front junipers against spider mites. The last trip to the Home Depot only had two bottles of my preferred spider mite spray, so I start looking for other sources of the spray. I'm very serious about NOT losing these 34 year old juniper bushes in the front of the house.
I'm out of be dat 5:40am and start work n crime mapping, a mesh generator, and then a global web viewer. Near 10am I get out to the ATM and the library to return three books and pick up three new ones. One of the new books is one that has been proposed to be banned in the state of Texas and I want to see what they are thinking. Early in the afternoon I increase the weights and have a good session with th weights - each set of lifts being a real struggle. And then I trim the roses, water some bare patches in the front yard, and then spray the junipers again for spider mites. Tonight's CSULA Zoom meeting is delayed until 7:30pm so I just watch some Netflix and work away on stuff until then.
As I wake up at 5:30ish and finally get out of bed before 6:00 am on Saturday, I finally decide to try for the longer road bicycle ride that I had been thinking of doing. I start out a bit slow and there seems to be a headwind the entire way up the Los Angeles river trail. When I cross over the Whittier Narrows dam and continue north on the San Gabriel trail, the headwind seems to have died down. I get to the desired turn-around point and start ranking nicely back towards Long Beach - maybe that wind is still there but now at my back. I eventually get home for a good eighty kilometers. This is probably the earliest in a calendar year that I've ridden so far - so it looks like the year is starting out well for cycling. After a shower I make a quick trip to the grocery store and check out some of the results or pre-season MotoGP testing from Sepang, Malaysia. And then I go debug the front sprinklers. I noticed this morning that the front yard did not seem to get watered so something is going on. ANd when I take a look, I see all three front sprinkler ground wires are unattached. What happened? I performed a final checkout when I was readjusting the sprinklers last week, but all three front sprinkler ground wires are unattached. Once I bundle the front sprinkler ground wires with the backyard ground wire sprinklers everything works well. I apply some extra tape to make sure that they stay attached. And then I just kinda veg out on Saturday with some Long Beach crime statistics and some Olympics coverage of long track speed skating and some of the cross country skiing events. I do a bit of work on a real-time geographic programming and I get the initial and final states to workwell, but the intermediate states shwoing the tracking needs work.
I'm out the door in the semi-darkness at 6:36 am on Sunday morning for a recovery bicycle ride on the mountain bicycle. It takes me quite a few kilometers to get warmed up and moving along on today's chilly morning. I end up getting down along the cean to the old yacht club and baack home again for a good. At home I trim the roses and take a shower and but a few supplies for today which I epxect to be consumed with watching Olympics speed skating and cross country skiing. I check the statistics and errors of some of the websites and don't see anything significant. And I just don't feel like coding any Python (or other language) algorithms today, so I don't.
On a planned day off from cycling or running I walk to the grocery store for some cinnamon muffins and read the news and markets. Near 10 am I take the Yamaha YZF-R1 out for a riude ands top off at Home Depot for some additional sprinkler nozzles. Back at home I lift weights heavy again and this session does not go as well as Friday's did. But it's stil a very grueling workout. I then replace a sprinkler nozzle or two and spray the backside of the front Junipers. I've been concentrating on the front side (facing the street) where I can see some spider mite damage. But I better spray the backside also to be safe. After a shower I ctach up on a lot of Olympic long track speed skating, short track speed skating, and cross country skiing. And watch soem Netflix.