On Tuesday I'm out the door at 6:08 am for a decent 65 kilometer bicycle ride. On today's ride I do not run into my cycling acquaintances from Portugal but I do cross paths with my cycling roofer (or roofing cyclist) and we give quick greetings as we are headed in the opposite directions. (My cycling roofer is an incredibly nice and knowledgable man and did a super fantastic job on my roof and others in my neighborhood and I always "talk him up" when people even say the word "roof".) After a cooling shower on this hot day, I refill a prescription, get my first professional haircut in two years, do some grocery shopping, and come home to read the news. I keep teasing the professional hair-cutter that it is okay to laugh at the job that I have done on myself for the past two yeas, but we tease each other and she knows the situation. As I leave and she asks when I want to come back in for a haircut, I just respond with "Two years" and she laughs hysterically.) The haircut does look nice and much better than I could do. I watch a fun Moto2 race from Assen, Netherlands and just stay cool on today's very hot day with minor little coding things and some Netflix. I also update a website for the new month starting soon and prepare for future months. Late in the day I turn on the air conditioning for the first time since October since it is so hot. But I only get warm air coming out of the vents. I turn off the system and look back at old records and see that it was four years ago that I had a Freon re-charge and some other work done. And was told at that time that Freon is going to be banned from California very soon. So if I have to change to a different coolant, all of the pipes and compressor will have to be redone and that will get expensive. Fortunately the weather forecast shows tolerable weather for the next ten days so I have to time to think about this and procrastinate before calling the repair people. And I've lost confidence in the company who installed and maintained the system for the last eighteen years because they always tried to upsell me something on every visit, so I'll be using the repair people from a neighbor down the street.
I start Wednesday out of bed at 6am reading the news and markets. I then go work on a cryptocurrency scraping and display process that somebody had mentioned to me and might be interesting to play with. Throughout the day I trim the roses, get in a workout with the weights, and watch some Netflix.
I'm out the door on the mountain bicycle at 6:13 am for a ride to the old yach club and back to home. Today it seems like I have many almost collisions with two cyclists riding the wrong way, a couple of runners and their dogs, and another pedestrian. They were not close, emergency calls, but some hesitation on both sides in each case on what action to take. I also run into a former co-worker out cycling and he said he just retired last month. So we stop and talk about retirement for a while. After getting cleaned up I call the AC repair place suggested by a neighbor and they will come out in a week or so - the specific technician that the neighbors told me to ask for is very busy right now. I continue work on the crypto pricing metrics and find some interesting ideas to pursue. Late in the day I get on the motorcycle and visit my acupuncturist. Since my neck is feeling almost perfectly normal, we arrange for a visit with a chiropractor to see if they can do a perfect alignment of the neck and get rid of this problem entirely.
I start Friday with a fifty minute run/walk followed by trimming the roses, spraying the junipers for spider mites, and trimming a sidebush. A cool shower gets me into news and market reading mode and then I do a bit more coding in Python for cryptocurrency metrics. I manage to catch FP2 for the F1 cars from England and then relax with Netflix. Near 6:30pm I ride the bicycle over to the First Fridays event and then just walk along with the bicycle on the sidewalks and check out the music, arts, and people.
On Saturday I'm out the door at 6:09am and I start north on the Los Angeles river trail. After I cross the Whittier Narrows dam I take the winding bicycle trail that goes past the El Monte airport rather than the most northern stretch of the San Gabriel river trail. I haven't taken this more scenic trail for years and I enjoy it (except for some street riding on Live Oak and Arrow highway) and will try to make it more standard. I turn back south on the San Gabriel river trail and end up with ninety kilometers with no tiring at all. After a shower I relax and watch a rainy, but changing qualifying for F1 from England and then I'm a vegetable for the rest of the day after today's long ride.
Though hungover from Saturday's long bicycle ride, I drag myself onto the mountain bicycle and have a decent ride (after the first six kilometers) down to the old yach club and back to home. At home I trim the roses, get cleaned up, and watch the F1 race from England with a nasty accident (and red flag) on the first lap and a yellow flag near the end which determines the outcome of the race. For the rest of the day I still feel hungover from the two rides and relax with some international series on Netflix.
I start July 4th with a 55 minute run/walk. Again the first kilometer is hard to get started, but then I feel decent and get in the extra five minutes for the twice weekly run. It is a national holiday and there isn't much to do, so I continue watching the internal series on Netflix and get to bed early as the fireworks (which are illegal in the city of Long Beach) are going off all over the place.
I'm out the door at 6:12am for a road bicycle ride. Today I feel strong throughout but don't run into some of the typical Tuesday riders that I'll slow down and chat with for a couple of kilometers or so. After a shower I get on the motorcycle, get down to the main Long Beach library, return two books (one unfinished), and pick up three new ones to read. And then I ride home and realize that I made almost every traffic light in both directions and there was very little freeway traffic. At home I gather more city of Long Beach crime statistics - I have to wait until the police produce the data files - and start the matching/predicting process for the 300 crime districts. And I spend the afternoon performing motorcycle maintenance, doing the laundry, watching "Zero Dark Thirty", and finishing off an internal Netflix series.
I'm out of bed at 6:10 am as today is a day off from cycling or running. I read the news and markets, make a trip to the ATM, and pick up supplies at the grocery store. At home I do some maintenance on the garage, lift weights with only minor left tricep pain, and do a lot of weed-wacking and cleaning up around the roses and backyard. I've turned the sprinklers down since we have no water in California and the weeds are taking over where possible. So I try to keep them at bay. After some additional sweeping I grab a cooling shower and work a little bit on the cryptocurrency pricing metrics and have to transfer the preliminary metrics over to a dashboard. Other metrics can be added in as desired.
On Thursday and Friday I keep up my recent pattern of cycling and run/walks, respectively. After each workout I do little efforts in the yard to clean and tidy up. On both of these days, for unknown reasons, I have some wild mood swings (which is very un-typical for me). What's going on? Friday is a good day because there's F1 qualifying from Austria, the first mountain stage of the Tour du France (with a super exciting ending), and I find a Thai movie (with English subtitles) called Mother Gamer from 2020 which shows promise in the first few minutes of watching. I'll watch the rest of it on Saturday. I also take the time to give a final look through of notes from engineering clases that I had at UCLA before dumping them into the recycling bin. I'm slowly thinning things out - making sure I won't need anything again before I recycle, give away, or trash them.
I'm out the door at 6:06 am on the road bicycle for a ninety kilometer ride. Unlike last week's long ride, today I struggle a bit towards the end and pretty much just crawl along Del Amo blvd to get home. I get in a cooling shower and cook some pasta to watch during the Austrian F1 sprint race - which has a couple of good midfield battles though the first few poisitions were decided right from the start. I watch the Thai movie (with English subtitles) and I enjoy it though I can predict the outcome of the movie very early on. I'm tired from today's ride so I don't really accomplish much at all throughout the rest of the day.
Sunday starts with a recovery mountain bicycle ride down to the old yacht club and back to home. At my house the sky is sunny but along the beach there is thick fog. At home I trim the roses and climb up on a ladder with hedge trimmers to trim back a neighbor's bus/trees that are getting close to my Internet cable. After a shower I watch the F1 race from Austria with various pit stop strategies and some good action. And then I watch a mountain stage of the Tour du France where they climb a mountain that I climbed back in 1985 near Morzine (on the border of Switzerland). At 6:39 pm I go outside and with the live feed playing on my phone, I can barely visibly see the contrails from a SpaceX launch vehicle heading towards space from Vandenburg Space Force Base.
I get in a good early morning 55 minute run/walk on Monday to get the day started. After a shower I read the news and markets and work a bit on the cryptocurrency metric process. In the afternoon the air conditioning repairman comes and checks out the system.