I have incredible sleep on Monday night into Tuesday morning with lots of REM (dreaming) sleep and lots of deep (physical recovery) sleep. I get out on the road bicycle, thinking I may cut today's ride short, but I get cranking along and don't want to stop. Today I run into Tony who I have not seen for a few years and we ride (slowly) together for a while as we catch up on things. Back at home I grab a shower and call a bicycle store to talk with them about some maintenance - but they don't call me back. When I go to the grocery store I see a man with Thai characters on his shirt and before I can finish my sentence of "Are you Thai?", I realize that it is Ricky. Ricky is a cycling enthusiast (addict, fan, etc) that I rode with a time or two before and is the brother of my neighbor down the street Al (another cycling enthusiast, addict, fan, etc). Ricky has a Thai wife and we talk a lot about Thailand and cycling and bicycle maintenance and F1 and MotoGP. It must have been a thirty minute talk outside of the grocery store. I tell him to just come and knock on my door and we'll talk more. I rode with Al a fair number of times but I only rode with Ricky a time or two because he was super fast. After doing my shopping I go back home and run some test cases on both the desktop and laptop for my Python/Anaconda/Spyder upgrades. Both machines pass the tests (with a few deprecated warnings to eventually take care of) and now I'm happy that after the struggle of the past few days, both machines are successfully running upgraded software. Just in time for a new semester at Cal State Los Angeles and possible travels. The rest of the day is a slow day but I sure enjoy the pizza for combined lunch and dinner in the mid-afternoon.
On Wednesday I start with a run/walk and feel good. Except that towards the end, when I'm wanting to get to 70 minutes, the right hamstring starts to feel a bit strange. I quickly make a U-turn and continue the run/walk for a total of 60 minutes. Except that just as I approach home I see the retired school teacher out for her walk and so I walk with her and we talk about many things as this adds 20 minutes of walking. But at least I avoided a right hamstring tear/strain/etc that leaves me hobbling around. Later in the day we have a CSULA kickoff Zoom meeting. Is the summer really over? It just seems like yesterday that I was up at CSULA for the senior design Expo and moderating a session.
I start Thursday with a mountain bicycle ride to the old yacht club and back to home. I run into Aaron and I ask him whose house is that that Bill is working on at Cedar and Bixby. And he says that it is his. I tell him how beautiful the house is (or will be after the construction) and he tells me some of the history of the house including having pictures from the 1930s that he's trying to restore the house back to. When I get home I get aggrssive with the junipers and try to cut out as much spider mite damage as possible, clean up the trimmings, and then immediately spray with spider mite poison to try and stop the damage. After a thorough shower (since I've been spraying with poison), I immediately order more poison from Amazon and will probably be spraying again on Tuesday to stop the bleeding. I'm tired from the riding and juniper trimming/spraying, so I enjoy a cooler day and take care of some things online and watch some television and Netflix.
As is usual lately, I sleep an extra 25 minutes on Friday morning. I trim and water the roses aand then put my head down and make a lot of progress on the Long Beach Human Trafficking Task Force databse and search tool. Just after noon I get out and lift weights for the first time in three weeks. I use lighter weights and higher repetitions to get started back in. Later in the afternoon I help a friend out with some machine learning ideas and coding and helping her understand how pieces fit together and what the results mean. And I end the day with a bit more coding for the LBHTTF mapping tool.
I'm out the door at 6:10 am on Saturday for a road bicycle ride. I feel decent on this ride but call it quits at eighty kilometers. After a shower I get to the library to return old books and get new ones, drop the road bicycle off at the bicycle shop for a new drivetrain, and stop in at a Cambidan community event in Cambodiatown. The Cambodian community is both providing resources for their residents as well as trying to sktech out plans for a memorial park or community center. I wander around for a while and then drive back towards home - stopping off at the grocery store for supplies. Moto3, MotoGP, and Moto2 qualifying is fun to watch though the results are not as much as I wanted them to be. In the afternoon I get a request to update the Fair Trade Long Beach website and I get that taken care of quickly and then just relax.
There's a headwind on the first two legs of my Sunday morning ride to the old yacht club. And after I've pushed against it on top of yesterday's long ride, I'm tired. But fortunately I get the wind at my back to get home. At home I trim the roses and ponder digging them all up since we don't have any water. After a shower I watch a close, fun MotoGP race though the results are not what I had hoped for. And then I just relax and try to recover after two hard rides in two days.
I don't sleep great on Sunday night into Monday but, surprisingly, I get in some deep sleep just before the alarm goes off. I consider taking the day off from working out, but on the running shoes and even consider just walking. But I get to my designated "warm-up complete" spot and start run/walking. I get in a good 70 minute run/walk today. At home I spray the junipers with poison for the spider mites and take a shower to clean up. A quick trip to the grocery store follows and then I flush the tankless water heater. Since I bought the new self-priming pump a ffew years ago I've been pretty diligent about flushing the tank every six or eight months. I touch up a few colors on the LBHTTF website and now I'm on hold until I get content from the core team to add to the website. There's a fun Moto3 race from Austria that I catch and later in the day I watch the recorded IndyCar race from Saturday.
Wednesday is a day off from working the legs so I get up early and trim the roses and water the roses. Overnight I've had this interesting idea related to using covariance for the crime prediction tool. So I spend all morning working away on implementing the covariance part. Before noon I get in another lightweight, high repetition workout with the weights and then continue with the covariance algorithm after lunch. At 3pm I have a Zoom link related to linear regression and data science and, unfortunately, it is so rudimentary that I could have been teaching the class. And after watching the Netflix about John McAfee, the narcissist who started the anti-virus program and then spent many years running from the law, I go back to fine tuning the covariance algorithm's first shot. I'll take some time and let this idea percolate for a while in my head and see if I can come up with some other ideas.
I keep waking up a bit early on Thursday morning, so I'm out of bed early and out the door at 6:05 am on Thursday morning for a mountain bicycle ride. It's a bit dark to start, but I ride along and the legs feel strong. On the way back home I there are detours for "A Taste of Long Beach" and I run into a couple of walkers that I have regularly seen forever. So we start talking and it turns out, after my first two guesses of Cambodian and Vietnamese are wrong, they are Thai. So we start talking in Thai and they kinda laugh everytime I use some words or a sentence that is new and demonstrates that I'm a bit beyond basic Thai. They are both teachers and I tell them how much I appreciate both farmers and teachers. And we talk about my inability to get a hotel for the Thai MotoGP race. I will see them again regularly and now I can greet them in their native language. At home the air conditioning installers are sitting on my porch waiting for me. "But I told Karen at your office that you should come after 9am". They have only been waiting 10-15 minutes and I profsely apologize the for miscommunication and I let them in the house to add an additional air intake so that the new air conditioning system is up to current standards and codes (as opposed to the codes from 18 years ago). The job takes an hour and when they turn on the air conditioning to test out the repair, the air conditioning is blowing like crazy - as if the previous air inlets were limiting the amount of airflow through the system. Now I just need a Long Beach inspection and permit signoff. I work on scraping the Long Beach crime statistics a bit, but I'd rather move around. So I grab a mop and bucket and clean the hardwood floors (including the area where the AC installers had to drill and create new openings and left a bit of dust). Later I clean the kitchen floor and call it quits for the day.
Saturday and Sunday are bust days. I start Saturday with a timed mountain bicycle ride up the Los Angeles river nad back to home. After getting cleaned up, I go buy gourmet cookies at a bakery to take the neighbor's birthday party that I was just invited to last night. I do some grocery shopping and then pick up the road bicycle so that I can ride it while they wait for a piece or two needed to repair the second water bottle mounting. At home there's a weird F1 qualifying from Sap, Belgium where six of the driver will have to start at the back of the grid due to taking execessive engine components. And near 6 pm I walk across the street to the neighbor's birthday party. Everyone is Philippino except me, so I have to practice whatever Tagalog I can. I meet some really nice and fun people and everyone seems to have a great time except an older guy who drinks too much and almost starts a fight. But eventually I walk back home and get ready for sleep.
On Sunday I just can't wait and need to try out the road bicycle. So I ride north on the Los Angeles river and go past the Whittier narrws dam and past teh El Monte airport. And then I seem to feel better on the return trip for a total of 80 kilometers. On the way back home in the runoff area of the Whittier narrows dam I see a coyote standing in the bicycle path appearing to stalk some prey. This is a very tall coyote - perhaps the tallest one that I've seen and I wonder if I should stop, or turn around, or just ride past as fast as I can. The coyote makes the decision for me since he/she sees me and scurries back into the bushes and I'm able to pass safely. After a shower I trim the roses and watch an unpredictable F1 race from Belgium. Well, the first two places were almost predictable but the rest of the order is jumbled. I rest for a bit and then ride the motorcycle up to Hollywood for the Thai New Year's festival (which is usually in April but was moved to August this year due to Covid-19). I meet up with Person W_HK and his friend and we hang out for almost two hours. They've already been there for an hour, so they care getting tired and take leave. And I just greet people with Happy Songkran in Thai and smile and wander around. And then race on home on the motorcycle to relax.
After all of the weekend activities, Monday is a designated slow day including no working of the legs. I start by sleeping in an extra twenty minutes and work away on scraping a dynamic website. (Dynamicly-loaded websites can be difficult to scrape, but I'm plugging away at it.) At mid morning I get in a good workout with the weights where I've both increased the weights a little and added in an extra set for each exercise. Both shoulders hurt and they get iced immediately after the workout. After a cooling shower I start the laundry and make more progress on the web scraping though I know this is going to take a few days to get right. I cook pasta today and enjoy the extra carbs in anticipation of a good Tuesday road bicycle ride.