Fortunately I'm not called for jury duty on either Tuesday or Wednesday and I get a notice indicating that I am done calling in. I thought that it was supposed to be five days of calling in, but I'll take the three days. Tuesday is spent with a walk and PT exercises and watching some videos and helping the neighbor lady make her Medicare choices (though she is 81 years old) and then helping her debug and find an electrical outlet that has decided to die. I start Wednesday with a 75 minute walk and then ride the motorcycle - bald tires and no speed sensor - to the motorcycle dealer for repairs. I swear this is the last money that I'm putting into the 2002 Yamaha YZF-R1 ever. Though I've said that before. And I note that since the bicycle accident, this is the longest that I've not ridden a motorcycle since 1982 - 40 years ago. I have a free preview of HBO and SHOWTIME for the next few days so I take advantage of that in advance of Thanksgiving.
I let Thanksgiving morning warm up a bit and get out the door at 7:30 am. Today I ride down to the old yacht club and back to home. This is the two hour ride that used to be my recovery ride. Yet now is the longest ride. But I'm making progress. For the remainder of Thanksgiving I've declined invitations and I watch the Lions' game, eat pasta, eat ice cream, and just watch other football games or free preview videos.
Friday appears to be a slow day. But I do physical therapy exercises, pick up the motorcycle from the repair shop and go for a nice ride, pick up a toy on 2nd Street in Long Beach, and relax a bit. After 4 pm I help the retired school teacher acorss the street make her Medicare choices. And discover that she has named me executor of her living will and trust. WTF?
I start Saturday with a good mountain bicycle ride to the old yacht club and back to home. I feel stronger than Thursday but still find it challenging near the end into the headwind. I can see progress every single day in my rehab/recovery from the nasty bicycle accident eight weeks ago. At home I grab a shower and do some grocery shopping and watch some boring college football games. What other kind of college football games are there? But I also find time to work on a neural-based time series forecasting/predictive algorithm. I try to become familiar with the algorithm with both stock market data and Long Beach crime data that I have laying around. I just need to decide if the predictive capabilites are better tahn previous efforts that I've worked on. In the middle of the day, when the sun is warm but my house is still chilly, I get out and do a half-effort hard prune of the roses. I do not take them all the way down for a full prune, but trim away any of the shoots that are heading towards the middle of each bush. And I'll finish a "hard prune" of the roses just before Christmas.
I start out Saturday with another "long" bicycle ride. THough this isn't long in the traditional sense, it is for my current conditioning. Today I cut a couple of kilometers off because my legs are tired, my shoulder is tired, and my broken rib is letting me know its there. But it's a good ride and gives me an indication of what bodyparts need to be worked on. After a quick shower I turn on the football game in the background and clean the hardwood floors. Since it is winter and not as dusty as the summer, the floors don't need cleaning but I'm in the mood to do it. And later I wash the kitchen floor. As I take breaks I continue to work on the neural-based time series forecasting/predictive algorithm and for the data that I have, it is looking very promising and much faster than my previously-written gradient-based method.
I start Monday out the door at 6:03 am for a walk. Today my legs are a bit stiff from three bicycle rides in four days and the bending and stretching of washing the hardwood floors and kitchen floor. Thus I walk for an hour and call it quits. After a warming shower I keep making steady progress on the neural-based time series forecasting/predicting. By late in the morning I have it running. There are still lessons to be learned and trying to figure out what the algorithm is doing, but the method looks promising. (Of course the example problems that one finds in the literature have been cherry-picked to show how great the algorithm does without showing counter examples.) Throughout the day as I'm doing laundry I find myself dropping clothes and inadvertently closing windows on my computer that I should keep open. Am I distracted or clumsy or senile? In the afternoon I watch a video on my last free-preview day of HBO and Showtime and then watch the fairly meaningless football game.
Monday is a slow day. My legs are tired and I walk for an hour in the early morning. I continue to work on the time series analysis and have found another interesting sports-related problem to work on. Throughout the day I scrub down and use a razor blade to remove soap scum from the shower doors and I scrub the new tires on the Yamaha YZF-R1. (The new tires always come with a very slippery sheen on them that almost caught me out once, so I tend to scrub the tires down and rough them up a bit before taking them for a serious ride.) The Monday Night Football game is theoretically exciting with a few strange sequences of plays, but I'm bored.
I start Tuesday working more on the sports-related agoirtihm until 7:30 am when I'm out the door. There's a blustery wind and I try to take advantage of it when its favorable and push against it when it fights me. On the way home I see a lady rider way ahead and I put in a long duration surge and catch up to her just as she turns off the bicycle path. I ofrge ahead and see some "familiar riders" in the distance and I re-establish my surge and make good rpogress catching up to the the riders. Who just happen to take a break when I've caught up to them within ten meters. And the, in the distance, I see a rider who I see riding 90% of the time that I ride. She wears a black helmet, black facemask, black top, and black long-legged pants and I've tried t make a few non-threatening, friendly comments to her a time or two but she always ignores me. Regardless, she's at a distance and I continue surging and blow past her until I come to Del Amo where I have to turn off to go home. This has been the first ride since the accident where I've done some serious pushing and though I know that I will pay a price for it later, it felt super fantastic. After a shower I run a few errands for vitamins and grocery supplies and then spend time on the phone confoirming my health insurance selections for 2023 as well as performing monthly updates of websites.
I don't sleep well on Tuesday night into Wednesday - my legs are just still very tired from Tuesday's chasing down of riders. I get out the door at 6am for an hour long walk and take a short break. Then I rake leaves away from the fences so that the lawnmower can pick them up. I mow both the front and backyards and drop fertilizer down in advance of upcoming rains. And then I pull out the hedge trimmer and ladder and trim branches dropping over two neighbor's fences. I shouldn't be up on a ladder, but I'll let the doctor yell at me tomorrow during one of my two appointments. The rest of the day is fairly slow since I didn't sleep well and it was a very productive morning.
I get out walking on THursday morning since I don't have time for a bicycle ride. After a shower I run errands and get to see my primary care physician. Except for my constantly low red blood cell count and hematocrit levels, all of my blood work looks super. I stop in at the library for three new books and get to the hand doctor. I'm early for my appointment, but the doctor sees me early and says that the finger is looking good. I do not have to dress it or cover it or attend to it everyday anymore and he says he will see me in one month. And he gives me some finger exercises to do to try and regain mobility of the last knuckly that has been immobilized for so long. On the way home from the hand doctor I drive by the post office and see that there are only two people in line. So I pull over, call my retired schoolteacher neighbor, and tell her that I'm coming to pick her up in two minutes because there is no line. (She had complained that the line was very very long with holiday gift shippers the previous day and she started feeling dizzy so she quit the line and went home.) I pick her up and it turns out that there are five people ahead of us in line. But its a short trip and now I don't have to listen to her complain about how long the line is. And then I just veg out with the football game on Thursday night.
I start Friday walking in the rain. I'm hoping that the rain ends because I told CSULA that I would try and make it up there today in advance of next Friday's final fall semester presentations. But by mid morning the rain is not ending, so I just give up. I was going to have to rush home for a LBHTTF zoom meeting anyway. In the afternoon we get back to working on the LBHTTF website and then I do some shoulder, scapula region, and rib region exercises.
I'm out of bed early to work on the Long Beach Human Trafficking Task Force (lbhttf) website and I make good progress. But at 7:30 am I am out the door for a mountain bicycle ride to the old yacht club and back to home. Today I am slow though I do not know why. But I still have a smile on my face and enjoy the ride. After a quick shower I pick up supplies at the grocery store and have figured out what the latest version, which changes constantly, of what the LBHTTF wants. So I put the homepage and a skeleton site together and send it off to my main contact. By now it is near noon and I'm going to be decadent and have a frozen pizza with corn on it. (The corn seems to be a Cambodian thing.) And leter I just relax and give the shoulders and scapula a day off.
I get some good reading in before sleep on Saturday night and have a super night of sleep. I'm out the door at 7:25 am for a mountain bicycle ride to the old yacht club and back to home. Today, as opposed to yesterday, I'm both faster and stronger and finish with a good ride. At home I trim the roses and adjust the front brakes on the mountain bicycle and finally get a warming shower. Today will be a bit slow so I start the laundry and notice, about 45 minutes after I've finished cycling, there are a few raindrops falling. It's not heavy enough to be dangerous, but I'm glad that I started in the morning fog but finished before a later morning rain. There is no coding to e done until I get feedback from various people so I just veg out with pasta and football games.
I don't feel like it, but I get out and walk for 55 minutes on Monday morning. I stop in at the grocery store for blueberry mufins along the way. At home I work more on the LBHTTF website and then go to the dental appointment. This is a brand new dentist since my previous dentist retired and this is an emergency visit because a tooth has fallen out. (Painlessly, I admit.) I spend an hour with the dentist and his assitant with xrays and my whole history of the white spots, the biopsy, the candida, and the weird CD8 cell blood count. The dentist doesn't even want to touch my teeth to clean them until I see an oral pathologist to try and figure out why one single tooth fell out while every other tooth, including the surrounding ones, are as strong as an ox. His logic does make sense. I drop a finishedbook off at the library and go work a bit more on the LBHTTF website before vegging in front of a football game.