The chilly weather returns but I'm still out the door at 7:35am for a mountain bicycle ride to the old yacht club and back to home. Soon it will be time to increase the distance again and/or get on the road bicycle that I have not ridden since the accident. At home I pull out the hedge trimmers and spend a lot of time trimming a sidebush way back - it is now at the same height as the tallest juniper bushes. And after cleaning the trimming up I am starting to get tired. A warm shower feels good and then I procrastinate on some Python work since I still have Wednesday to make more progress anyway.
I'm tired from Wednesday's activities, so I work on shoulder exerrcises and get in an abdominal and lower back workout. The abdominals and lower back certainly will help with the hip flexors and nearby muscles. I do a lot of work on the LBHTTF website and get more than expected finished in support of Thursday's Zoom meeting.
I'm motivated on Thursday and ride the mountain bicycle north on the Los Angeles river against a persistent and sometimes nasty headwind all of the way to the base of the Whittier Narrows dam. I don't climb the dam, however short the climb is, because this is a longer distance ride and I don't think I have the leg strength yet. I turn around and get a nice tailwind and end up near fifty kilometers. Soon it will be time to pull out the road bicycle. At 1pm I have the Zoom meeting for the Long Beach Human Trafficking Task Force website but nobody shows up. I later get an email indicating that everyone was tied up and I send them over the progress that I've made and I get some feedback to work. And we have a plan for the next week. Its a chilly day and I rode extra long today (for the current state of health and recovery), so I spend most of the rest of the day wearing sweats to stay warm and relaxing.
Friday morning is very chilly, down towards 42F, but I'm out the door at 5:55am for a 65 minute walk. A warm shower afterwards certainly feels good and then I'm off to CSULA. It feels good to ride the motorcycle, to stop for gasoline where the cute attendant always gives me a big smile, and to continue the ride up to campus. I just have to greet everyone as they are seeing me for the first time in two months and they can't even see that I've been in an accident (except a bandage on the left ring finger that I use to keep other people from being grossed-out if they are squeamish around healing wounds). When the poster review session starts I only get a chance to talk with three teams - I end up spending thirty minutes with each team. One team is completely stuck and their scientific advisors don't know what they are doing so I push them in an engineering direction. And I give them my email address because the senior design advisor has been asking me to help since September but I couldn't do it. The second team is one that I met with before and they've made good progress but recently become stuck. So I suggest a number of ideas on how to un-stuck themselves during debugging and they already know how to get hold of me. The third team, related to imaging and modeling of human organs, is a carryover from last year that I really liked. And we just engage in a good discussion and they are approaching a very difficult issue in imaging: how do you know that two squares, for example, are two distinct squares or are really touching and NOT two squares. I offer a probabilistic solution with good heritage but I don't think they understand. But I like this imaging/modeling of human organs project and I look forward to the Expo at the end of spring semester. I ride on home early to miss traffic - I don't want to deal with heavy traffic at this stage of my recovery. Today I've walked 65 minutes and been on my feet for two more hours, so I am tired and can only manage to relax and watch Netflix and occassionally get up and do shoulder exercises.
I'm a bit unmotivated mentally for riding on Saturday so I get out of bed and put together a deep learning decision tree/classifier that works on some test data that I have. I'm disappointed that the decision tree algorithm does no better than a regression algorithm, but its the first day and maybe I'll find something. At 7:35am I'm out the door for a mountain bicycle ride to the old yacht club and back to home. Except that I feel guilty for riding this short after Thursday's ride, so I add on eight kilometers or so at the end to get close to Thursday's fifty kilometers. I'm tired so I warm up with a shower, do some grocery shopping, cut and prepare food for the next few days, and go back to working on the decision tree/classifier. The rest of the day will be slow and I'll end up bouncing between coding and Netflix and telelvision but no real shoulder exercises. Sunday is supposed to rain and I'm going to bomb the heck out of my shoulders.
I wake up on Saturday night into Sunday morning at 3am and enjoy listening to the rain fall. It isn't a hard rain, but hard enough to listen to and enjoy. I'm glad that Sunday is supposed to be wet and nasty for most of the day because my legs are tired from Thursday, Friday, and Saturday activities. When I wake up I get the last step in the decision tree classifier wrking and I'm still disappointed that the results are not significantly better than a regression analysis. As I'm working away a world class storm cell comes through and just pummels the area with rain. This short duration strom cell matches anything I've seen in the midwest of the USA or the tropics in Thailand and Cambodia. Fortunately it passes through quickly and we're back to the light to moderate rain. The legs are tired today, as I expected, so I set a time to go off every hour and do four or five different exercises for my shoulders each hour.
On Sunday night into Monday morning there is more - so no cycling or walking. I've agreed to help the retired schoolteacher neighbor get to the bank and to Trader Joe's because she's having difficulty right now. But we have a nice little outing and she gets her money transfer confirmed and we both pick up soome groceries. Approaching noon the rain is gone so I get out and walk for 45 minutes just to get the legs moving. At 1pm we have the Long Beach Human Trafficking Task Force web committee meeting to work on the website and then I pass the day with Netflix and the football game.
It is very cold on Monday night into Tuesday morning with a low at 42F. I stay in bed an extra half hour and work on the LBHTTF site a bit. When I know that I've got it figured out, I set off on a mountain bicycle ride to the old yacht club. It is very cold on the face and neck - more or less the only exposed areas on my body - and I fuly expect to just turn around and come home. But as I warm up I feel better and better and extend out to nearly fifty kilometers for the ride. I quickly jump into a warming shower and make a trip to the grocery store for supplies. Back at home I start the laundry and then propagate the LBHTTF solution that I have to the various other pages. We're making good progress on the website. For the remainder of the day I just kinda kick back and relax and decide that I need to double up my workpouts to make quicker progress to full health. And I vow that Wednesday will be the day to start.
I let Wednesday warm up a bit and then go walking for 75 minutes. When I get home I rake the leaves away from the fence (so that the lawnmower can pick up the leaves tomorrow) and I trim and dispose of some of the neighbor's tree branches that fell on my side when their gardener was trimming their tree. I have the LBHTTF Zoom meeting and a Python Cybersecurity Zoom meeting and then it is a slow day. Except that the injured right shoulder feels better after Sunday's "bombing" of the shoulders, so I bomb again today - do exercises for the shoulders once per hour until I run out of motivation.
I have all of my cycling gear lined up for Thursday morning, but I don't get out cycling. I'm out of bed at 5:35 am and I start work on the LBHTTF website. Ad IU find that the site works well on a desktop but the mobile site is messed up. I work on debugging for two hours and finally go out and mow the lawn and pick up the leaves with the lawnmower that I raked yesterday. But still no thoughts on why desktop works and mobile doesn't. I plug along and start eliminating items one-by-one until I think I've found the problem. But now it is time for my artificial intelligence decision tree learning session, so I log on. The last session by this organization on regression was kinda useless to me, so today I pre-empt the meeting with a few selected questions. The presenter of the Zoom meeting is very knowledgeable and speaks away but sometimes checks for audience questions adn answers my questions. By the end of the ninety minute presentation I believe that I've picked up as much as I can from the presentation and log off with some ideas to pursue. One ideas is as simple as I was trying to use to small a set of training data. Somewhere along the presentation a bottle of wine got opened up but I'm still coherent and take notes of ideas that I've learned as well as thoughts to fix the the LBHTTF mobile-incompatibility problem. After the Zoom session on decision trees I start exercising the shoulders again once per hour even though I worked the shoulders pretty hard yesterday. (Recall that there were many torn rotator cuff and shoulder muscles from the bicycle accident and though I'm close to having full range of motion, I still feel weakness there.) As I take breaks throughtout the day I watch some Netflix and some news and just have a very slow day.
On Thursday night ninto Friday morning I wake up at 4am and cannot sleep. THus I get out of bed and start writing all of the Javascript error checking for the LBHTTF website. By 7:30 am I've made a lot of progress and I'm out the door for fifty kilometers on the mountain bicycle up to the Whittier Narrows dam and back home again. It's really time to get back on the road bicycle. Throughout the day I work more on the LBHTTF website and just relax - my legs are tired from the ride. But a good tired.
It seems extra cold on Sunday morning. I'm awake to work on some Javascript and then take the mountain bicycle down to the old yacht club and back again. There are noises coming from the bicycle so I stop once and loosen the front brakes - thinking they are dragging. But the more I ride the worse the noise gets. I think it is coming from the main bearing because it seems loudest as I pedal along. I finish the ride with a good workout and immediately start debugging. I completely degrease the drivetrain and gears and chainrings and though they look nice and run smoother, there is still noice coming from the rear wheel. Crap - the bearings need to be cleaned and repacked. So I take them apart and get the effort done without too much swearing on my part. And a est ride up and down the street gives no indications of noises. Later in the day I look at my diary and its been each of the last few December or Januaries that I've had to do this task - so I guess this will be an annual thing until I decide to get a new mountain bicycle. Funny how I've never touched the from bearings and they are still as smooth as glass. I do more Javascript work and the error-checking keeps expanding in scope. I'll finish it on Sunday or Monday. Late in the afternoon I drive over to a local co-working space, the one where I went to the grand opening a couple years ago, since today they are having the Fifth Annual Long Beach Parol Lantern Festival. (The community may share in the Filipino tradition of lighting star-shaped lanterns during the Christmas season.) I go to hang out and talk with people at the Filipinx, BIPOC, LGBTQ small businesses and creatives co-working space more than anything else.
I start Sunday vowing not to work on Javascript today, but that mobile-compatible problem is bugging me. So I work on it a bit and find a solution (for most of it). At 7:35am I'm heading out the door for the third ride in three days. It is cold today, so I wear a bandana across my face and nose and mouth as that is really the only part of my body that gets cold on these rides. (My legs are completely exposed to the wind, I don't where long cycling pants in the winter, but my legs don't ever get cold.) Today is a good ride and I'll be happy to have tomorrow off. But its an eventfull ride as three times during the ride I startle birds and they fly close enough to my head that I can hear the wings flapping and feel the airflow from the flapping. One of the birds was from a whole gaggle of geese and this one got startled and was up against my head (almost) for a second or two. At home I work a bit on the Javascript and it seems to work. So I relax and tidy up the bathrooms and watch football.
I sleep an extra planned 45 minutes on Monday morning. And then I get up and start pounding away on the Javascript and the html pages. I've pumped myself up with a Red Bull and Mountain Dew cocktail, so I just keep going and going. And eventually I find a hidden element that has been partially covering up some links on mobile platforms - that was the source of our weird weird weird behavior. And now its fixed. Its 3pm and I haven't eaten a thing yet, so I steam some vegetables and watch the news for a bit. And then I watch the football game as I clean up my road cycling shoes which are still dirty and dust covered from the big accident back on 24 September 2022.