I sleep horribly from Monday night into Tuesday and finally get out of bed at 4:20 am to work on some projects. What's going on with my sleep lately? I manage to wrap an optimization algorithm around a deep learning decision tree algorithm and I sometimes get promising results. I think I need to better pose some of the constraints to get the double algorithm to do what I want it to do. At 7:35 am, with 42F weather, I get on the mountain bicycle and start riding. The front brake is still dragging intermittently and I can stop the drag by reaching down with my left hand and giving a push on the cantilever. But this is not a good solution so I just do the ride to the old yacht club and back to home and leave the bicycle in the garage for some front brake adjustments. After a shower I run some errands and then go back to adjusting the front brakes again. In addition, I take the road bicycle shoes, covered in dust and gravel since the September accident, and clean them up for an approaching exploratory road bicycle ride. And then I do more coding and continue to learn some weird algorithms for future use. It's 1pm and I haven't eaten anything yet, so I finally take a break and have some pasta pesto while watching the news. And then just relax the day away with intermittent Netflix viewing and coding and tidying up around the house.
I work on the wrapped optimization algorithm around a decision tree and continue to play with different forms of constraint equations. At 7:30am I go out walking for almost ninety minutes. As I walk I try to walk in the sun rather than shade so that I can warm up quicker. Back at home I have a Zoom conference for the Long Beach Human Trafficking Task Force website and we're making good progress. Possibly going live in January. And then I have a slow day.
I sleep well on Thursday night into Friday. After reading the news, I tentatively get on the road bicycle for the first time since the nasty accident. (Previous bicycle rides have been on the hybridized mountain bicycle.) I just do the neighborhood ride today as I want to gain confidence that that there are no hidden cracks in the carbon fiber frame or wheels. (I've done a detailed inspection of the bicycle and the neighbor, who builds bicycles for his team and friends, has also done a detailed inspection of the bicycle.) It's a starter ride and I have a bit of confidence in the bicycle to go for a longer ride tomorrow. At home I rake the leaves away from the fence, pick up all of the leaves with the lawnmower, and then trim the sideyard. After a shower I drop off a letter at the post office, get more gasoline for the lawnmower, and do the grocery shopping an advance of Christmas eve and Christmas. At home I work on a "Lissajous" idea of plotting standard deviation against moving average - an idea that came to me a night or two ago as I was reading. Throughout the rest of the day I do another "shoulder bomb" with a set of four or five shoulder exercises performed every hour. I've added weight to the dumbbells, so after the 4th set I increase the length of time to two hours between sets. The shoulders are crying for rest by the end of the day.
By Friday night and into Saturday morning, I've given up on cycling for the day. So I go walk for almost ninety minutes and stop at CVS for supplies. Today is a very very slow Christmas Eve day but at least there is some football to watch. And later in the day I watch music videos.
On Sunday and I hem and haw and finally decide that I need to go for a road bicycle ride - I can't be afraid of it. So I start north on the Los Angeles river trail. Of course, every little noise I hear I think "Oh here comes the first crack". But I get to the Whittier Narrows dam and still do not climb it. But I turn around and only my hands, wrists, and forearms are tired after the ride due to the loss of strength and riding position. After a warm shower I just relax with football games - there really isn't anything that needs to be worked on or anything that I'm motivated to work on.
Lately my sleep has not been great according to the FitBit Charge 3 that was given to me as a present a few years ago. I keep wracking up a good amount of REM sleep and deep sleep, but lately the scores have been ten points (out of one hundred) below where I usually am. Nonetheless I'm out of bed before 5:30 am and get on the mountain bicycle at 7:05am for a recovery ride down to the old yacht club and back to home. At home I lay down some more winterizing fertilizer since we are supposed to have a fair amount of rainy days over the next week. After a shower I run an errand at CVS and help the retired schoolteacher across the street with another computer problem. Back at home I decide I want to convert a very old Perl-based web scraper for some sports statistics to Python, so I work on that and make positive, if incremental, progress. By the end of the day the web scraper works except for a few special cases (which may have to be dealt with manually). Since I want to cycle on Tuesday for the third day in a row before the rain, I take numerous breaks to stretch upper legs, lower legs, and shoulders/upper back to avoid cramps.
Though I feel very rested on Tuesday morning and my FitBit says I have a lot of REM sleep and deep sleep, the score is only 79. Which is about ten points lower than usual. So what's going on with the FitBit? I see a beautiful early morning sunrise of reds and oranges and purples near 5:30 am and get out cycling at 7:05 am. Since this is the third day of cycling in a row and fifth of the last six days, I cut the ride a bit short and vow to take Wednesday off from cycling or walking and start lifting weights again. After trimming the roses and getting cleaned up, I do my own grocery shopping and then take the retired schoolteacher neighbor out to Trader Joes for her grocery shopping. Back at home I work on the Python web-scraper and make good progress. I can scrape the desired websites of the statistics that I want, I just have to re-order them for subsequent processing. And then I try to "get ahead of the curve" by pre-updating some websites in advance of the first few months of 2023. Though, of course, I don't activate the pre-updated files in case there are changes over the next couple of moneths. And I, again, have a slow afternoon and evening wth the news and Netflix.
On Wednesday I turn off the 5:30am alarm and sleep until 6:15 am. It was a planned non-leg day due to all of the recent leg work cycling and walking. I check out the Python scraper and it has completed the first task overnight with no exceptions. So I start the second phase with a change of IP address to prevent limits being hit. I still expect some outlier data to cause exceptions. This comes true and it takes me until noon (intermittently debugging this one-off case) to make it work. In the meantime, as the Python scraper runs, I go out into the garage and do a workout for all of the upper body muscles. It feels good to go through the workout even if the weights are very light compared to those before the accident. And I'm sure various muscle groups will be sore on Friday morning. I've planned a walk to CVS for some supplies and the retired schoolteacher across the street asks me to do her a favor involving shipments to Japan via both UPS and the US postal service. Fortunately both of these places are within walking distance and I gather data for her and bring the data and necessary forms back to her. (It turns out UPS is ten times the cost of these gifts to Japan as the US postal service is.) So now the schoolteacher will have to fill out some US postal service forms in the comfort of her home before we make an in-person visit to the US postal office. The rest of the day is spent stretching muscle groups, fixing six sigma scraping events, and watching the news and/or Netflix shows.
I have a few blah days to end the year. Thursday is decent with a very long walk and another workout with the weights and finally taking the Python-scraped data and trying to use it in a decision tree and an optimization algorithm. Friday is a big blah day since it is barely too wet to go cycling and I'm just not in the mood for walking. I work the abdominals, lower back, and core muscles as well as do some extra upper body workout. And continue trying to derive relationships from the Python-scraped data. Saturday starts very blah with heavier rain but I find a window where the rain has let up. I bundle up and carry an umbrella and go walking. Of course it rains during the walk and I'm very wet at the end of the walk - but it felt good. Everything goes in the washing machine and I grab a shower and wash the hardwood floors. The hardwood floors take longer to dry today because it is raining (compared with a hot dry summer day) but I get them cleaned nicely to start the new year. And then I just watch college football while intermittently tidying things up around the house to kill the day and put an end to 2022.