I sleep an extra ten minutes on Tuesday and drive over to Liberty Park for an eighty minute run/walk. I feel good and strong. After a shower I read the news and markets and tidy things up before driving to the ATM and to Del Taco. I'm coming to the end of this Del Taco period of eating since I'm gaining taste back in my mouth, the radiation blisters inside the mouth are mostly gone, and I'm craving for something new. After lunch I pick up a book at the library and then go work for a few hours on the baseball Markov chain. I keep finding details and historical statistics to include in the simulation/modeling. But I can see it being finished shortly and then I just have to wrap some AI or deep learning around the simulation/model to try and determine optimial batting orders and player change strategies. This is fun! Late on Tuesday I pick Person Ha_KY up at the airport and we get home before midnight.
Person Ha_KY nad I start for a mid-morning bicycle ride to the old yacht club and beyond to the Seal Beach border and turn back for home. AFter getting cleaned up we have Japanese food, get to a bank for paperwork, and go visit a recreational vehicle store as he's interested in possibly purchasing one. On the way home we make a qucik stop at an electric bicycle store for me and then at a motorcycle dealer for both of us to look at new motorcycles. We drive towards home and have a Mediterranean dinner with some high quality food. But I have to box up half for Friday lunch.
When Person Ha_KY wakes up on Thursday he says we should trim my Juniper trees along the backl fence - it's something that I put on the list of errands/rasks to do. We pull out the equipment and spend about two hours with ladders and a chainsaw and corded hedge trimmers and stuff topping off three Juniper trees. With five minutes lef to to go I accidentally slice through the electrical cord with the hedge trimmers - the second time I've done this in 35 years. So I climb the ladder and muscle the last few branches down with cmanual clippers. We rest for a bit and watch some television and then start riding the bicycles out Del AMo so that I can show Person Ha_KY the Liberty Park rubberized track and pickleball courts and other facilities. After the die trip we make a seven mile ride down to the ocean with a nasty headwind the entire way. And then ride along the ocean with a sidewind and finally north on the Los Angeles river trail for a complete day. After showers we relax a bit and head to our favorite Thai restaurant. I order my veggie curry extra hot, as usual, but its too much with all of the radiation damage in the mouth still present. So I eat about half and box up the rest for Saturday. At home we watch a stupid movie for a bit bout we're both tired.
Friday starts we me taking Person Ha_KY to the Rosa Park train station since he wants to take the train today and not have me drive all of the way to the airport. So I show him how to buy a TAP card and how to ride the trains. Back at home I do some grocery shopping, lift weights (which is a strugggle), trim the roses, and clean up all of the downed Juniper tree limbs. Now I'm tired so I spend the rest of the day coding, watching FP2 for F1 from Japan, FP2 for MotoGP and Moto2 from India (the inaugural Indian MotoGP race), and eating some of the leftover Mediterranean food. But I still cannot finish it and put it back into the refrigerator for Sunday.
Even though I took some Aleve before trimming trees yesterday, almost every bodypart is sore on Saturday morning. My glutes, related to climbing up and down and stretching on the ladder, are especially sore. I stay in bed until 6:05 am and then as I feel more and more guilty I get on the mountain bicycle and get out the door by 6:30 am. It's chilly today and I enjoy it and once I get warmed up my legs and entire organism feels very strong. At home I get cleaned up and watch a fun and close qualifying session from Japan for F1. I then work on the baseball statistics/strategy algorithm and make some great progress after a number of false starts over the last couple of days. Later I watch rain-affected qualifying for MotoGP/3/2 from India and look forward to the races over the next few days. (They all take place on Sunday but I always stretch the fun and pleasure out for a few days.) Later I watch some of the Dodgers' game and make a bit more progress on the baseball algorithm. This baseball algorithm currently combines pure statistics with Markov chains, but I want to add some deep learning to the process and see what I can come up with.
Originally I expect to ride long on Sunday, but my glutes are still sore and I don't sleep well. Thus I drive to Libetry Park in the darkness and start in on an extended run/walk. I run into a man I've seen before, Richard, and we walk for a bit as I warm up. It turns out that he was an aerospace engineer at the old Hughes and we have a lot in common. We occassionally "catch up with each other" as he walks and I run/walk and we talk more. It turns out he knows a lot of the people who come out running and walking and I look forward to talking with him more next time. And I've given him an apology that I saw him back in February and March, but I've been missing due to cancer. I extend my run/walk to 90 minutes today and drive home to get cleaned up and buy some grocery supplies. There's a very interesting and strategic Japanese F1 race from Suzuka whih keep me enthralled with rhe race and through the podium ceremony. And I've thought of an idea to pursue related to human/sex/political trafficking and I toy with the idea of pursuing this idea. Today I let the baseball algorithm sit and simmer and I just watch the F1 race, fotbball, baseball, the Inuaungural Tissot Sprint MotoGP race from India, and later some more football. I'm targeted Monday for either a very long bicycle ride or lifting weights and the human/sex/political trafficking idea to work on.
Monday morning comes and I sleep an extra hour. I'm mentally and physically hungover from activities over the last week. At mir-morning I get in a good workout for the core group of muscles including abdominals, obliques, and lower back. And I trim the roses and note a good number healthy blooms showing up after our 2 inches of rain from the "fizzled out" tropical storm back in August. In between football games I make a lot of debugging and comment effort on the baseball algorithm. There are now only two little niggling problems to deal with before I add in one last major feature.
I wanted to ride long again on Tuesday, but I just do the mountain bicycle ride to the old yacht club and back to home. I should have ridden long because my legs feel strong throughout. In reality, the entire organism feels as good as it has before the surgery in May 2023. At home I get cleaned up, buy some supplies at the grocery store, start the laundry, order new parts and equipment that has worn out in the gardening department, and then go back to adding comments and explanations to the baseball code. I'll note that some of the gardening equipment was twenty years old or more, so it was time to replace it. As the laundry finishes I start in watching the Moto2 race from India just as noon arrives. But before the race gets under way, which would take up 100% of my attention, I wonder if I need to build a user-friendly front-end for this baseball idea since right now it is purely Python code. Hmmmmm. By the way, if somebody asks me why I'm spending so much time on this baseball algorithm, I have a good story to tell about how the skills translate to other more important topics. Even as simple as a batter getting a perfect fastball down the middle of the plate and he grounds out weakly to the second baseman compared to a child is placed in a perfectly happy adoptive family environment and ends up being a criminalm (or vice versa, a child is placed with two criminal parents and ends up as valedictorian of their high school). There are lots of lessons and coding to be learned related to data, phhysics, and human behavior between baseball and other apparaently unrelated fields.
I start Wednesday with an early morning doctor's appointment. The first thing he says is, "You look really good!" I share with him how depressed I was for the last week of radiation and the first two weeks afterwards. But things have changed so much and my radiation blisters in my mouth and on my tongue have disappeared, my neck swelling is way down, my neck discoloration from the radiation is way down, and my neck range of motion is way up. And I've started running again. And I show the doctor a picture of me on the top of a ladder with a chainsaw in my hands from last Thursday. So we're both happy! I just share that I haven't fully recovered taste, weakness when lifting weights, and mouth dryness, but we both agree that I'm making good progress and I'll recover. And he again reiterates, "Nobody has done as well as you have with the duration and exposure of radiation that you had". At home I lift weights and I actually feel a tad bit stronger, then trim the roses and bring blooms inside the house. I find some of the bugs in the baseball algorithm and fix them and keep pushing forward. In the early afternooon another home healthcare nurse comes to visit, despite me trying to stop them from coming because they cannot help me, and this time I'm successful. I show the nurse a picture of me on the top of the ladder with a chainsaw in my hands and though she says I shouldn't have done that, she agrees to "discharge" me from further nurse visits. Later in the day I finally watch the MotoGP race from India and then catch some of the Dodgers' game.
I want to go for a long road bicycle ride on Thursday morning, but instead do the standard mountain bicycle ride to the old yacht club and back to home. At home I mow the front and back yards and chase a possum away. Where do they live? After getting cleaned up I update two websites for the end of month calendars of events and read the news and markets. Today my primary desktop computer is doing some weird things and I finally, hopefully get it straightened out. I work on converting the purely baseball simulation/model, with a few bugs left to be worked out, into a design model that can be integrated with an optimization or deep learning package. And later I just relax with some Netflix and the Dodgers' game. Though I do get to the Thai grocery store to buy supplies for Thai curry and I drop the mountain bicycle off for maintenance.
No ride on Saturday cuz I'm lazy and there's a threat of rain, 80 minute walk, install new chainsaw, mess it up many times and now need to read back about tensioning, work on ensemble fitness function for the baseball algorithm, qualifying for Moto3/2/GP, more ensemble work, Dodgers' game. Today I find thqat my errors are easy to find during coding because they are simple typo errors - not logic errors. But I do get frustrated that Im making so many simple errors. By 3:40pm I realize that I have not eaten anything yet today so I cook some veggie burritos and add extra chese, jalapenos, and hot sauce to go with an ice cold coke.
When I wake up on Sunday, with the possibilityy of cold rain, I instead put on warm sweats and start my day. Today I feel a bit dizzy when first out of bed - maybe I didn't eat enough for dinner or I'm dehydrated or my blod pressure is low. I make super progress on the baseball algorithm though the dizziness keeps making me make typos (which are easily found anyway because they usually cause syntax errors). But I solve two issues I've been working on for a couple of weeks. After watching Saturday's Tissot Sprint race for MotoGP motorcycle from Japan I increase the weights and lift heavier. I've taken a big leap in weights so all of the repetitions are down but it feels good even though I'll be sore on Tueday. And then I trim the roses and eat my own Thai curry. I'm just feeling out of it today and I cannot pinpoint what might have caused it in the last few days.
I'm awake at my normal time on Monday and I just cannot ride or walk. I'm again feeling blah and feeling cold. I put on warm sweats and work on the baseball algorithm and trhoughout the day I find a few more inaccuracies that I fix. Near 10 am I drive down to Tustin to see the radiation dentist. He's really happy with all of the facts and figures and experiences and feelings that I give him until I show him that I'm feeling so well that I climbed a ladder and whipped a chainsaw around some juniper trees. He gives me the "don't be an idiot" lecture because even a two step fall is going to be a problem. At the end of our long discussion I just saay we should agree to disagree. We continue on with our planning and he says to keep pushing myself cycling and running and the strength training will take longer to come back. But he expresses surprise a number of times that my taste is almost completely back after such a long duration, high exposure radiation and only a few weeks of recovery. I drive on home and stop at Home Depot, the library, and the drugstore for a fluroide gel treatment. The Moto3 race from Japan is not what I wanted and I want to go ride or walk or something. Instead I grab an old unused door in the garage and attach rollers to the four corner of it so that it serves as a trolley for all of the paint containers and tile and stuff. This will make it easier to roll the trolley out when I want to wash the garage floor (rather than have to carry everything out individually). Later I just poke around for a few new ideas to try as the baseball algorithm is pretty much done but not quite generating good results.