I start north on the Los Angeles river trail against a slight headwind. But I feel strong today and get all of the way to the flooded El Monte dam before turning fo rhome - a total of about 8 kilometers. After a shower I get a Lyft ride to the bicycle store and ride my repaired mountain bicycle home. It has new chainrings, a new chain, a new 8 speed cassette, and new brake pads. I'll ride it on Wednesday and hopefully Thursday to break it in and check on the repairs. Today I watch a good Moto2 race from Japan and try to help the neighbor with her voicemail. She can record an outgoing vociemail recording, but when you call her number it givees the "This voice mail box has not been set up by the user". Even though it worked perfectly a month or two ago when she bought the phone and I showed her how to use it. Confusing. ANd today, out of blood sugar from the ride, I have a slow day.
Again I sleep well at the beginning of the night and then start tossing and turning as it gets closer to sunrise. I get out of bed at 5:15am to read the new and pre-markets and gather stuff to go cycling. I get out late - at 6:30 am - for cycling and the entire organism is tired from yesterday's good ride. But I jet keep turning the pedals over on the newly-maintained mountain bicycle and get home safely. At this point I have no blood or brain glucose, so I pull out the brand new extension cord and hedge trimmers and ladder and carefully check out how the new equipment will work. On this juniper, the new equiment works fantastic and before I know it the juniper has a nice shape to it though it is still too tall. I make two small cuts with the newly-rechained chainsaw and it cuts well. I don't have confidence in the chainsaw because my installation seems to leave a bit too much slack in the chain, but I make two cuts and declare victory. The top of the juniper will be lopped-off on day another shortly after I play some more with the new chainsaw tensioning. At this point, tired from two good bicycle rides and tree trimming, I throw stuff willy-nilly into the garage, take a quick shower, get gasoline for the World Rally Car, ad buy some groceries. I'm tireed and lay on the couch to watch a very wild MotoGP race from Japan where raindops are falling on the fist lap and very few riders stay on dry tires for more than a few laps. More than halfway through the race the race has to be red flagged because the rain is bucketing down , the motorcycles are aquaplaning, and the top riders have given the arm-raised signal to the organizers that conditions are too dangerous t continue. After a period of time the organizers try to start the race but even on the warm-up lap, there are riders raising their arms indicating aquaplaning. Thus the race is over after a lot of excitement. I fill up with half of a deep dsh pizza and spend the rest of the day watching some baseball and diggining deep to find "a final" arror in the baseball algorithm before I move to the next steps. But I'm also very tired and I'm ne bed for reading and sleep before 8 pm on Wednesday night.
I'm out of bed at 5:15am on Thursday and I put on warm clothes to stay warm before going out cycling. I don't get out cycling until 6:30am but I feel strong and I crank quite nicely on the mountain bicycle for more than three quarters of the ride. And then I tend to run out of steam. Coincidentally I see a white Giant X road bicycle rider pass me again today as I'm slowing - the same rider who passd me yesterday at a faster rate in this same area. At home I rake up the trimmings frm yesterday's Juniper tree trim and put them into the city's trash bin. The top of the juniper needs to be "topped off and evened out" and I put that on my shcedule for either this Friday or next Wedneday. It will depend on what the Friday morning workout is and whether I'm ready to climb up on the ladder and swing the hedge trimmers and chainsaw again. The right middle portion of my back continues to "be tired" - it's not sore or in pain - just it tells me that it wants some rest. So I watch a one hour Netflix series finisher which is pretty disapointing and then I work on a slightly new idea related to baseball - how managers use starting and relief pitchers throughout the years. The scraper is pretty set to go and I only occassionally have to hide/change my IP address to avoind any sit elimits for raw data scraping. Processing the data and writing a story will take a bit mre time.
Despite me wanting to go run on Friday morning, I do not. The entire organism is very tired. I wake up and work on scraping a website and post-processing the results. At mid morning I workout the core muscles and abdominal muscles and lower back and trim the roses to brng fresh blooms into the house. FP1 and qualifying from Qatar for F1 is interesting and the rest of te weekend should be fun. Since I'm tired today, I spend a lot of time watching a Netflix series on Uber as well as floating ideas around in my head. I know that I have some good ideas t work on, I just can't quite get them to be crystalized enough to make progress.
On Sunday I get in a good mountain bicycle ride where I get to try out the new rear lights on the bicycle since it is dark and foggy this morning. At home I trim the roses and get cleaned up and watch very weird F1 race from Qatar where they've modified the track overnight and the tire supplier had put a limit on the number of laps the tires can be used (because they saw some weird "almost failures" over Friday night and Saturday night inspections). I work on putting the baseball statistics into production form for easier viewing and maybe writing an article about what I've found and then I pass the day with a Netflix hour or so and some football games.
Though I've laid out cycling kit to go ride on Monday morning, neither the mind nor the legs are ready. I start by reading the news and doing some quality checks on the baseball algorithms I've been working on. The quality checks look good and its time to keep adding more capability. Today, for the first time in nearly a year, I have a Red Bull to get me going and soon I'm looking through closets and pulling a few old items out to toss in today's trash pickup. It's on my "slowly but surely" list of things to do - start recycling or selling items that I don't use. And then I spend a fair amount of time moving some neural network code over from a different implementation to the baseball implementation. Ruby visits for a while and then I lift weights and re-organize all of the spare wood, pipe, and mouldings that I have in the garage. I organize it and store it approximately based on length, so its easy to see what spare pieces are available for any projects that come up. I haven't eaten anything all day and I have two bean and cheese burritos while watching some of the baseball game but this isn't going to be enough for a long Tuesday ride. We'll see.
I again wanted to ride the road bicycle long on Tuesday, but there ws not enough blood and muscle glucose. So I take the mountain bicycle down to the old yacht club for a strong ride. Upon further review, there probably was enough energy stores available for the longer ride. I get cleaned up quickly and then ride the mountain bicycle to the grocery store for a few supplies. Why take the car out of the garage to drive a mile to turn around and come home when a locked bicycle and backpack will do? Unless, of course, I'm buying a gallons of milk and other adult beverages. At home I start the laundry and tidy up the baseball regression implementation so that it is ready to be droped into my waiting neural network code. It will take a day to move it over, but this is going smoothly and the linear regression has identified factors that just don't matter enough to include in the neural network implementation.
On Wednesday my legs are tired, so I start the day with a one hour walk. When I get home I pull equipment out of the garage and edge, mow, and trim the lawn. Aftwr sweeping up the front yard, I quickly mow through the backyard. I then take some time to trim the roses and bring blooms into the house and then trim the sideywards, At this point, the right, mid portion of my back is tired and there's no way I'm going to climb the ladder and trim one last side juniper tree. So I tidy things up, grab a cooling shower, and start reading the news and markets and doing some coding. Today, after the basic results are working, I wrap a nuurall network around the results and play and perturb the results to get a feeling of how it responds. I'v ben super-productive today, so I strt to slow down. I clean up a few bugs in the baseball algorithm and then I wrap a neural network around tha system to see what it finds. With neural networks it takes some iteration, and I do this and then give up for a while. Today I cook and eat an entire medium vegetarian pizza and as I do this, I start laying out cycling equipment for a long ride on Thursday.
I go north on the Los Angeles river against a slight headwind on Thursday morning. I try to keep the pace up as I want to see if I'm gaining strength. I turn around at the El Monte dam and crank away on the way home - up one gear from the slight tailwind and extra effort. Only in the last two or three kilometers (out of 80 km) do I get mentally rather than physically tired. After a shower I answer some questions from people who want me to dig stuff up out of my archives. And I manage to find the relevant stuff though some of it was copyrighted 2016 and has been laying dormant for that long. Since I've ridden long, today is a slow day where I watch some Netflix and water the roses.
I start Friday wit a 64 minute run/walk at Liberty Park. This was a planned sorta-shortened run/walk beause I really want to pound on the bicycles for a few days. At home I trim the roses, get cleaned p, do the grocery shopping, get to the libray for a new book, and get to CVS for a planned Cvid-19 booster, I ask if they have the RSV vaccine and they do, so I ask for that also. When it's time for my shots I notice it is the same Vietnamese lady as flu-boosted me last week. So I speak with her in (a bit) of Vietnamese and she says, "I remember you. You went to Hanoi". I have to correct her and say that I want to get to Hanoi in December of January. After the first shot I ask her for a band aid with a giraffe on it and she starts laughing very hard. She just says, "I've never seen a band aid with a giraffe on out" and keeps laughing. She composes herself but then I ask her how to say giraffe in Vietnamese. And she says its hard to do because there in one word. And I tell her that is similar t Cambodian which just says "sat kor veng" which means long neck animal. She tries to get me to pronounce "huou cao coh" but I'll need some practice. Back at home I watch FP2 for MotoGP from Indonesia, start cooking pasta during FP2 for Moto2, and then carb-load for a long bicycle ride on Saturday morning.
I start Saturday on the road bicycle north on the San Gabriel river trail and hit a turnaround point to make a big loop down to the ocean, along the ocean, and back up the Los Angeles river. After a shower I take a break and watch Moto3/2/GP qualifying from Indonesia where all three grds are jumbled up due to resurfacing of the track. Sunday's races will be fun! By Saturday a bit after noon I'm realizing how great of a day it is - almost every body part hurts.The legs hurt from long Thursday and Saturday bicycle rides and Friday's run. My mid back hurts from all of the cranking on the bicycles. Of course my neck and shoulders hurt because, let's face it, they haven't recovered from the surgery or radiation yet and are still weak. And both arms are sore with every movement due to the COvid-19 and RSV boosters from Friday. This is the first time my arms have hurt from shots or boosters so that kinda says the entire organism is still weak after the difficult circumstances of the year. Fortunately I don't have much scheduled today and can just watch some football. The emails that I answered yesterday about a new opportunity having disappearred into the ether as if they were not received - though all of them are in my Sent Box.
I sleep well for the first four hours on Saturday night, as is typical for me, and then I start having all of these very strange dreams with ex-co-workers and ex-friends and random people. When I get up I put on the mountain bicycle shoes and go do intervals down and up the Los Angeles riverr trail. (I wasn't going to be ab;le to go across the ocean trail because of the Long Beach Marathon clsoure.) Noentheless I get in seven all out sprints followed by a spinning rest period before another interval comes. I'm completely beat up by the time the ride is over with but I'm surprised that my legs held up better than I thought that they would. I trim the roses, cool down with a shower, ride the mountain bicycle (again) to the grocery store for supplies, and watch a fun Tissot Sprint race from Indonesia. With the jumbled starting grids, all three classes are going to have fun races on Sunday. I relax on Sunday with some webwork, football, synching my DropBox/GoogleDrive, and external hard drive, and thinking of a couple of new ideas to put together.
I'm very tired on Monday morning and though the cycling kit has been laid out the previous night, its not going to be used. Instead I read the news and markets and clean up some websites, and work a bit on the new ideas I came up with yesterday. At mid morning I go out and work the abdominals, lower back, and core muscles. Throughout the entire workout I just keep saying, "I need to climb the ladder and use the new hedge trimmers to top off the Juniper". I don't feel like climbing the ladder after the workout, but I cautiously get up high enough and top off the Juniper tree. One large branch cannot be cut so, instead of running the chainsaw up the ladder, I just manually use a tree saw. The trim job goes quickly and though it is not perfect, I'll let the wind and weather blow the loose and uncut branches around and see hw to "pretty it up" in a couple of weeks. I get in a good shower and wacth a wild Moto3 race from Indonesia. I'm very physically hungover from everything from the last week or so, and I'm glad that I have a doctor's appointment on Tuesday way up at Cedars Sinai so that the most I'll get in on Tuesday is maybe a workout with the weights.