I start Tuesday with a day off from cycling or running and instead lift weights. Today, for the first time in a long time, I increase the weights and it feels great. I trim the roses, grab a shower, get tot he ATM, get a haircut, and run another errand. I have to tell the Cambodian lady who cuts my hair that I was in Vietnam, Thailand, and Cambodia for seven weeks and had a lot of fun fun and then I cut my own hair a while ago to remind me of the Covid-19 pandemic. But now my hair looks good. Back at home I watch a wild MotoGP race from Silverstone where there are four crashes in the firsttwo laps and oil on the track. Only two crashes are from the oil on the track, but everybody is allowed to retake their initial starting positions on their backup bike. With only a few laps to go a Yamaha is leading until he suddenly uts his hand up in the air and slows down and gets his bike off the track. The rear ride height device has failed in a locked position - a hearbtraking loss for him after he had built up a big leab. But the winner, on an Aprillia, is happy and the owner gives their injured World Champion from another team a warning that this is still a race winning bike and that he shouldn't be thinking of changing teams. Afterwards I do some coding for a friend and make progress. I just need to display the optimization results, write it up, and send it off to him. And maybe rewrite the code in an object oriented fashion so that it might be easier to read. Later I just watch the DOdgers' game and the ice hockey playoff game.
Wednesday starts with a typical mountain bicycle recovery ride. I fight a bit of wind and end up with a good ride. After trimming the roses I grab a shower and get ready to run errands but our Salvadoran gardener grabs me and says that my retired schoolteacher needs my help. So I go over and she welcomes me back from my trip on a few different occassaions ad I just say, each time, "I havent gone anywhere". I wondered why she had not called for this or that lately and now I know that she thought that I was out of the country. I fix her television and her laptop and say that I am always available in the afternoons. She has scheduled an appointment with her accountant in the morning and I have to explain to her, again, that I am out cycling and might have a flat tire or something and being safe by saying that only afternoons are availabe. So she will re-schedule the appointment for next week in the afternoon. I am dreading this appintment because it deals with a disagreement with Bank of America where I believe that Bank of America has made an $800 mistake and I'm going to have to explain everything for her. Later I watch an exciting Moto3 race wheres my favorite Moto3 rider, penalized to last position for impedng traffic, runs through the field to win. Later I see the Dodgers blow a good lead and lose and then watch the ice hockey playoff game. No coding today as I celebrate Joe's birthday from yesterday and what would be my brother's 69th birthday today if he were still alive.
I almost hit the szoonze button on the 5:41am alarm, but I don't. I take my blod presure and temperature, as usual, and then get taped up and dressed to go run. Today I want to run extra long. I warm up with my usual 10 minute walk and then start running. SInce I am going long today, I do take a few extra ten second walking breaks in the middle of the run and continously change sides of the road to even out the crown loading on my legs. At the end I finish at at 20 kilometers - just short of a half marathon. I feel good and mow the front yard only (the backyeard doesn't need it) and trim the roses and grab a shower. I call my prosthodontist because there is an appointmnet hand-written on a schedule and the receptionsist confirms that I do not have an appointment today. On the motorcycle I return a book to the library (that's four of six books read from my last trip to the library) and make a stop for more anitiobiotic creme at CSV. At home I read the news and markets and pull out the Pumi stick to scrub away rust stains in my rear toilet. I continue to get up regularly and do my routine of stretches for the legs and shoulders and I feel good. Before noon I start bioling water to cook pasta so that I can carboload for a long road bicycle ride on Friday. I update a couple of websites for the monthly calendar updates as we approach the end of May. And then have a slow mid-afternoon and watch the ice hockey playoff game (with more regular stretching sessions).
On Friday I start off tentatively again but start cranking nicely. When I turn ack south from the Sanata Fe dam is seems like the wind is against me. But I continue on and ride past Del Amo down to the bridge. Grab a drink of water, and go back to Del Amo and make some nice sprints to make green or amber lights for a total of 110 kilometers. After a shower I deal with the retired schoolteacher and though her neice has said she could go live in Ojai with her, this isn't going to happen. Ao I make a ton of calls to her primary care physician and other places saying that she cannot live alone anymore. EVeryone says, "We'll get back to you". But by the end of the day they have not. What is the retired schooteacher supposed to do if everyone has abandonded her. ANd it's t the point where she gets a bill from BofA sayigng she needs to make a payment of $70.00 and she insiststs, despite my reasoning with her, that she thinks they are ashking for $7000. I finally get her to understand, maybe, but there will be another letter tomorrow with the same problem. I watch FP2 for F1 from Spain and the reslts are inconclusive. After today's long ride I relax but I also stretch regularly. And I also screw with the mind of someone who has contacted me at random and I pretend to be a rich startup player and let the "fashion designer" - how come all of the scammers are fashin designers? - try to get me to buy something. I think, by the end of the day, he/she has given up. But I would not be surprised if he/she tries again tomorrow. If I am not busy, I like to waste the time of the scammers and pretend that I have a ton of money and don't know what to do with it. Most of this I do with a burner phone number that I can burn at anytime and start all over - so there is very little chance of me getting hacked.
I'm physically hungover from Thursday's long run and Friday's long ride. But I wake up just after 5:30am as I hear noises outside. I hope it is not another possum or rat or something trying to pull off my crawlspace vent screens to live under the house. So I'm out of bed early and when I pull the mountain bicycle outside I see one of the black cats in my backyard. It must have been the noise of the cat crawling along the fence that I heard. I vow to take an easy ride and I succeed at that for the most part. I still climb the Junipero hill twice and I have to go a bit slowly since the annual Wrigley District run is using up parts of the bicycle path. After a shower I read the news, renew the two books left to read, and then watch qualifying for F1 from Spain. I do laundry today and always note these days that the vast majority of my laundry is workout clothes and socks.
I get out for another mountain bicycle recovery ride because my legs are still tired. At home I trim the roses and water the roses since it will ne warm. I coincidentally fall into a channel covering the IndyCar race from Detroit and watch that before watching the Spanish F1 race. I also take note that today is nine years since I retried during which my brother died, my nest friend Terry died, we had the Covi9 pandemic, I had a bicycle accident with 12 days in the hospital, and I had cancer with another 9 days in the hospital ans xsix weeks of radation. I hope that I have all of the bad things of retirement out of my system now.
I start Monday readt to go but even during the first ten minutes of walking warmup, I can tell my left hamstring is going to give me trouble. It does. I struggle with extra walking periods and changing the crown of the road, but the left hamstring hurts and I quit at one hour. Then I pull out the ladder and electric hedge trimmer to trim the neighbor's bushes away from my Internet cable and then I climb higher than recommended on the ladder to trim the top of a juniper tree. It's still not as low as I want because this means I'll have to climb on this undesireably high step again in the future, but it's done. I put everything away and grab a shower and read some news and eat a banana and milk. I drive the retired schoolteacher to her tax accountant and he ends up calling her bank and getting a price to pay off her card so tha they will quit sending her letters and calling her. It looks like they have waived the late fees with this latest price and so she'll just have to pay up. We stop at Trader Joe's on the way home because she says she only needs milk. But she loads up her shopping cart with food and I teach her how to use a debit card to pay for her groceries (because she didn't bring cash and has never used her debit card). And I pick up some Indian garlic nan to eat. I have rice and vegetables for lunch after doing some online shopping from Mexico. And then I start converting the code for my fried from standard Python code to object oriented code so that it might be more readable in the future. This will take a couple of days but it's almost done today. And would have been done if I had not watched another two episodes of a Thai series on Netflix.
I'm out the door a bit after 6:10am for a road bicycle ride. I get in an extended loop ride of 75 kilometers where I'm jusr cranking away and when I see riders ahead I go up a gear and catch them, pass them, and yell at them to tag on to my back. It's a super good and hard ride. At home I trim the roses, grab a shower, and get on the motorcycle for a trip to the main library. Again, like last time, I immediatey find books that look interesting and soon I'm checking out five new books to read (after returning all of the others that I had with one of the six unfinished). At home I go visit the schoolteacher again and she keeps asking me "Why isn't anybody helping m?" referring to her doctors. She's made the decision to wait for her neurology exam in the middle of July and has not taken an active role. I just tell her, "I'm only going to say this once more. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. You should be calling both your primary care doctor and your health insurance company every single day and not give up until you get quicker help". I know she isn't going to do that because she's stuck in her ways. WHile I'm there her niece calls. This is the niece that offerred to help her out by letting the schoolteacher live with her in Ojai. Which the teacher refused ten days ago when her niece visited in person. I get on the phone with the niece and share with her some facts and then give the phone back to the schoolteacher. And IU overhear the schoolteacher say something like, "Ray wants to get rid of me". I only want to get rid of her when she can't turn on the telelvision or start a Safari browser when I've showed her hundreds of times on the same computer which is 14 years old. (The computer does what she asks of it, so that's not an issue.) And she calls for help and says, "This is urgent. If you could come over immediately", just because she can't turn on the computer or television. Regardless, I leave in the middle of the conversation and just say, "I'll let you two decide. But it's YOUR decision and should have nothing to do with me". I go home and finish off the Netflix series with a lunch of salad and crackers. Later I do a bit of coding as I'm converting the code to object oriented code and making it more modular as I expect my friend will have somebody else pick this up in the future.
I stay in bed an extra ten minutes today before getting on the mountain bicycle for a recovery ride. The legs feel strong and I push at times knowing that I'll probably have Thursday off from cycling or running. After a quick shower I drive to the grocery store to pick up the items not available at the nearby store or are to heavy or big to carry home by bicycle. Recall that the Vons grocery store near my house was shut down in Feburary for "underperforming" and the closest Vons for certain items is a few miles away. At home I read the news and markets a bit and then go sharpen the corded hedge trimmer blades, the hand hedge trimmer blades, and the rose clippers. Then I start in on a once per hour abdominal/lower back workout. It's been more than a month since I did one of these once per hour days. As I do these hourly workouts and stretches, I sit back down and read more news or watch some Netflix. I'll just do some computer maintenance today and think about coding tomorrow. And later I watch the first game of the ice hockey Stanley cup finals.
I turn off the alarm and sleep an extra hour on Thursday morning. I get up and read the news and markets and get in a good session lifting weights. And then I go around and paint all of the exterior window sills since they get beaten up by the sun a lot more than the entire window trim. When I've finished with all of the windows sills, I realize that the three exterior door thresholds are beaten up by excess usage. Thus I paint three three door thresholds. This should do for quite a while. (I saw some small blue paint dabs on the two windows with shutters, so I realize that the window sills have not been painted since I painted the shutters blue sometime during the Covid-19 pandemic.) I grab a shower and cook pasta to carboload for a long Friday bicycle ride. During the afternoon I finally get the instructions for my upcoming colonscopy but I still don't have a prescription to get get the preparation medicine. So I call the office for a third time to bug them for the prescription. Now I can relax with pasta and part of the Dodgers game and some television news and some Netflix.
A somehwat typical Friday. I had decent sleep on Thursday night though I always have questions before embarking on these long bicycle rides. Today I fly out of bed at the sound of the alarm (after taking my blood pressure and body temperature) and fly out the door on the road bicycle. Because the El Monte section of the bicycle trail has a detour to surface streets again that I don't care for, I go "old school" and cross over to the San Gabriel river trail at the Whittier Narrows dam and continue up to the Santa Fe dam. And then, after not having a single stop for a traffic light or anything, I make a quick U-turn and crank wildly down the San Gabriel river trail. If there are cyclists out today, they get gobbled up quickly and left as if they are standing still. And then I make a couple of hard sprints to make green or amber lights at a number of intersections on Del Amo. It's still a 100 kilometer ride today, but a hard ride with a faster time again. I have a quick shower and run one errand. Back at home I rest by reading the news and markets and doing some tidying up of the bathrooms. It's been a productive week around the house - trimming trees, painting exterior window sills, painting door thresholds, clearing up instruction and prescription information for an upcoming colonoscopy, and tidying up the bathrooms - so I have a slow Friday with no coding but watching FP2 for MotoGP and Moto2 from Aragon (Spain) and then later the ice hockey playoff game. After Thursday's session with the weights I am starting to get sore (a good sore) in certain bodyparts and along with today's hard, long ride, I'm sure Saturday will also be a slow day.
I sleep extremely well for the first six hours on Friday night and then I keep waking up hearing things. HHopefully it is a cat in my yard bumping into things and making noise. I get out for a decent recovery mountain bicycle ride to the old yacht club and back to home but I can tell that my legs are missing strength, not endurance, from yesterday's long, hard ride. After a quick shower I get to the grocery store for supplies and then get to the CVS for the pre-colonoscopy preparation mixture that I will be using next Sunday. CVS has sent me a discount text coupon and I try to use it, but the price of the prescription goes up when CVS tries to use it. So we resort to the original price. I read the news and markets, dust and oil some of the wood furniture, and have golf, the Dodgers' game, and other things going in parallel. But I certainly sit down and pay attention to MotoGP/2/3 qualifying from Aragon, Spain. And then I just relax and continue to recover from Friday's ride. And do some dusting around the entire house. Along with vacuuming, dusting is my least favorite house cleaning activity. And I spend time relaxing and stretching and watching the Netflix series Club de Curvas that someone has suggested that I check out. And I'm enjoying it.
I'm completely worn out and hit the snooze button twice before getting out of bed on Sunday morning. I go do another mountain bicycle recovery ride to the old yacht club and back (with two climbs of the Junipero hill) and finish with a very fast time. I do a quick trim of the roses - they are not producing many blooms right now because our weather has been so strange. After a shower I run one errand and notice thet the retired schoolteacher's house has four newspapers laying outside it. I call her with no answer or voice mail. I walk over, pick up the newspapers, knock on the door, and get no answer. I put the newspapers in a place near the garage and notice that the garage door and garage side door are locked. Thus I take her trash out to the street for Monday's pickup and realize that the white van that I saw outside her house a few days ago was her niece who has come to pick her up and take her for a visit in Ojai where her niece lives. It was during a conversation with her niece when I got on the phone that she said "It's the dementia talking" as my retired schoolteacher neighbor said directly to me, "You're just trying to get rid of me". I fully understand the effects of this disease and hope that she is with her niece in Ojai now because I cannot get into her house with the spare key (which is locked up in the garage that the retired schoolteacher never locked). I try to rest and recover more with golf, the Dodgers' game, the Aragon Tissot sprint race, trimming the roses, laundry, and a Netflix series. As I approach NEXT Monday's colonoscopy and the required preparation beforehand, I concentrate this last week on eating the highest fiber and vegetable content diet that I can (to make the preparation easier).
I hit snozze a couple of times on Monday morning and get up and read the news and markets. At mid-morning I go have a great session lifting weights and it might be time to increase the weights again. I try to weedwack the rosebeds but the string has run out. So I go grab a shower and run some errands and re-string the weedwacker for use tomorrow. I work on the code for my friend and make some progress, but still keep getting weird responses from the optimizer. An optimizer that I've used with great success before. I'm at a loss. I watch an exciting Moto2 race which ends up being the closest finish in Moto2 history and my favorite rider wins his first race. I also take the time to put critical stages for the upcoming Tur de France into my schedule and will have to subscribe to Peacock for a month (like last year) in order to watch the various stages at my convenience. Later I try and track down bugs in my code and almost finish off the conversion to a full object-oriented code. And tehn I watch the ice hockey playoff game.