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I have a very interesting day on Tuesday. It starts with a good two hour mountain bicycle ride after a great night of sleep - the last few nights of sleep have been very deep and restfull. After a shower and some checking of the stock markets and emails, I drive to Long Beach City College to meet one of the Board of Trustees about puting resources for students online (rather than paper-based). This is a lunchtime meeting at the LBCC Bistro where students are the cooks and the food is delicious. I show the Board of Trustees the model or skeleton project and they agree to try and get it implemented starting with a meeting on Monday. After the lunchtime meeting I relax for a bit and then go to class. After class Jay and Leslie and I spend 20 minutes talking and hanging out because I have a 4 o'clock meeting. Later I stop at the grocery store for a few more supplies, trim the roses, watch another exciting Moto2 race from Qatar, and then relax by answering emails and trying to figure out some final selling points for products.
On Wednesday I lift weights and then go to class. We receive our take-home midterm exam to work on. After class I go home for a bit and then ride the motorcycle up to Alhambra to meet up with Jacky. Jacky is the young man that I met on the airplane back in November who attends UC-Davis in forensics. I arrive at the restaurant at 4pm but it doesn't open until 5. So we go have tea/lemonade and talk until the restaurant opens and then we have good Japanese curry. We talk about a wide range of topics including school and economics and music and the environment. Before I know it it is 7 pm. So I take leave and have a good motorcycle ride home since rush hour traffic is pretty much over for a Wednesday.
On Thursday I mill around the house and eventually get off to my atmospheric sciences class. After class I ride the motorcycle down to Irvine to meet up with some more people who will be attending the child abuse hackathon at the end of April. And all of us lament about people who "just talk and never do anything". But we try to divide up our activities and decide on what we are trying to get out of this hackathon event. I ride the motorcycle back home in cooling weather and just relax after 8 pm.
I start Friday with some "getting started activities" and then lift weights with the high repetitions. The high repetition workouts still tax my system but don't have as much stress on the soft tissue ligaments and cartilidge near the joints. After a shower I have a very productive day at CSULA with both of my teams making progress and I also help out another team who is having difficulty getting a finite element model to run. It runs when I am finished helping them out.
Saturday starts with a road bicycle ride. I don't think I'll make it to the second dam today so I stop at a convenient place and turn back for home for about 50 miles. After a shower I run some errands and then install new door handles on some sliding doors, trim the roses, relax a bit, and do other little things around the house that need to get done. I'm wondering how these things got done around the house when I was working. I get some other paperwork done and then get to bed early.
On Sunday I take the road bicycle out again and repeat Saturday's ride. The legs are slow to get moving early in the ride but then they get going. It is a good ride and, again, I think about continuing on to the second dam but think better of it and turn around for about 50 miles. I will live to fight another day. When I get home I cancel my intended meetup with Alik and then convert DVDs to digital format and do more small tasks around the house. (I have finished the conversion of about 50 VHS tapes to digital format and now I have found a place near Long Beach that will take the old VHS tapes and recycle them appropriately.) Later I'm on my hands and knees cleaning out the carnation beds and continuing to convert old DVDs of F1 races and other interesting recordings to digital format.
On Monday my legs are so hungover that I go walking for 45 minutes and stop in at the grocery store. When I get home I work on my take-home midterm examination for the crisis management class, work on some cron jobs for the upcoming baseball season, and paint the steps to the kitchen and backdoor where I've recently caulked. At mid-morning I get in a decent session with the weights though it is a struggle from the Saturday and Sunday cycling hangover. After a shower I have a noontime webinar about data analytics and it turns out to be more of a sales pitch to attend their classes rather than to actually learn some data analytics. After the webinar I finally finish off the non-profit Board of Directors' meeting minutes and put them on the web for viewing. In the afternoon, I don't know why, but I watch a world superbike race and nearly fall asleep - production-based racing is guaranteed boredom.
On Tuesday I am still hungover from previous bicycle rides. I stay in bed an extra 15 minutes and then start my day. I send off emails from the non-profit for possible collaborations, water the lawn, walk for 45 minutes, grab a shower, recycle some cans, do some grocery shopping, and return home. There is interest in my non-profit emails so I respond with appropriate times that we can talk. At home I start back in on the genetically-derived neural network effort as I simultaneously convert some DVD movies to digital format for future viewing. Though I have not had a serious wrokout today, it has been productive. I continue to work on the nueral netowrk for pattern recognition, classification, and data mining as the afternoon wears on. Later in the afternoon I continue preparing for the upcoming child abuse hackathon at the end of April and I send some CSULA students some code (and future ultrasonic sensors) for their senior design project. I continue to convert DVDs now to digital format and realize that there are only a few DVDs that I want to keep. So I focus on them and notify the providers of other DVDs that I will convert them if they wish otherwise I recycle them appropriately. I also start laying out the framework for a chatbot for a child abuse or human trafficking victim that can detect their degree of danger and, hopefully, provide access to resources and reduce their danger level. As I scan through my list of tasks for this spring break, I can see that I have made great progress and I re-write the list of things to do.
Throughout the week I am very productive on the neural network effort, preparation for the child abuse hackathon at the end of April, working on a new website for Karl's company, work on updates to the baseball and ice hockey statistics websites that I have, and getting in some good workouts. On Friday morning I take the mountain bicycle and do intervals - I haven't done intervals for quite a while. I beat myself up well and push hard. After recovery I get up to CSULA to help the two teams. Again, one team is almost finished and ready to present and report while the other team just keeps finding roadblocks.
On Saturday there is a light rain and my entire organism is hungover from Friday's intervals and a long day at CSULA, so I get up and watch qualifying for the F1 race in China and work on the neural network some more. At mid morning I get in another good workout with the weights with high repetitions. And I try to decide when or if to start increasing the weights. After a walk to the store for supplies I check out the qualifying efforts for the MotoGP races in Argentina and then go back to try and finish the preparations for the child abuse hackathon.
I get on the road bicycle on Sunday morning and fight a slight headwind all of the way to the first dam. I continue on expecting to hit a turnaround point and turn back for home. But there is a rider who latches on to my wheel just after the first dam and is playing old music a bit louder than I want. Don't these people know about headphones or earbuds? So I keep on going past my turn-around point. I don't put in any surges to lose him but I let him know that he he isn't going to even think about trying to pull me up to the second dam. At the second dam he peels off to rest and I simply turn around and head back home. During the entire ride there is nobody who passes me so I must have kept a good pace throughtout the 56 miles. There's an exciting wet but drying Chinese F1 race that I watch with some fun passing and results. Since I've spent myself with a very good long bicycle ride, I spend more of the day watching the Long Beach IndyCar race on telelvision and finally and exciting MotoGP race also.
On Monday I'm hungover from Sunday's bicycle ride and barely manage a workout with the weights at mid morning before going to LBCC for some volunteer work. Today's volunteer work is related to April being the month of sexual abuse awareness, so the skits that I get involved with have to do with sexual consent and appropriate responses. It is good to just play along (with responses that I would never do) and try to inform the students of the idea of consent with respect to sexual relationships. I run into one of my atmospheric sciences students and I explain to her what I'm doing and she and I have a long discussion about the topic. When I rush on home I catch another exciting Moto3 race from Argentina and try (without much success) on concentrating on other intellectual topics related to data analytics and child abuse/homelessness/domestic violence.