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I start Tuesday with a good 48 mile road bicycle ride. During the cool ride there is some gusty wind as well as two different sets of trivial rain which dampens the pavement but does little else to bother me. After a shower I finish reading for one class and take the associated online quiz. I also fix a few little issues with various websites and then lose momentum in the early afternoon.
I'm up early on Wednesday and trying to figure out how to make this website and backend programming fit together. Before I know it I've been working away for three hours, so I go and lift weights, trim the roses, and mow the lawn. After a cool shower I start in on homework for classes - one set to finish the week off and the other set to start a new week. But pretty soon I'm back to figuring out the website. By early evening I've had my head down working away for most of the dat but I've finished everything that I can. And now I'm on hold until other people decide what we should do next.
It's a chilly night from Wednesday night into Thursday morning - it feels good that fall is arriving. When my alarm goes off I shut it off and go back to sleep for another 45 minutes. When I get up I work on homework and just a little tweak or two to this latest website. Before 10 am I get ready to out for a bicycle ride but the mountain bicycle has a flat rear tire (though it was fine on the last ride on Friday morning). Thus I pull out the road bicycle and get out for a decent loop ride. This being the shortest road bicycle ride (near 30 miles) that I've had in a long time. After a shower I get out to the ATM and to the grocery store for supplies and then eat lunch. In the afternoon just relax a bit since I'm unmotivated to do school homework and am at a standstill on various websites. Late in the afternoon I drive down to pick up a prescription and then go to Long Beach's old and quirky Art Theatre for a fundraiser. A friend of mine is trying to physically expand her fitness business and is showing the old bodybuilding movie "Pumping Iron" for donations from people. (I met her at a number of homeless meetings and community-based meetings.) At the event I keep looking at this one other guy who I know I've met before. Finally I realzie I met him at my neighbor's wake - he's my neighbors co-worker. He's surprised that I remember him but we have a little conversation. I take leave early since I've seen the movie.
I'm tired all day on Friday. I don't get out cycling and have a struggling workout with the weights. At least when I ride the motorcycle up to CSULA the team that I'm working on is well prepared and they do very well in their content and practice presentation for a real presentation next week. When I get home I just relax and can't get interested in anything so I read for a while. Person T_U is supposed to pick me up at 7:30 and we go see a 7:50 movie. He shows up at at 7:54 and we rush to the theatre and certainly miss the start of the movie. (Because Person T_U was watching a street performer guitarist who he has seen play "hundreds of times".) The movie is fun about drug smuggling and arms and international intrigue. There is a lady behind us who keeps making comments and I turn and give her en "evil eye" a number of times during the movie but she doesn't figure it out. Nonetheless, it is entertaining and Person T_U and I have a good discussion about the movie and the facts on the way home and as we sit in his car in front of my house.
I get up and get ready to go cycling before 6:30 am on Saturday morning. As I am jumping on the road bicycle I hear a loud pop and notice that my typical road bicycling left shoe has "given up the ghost". That is, the upper portion of the shoe has separated from the hard lower portion. I switch to another set of cycling shoes and proceed to have a good 56 mile ride. As I'm riding north on the Los Angeles river I see a beautiful reflection of an orange sunrise off the tall downtown Los Angeles skyscrapers in the distance and I want to yell to everyone around, "See how beautiful this city is!" These reflections last for about 10-15 minutes in the fall and spring and makes all of life worthwhile. Only in the last few miles down the San Gabriel river trail does a group of eight riders catch me and, they are fast, I hold onto them for a couple miles and then slow back down to my pace as it is nearing the end of my ride. I run a few errands and watch a predictable outcome for the F1 qualifying from Suzuka, Japan and then try to relax, stay busy, stay moving, and enjoy a very warm October Saturday. Now I have to fix the flat tire on the mountain bicycle and start looking for a new pair of road cycling shoes.
When I wake up on Sunday morning I'm still hungover from Saturday's ride and I realize that the streets and trails near downtown Long Beach will be closed today for the Long Beach marathon. So I get up and do homework and watch the F1 race from Japan before lifting weights and cleaning the roses. Throughout the day I relax and clean things up a bit have a generally slow day.
I start Monday with a decent two hour mountain bicycle ride. While riding I run into my friend Tony and he stops me and tells me that his partner, Kevin, passed away this past Friday from cancer. We had spoken about all of the treatment that they had been trying for Kevin, bit was not enough. TOny is broken up, of course, so we park and talk for a bit and I give Tony my number in case he needs something. When I get home I adjust the rear brakes of the bike since they appear to be rubbing a bit and then have a cool shower. I start in on homework for both classes - quizzes for the network security class and reading for the mapping class. Later in the day I work on a few more enhancements to a website and try to debug a statistics scraper cron job that works fine when I run it manually but produces output files with nothing in them when run in cron mode at 3 am each day. Weird!
I want to get out cycling on Tuesday morning but it is very foggy. Instead I do homework and even start next week's assignments. At mid morning I go work the abdominals and lwoer back, grab a shower, and then starting drinking "the cleaning fluid" for tomorrow's colonoscopy. Thus I spend the day at home reading, vegging out, and watch some television in between trips to the bathroom.
I'm up at the usual time on Wednesday and I do some homework and reading of websites before I take a shower and catch an Uber ride to the medical facility for my colonoscopy. Each person I come in contact with I tell them "My Dad died of colorectal cancer at age 73" and "I had a colonoscopy at age 50 and it was very clean but I kept fainting afterwards probably because I run and cycle long distances". All of the facility nurses and doctors are nice and the actual performing doctor used to do some cycling before he had his two kids. Whereas for the last colonoscopy I was entirely "put under" and didn't see a thing, this one I am wide awake and can watch the video of the entire event. There is one small polyp that they remove this time and it will be analyzed later. But as they continue to ask me how I feel or if I have any pain, I finally decide to trick them and say, "Yes, now it is starting to hurt as you run out through my right ear". The nurses and doctors really appreciate my humor and we have fun together during the procedure. Afterwards there are no side effects at all and I'm up and about and waiting for Person T_U to pick me up. I think they got scared of my fainting spells last time and decided to give me the lowest anesthetic dose possible and to keep me awake also. I feel good when I get home so I do some more homework and some web programming and relax a bit. I'm restless and feeling well, so I drive to the grocery store for supplies and then drive another mile to the library to return two books and get two more. Wehn I get home I lift weights with very low weights and high repetitions and have a great workout with a lot of sweat. A cooling shower afterwards help and then I work on some encryption tasks for websites and have a quiet evening.
After all of the non-standard activies of the last two days, I cannot answer the typical 5:55 am alarm. I reach over and shut it off and sleep until almost 7 am. I get up and do some homework for classes and then get out on the mountain bicycle. As I'm heading towards home I run into Terry and Kihn, who I have not seen forever, so I turn around and ride with them back to the old yacht club. They like to take a break there so I relax with them and we catch up on things and then we start back for home. It's a good ride! I had not seen Terry or Kihn for probably 10 months. I clean the roses and get a shower and then start in on more homework. This set of homework goes well with the mapping software (whcih I enjoy using and learning) so it is enjoyable to do. I also see that there are individual projects required for this class so I download some mapping-compatible files and start in on a project that interests me (and that I'll have to sell to the instructor). Afterwards I eat pizza and relax.
On Friday I get up and do homework and then have a decent session with the weights at mid-morning. I still do the high repetition workout from Wednesday once more. After a shower and some food I ride the motorcycle up to CSULA for presentations. The four presentations that I see and grade are all very good with the one ocean cleaner team that I am helping being the best one. I know that the team members were nervous, but they performed extremely well. After the four presentations I head for home and work on a proposal for a school project and then just relax for the evening.
I start Saturday with a run in new running shoes and without my orthotics. I'm experimenting and trying to figure out if some changes will allow me to run without "pulling" something in my calves. I run/walk for 52 minutes and only at the end is there a little pain on the inside of my right calf. This is a different location than the pains I've had over the last few years where it has been on the outside of my calves. And this pain can probably be attributed to not using my orthotics. So I'll take a few days off from running and try again on Wednesday as I experiment. Before noon I ride the Motorcycle up to CSULA for a rare Saturday meeting to help the professor review/grade presentations. The presentations are of high quality this year! I talk to some of my student friends and then rush on home on the motorcycle to work on a mapping project that I want to work on (and hope that the professor of my mapping class will accept as the individual project that each student is supposed to work on). Person T_U wants to go out, but his options are not to my liking, so I stay in this Saturday night.
I'm awake at 4:30 on Sunday morning and cannot sleep. So I get out of bed at 5:20. The running experiment was a failure as both calves hurt (though in different locations than I've been struggling with for years). So let's think about the next plan of attack. I watch a fun and exciting "last lap decides it" MotoGP from Japan in very heavy rain. I go back to working on my mapping project but get stuck. So I email the professor for a bit of guidance. At mid morning I lift weights for light weights and high repetitions again since it loads the muscles and aerobics system but not the joints as much. And then I clean the roses and get down on my hands and knees and clean the kitchen floor. Throughout the day I cookie vegetables for the week, work on some homework reading and exercises, relax, and take care of a bit of paperwork. And then I settle in to watch some of the Dodgers' second playoff game in the league championship series. The Dodgers win on a walk-off homerun in the bottom of the ninth inning - 29 years to the day when Kirk Gibson his his famous walkoff homerun.
I don't sleep well on Sunday night. When I get up I start in on bookeeping work, implement a good idea on some of my stock market predicitions, water the roses, and get some direction on how to proceed with the mapping homework project. (This is not a standard class homework project. This is a special project that I want to do and to turn in as my end of class special project. The professor has accepted my proposed project and given me a pointer to implement my idea.) Near mid-morning I go work the abdominals and lower back and then I clean the two bathroom floors. After a shower I start in on reading for my classes and try out the suggestion for my mapping project from the professor. I take a break to watch the very wet Moto3 race and then go back to work. Before I know it it is almost 8 pm and I've been working away for hours. I get ready for bed and read and get the lights turned off at 10:30 pm. But I just lay there for a while and realize that sleep isn't going to happen. So I get back up at work some more on my individual project until about 1 am.