On Tuesday and Wednesday I put my head down and work through some bugs in programs that I have. It always takes a long time to find the last little errors and innacuracies. I relieve stress on both days with an abdominal/core workout and a good weights workout. On Tuesday afternoon I ride the motorcycle to Long Beach City College and listen to a social worker panel discussion that my former instructor alerted me to. It is somewhat informative but geared more towards students looking to work in the social work field. But I learn a few things. And then go back home and continue programming and writing.
on Friday I get out for the loop ride on the road bicycle. It get out early in the morning since I have an earlier than usual meeting at CSULA today. I take the time to water the impatiens, trim the roses, and even trim a few small overhanging branches from two fences before getting cleaned up. Eventually I take the motorcycle up to CSULA and meet with the team as they are putting together the charts for tomorrow's practice presentation and the real final presentation next Friday.
I sleep horribly on Friday night into Saturday morning. Yes, the first few hours are deep sleep, but from 3 am on and I mostly awake and tossing and turning. Finally I get out of bed and do some grocery shopping and starts some more Python scripts for fun algorithmic studies and then ride the motorcycle to CSULA for a practice presentation. The team is late getting the final presentation together so there are some good and positive suggestions from the senior design professor. My team is a bit dejected so I try to rally them by telling them truthfully that they actually have all of the figures and data that the professor suggested. We just have to re-format it a bit and add some salesy titles and outcomes. I hope that they undertsand. I rush on home on the motorcycle with maximum speeds that should not be documented and I re-start a Python script for some of the work that I am doing. I go and rapidly and sloppily mow the lawn today - no trimming or edging of the lawn. Afterwards I watch the Formula One qualifying from Azerbaijan in spanish because the usual coverage channel would rather cover women's college softball than global Formula One qualifying. I certainly understand the timing and can somewhat understand the commentary. I continue on working on Python scripts and a few other online articles that I had better publish shortly.
Though I have been fairly productive over the last few weeks, I feel that I need to have a good cry to relieve stress and feel better. No matter what I do, I cannot seem to get some tears out that may help me feel better.
I start Sunday with a decent road bicycle ride. I fight the winds on some legs of the ride and enjoy a tailwind on the other legs. After a shower I notify the Fair Trade Long Beach organization, which I have somehow got roped intto, that I will not be attending today's meeting because "I'm a bit under the weather from all of the CSULA students who were sick on Wednesday. And I don't want to get everyone sick." It's more of an excuse, but I can help them out via email and I'll probably see some of the same people at the human trafficking meeting on Thursday. I watch the Formula One race (in English) from Azerbaijan and it's a wild race. Later I do more programming and have some ideas about confidence and sensitivity calculations for the nueral networks that Im working on.
I stay in bed a bit late on Monday but get on the mountain bicycle and have a great ride. I have to fight the wind for two legs of the ride and I just keep pushing (even though I thought I might take an easy day). And I even push a bit on the tailwind legs. After a shower I start in on some related Python scripts on financial market prediction but I let the sensitivity/confidence level scripts for the neural networks sit for a day.
Since I'm at the end of April I compare last March and April bicycle rides (number of rides and durations) with this year's rides and note that I am a bit short on both. So I vow to make May of 2018 match or surpass May of 2017.
It is possibly supposed to rain on Tuesday and Wednesday, so on Tuesday morning I put a book in a plastic bag and take a long walk to return the book to the library. I continue to work on some algorithms and grab a shower and head for a coffeehouse to work. Today the coffeehouse is a bit empty, but I make some good progress and quickly find the bug in my code that I had let settle since Saturday. Sometimes you need to step away from a problem to find that the solution jumps right out at you. Thus I can start making estimates of confidence levels for neural network predictions. On the way home I stop in at a Home Depot and buy some impatiens. As soon as I step in the door I'm taking my clothes off to put on workout clothes and lift weights and plant the new impatiens. Today I bump the weights up a lot and do 5 repetition sets (as opposed to the 15 repetition sets that I had been doing). After dinner I watch two close ice hockey games that are decided in the last few minutes of play and try to stay away from programming. I find that if I do programming later in the evening and get stuck, then I keep waking up in the middle of the night thinking about where/how I'm stuck.
There's the possibility of rain and some web work to be done, so I get up late on Wednesday morning and work on the websites for a while. Just before 11 am I get out for the loop ride on the mountain bicycle. It's a good ride and I feel strong throughout. After a shower I relax for a bit and go to trim the roses. After trimming the roses I notice that the oil leak on the Yamaha YZF-R1 is continuing to deteriorate. There's still plenty of oil in the engine to run, but the leak is getting a bit worse. I'm not sure I'm going to get to 100,000 miles because I'm not going to put a substantial amount of money into the bike. I note that I've had the bike more than 16 years and there are tears welling up in my eyes when I realize that it is getting on its last legs (in terms my ownership). I watch some of the ice hockey playoff games and play around with websites, but nothing substantial.
On Friday I'm up at CSULA by 7:30 am for the senior design Expo. All of the teams have posters, hardware, videos, and formal presentations. Some of the presentations are super good. And the three ocean cleaner teams that I was the instigator (and advisor) of do a fantastic job on their presentations and discussions at their table and poster. The teams only have to finish their final report and they graduate. I tell a student from another team who I've become acuainted with to call me sometime we'll hang out or go have lunch. I rush on home and finally decide to go for a 45 minute walk and call it my exercise for the day.
I get up a bit late on Saturday and just go for the loop ride instead of a planned longer ride. After a shower I go to the library and get three books to read. Two will probably be silly books but one is by a siesmologist about earthquakes. I also do some grocery shopping and head for home. I pull the motorcycle out of the garage and wash it. When was the last time I washed and waxed it? As the motorcycle dries in the sun I trim roses and carnations to bring into the house. And then I finish drying the motorcycle and put it away for later waxing. I cook some vegetables and now I've run out of steam so I lay on the couch and just flip through television channels as I regain some energy.
On Sunday I get out for the loop ride on the road bicycle again. I originally wanted to ride longer, but I'll take what I can get. After a shower I get out to the garage and put a coat of wax on the motorcycle. From a distance it looks brand new, but up close one can see the small pits from so many miles on the roads. It's okay - as I wax the bike I keep telling it, "You look fanatastic!" I watch a very wild MotoGP race from Jerez, Spain where tire choices are important and some non-injury crashes amongst the top ten riders make for an unexpected podium. A fun race to watch! I've received word from Centinela hospital that they want to pick up our child abuse reporting application and I remind the principals that we have a lot of work to do before this application is ready to be inserted into their standard work flow. And, as the past, these words fall on deaf ears. The principals think that if Centinela hospitals says "Go!" on Money that our application will be running bug-free on Tuesday. What can I say? I spend Sunday afternoon watching ice hockey and messing around. I don't necessarily want to go fix some of the Centinela bugs because I've been pushed to do this before and nothing came of it. So instead I prepare some charts for a Tuesday meeting with the Executive Director of 211la and I hope that my charts can lead us to a decision without being condescending. I just want to make it clear who is doing what tasks on this effort because it is our last chance. And later I try to work on the Centinela child abuse effort and cannot solve the Centinela bugs. As I am ready to call it quits, I list a number of things to try in the morning.
I'm lazy on Monday morning and do not go cycling. Instead I go for about an hour walk and stop at the grocery store for supplies as I head for home. At home I get out the knee pads and get on my hands and knees and wax the rims of the Yamaha YZF-R1 and when I step back, I verbally tell the bike that it looks great and my previous thought of its demise is a bit short-sighted. I also trim a small bush and trim the roses before getting inside for a shower. And now I go back to work on the Centinela child abuse process. It doesn't take long, with enhanced brain supplements, to find a work-around and get the site working again. Since I'm on a roll, I continue on with re-styling some of the pages and making the user experience more intuitive. I finally call it quits after 4 hours of work and watch an exciting Moto3 race where, again, three or four of the top contenders for the win are eliminated with a single crash fairly close to the end of the race. And then I go back to work on various priority jobs and end up skipping the Fair Trade meeting on 2nd street in Long Beach because I want to keep making technical progress.