evening constitutional
this past week i switched from riding my bike up and down the bayou trail to walking around the neighborhood. the main reason for this is that i need a new bicycle seat and can't summon the will to research bicycle seats in order to buy the right one. i also need things like a helmet and bicycle cleaner and i'm worried the trip to the bike shop will get out of hand.
so i've been walking to my old elementary school and using the quarter mile track that surrounds the playground. i like using the track because i like to know how far i have walked. others might suppose i would wander around the neighborhood to keep things interesting (and possibly because that's what i said i was doing in the first paragraph) but i prefer to walk in circles on the playground track.
the walking boundaries of my neighborhood have not changed since i was a kid. my house is nestled snugly at the intersection of two eight-lane freeways so those two cardinal directions (north and east) are out of the running (or walking) right off the bat. to the south and west the barriers are much less obvious, a kind of suburban pedestrian quicksand of sidewalk-free four lane roads, parking lots and walled up private property. in text adventure terms, these directions lead you not to actual locations but just present barriers you must solve a puzzle to cross over. in this case, the puzzle is acquiring and learning to drive a car.
another thing i like about the playground track is that four laps make a mile. thus i can use super mario notation to keep count of how far i've walked. tonight, for example, i got to world 5, level 1. it's surprisingly easy to lose count. i do it all the time because i get absorbed in picking songs on my iPod.
spent the afternoon at the museum of printing history getting a show of hornak lithographs ready to hang. does that sound fun? what it means is my father and me spent hours cleaning 24" x 36" pieces of plexiglass. which is satisfying in its own way but also tedious and sweaty. iPod to the rescue again. near the end of this task a couple of small girls (daughters of one of the paid museum staff) came and asked if they could help. they ignored me. as it turns out they didn't recognize the ipod and thought it was some kind of medical device, thus felt i shouldn't be disturbed. it was interesting to see my dad talking to small children. they kept asking him riddles and after three or four he just said "you won't be able to ask me any riddles i don't know the answer to." undaunted they asked him what would happen if they drank the stuff we were using to clean the plexiglass with. his answer? "you'd probably die."
30,008 tonight, which i am quite pleased about.
-June 11, 2004 03:15 AM