WALKERONI

Walkeroni? Sounds like pepperoni. Yumm, pizza.

Oh, rainy dreary afternoon. No snow for us wicked district residents. Just chilly drizzly rain that promises to turn to a deluge just in time for evening rush hour. Lucky for me, I don’t have to go on the freeway to get home. Although, I can’t say my commute is much safer. Just yesterday, this crazy bitch was trying to race me to a traffic light – someone in her lane was stopped, waiting to turn left, and this lady wanted to cut into my lane to get around the turning car. No way, jose. My general rule is this: if you are so short-sighted and distracted in driving that you wait until the very last minute to get around an obstacle… then you richly deserve your fate. Pay attention! Plan ahead, people! Look around you. This is how you defensively drive. But I digress.

So this crazy lady is zooming up on my left, and I say to myself, ‘ha, ha! Think again!” and I gently close the gap ahead of me as we both approach the stopped car ahead. She zooms forward, then drops quickly back, but the guy behind me closes his gap (good man!) and at the last minute she zooms ahead again to get in front of me. Too late! Way, way too late! She gently rams the front left corner of my bumper, swerves back into her lane, almost smashes right into the poor stopped car… before giving up the fight and sitting behind the left turner. I couldn’t pull over at that spot, then in my mirror I saw her yank out around some other person before zooming past me again. I couldn’t get her license number because of the sun glare, so all I could do was flip her off as she made a crazy turn off onto a side street. Thanks be to plastic bumpers, as I don’t even have a single scratch to show for the whole encounter. And it cheered me no end that she lost the race.

But all that is beside the point. Is there a point? I forget. It’s Friday and my boss is leaving early. I have had a busy busy stressful week, and my brain has been closed for new business since lunchtime. I plan to mentally design my vegetable garden… daydream about sewing projects… obsessively stalk the blogs on my google reader… I also have a plan to make a cold-frame for my garden in the back – I have a formidable stack of bricks left over from last year’s patio project and I’ve been wanting to build a cold-frame. I am going to scrounge up an old window on freecycle or craigs list, then use the bricks to wall in a small raised bed the same dimensions of the window… plus, oh, say about 1.5 feet deep. Then I’ll line the bed with weed cloth and fill with dirt, and top with the window! Instant cold-frame. Maybe I’ll build that this weekend. There’s been a lot of illicit action in the abandoned garage across the alley. I should have plenty of opportunity to call the coppers if I’m out putzing in the yard all day.

My only other mission is to plot out a long, winding 12-mile walk for tomorrow’s training session. I went with Julie and her friends last weekend, for a 12 miler. It was fine. Honestly! I had a few kinks for the first 100 yards or so (you know, wedgie, crooked-feeling-shoe, itchy tag in my shirt, something crinkly in the pocket, etc.) but those went away in pretty short order. Then it was fine for quite some time. A little boring, but not bad. Then around 7 miles my right hip area started to get sore – at our pace, this was just under 2 hours into the walk. The soreness soon turned into throbbing. Which turned into feeling like someone stabbed me right in the center of my butt cheek. I was really to turn in the towel at about 10 miles, but somehow made it through the last 2. I walked like a rusty robot for the whole next day, but was back to normal by Monday. So I am ready to go again this weekend! It can only get better, no?