Random Musings

Oh, mah Gawd it's HOT in Florida!
No, really?
It was 82 degrees at 9am. Now it's 85. How am I going to run in this? Even the Team workouts get cancelled when the temps are too high. I don't have a gym membership down here, so heading for the treadmill isn't an option. I would run at night here, after work, but the gates are locked when I get back and I'd have to run on the golf course. That doesn't bug me, but I'm afraid that the people who live facing the course will see a shadowy figure and call the cops. I guess I'll need to tough it out. A couple of days ago I did a 4-miler that I thought was going to kill me. I took a Succeed cap (electrolytes) and had Gatorade but I still felt lousy. Good practice for summer, I guess.

I forgot to mention that my parents were also down here in Florida visiting for two weeks. It is their apartment, after all. And no, Dad, when I talked about new crops of madness in my life in a previous post, I was not referring to your visit. In fact, the only negative thing about their visit was that I had to sleep on the pull-out couch for two weeks, and that's just no fun. Oh, and they didn't leave the fridge stocked with food, nor the bathroom stocked with new towels (for some reason, my parents -- no, my Dad -- became obsessed with getting new towels last time they were down there. For an apartment that stands empty nearly eight months of the year, and at its fullest holds three people, there are now about 2 dozen towels.) I was such a wreck for the first week anyway with my computer trauma, I was certainly no joy to behold. But it was lovely to have them down there with me.

Now I'm nervous because I'm coming back to NYC in a week and a half, and I've got a month before my next "tour of duty" in Florida, and no job or nothing to come back to. I can't get unemployment until after the second gig because I won't have enough weeks of work in a calendar quarter. So it's TempVille for me. Of course there are all these little things I need to do in the month that I'm home that have to be worked around, like getting my taxes done. Why does life have to interfere so much with...life?

Some of the things I've noticed while running around Delray and Boca, is that there are precious few sidewalks. Why is that? I'm always reading studies that say people need to walk more, but how are these people supposed to walk when there's no safe place for them to do that? No wonder folks take their cars two blocks to the store.

And I've never seen so much random stuff on the sidewalks as I do here. I'm not talking about gum wrappers and such. On my runs I've found tampons (new and, um, used,) diapers, pizza boxes, cassette tapes, a whole dead fish (not from the supermarket, but from the ocean, which is really odd considering where I stay is nowhere near the water) and tons of clothing, especially shoes. I don't understand how a shoe can be left on the sidewalk. How can you not realize you've lost a shoe? No, it's not sneakers over the telephone poles, this is a retirement community, not a drug-infested neighborhood. Just random shoes. The weirdest one was when I first got down here, a sofa cushion. How does a sofa cushion end up on the street? Anyway, it was there for a couple of days, then it was gone. The weird part was that two days after that, it came back. Huh? Did someone take it home, decided they didn't like it and put it back? It's gone again, but I keep looking for it. Maybe that's why there aren't more sidewalks, to keep all this crap off them.

On Atlantic Avenue, Sky King Fireworks is located next door to ABC Liquor. Am I the only one who thinks that may not be such a grand idea? (I just went out to try to take a picture of it, but there's no place to park. I'm sure it's on Google Earth somewhere.)

Okay, enough avoidance. I've got my AirAides, I'm taking a Succeed and doing maybe three miles, four if my water holds out. I've been eating so much lately, I need to burn some of it off.

For real this time. I'm going.

Off I go.

Out the door...