Sunday

June 24, 2001

protective sculpture

urban adventurers

contemplative corner with bowling bowl

SuRu rousts us from our dreams a little after seven. It has stopped raining. It's time for eXtreme dog walking. (Although when we add FFP I've given it another name: urban adventuring.) Soon we are ready. Caps, walking shoes, water (one bottle for people, one for dogs), digital camera, leash. SuRu and Zoey pick us up.

We park by the Walgreen's on 45th and Guadalupe and attack the neighborhood north of 45th and east of Guadalupe. It's a neighborhood with lots of quiet dead ends that abut UT land.

In Urban Adventuring, points are gathered much like eXtreme dog walking but with the addition of using the fifth unit (FFP) to retrieve 'take ones' from houses for sale and to get tangled in lines in unique ways.

There are lots of properties on the market, both for sale or lease. Maybe the rentals will disappear, at least in this area, when the fall semester starts. But there seem to be an awful lot of places for sale.

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We make our way to Flight Path for coffee. It appears closed when we arrive because there are no cars. But it soon gets more lively with arrivals by foot and vehicle.

I take some pictures of the shop windows. It's nice of shop keepers to create little still lives for photographers.

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I am lazy again after the walk is over. But after a bit of play with the WEB, checking maps to see how far we walked, stuff like that, I decide to 'do something useful.'

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I find a box cutter and flatten most of the boxes in the storage room, emptying the styrofoam to go into the garbage as space in the 'pay as you throw' container becomes available. Too bad I don't know an ebay trader in pursuit of boxes, styro and bubble paper and stuff to recycle. That done, I use up some of the space in the room by removing the 'boat anchor' from FFP's desk. As I remove this computer with the dead hard drive, I realize that if it goes out of service, so goes our last remaining 5.25 floppy drive. Parts of the thing are usable still. That floppy drive, the regular floppy drive, the motherboard (maybe), the monitor, keyboard, mouse, network interface card. But it will likely sit in storage until it becomes curbside stuff. I dust and clean the grime where the computer sat.

I install software on FFP's computer, coming up with a weird problem which, amazingly, I find a solution for on the WEB.

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FFP needs a new computer. I shop for one, but Dell's shoping cart is broken. Not good, dudes. I start shopping around other places for a machine. There are some cheap deals where they don't even sell you an installed operating system but who knows how good they'd be? Some places that seem to sell stuff are trying awfully hard not to do it. It's back to Dell trying to figure out what I should buy. Still can't decide.

I spent a lot of time during the day just doing things I wanted to do but never found the time. Looking up WEB stuff I'd clipped from the paper. Redoing some of my site. Starting a DreamWeaver tutorial again. Looking at sites I hadn't checked in a while.

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In the evening we went to Westwood. We got an out of the way court and I showed FFP how to hit a forehand. He practiced that while I served some balls. He wasn't too bad considering he'd never, ever played. We discovered that they have an even more out of the way court with a half practice court and net attached.

When I was a kid (early twenties) learning tennis by hitting on a backboard at some public court or hitting with a few friends, I really started loving the game. At first I had a $5 discount store racket and no proper shoes. I remember wrecking a toe with a stone bruise because my bad shoes had a hole in them. I got a little better, scored a little better equipment and enjoyed the game over the years. But I never belonged to a tennis club until we joined here last year. So I either had to reserve a court in a public center or get to a park or something when courts were free. It wasn't that easy finding a court when I was ready to play sometimes.

It got to the point that every time I drove past a vacant court, I felt a longing. The neatly drawn lines, the 36 foot by 78 rectangle, with the alleys and service lines. Divided by a net, a real net if you were lucky, and not a section of chain link fence that sent your balls that didn't make it flying unceremoniously off at weird angles.

Needless to say, this longing faded. I still feel it a little, though. And now there are courts seven minutes from my house, almost always available. The best courts. Wonderful courts. A canopy over the bench for shade on a hot day. A jug of cool water provided. Now I need time and partners. I need to get on the weights and get my knees some better muscles to protect them. I have everything I ever dreamed of having. But I have to reach out and take it.

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It was a weekend that made a little dent in the stack of things I want to do around here. A little dent in the stack of pleasures I want to take. I've been so busy for so long. With what? Some good things...like getting my parents settled here and fun trips and parties and plays and performances. But work has taken a toll. It's always there, always asking for more than I could possibly give. Always demanding my attention again on Monday morning. Sure, work has given me the things I have and some great intellectual stimulation, too. But a balance needs to be found. At the very least, I need to find time to take some vacation.

So many people, in so many places, would trade places with me. My little problems don't count. But they are, of course, central to me. We are really tiny critters living inside our skulls, living an existence there that is not so obvious to others or even to the big, hulking body carrying the critter around.

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