a change in procedure

I wake up around seven-thirty and jump up. I want to have time to sip my coffee before dog walk. SuRu calls at eight and doesn't want to go. I'm dressed. I decide to go alone, but on my own pace. I fiddle around some more on the computer, finishing yesterday's entry, waiting for a boot when the computer locks up. By around nine, though, Chalow and I are in a neighborhood slightly north of the one where we walked yesterday.

Chalow is unnerved by riding with me, not sure what's up. If we ride to a neighborhood to walk we are usually in FFP's car or SuRu's. I park just beyond a mound of discarded stuff...a couple of mildewed recliners, the deck and engine of a lawn mower, a plastic toilet, something I've never seen before. Not a portable one but one you install only not porcelain, but plastic.

I walk up a street and back east and I should be within sight of my car and I am. There are two City of Austin Solid Waste trucks hovering around. One guy appears to be peering in my car. I walk up to where they are. A woman comes out of her house and speaks to them. Surely they are interested in the trash pile and not my (legally parked) car. Nevertheless, I hover, walking down the street and both trucks leave, hauling none of the trash away, just spending gas idling in the street and then driving away. I walk back by my car and continue on. I find a bendable, posable figure in the gutter. I walk up to Cameron and through a shopping center near 290. On the way I pick up a discarded scratch off for the little arrangement that decorates today's page. At the shopping center, two guys with numerous bags are hanging out around an apparently disabled car with two red plastic gas cans behind it and the hood up. They look homeless and the car looks like it hasn't been functional in some time. They say nothing to me as I pass.

I do just shy of an hour's walk, returning to the car from another direction. A stray follows me the last couple of blocks, barking at us once. I miss SuRu's pepper spray (which we've never actually used). At one point Chalow's line catches under a big truck. I am only able to extricate it by unhooking her. Suddenly these reels with 15-foot lines seem amazingly prone to catch on things.

Home again, I decide to go have a real workout. FFP is going, too, but he suggests that we go separately. Everyone wants to go their own way on their own schedule today and I'm for it, too. I asked him when SuRu bailed if he wanted to go dog walking but he didn't. He leaves for the club a little before me. I do forty-five minutes on the recumbent bike and do all my arm exercises. My upper body workout takes longer than my lower body. I am exercising with a friend tomorrow so it will be good to have a shorter routine.

Home once more, FFP comes in with bags of groceries. He's gotten more salmon, some frozen chicken, spinach and other salad stuff, canned tuna, orange juice, some clementines, a jar of grapefruit. He offers to make chicken since I had salmon for dinner last night but I say that I'd be happy to have it again. He cooks while I shower. I read the travel section of The New York Times while eating some spinach salad with grapefruit sections, mozzarella cheese and croutons and spinach salad dressing and eating the salmon with capers and tartar sauce. I have a clementine for dessert.

I allow myself some journal writing and e-mail time and promise to spend no less that one hour on ordering the mess.