a walk in the hood, a visit to the club, an old fav

I get up easily and have some coffee and sit at the computer. When SuRu calls, I have trouble getting everything together but I finally do and she is walking down her drive when we swing around on Crestmont. We are headed for CC's coffee. We wind through the neighborhood and sit there by an outdoor fire of gas logs not producing much heat. But the sun is warm and I've felt charged up ever since I walked out the door. It's a beautiful day (if a bit chilly)! The sky is so, so blue. We have a snack (Americano coffee and breakfast taco for me) and we go back via Shoal Creek although we have to 'cut off' the corner of 38th because it isn't that pedestrian friendly. We don't often walk here. Something different.

We notice on this walk as we cross the Hancock branch of Shoal Creek that it is flowing and that the 'water' looks soupy or soapy or, um, polluted. I haven't read the front page of The American-Statesman today but we see the main headline in driveways where the homeowner is still asleep or out of town and hasn't yet gotten the paper. It reads: 'Toxic Chemicals Taint Barton Waters.' Later I'll read that the pool, Bouldin Creek, Waller Creek and the Central Market Pond have high levels of toxins. What I'm looking at doesn't look so nice either but maybe there is just a car wash going on. This branch enters Shoal Creek which, as all Austin geographers know, enters Town Lake (which is just the little Colorado, damed by...you guessed it Longhorn Dam). Have I mentioned that Lake Austin (that would be Tom Miller Dam, I think) has been lowered so that this nasty proliferating weed can be killed? I noticed this change from my seat on the exercise bike at the gym before I read about it and heard about it on TV.

Home again, I see a note on the back door that FFP is at the club. I download some digital pictures, play with the Mac, play with my PC, write some e-mail. I finish up yesterday's journal, start up today's.

FFP comes home with groceries (fruit, cheese, orange juice) and a free loaf of wheat bread. He says a buzzer went off and he got a free loaf of bread. Yasu.

I decide that a visit to the club is in order. A little more exercise, some time on the bike reading my book. How many times do FFP and I both go in a day but at different times? We manage to get together on meals some times, but not today. He had breakfast while I was still in bed and lunch before I went to the club. Well, we will dine out together tonight!

Back home, I decide to dedicate one hour to reading the paper and having a snack (fruit, cheese, salami, coffee, water) and one hour to office cleaning. But things never work that way. I kept getting interrupted mostly by my own thoughts. I did have the snack, read some of the business section about Verizon and AOL Time Warner and I did start on the cleaning. But I also wrote e-mail and stopped to read things I found. As predicted things got messier. I decided I need to have a place to keep cameras between uses. (I picked up the first thing 'in my way' and it was my digital camera.) I did have such a place but that cabinet needing cleaning out. There was no place to pile stuff while cleaning so I piled a bunch of books on the floor. And, so it goes.

I came across two old newspaper sections. I saved them because of articles about neighborhoods where the eXtreme dog walking team might walk. Oddly, the papers were from the January 19th and 20th issues of 2002. A year ago, a life time.

Yeah, interruptions. Thoughts, phone calls, put away the dishes, straighten up the kitchen. Where does the time go?