Category: Health

HAPPY NEW YEAR 2008 !

Sky: Partly Cloudy & Foggy
Temperature: 67°F
Relative Humidity: 100%
Winds: Calm
Barometric Pressure: 30.11 RISING

My thoughts:

1.  It’s the calm before the storm (or the freeze). Tomorrow morning at this time air temperatures will be up to 20 degrees colder (upper-40s), and the following morning they could be as much as 35 degrees colder (mid-30s). The Walk-A-Thon will resume on Saturday morning when it’s back in the milder low-60s at 7 AM.

2.  You can tell where the party-animals live here in my neighbourhood. Their dumpsters are overflowing with leftover holiday week garbage. The dumpsters that were still able to be closed from the top are where the retired folks live.

3.  Dogs can be party-animals as well. I came within inches of stepping in some of their ‘holiday leftovers’ during my walk this morning. It was a close call !

4.  Near my neighbourhood’s main entrance a frantic lady accompanied by one of our uniformed security guards stopped me and asked me if I had anything to break in to her car. It seems that she locked her keys in it. I had nothing. If that ever happened to me then I would call AAA.

5.  After the above incident I realized that I was falling behind my 25:25 pace for a 1.3-mile walk, so I picked it up a notch for the final 0.8-miles. I picked it up so much that I finished this morning’s walk in less than 24½ minutes ! 

It was another 25:25 (25-minute and 25-second) walk for me this morning around the entire perimeter of my wonderful neighbourhood, so that means another 1.3 miles gets recorded in the book. Actually there is no book, and I’m not even tracking these walks on an EXCEL spreadsheet. I’m doing it all for fun !

Sky: Partly Cloudy
Temperature: 74°F
Relative Humidity: 87%
Winds: Calm
Barometric Pressure: 30.14 RISING

My thoughts:

1.  I walked clockwise this morning – as opposed to counter-clockwise on Christmas Day Morning. I think I’ll alternate between the two as I do these walks.

2.  Me and another walker gave each other ‘the acknowledgement’. We saw each other from afar. We repositioned ourselves slightly, and then as we passed each other we gave each other a nice nod and a pleasant smile as if to telepathically state to each other ‘Howdy Fellow Walker !’

3.  The construction workers high atop the brand new ‘Key West Style’ townhouse development that’s going up just across my neighbourhood’s south perimeter fence were hard at work making a lot of racket on the roofs.

4.  At around the 21-minute mark of my 25:25 walk a little dog was barking loudly and tapping violently on the front window of his / her home as I walked by. Apparently he / she didn’t like me. It’s just further proof that most dogs don’t like me. Cats like me. Cats are cool.

5.  After the 25:25 walk I got in my car and drove the southern arc of my walk. It measured out as 0.8 miles. I then drove off into Florida City to do some errands. When I returned I drove the northern arc of my walk. That was 0.5 miles. The 1.3 miles that Google Earth measured has been successfully confirmed by my car.

THIS MORNING I did the unpredictable – I walked the entire perimeter of my neighbourhood – approximately a mile-and-a-half – close to 2½ kilometers for the rest of the world. (I’ll have to drive my car the entire trek to determine the actual distance.)

Sky: Mostly Cloudy
Temperature: 69°F
Relative Humidity: 95%
Winds: NW 8 MPH
Barometric Pressure: 30.04 RISING

My thoughts:

1.  My iPod Shuffle came along for the walk this morning. All of my smash hits on it provided a great beat to walk to.

2.  One of those smash hits that played as I walked alone was the Christian speed-metal-romp “Writing On The Walls” courtesy of Underoath. Its lyrics include the prominent (screaming) verse ‘We walk alone !’

3.  There were a bunch of other walkers out and about on this most glorious Christmas Day morning. Some of them were walking alone, and some of them were walking their dog(s). There was even a nice older yellowish cat walking alone. He / She looked at me with love rather than fear. This cat somehow knew that I was a lifelong friend to the feline populace.

4.  There’s a new ‘Key West style’ townhouse development going up just over the southern perimeter fence of my neighbourhood. I hadn’t seen it before.

5.  This was a 25-minute walk for me. There was only one thing that I wanted as soon as I walked back in to my home, and that my friends was a MASSIVE gulp of Zephyrhills Natural Spring Water.

Inspired by fellow WordPress blogger Stephen Hollifield I decided to take my own leisurely walk around my neighbourhood today at High Noon – just a few minutes after I commented on his ‘Morning Walk’ for this Christmas Eve morning.

This is quite remarkable for me in that this is the very first time that I have ever done such a thing – and I’ve been living here in my neighbourhood for over 12½-years !

I walked around the northern circumference of my neighbourhood in just a little over 18 minutes. It was close to 0.75 miles in length.

Sky: Mostly Sunny
Temperature: 79°F
Relative Humidity: 57%
Winds: NE 13 MPH
Barometric Pressure: 30.09 FALLING

Here are a few thoughts as I walked the walk:

1.  There should never be a parking problem here in my neighbourhood. We have far more parking spaces than we actually need.

2.  I am blessed to live in a relatively litter-free neighbourhood. The City Of Homestead actually emptied out all of the dumpsters early this morning – on Christmas Eve !

3.  My neighbourhood smells good. There’s good cookin’ in the neighbourhood !

4.  My neighbourhood has sidewalks that I never knew existed. I’ll have to discover some more of them in my future walks.

5.  If this were May, June, July, August, September, or October then I would have probably been eaten alive by every bug known to mankind, but this is December and it is just so refreshingly delightful outside !

I’m doing another walk tomorrow !