i could be brave

Friday, May 26, 2006

I Take Walks

Categories: Art • Life

I work from my home now which means after waking up in the morning I'm already at work. This has its positive and negative aspects. For instance this morning I rolled out of bed at 6:30AM and started heating up some water for my morning tea. Spent my requisite time in the bathroom grabbed my tea and sat down to check my email. Then I got an idea for something I had been trying to solve for a client and started working on it. Before I knew it, it was 12:30PM and I hadn't had anything to eat or drink except my tea in the morning.

This forgetting to eat thing has been a long standing problem of mine when I'm focused on something that I am enjoying. I didn't have this issue while working at XEROX. It happens an awful lot now. I've also found that I've started taking showers in the evening more often than in the morning. Unless I need to meet with a client I have very little need for such things.

But what does this have to do with taking walks?

OK, OK, so I've gotten a little off topic.

As a result of that fact that I work at home I get pretty sick of being here. My solution has been to take 1-2 hour walk every evening at the end of my work day.

Every day I see something different.

Take yesterday. I walked towards downtown and met woman walking her cat. On a leash. I hadn't known that people even did that with cats. She actually seemed a little embarrassed about the whole deal when I said hi like she knew it was a little strange. Or it could have just been the fact that I said that embarrassed her. I sometimes forget I'm living in a city and people don't always just say hello to people they walk by on the street.

Then I took a right and accidently kicked a car key across the street. After picking it up and quickly identifying it as a Toyota key (It had TOYOTA written on the side of it) I found a nearby house with a brown Toyota Corolla parked in front. Figuring there was a good chance the key belonged to that car I knocked on the front door of the house.

A middle aged woman came to the door with a look of complete and utter fear on her face. I wasn't expecting the fear. So at first I just stood there staring at her. Finally after what felt like a half hour I managed to spit out that I'd found a key to a Toyota on the street and was wondering if it belonged to her. It turned out that it was her key. She had just brought the car back from the shop and the key had been the extra one she had given to the mechanic. She was much warmer almost immediately, and said thank you to me. I continued on my way.

I did have to wonder though. What did she think I had been doing when I first knocked on the door? Am I that scary looking? Or was there someone she was expecting that she should have been afraid of?

Two blocks later I walked by an attractive girl in her 20's who wanted to know if I had a spare cigarette. I don't smoke so I had to apologize. Then she wanted to know when the bus typically showed up. I had to apologize again.

She responded with a heartfelt, "GOD!" stomped her feet and sat back down on the bus bench. Apparently I wasn't everything she had been hoping for.

That was the last interesting occurrence on yesterday's walk. I did get something interesting in the mail though! I found out from the Government that I am now old enough that if I were to die my children and/or spouse would get Social Security benefits. Now if only I had either one of those I could rest easy.

More neat links:

1. Ask A Ninja
2. Rocketboom

Tiny little images of sites I'm designing at the moment:

Posted by Jamie at 11:08 PM