This week we’re beginning flex-time for the summer, as we’ve done the past few years. The first summer we did it, I worked four ten-hour days & had the fifth workday free. I took Wednesdays off & devoted it to writing. Or I tried to devote it to writing: in practice, I’d be so tired from the long workdays that I’d spend a lot of my writing day falling asleep at my table in the café at Barnes & Noble.
So in succeeding summers I did four nines & a four, as I say it in shorthand: working four days of the week from 7 AM to 5 PM (with an hour for lunch), but on Wednesdays working just in the morning, & using the afternoon for writing. This worked much better, especially since it got me up & out of the house a lot quicker on the writing day anyway. That’s the schedule I used for two or three years in succession.
Last year, though, I switched to an even better schedule: taking Monday, instead of Wednesday, as my half-day. That way with the writing I can build on whatever momentum I’ve got going from Sunday, Sunday evening & Monday morning being far less of a pause in the work than a longer interval. Since I’m really working hard to get more momentum with my writing, this seemed like a good schedule this summer too.
So at 11:00, off I went to hop a bus to the other side of town, where my home-away-from-Side Street-away-from-home writing venue has been established as the Kaladi Brothers café next to Title Wave Books. I wouldn’t say I got a huge amount of writing done today, but it’s a pattern in development at least.
Afterwards, on the walk home, I decided to make good on the Start Walking program by taking a longer route home than usual. So I made my way over to the bike trail that parallels the off-ramp from Minnesota up to Hillcrest Drive & West High, took it down to Westchester Lagoon, & then eastward on the Chester Creek Trail as far as Valley of the Moon Park. (Cross reference: The Start Walking account of this day at Terveys.)
The deciduous trees are still by & large bare of leaves, but the days have grown warmer, & I got a bit sweaty going home. Still pleasant. Actually, the worst part of things was that I for the Start Walking program I had to count my own steps, because the accurate pedometer still hadn’t arrived. I counted to 100 a whole bunch of times, & every time I reached 100 it was stick a finger of my left hand out, or bring it in again, as a marker of another century. I only use my left hand so I can use my right for other things; luckily I have enough short term memory to recall how many times the fingers of my left hand have been completely opened or completely closed, each of which represents 500 steps.
I went actually into the park to get a few pics of the play rocketship that gives the park its other, informal name of Rocketship Park, & then up Arctic to my own street. I established that my longer route was about twice as many steps as the direct route from Kaladi Brothers, & got a good 4200 steps out of it. And was delighted when I got home to find that my Amazon delivery had come through: my new pedometer (& a heart rate monitor) had finally arrived.
Rozz & I watched “Chutney Popcorn.” I wouldn’t call it a great movie, but it’s definitely a good movie: about an Indian (as in India, not Native American) dyke living in NYC, & her sister can’t get pregnant, so she offers to act as a surrogate mother for her. I very much liked the main character, & was very appreciative that #1 there is an actual community of dykes around her, including her girlfriend, instead of her being “the only dyke in the world” as is so common in movie depictions of lesbian/gay life; & #2 her family dealt with it & talked about it. Her girlfriend’s mother was pretty cool too.
