In the last few years, I’ve started walking a lot more. Not just walking for exercise, but walking to actually get places, although my dog often goes along. Last time I lived in Quincy several years ago, I don’t think I walked anywhere. At one point I lived five blocks from work, and I don’t think I walked there once unless my car was broken down. Another time I lived two blocks from the grocery store, and never walked there either. I don’t know why; I guess I just had the drive-everywhere mentality that’s so common. (And maybe driving on Broadway wasn’t so painful back then.)

When I moved to Barry, some businesses were as close as where I parked, so it just made sense to walk, and I had to walk the dog anyway. After living several years in the country where I had to drive 15 miles for groceries, it was a nice change, and it saved a lot of gas. Now that I’m in Quincy, I still walk to the grocery store and a few other places that are close enough. I don’t suppose I’ll be walking the 20 blocks to church any time soon, but maybe once in a while in the spring.

I notice different things walking than driving. There’s a lot of interesting architecture in Quincy; not just in the big houses in the historical areas, but scattered everywhere. Just east of 24th street on College, there are four tiny houses right in a row that are sort of a box-shaped adobe-style, painted in white and bright primary colors. They almost look like toy houses or something from a cartoon. It’d be interesting to hear the story behind those, since they were obviously built at the same time, probably by someone who thought that particular style was the coming thing. There are stuccoed houses, steel houses, houses with cool chimneys, and plenty of other things to see. There are tiny offices and home businesses tucked away here and there that don’t catch the eye at 30mph. You have time to admire flowerbeds, lawn decorations, and chalk drawings kids make on the sidewalk.

I smell different things too. In a few places, I’ve caught the unmistakable odor of sewer gas. I wonder if that’s normal in town, or a problem the city should be notified about? People complain about the smell from neighboring hog farms when they move to the country; I can’t imagine they wouldn’t complain about that smell in the middle of town. Just west of 24th on Oak, across from County Market, there’s a nasty whiff of it there. If I lived in that stretch of houses, I don’t know how often I’d want to spend time in my front yard. Then there are much better aromas: walking past Spring Street Bar the other day started my mouth watering. I don’t know what they serve there, but it sure smelled good. I’ll have to walk over there with my pool cue one of these days and find out.

When I stop at the store, I tie Pepper up outside. I think she gets a lot of attention out there, because once in a while I come out and people are talking to her or petting her—usually kids. Most of the time she’s sitting and watching the door for me, though. I haven’t seen anyone else leave a dog outside while shopping, but it just makes sense to me: if I’m going to walk a dog, why not make a couple stops along the way? Now I just need to get her a backpack and have her carry some groceries for me, like Cesar Millan does.

Ok, I’ve had enough winter; I’m ready for spring already. It sure was nice to be able to go outside without gloves today and be comfortable. Bring on the mushroom hunting, garden planting, fishing, picnics, and Cardinals @ Mets on March 1st (if it’s on the radio near enough to catch it).

Is it weird if your dog likes to eat bricks? One place where I walk Pepper a lot, there are some bricks crumbling at the base of a wall, and a couple times she’s found something there to eat. It sure looks like she’s eating pieces of brick, but I guess she could be finding something else in there. Maybe a brick fell on a mouse or something. I can’t imagine what her diet would be lacking that would be in bricks — calcium? She gets more bones than most dogs probably do, considering how carnivorous my diet is. I’ll have to ask at the vet’s when I stop in next month to get her flea medicine.

I’ve been playing through a bridge tutorial lately, because it’s about the only popular card game I don’t know; and wow, it’s complicated. The play isn’t complicated; if you’ve played any trick-taking trump game like euchre or pinochle, it’s even simpler than those, because it doesn’t put the cards in a strange order. But the bidding is incredibly convoluted. If I bid one-club, that means something, and if my partner bids 2-diamonds, that means something else; but if I had bid 1-diamond first, his 2-diamonds might mean something else entirely; and sometimes you bid 2-clubs even if you don’t have any clubs in your hand; and on and on and on. They’ve developed a whole language where you communicate with your partner with your bids to tell each other what your hands are like and how many tricks you think you can win.

It amazes me to think that regular people — not statisticians or people with eidetic memory — consider this a parlor game. The only thing I can think is that this tutorial is going a lot farther into the minutiae than most players ever do, because I just can’t imagine most people picking this up without many hours of watching and having it explained to them. Maybe if you grew up in a house where your parents hosted bridge games every week, but otherwise, I don’t see it. Memorizing all these different bidding options (and I haven’t even gotten into the scoring yet, which is fairly complicated itself) is like memorizing all the rules and strategies for cribbage, poker, euchre, rummy, hearts, canasta, and pinochle combined. No wonder I got nowhere the times I tried to learn it from reading the rules in Hoyle’s.

Last but not least, I’m starting a new job! I’ll save the details for after I’ve been at it for a while and know more about what I’m doing, but it looks promising so far. It’s probably not going to be full-time, at least for now, so I’m still looking for other jobs like I talked about here a few weeks ago, but it’s a step in the right direction.

I’m working up a rant about cell-phone companies, but I’ll save that one for next time; this is already long enough!

I may have mentioned this before, but I found my camera, after missing it for several months. So I took a few pictures, and I’ll come up with more later. Click on them to see them full-size.

My sister gave me some eggs when I was over there recently, because her chickens are producing like crazy lately. Check out the green ones. Some of her chickens are an Araucana breed, which lay colored eggs. And you thought green eggs and ham was just a story, didn’t you?

Here’s one of me playing with Pepper earlier. When she gets really bored, she’ll bring me one of the leather gloves I keep lying around, so we can fight. She’s pretty careful about not biting me, but she still catches me with a claw by accident once in a while, so the gloves help a lot.

Later we went for a walk, and I threw a dog treat up on top of a big pile of snow, thinking I’d get a picture of her standing on top of it, but she grabbed it and got back down so fast that my freezing fingers were too slow.

More to come soon!

I think if I had a pair of ice skates, I could skate in the park next to my house today. No, there’s no pond there; there’s just enough ice frozen on top of the grass that it holds my weight without even cracking. It’d be a little rough, and the slope might be an issue on skates….

Even Pepper doesn’t like it. She loves the cold and the snow, but not so much the sliding around and being unable to keep her footing. She has a hard time even standing on three feet to pee on all the things that need peeing on, and that clearly bothers her.

The diet is still going fine. Sorry to anyone who’s actually reading this regularly; I know I’ve been falling down on regular updates. I just haven’t been cooking anything spectacular enough to bother talking about. I did cook a huge meatloaf the other night, with venison burger, turkey burger, and pork sausage, plus diced onion, celery, and yellow bell pepper, but other than that, it’s been eggs, roasts, salads, stuff like that.

I weighed myself this morning, and was 238. My scale isn’t that accurate — stepping off and right back on can make a 3-4 pound difference — so I don’t bother with it very often, but I was curious. Inches around the waist are a better indicator of fat loss, and I’m starting to notice a difference there. Mostly I feel a heck of a lot better, and that’s the main thing.

I did have kind of a nagging low-level headache that wouldn’t quite go away, and then I remembered that I’d run out of potassium salt (Morton Lite Salt) and was using the regular kind. Potassium is the one thing that low-carbers sometimes don’t get enough of, if they don’t make sure to get plenty of vegetables, so I use the Lite Salt to supplement it. When you’re low on potassium, it can lead to muscle cramps and pain, and I think that’s where the stiffness in my neck was coming from. I got a new can of KaCl a couple days ago, and poof! No more headaches.

More to come later today…..I think!