I’ve been busy every morning this week so far, so today was the first real chance to go for a run. I did my now usual 5k run route, from home up* to the nearest sports oval, and then laps until I reach the 5k mark.
* Literally up. From my place to the oval is an elevation rise of 40 metres. There are stairs.
I tried to beat my previous best effort, by doing longer running segments and fewer walking segments, and I succeeded, with a time of 5:49 per km, beating my previous best of 5:52. (i.e. 29:05 for the 5k, versus 29:20.) One annoying thing I discovered with my new phone is that it’s impossible to unlock it while running. My previous phone had fingerprint unlock, which worked fine, but the new one has face ID, which I could not get to work while running – I presume because it needs your face to be relatively still, not bouncing around all over the place. And forget trying to type my password while running, without my reading glasses. So I couldn’t get lap times or anything, and had to wait until I’d completed the run and stopped before I could unlock my phone and stop the timer.
For lunch I went out to the fish & chip shop, but this time I decided to try one of their burgers rather than seafood and chips. I got the basic beef burger, which of course comes with tomato, lettuce, fried onions, and sliced beetroot. It was good! I’ll have to get burgers from there more often.
To eat I went to my favourite lunch spot, about which I previously wrote about someone illegally poisoning the trees. The shade trees are now even more dead looking, and throwing essentially zero shade on the seats. I sought a shady spot down the slope, sitting on the grass under a large gum tree, where the view isn’t as good as this:
To head home, I decided not to walk along the streets, but to take the bushwalk route along the creek. It’s a steep set of carved sandstone steps down from the lookout point to sea level, where you walk along a mangrove swamp for a bit, before heading inland and uphill, following the creek gully.
It’s a 1 kilometre walk up the creek back to my home, and was very pleasant being in the deep shade of the forested gully, rather than the hot and sunny streets. I really like having areas, albeit small, that look like wilderness so close to home.
This afternoon, Scully had her first exam to qualify as a Delta therapy dog. My wife organised this to see if we can volunteer with Scully to visit hospitals and so on, to let patients interact with a dog to help brighten their day. The Delta Society is a volunteer organisation that does this. They have pretty strict requirements on the dogs, so we have to go through a bunch of tests. Today was the physical exam by the vet, which Scully passed with flying colours. On Sunday we do a 15-minute interview during which they test Scully for obedience, calmness, and ability to be handled by strangers without reacting adversely. We don’t know if she’ll pass that one, but we don’t think there’s any obvious issue that will instantly rule her out. It’s going to be a matter of degree and how strict they are. We have our fingers crossed.
New content today:
