Today I had my first online ethics classes with kids again, since returning from my trip. I’m still a bit jet lagged – I managed to sleep until just before 06:00 this morning, which was much better than I’ve been doing but I still need to catch up on a lot of sleep. So I was very tired when I began the classes at 17:00 this evening. It was a bit of a chore getting through them, but I managed okay. Today and tomorrow morning I’m finishing off the weekly topics on “Shrinking and Enlarging” and “Revolutions” that I started in the week before I left for the trip. We start new topics on Wednesday.
Early this morning after breakfast I left home to go for a run. I decided I felt okay enough to tackle 5k instead of just 2.5k. But I was almost foiled by something I found on the warm-up walk to my starting point. It was a dog – a little Pomeranian, perhaps not fully grown. It was just standing on the nature strip by the road as I approached, with no owner or other person in sight. It had a harness on it, but no collar or tag with any contact details.
I approached it carefully and it was friendly and didn’t try to move away. So I picked it up and set about trying to find where it had come from. The nearest house had an open gate leading up steps and around the side of the garage, so I thought, “Aha, it’s escaped from that open gate.” I took it in the gate and went up the stairs, turned the corner… and found a closed gate. Okay, so it couldn’t have wandered out through there by itself. I looked for a doorbell or intercom system anywhere, but there was none. I noticed the inner gate had a child lock on it and I opened it and poked my head in, seeing a yard strewn with toys. There door of the house wasn’t insight – I’d have to walk through the yard to find the door if I wanted to knock, and being 07:30 on a Sunday morning I didn’t fancy walking through some stranger’s yard and possibly scaring someone or having them get angry at me.
I put the dog down to see what it would do, and it turned and walked out of the property. Okay, so maybe this isn’t where it belonged. I closed the gate and followed it back to the street, where it turned and walked along the footpath. I followed, accelerating after it as it crept away. I feared it might run off down the street and I wouldn’t be able to catch it again. And then it turned into another yard several doors down, crossed to an open gate leading to the backyard, and went through there. I figured this must be where it lived, and it had escaped through that open gate. So I closed the gate so it couldn’t escape again and left, to go start my run. Hopefully that’s where it lived, and the people there didn’t wake up to find a strange dog locked in their backyard!
My run went a lot better than the efforts earlier in the week. I managed 5k, and a reasonable if not spectacular time. It probably helped that the weather had cleared up a bit and wasn’t rainy with 100% humidity. Although we have a fun “up to 150mm” of rain to look forward to over the next few days. What sort of stupid El Niño is this? We’re supposed to be having hot and dry conditions and fires all over the place.
I spent some time today processing and uploading photos from my first day in Rome on the recent trip. You can see them on the diary page on my website.
New content today: