BACK ON TRACK!

BACK ON TRACK!

Literally.  Yup, the shoulder's still stiff and my knee's still banged up from my sidewalk tumble the other day, but today is a day that screams to the world, "I love L. A!"  Why?  Weather!

 After last night's rain, the sky is clear powder blue, the air smells fresh and the temperature is a beautiful 70-ish.  Some days are diamonds and today is one of them.  It's a day to get out of the house and smell the rose...mary (well, it does seem to grow everywhere here)...  a day to soak up the sun's vitamins (thru sunblock)... a day to chase the blues away...  To hell w/ the economy... to hell w/ divisive politics and to hell w/ my aching butt muscles...  I'll think about that tomorrow (unless it's a day like today).

Crawling out of bed this morning was a chore.   The Advil I'd taken at bedtime had worn off and my bruised muscles wouldn't move... but slowly they came alive not so subtlly reminding me that I'd fallen.  Ouch.  But the sun was streaming thru the windows and when I opened the front door, the air smelled so sweet, I knew it was time to 'work through the pain.'  Hey, I could do it when I was still dancing, why not now?  I won't tell, if you won't that dancing and barre work 'working through the pain' was thirty years ago.  I'm still a dancer at heart and that should count for something, right?

Some of you may remember my Sept. 4th "Kinsey & Me" blog where I mused a Sue Grafton alphabet mystery around one of the 'characters' who makes daily appearances at my favorite outdoor track.  It's a half-mile, wide-open space where I can walk round and round and make up life-stories about my fellow power walkers.  Alec Baldwin sometimes jogs beside me when he's in town, nodding 'hello' as he chugs by (and I mean 'chugs' - he's like the cubby engine that could)... and I can watch, w/o envy, those who are strenuously working out w/ a trainer, racing up and down the baseball diamond stands.  Talk about pain!   But that's an "into the car and drive-to"  track a few miles away and there's a perfectly fine outdoor quarter-mile track I can walk to.  I don't know why I don't like it as well (maybe because I have to go around twice as many times), but it does surround a couple of baseball diamonds w/ stands I can use for 'barre' stretches and stomach crunches lying on a lower bench... and there are a bevy of tennis courts that are always busy (Richard plays tennis there three mornings a week), making the park/track a happening place on any given day.   So, even though I miss seeing my fellow walkers at the old track, I'm lowering my carbon footprint by walking to the smaller track.

The hazards of this decision, however, are the pothole-d streets (ours) and many broken sidewalks caused by tree roots that I must navigate to and from the park.  It was one such sidewalk that jumped out at me earlier this week causing my unscheduled rendevous with the cement pavement.  But to save on gas, I brave these urban jungle pitfalls.  I put on my mini-IPod and venture out on foot listening to Sly Stone, Eric Clapton, Bonnie Raitt, Rod Stewart, et al, w/ a little Reba thrown in (yeh, I'm that old) and, for the most part, arrive home unscathed.  Sometimes I sing along.  Today was a sing along, unscathed day.