Walking Commentary

If you’re a peppy and dedicated individual who would truly enjoy being more healthy, or svelte, you have to get off your duffster and move it! You have to join the throngs of others who venture out on a blustery day to get that heart rate up, and sweat glands functioning. (You do understand that I’m attempting to make up for the bitchy grousing I was engaged in earlier today, don’t you?) But it is excellent advice, because you just never know how things will turn out. Besides, you would rather be someone who talks about sedentary Americans than actually be one, right? If you get out and about, it could be possible that…

• You may get to hear your VBF confirm that you do smell in your laundry basket retrieved walking attire but that it won’t matter because her horse-like doggo is in the car, too, smelling like a dog should and that it’s a toss up on who smells worse.
• You will get to see signs like this and, well… take a picture of it, then restrain yourself from commenting at this point because your passionate self is on sleep mode temporarily, and that is a completely different set of posts that you don’t want people to have to read on a Sunday.
• You scratch and wonder about the red stick art thing in this person’s back yard. “Is it really art? Or is it a stick?” And then you notice others, barely discernible through the plants, but equally mystifying.
• You smile because Paradise is actually a desert and looked like this hill once upon a time before we all showed up and planted palm trees, grass, bougainvilla, and ugly eucalyptus trees that need water to grow in a place where it rarely rains;
• then understand why sign signs like this

have to be posted to save some of it and also to keep people away, or there would be even more houses like this

• crowding in to get a view like this

• or even a view like this

• or this — and not minding at all that their house is built on a ledge that is about 15 feet wide… …and that we do occasionally have mudslides, and earthquakes, and other natural type disasters. (This would be the sour grapes segment of the post.)

And when you’re done with this breath-taking exercise — really — you get to go to the very cute farmer’s market and borrow money from your VBF to buy more little plants for the snails and worms on your patio to eat in the night because you forgot to sprinkle that Sluggo again. Sigh.