Day 1 - Walking to Work!

My walk-to-work program began as planned! By the time my lightweight backpack had been packed with my lunch and various other odds and ends (cellphone, keys, wallet, make-up repair kit ;) etc.) it was heavier than I thought, however, it had substantial straps so it was fine. On went the lined jacket with hood and my gloves, on went my backpack, click went the stopwatch and pedometer and off I went. It wasn't raining! The air smelled fresh, dampish but quite pleasant. I noticed a few dogs walking their owners, but otherwise it was quiet. Eek, I forgot my camera! Oh well, I was walking not dawdling! Results are as follows:

Day	Date	Weather	Min/Sec	Pedometer
1	Feb 24 09	4 C overcast	20.47	3259

Did you notice I broke my trial walk record of 22 minutes!

And so the day began. However, before long things started to act strangely! The paper for the newsletter was full of static electricity which resulted in three pages coming through as one, with the front pages of the newsletter one-sided, separated by a blank sheet, and the back pages of the newsletter on a one-sided sheet. While the photocopying was going on, I decided to FAX the company that recently supplied us with this particular paper and let them know, however when I pushed the "2" on the FAX machine to begin the number, it didn't activate. Hooped. So back to the photocopy machine. I started separating all the pages ~ the ones that were properly double sided, the blank ones and the ones that were one-sided, and then proceeded to manually feed them through again to print on the other side. Now with all this static electricity and the curly hair that resulted from the damp walk, I had a feeling I looked like Ms Frizzy ~ a make-up repair kit would be useless, after all!

Meanwhile, in another part of the office, the laminator had gone loopy, and was only heating one side of the film, so we put in a maintenance call to the electrician.

Enough of that, I thought and sat down at my computer ready to follow the next procedure resulting from the workshop I attended yesterday. However after a few minutes, my computer crashed. I rebooted and restarted, but it froze. Another maintenance call to the Tech department.

By this time, I had called for recruits and had some students come down, count out newsletters and deliver them to the classrooms.

Yay, the electrician arrived. Yay, the technician arrived. The office was buzzing with activity ~ and not mine! Soon the laminator was pulled apart, the FAX machine was poked at, and the Tech was under my desk checking out the CPU. Off she went to get me some more memory (wish it was that easy in real life), and a new keyboard. The laminator was working, the FAX machine was working, my computer had been upgraded and was ready to go! And I was ready to go home. Of course, along with this pandemonium, one child lost a tooth, one needed ice for a bump on the head, three had fallen in mud puddles, along with a couple of scraped elbows and knees.

By the way, the keynote speaker at the workshop yesterday discussed "brain wellness". One of the important things to do for our brain is to keep active, keeping those dendrites growing ~ walking, for example. Check. He said that brains do not like interruptions. They are not fond of multi-tasking. They like to complete one task before starting another. Hopefully, the walking grew some more dendrites, because they were certainly needed today.

My son dropped by in the afternoon with my camera. I had planned on timing my walk home, however my cellphone rang a few minutes after I'd left work, and somehow taking the backpack off and fiddling around, twisting and turning, trying to get my cellphone out of the backpack, I must have hit the stop button on the stopwatch in my pocket because when I got home it read 4 minutes, which was about the time the phone rang. I think, therefore, in future, I will keep the cellphone in one of the pockets of my jacket. Did you see that I said, "in future", which means tomorrow when Day 2 begins.

Thanks for your patience in reading through Day 1~ and here's a photo I took on the way home.



Even a cat is acting strangely ~ looking stunned and frozen in its tracks.