One of the things I’d been greatly looking forward to with our new apartment was its close proximity to my office. It really is “around the corner”, and I thought I might take advantage of this one some nicer days and walk. Despite the fact that rain was called for today, I decided to chance it and stroll to work this morning, to get a sense of the timing.
Now, there’s two ways I can do this. I can stroll up the street to the light, and then down a short block, and then around the circle which leads to my office building. We’ll call this “the long way”. The other way, which looks so much more preferable on the map, is to cut through the back parking lot of the office building that is two buildings down from mine. This is the route I took this morning.
Right after coming out of our complex, there’s a path leading up a fairly steep embankment. I climbed up, and thought to myself that it really was just a bit too steep for comfort, even if there was an obvious path. But I made it up ok (about 15-17 feet from bottom to top, with a relatively severe incline), caught my breath, and then had a nice stroll across the parking lot to my building. Total time in transit, from my door to my office door: 11 minutes.
At lunchtime, I strolled over to the shopping centre next door and had lunch at Mellow Mushroom, a local pizza chain that I’ve always been fond of. While I was eating and reading the back half of this weeks Creative Loafing, the sky opened up. This wasn’t a shower, this was serious sheets of rain with gusting winds. But I had time, so I leisurely nibbled on my pizza and, having finished reading Creative Loafing, leafed through their far inferior competitor, the Sunday Paper. (The Sunday Paper is an alternative weekly newspaper if it were written by your dad.) The rain finally slaked off and I strolled back to work through the now-light shower, getting wet but not drenched. It was warm enough that this really wasn’t terribly unpleasant.
By the time it was time to go home, the rain was gone, so I merrily set off for home. As I got to the top of the embankment, I thought “this really is a bit steep. I’ll need to be careful.” Unfortunately, two steps later my foot slipped and, unable to recover, I landed hard on my tailbone and slid down to the bottom. I picked myself up and shook myself off, and limped home.
My jeans were a muddy mess, and my dignity suffered a near-fatal blow, saved only by the lack of anyone watching. I have a great deal of pain in my bottom and lower back, but I don’t think I did any serious damage to myself. If I’m still in great pain after 24-48 hours, I’ll go see a doctor. But I’m afraid that walking to work is going to either have to be the long way around, or I’m going to have to find a less steep pathway that parking lot, because I’m not going down that hill again.
Ow.