Observations of a Dog Walker

Every morning, Jaimie and I are out for Walk #1 of the Day.  It’s our big one for the day, approaching 7,000 (14,000) steps according to my Fitbit.  We have a couple smaller walks later in the day.

Under the category of “You can see a lot just by looking”, I put together my thoughts today.  Since we’re rural, we don’t have too many options when it comes to walking…  we either go north or south.

There’s a lot of time to observe and speculate on the walk, the environment, and the vehicles that passed us by.  Here are some of them.

• With one exception, every car that passed us had a single driver.  The exception had a teenager in the passenger seat.  I’m guessing she was being driven to a summer job.  There wasn’t a great deal of happiness on her face;
• There are a lot of distractions happening.  We saw drivers:

• on their cell phone;
• smoking;
• drinking presumably coffee;
• eating breakfast;
• one person was even flossing.

Something that you’ll only see walking – because you walk against the traffic when there’s no sidewalks, right? – on the back of the road signs is an installation date sticker.  The teacher is me says “hey, that could be used for a mapping exercise”, or “collect the dates for data collection”, or “call the department of roads and get a sense has to how long a typical road sign lasts.”

We’re not the only ones who had their mailbox hit by a snow plough.  There were lots of genius ideas for duct tape;

The town does a nice job of trimming the path to the fire hydrant.  I wonder if they’d do my lawn?

The deer that got hit is still decomposing in the ditch.  We did call the roads department but they don’t clean them up unless they are on the road.  In other news, the skunk that got hit is still on the road.  So is the opossum.  Well, we think it’s dead;

It’s interesting to note the people that will move over when they see us and the ones that won’t.  We do get off the roadway into the gravel – how far depends on courtesy and the lack of distraction, I guess.  Big truck drivers are always the most courteous;

As we approach the crossing side road, it’s fascinating to see how many people don’t actually stop at the stop sign.  Recently, I’ve learned about the Idaho Stop – but this isn’t Idaho, folks;

There are considerably more expensive cars coming from the golf course subdivision that going to it;

We like a good puzzle and a cryptic personalized license plate will keep us busy thinking for a while;

And, about 45 minutes later, we’re done.  I couldn’t do it without my mp3 player and ear buds to keep me going.  I’m not fascinated nearly as much by the smells as he is.

But, come tomorrow, we’re ready to go at it again.