I’m in terrible shape, and one of my goals for this break is to improve that shape. I have gotten consistent in the last month in doing light exercise — I make it a point to get out for a walk every morning, nothing too strenuous, just getting into a good habit.

The last few days added a few other things on top of my routine: we bought some big bags of topsoil to repair a scar in our yard. So I was ripping up these 50 pound bags, dumping them out, and raking soil over everything. It was no big deal. Ten or twenty years ago I could have done this little chore and not even noticed. Now, today, that extra effort on top of my daily walking routine has me feeling it. My quads are burning, and this piercing ache is spiking up my back.

What I need to do this morning is get back on the horse. Not literally, of course, instead I’m going to go take an easy amble at an unchallenging rate for a while. Again. And again. With the prospect of doing it more for the foreseeable future, and trying to ramp it up a little bit every day.

My feelings exactly:

That said, I’m about to go on another stupid little walk.

My wife forced me at trowel-point to work in the lawn this morning. We’ve got a big patch that was torn up by a backhoe in order to replace a broken water line, and she bought a lot of topsoil that needed to be spread over it, and we got some prairie wild grass and flower seed that we sowed over it.

My boots were caked with mud, clay, and gravel. My back is aching. I’m sweaty and dirty. I think I’ll go walk a kilometer or two and hope I can scrape off some of the residue.

I live in a small town, a town where very little changes from day to day. I walk downtown almost every day, and almost a week ago I noticed something in a parking lot.

They’re still there. They are becoming part of the unchanging substrate of small town life.

I had to look more closely. After all, maybe they contained feet and I would become part of a rural murder mystery! Television and novels tell me that happens all the time.

They don’t contain feet. They seem to be stuffed with damp, moldering leaves, which is a little odd, but not sufficient to warrant calling in a small town sheriff.

They seem to have been worked hard — the leather is stretched and scuffed, the seams are loose but still holding everything together. They’re in the kind of shape where, if they were my boots, I’d start thinking I definitely need new shoes, but I’d tell myself I could keep using them for one more year. Which I’d tell myself again every year for a couple of years.

I checked. They wouldn’t fit me. They were much too large and very wide. In fact, I was surprised by how big they are. Whoever owned them had to be at least 300 pounds, and I could tell these boots had a hard life every day. Maybe they’re relieved to be resting in an empty lot, soothed by the rain, communing with the bugs that come around to visit.

It’s weird. Somedays I’m intensely curious about where they come from, who left them there, why they abandoned them here, what kinds of interesting things their owner did while wearing them…other days I’m like “Hello, boots. I wouldn’t mind joining you sometime. Tell me about the life of an old boot decaying on the pavement.”

This post has no significance, I’m just contemplating some soggy old boots.

I have evidence of my father’s criminal past. I wonder if I carry Criminal Genes?

He was a good looking rogue, I’ll say that for him.

Most of that is a lie, though. He liked fishing, and would play hooky to go down to the Green River and fish for steelhead, or hike up into the mountains for trout, but he didn’t own a gun (never liked them at all), so the only way he could have attempted murder is by whipping the game wardens with a fishing pole.

I think his inmate number is fake, too. He lived at 106 E. Willis St., so that’s where the first part of the number comes from.

I also think he was closer to 5’8″, if that.

The 2025 graduating class in biology at the University of Minnesota Morris:

I had big plans for today. I was going to make a day trip to do some spider collecting — today is my wife’s day off, so it was a good time to take the car away. I had it all planned out: the route, I’d identified some parks and likely places to stop, and the trip was going to end at a museum I’ve never visited before, an hour away. We’ve had a week of sunny, warm weather (we hit 91°F yesterday!) so I thought there’d be a good chance some spiders would have emerged.

Then Minnesota weather got in the way. I woke up to a massive thunderclap, and the forecast is for thunderstorms and strong winds. Forget about spidering today.

I think instead I get to go into the lab and scrub fly bottles all afternoon. Gotta get the fly lab cleaned up.

This will not be fun.

Mary was not enthused about the trip anyway. She’s in gardening mode.

Mary has gardening plans. She has taken over the sun room and filled it with seedlings.

We’re growing lots of milkweed, if you can’t tell.