Well, that was disappointing. I posted my open house on Craigslist on Friday night, like I was supposed to. I put the signs out, one at the house, one at the corner, and one a block away at the next intersection. I paid good money at Office Max this morning to print flyers, because despite repeated attempts to clean the inside of it, my six month old laser printer keeps spray flecks of toner over every inch of the page, making everything look like crap. I arrived early, set up, and waited. Fifteen minutes in, one woman and her son came through the door, but they lived across the street, and just wanted to see the transformation from the run down rental it was into the beautiful home it can now be. The lady was super nice, but she didn't stay all that long. She took one of my flyers at least. And then the next hour and a half was painfully silent. I tried walking laps around the house, but it was small and after about nine minutes of that I was bored of it. I had the tiniest cell signal, so Facebooking was difficult. I managed to purchase and download a six page long short story for my Kindle app, and that entertained me for a few minutes. But the bulk of my time was spent sitting in a chair (so glad it was staged!), staring at the window on the door, willing anyone at all to walk up and view the house. It never happened. I had so much emotionally invested in this open house, and absolutely nothing came of it.
I've been really focusing on building back up my stamina for walking. When last we lived in California, nine or ten years ago, I was dedicated to walking every night. I had to wait until the sun went down (it was triggering migraines constantly, and still 100 degrees even at 10 pm for weeks at a time), but I was going three or four miles every time. The next move took my health away (that's when all the surgeries started), and I never got back into the habit of walking. For the last month, I have been trying hard to retrain myself. Today I made my step target and more than doubled my walking minutes goal. I can't say it's a solid habit yet, but I'm so pleased that I'm doing more than the minimums now.
We went farther into the wilds of the new favorite city park this evening. We detoured down a trail along the river basin, which here seems more like a creek. But even now, three years after the big floods that proved it is really a river, there are still fields of alluvium where grass hasn't regrown. There are still sprinkler heads in those places, over rocky dirt. The paths have new concrete, and there are art installations that seem to pre-date the flood, but I just can't imagine that they are in their original state from prior to September 2013. It was absolutely beautiful this evening, at the perfect temperature, with gentle evening light, with little hints of wildlife around (like the tiny little toad who paused just long enough for me to get a single photo). And then there were the ticky-tacky boxes, a whole string of houses that were all identical, all in a row. Of course I would notice that.
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