Having skipped the afternoon walk yesterday (the day after the heart episode) and tanked up on carbs, I took a 55 minute walk today. The pulse was very low for the first 35 minutes, and it never started racing this time, but I also didn’t provoke it once it rose past 120 after about 35 minutes. I am still a bit wary, as you may imagine.

During the 55 minutes, someone removed the 5 days old rubber boots I had left standing near the front door. It has been raining cats and dogs most of the summer and fall so far, so I am sure they can come in handy.  The street is not really a thoroughfare, there is no reason to drive it if you don’t live nearby. So I must assume one of the neighbors has appropriated the boots, after seeing that I left the building. It would be kind of suspicious to stop a car outside a house to steal something unless one already knew nobody was home. So yeah, it seems this is the kind of neighbors I have now. A bit of a change from living in the countryside.

Ironically, I only bought the boots to walk around the house. Because I had somehow lost the key to the front door (presumably inside, since I locked myself in with it), I had to use the back door. Unfortunately, the grass in the garden is higher than my jogging shoes and teeming with ticks. I am not sure there is even one day I have walked through it in my jogging shoes and not found a tick drinking my blood a few hours later. That is where the rubber boots come in. Ticks here on the south coast harbor three potentially life-threatening diseases, so I try to avoid them.

But today the family upstairs handed back their keys, and I got one of them from the landlord, so I no longer need the boots. Not that my neighbors could know that, may God have mercy on their souls. I just hope they can resist the temptation to break the windows in the back yard and empty the house while I am at work. Probably they can. It takes just a moment’s weakness to swipe a pair of good boots, but at least a minute’s weakness to actually break in.

In any case, I would not leave stuff outside if I couldn’t afford to lose it. This is pretty much what I expect from neurotypical humans*. Still, it takes a bit of courage to nab things in broad daylight in a place that is visible from three or four houses.

(*I don’t mean to say that all ordinary people are thieves. Rather, that there is a randomness in us humans, as there also is in the rest of nature. If you expose a number of people to temptation for an increasing time, the likelihood rises that someone will break and fall for it. The risk varies with the temptation, but small and inconsequential temptations usually don’t take many people or a long time. There is, as I said, a randomness, a fluctuation in the human mind, so that it acts in part like a part of nature. And nature is not moral, it is seemingly random. When a stone is loose in the mountainside, it will eventually fall, unheeding of who may be passing beneath it.)

Anyway, now that I unexpectedly have my key, the boots would just have become one more  part of the heavy load I carry with me from one house to the next every time I move. Someone up there is still looking out for me, it seems. ^_^ Of course, that would be the case even if I did not see it, but it is still nice to see it.