Week in Review 2024-09-22 — False Fall

After an oppressive heat wave and subsequent wildfires all over the Southland, we whip-lashed in the other direction and had a genuinely cool week that felt like autumn. The temps fell by about 30 degrees over a couple of days, eliciting yearnings of hope that the cruel summer had ended and fall had truly started in earnest. But just as folks began rummaging in the back of the closet for a light jacket, mother nature yanked the blissfully ideal temps away from us and flipped the switch back to summer.

If you’ve lived here awhile, you know that summer barges in like an unwanted guest and will stand in the doorway to talk and say good bye for another hour instead of finally leaving after too long a stay.

True autumn usually doesn’t begin until late October/early November after a wobbly period of whipsawing temperatures, before finally dropping below 70 and staying there for the duration of winter. Which is really just the season when it rains.

The good thing about the weather is that it stayed around for precisely one more day, which was awesome because I was running my first 5K on Saturday and if the sun had been out, I would’ve been dying. As it is, the marine layer was nice and thick, the temp was around 60 degrees, and I finished with a time of 31:42. Considering I couldn’t run for more than a couple of minutes at this time last year, and I have never, ever been someone who ran as a choice, this was quite an achievement.

I’ve been training for a 5K since April, and my concerns extended well beyond mere stamina and cardiovascular fitness. I have compartment syndrome in my legs and have had multiple surgeries to address it. This can be a potentially deadly condition, so I started extremely slow and ramped things up at a snail’s pace, looking for any signs of the tightness and tingling that usually presage a return of the condition. Luckily, the stars aligned and I was able to run a few times a week until I hit the 5K mark repeatedly on the treadmill.

In fact, it was my knee that turned out to be the problem child, but strength exercises and stretching seemed to address that and it didn’t give me any issues during the actual run on Saturday, which was the first time I’d actually run a 5K outside for real (please see the above paragraphs regarding weather and heat).

After the 5K, I spent the weekend clearing out and building up my little hobby corner in the garage. I got a couple of small desks and other items from IKEA and assembled them, and I also found this cheap carpet material that I could slap down on the garage floor in that area to give it a comfy feel. I just have to remove some old paint and other things for the hazardous material drop-off and it’ll be ready to move all of my airbrush and model-making materials down to the garage, along with my 3D printer. I’m really looking forward to using and improving it over time.

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• 👍 P Pekka