I started walking again last night.  I don’t know what it is that makes me stop, but I just totally lose my motivation to walk for periods of time, then my health slowly gets worse.  I feel a little better already.  And the dogs, well I think they are elated.  They enjoy their walks immensely and just go crazy when I ask them be either saying one of the keyboards (walk, leash, or the pacman sound ‘wokawokawoka’) or by showing them their harnesses.  This, alone, should give me the motivation I need to take a walk daily, but I still just make excuses to myself with other things I need to get done, or “I did this today, so that should add enough exercise for the day”, or one of a hundred other things come up to give me a reason not to walk.  I even have a “desk treadmill” complete with a PC so I can watch whatever I want while I’m walking when there’s bad weather.  No excuses.  I just have to make it a priority, that’s all.  Going a month or two without a single walk is no longer acceptable and will kill me.  I need to keep telling myself that.  I have gained back the weight I worked a long time to lose, so now I start all over again.  Hopefully, telling myself this in a web post, to the world, will somehow help and encourage me to be consistent and walk every day from now on.

Yesterday’s walk was on 0.7 miles, but it felt like miles to me.  I’m clearly out of shape.  Or at least out of what I consider to be my normal.  I used to be able to walk 2 to 3 miles without issue, completely wearing out the dogs, and I felt really good afterward.  Last night I chose a circle of a few blocks and figured I would extend the walk depending on how I felt along the way.  I was always trying to strategically end the walk by coming back so we walked past this one house on an opposte corner of our block who always had a large basket in their front yard with a sign that said “Drop your bagged poop here”, and so I would.  I don’t know what they did with it, or why they were so nice to offer such an option, but I liked it and supported it with daily bags of Shadow and Tiger’s “donations.”  Last night that basket was gone completely, so I had to carry my bags the rest of the way home.  So I guess, from now on, I’m free to walk in any direction I want, they’re all pretty much the same–except for one side of our block with a very large and protective German Shepherd behind a 4-foot chain link fence he can easily jump over, which I avoid completely.  Not because of the dog though–because of the lady who lives there.  She, just like her dog, is very aggressive, and actually scolded me for letting my dogs walk on her grass.  They were leashed of course, but like to check everything out, and her German Shepherd, barking and jumping like crazy at my chihuahuas, got my dogs going, so they wanted to get closer and argue with him.   She said “Do you see the sign?  Do you mind getting your dogs off my lawn?”  The sign said “BEWARE OF DOG”.  Ok, I see the dog.  And I reeled in my leash to its shortest length so my dogs game back to the sidewalk.  But if she’s really that concerned about walkers’ dogs stepping on her grass, why not put up a fence in your front yard and not just your backyard?  Sheesh.  I just really didn’t see any harm in them stepping a few feet onto her lawn, but it is her lawn, so I pulled them off.  I just didn’t see why she had to be so mean about it though, I was just walking by.  We would have been gone and out of her dog’s sight in less than a minute.  So that’s why I try to avoid that side of our block.  It’s just sad that some people have to be so mean toward their neighbors while others leave something special out (the bagged-poop basket) to encourage dog-walking neighbors to walk by.