Friday, September 04, 2020

I'll be out having "fun" tonight

Another power outage is scheduled for tonight, and unlike last week, I'm not even going to try to endure the sweatbox conditions. I toyed with the idea of doing a massive walk to Bundang and back (over 50,000 steps), but I won't do that until Saturday night. Tonight, I'm going to head to a local motel, get a room, hook into the Wi-Fi with my laptop, blog and binge on YouTube, then check out late-ish Saturday morning (say, 10:30 a.m.) and head to Itaewon to pick up some ground lamb and feta for next week's office shindig: I'll be making gyros for the crew. Thanks to my buddy Charles, I have a flatbread recipe that I'll be using to make about twelve rounds for use as gyro wraps. I'll prep the meat and the flatbread over the weekend, and I'll prep the rest over the coming week, serving everything on Friday for lunch.

Saturday night, I'll do a nighttime walk from about 9 p.m. to around 5 or 6 a.m. Sunday morning. With the recent passing of Typhoon Maysak ("my sac"?), it feels as if a switch has flipped, meteorologically speaking: nighttime temperatures in the Seoul area are now down in the 60s Fahrenheit (18-20 Celsius). I'm hoping for a cool fall, but for now, I'm happy to have pleasant weather to hike in at night (although we do have yet another damn typhoon heading our way early next week). The reason I'm doing this long walk is to test my right foot, which has been bothering me over the past week. It's back to being slightly swollen again, and there's an ache radiating from inside the foot that's hard to ignore, even with meds. Because of the X-ray taken this past February, I know my foot isn't a festering mass of diabetic gangrene, so I'm betting the ache is from something else—some problem that never got solved despite the healing of my pre-Valentine's-Day stress fracture. This is bothersome because, over the months since February, I've done lengthy walks with my Korean friend JW, and my foot wasn't complaining much during those treks. So why is the pain flaring up now? No idea.

The one thing that matters to me is whether I'm going to experience an intolerable amount of pain while walking. I have to do a lengthy distance walk now, rather than later, so that I can recover from whatever I do to myself in time for the walk's start date. I'd also rather know my limits early on so I can figure out whether I need to cancel the walk and just wait until next year. While canceling and waiting would suck, such a move may be necessary. I have no intention of doing anything that might cripple me.

Anyway, I'm hitting a motel tonight, and since I'll be "out on the town," so to speak, I might also hit a restaurant... if any are open after 8 p.m., given the government's current quasi-lockdown. After dinner, it's back to the motel to chill. Such is my idea of "fun."



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