100º F, but feels like 111º F

My cell phone's Weather.com app is telling me that it's insanely hot right now (38º C, feeling like 44º C), but I'm going to go for a creekside megawalk in that heat with nothing more than my small backpack and maybe four liters of water. Normally, I hike at night, which is probably also the wiser course for today, but every now and again, I fancy a good daytime stroll.

Here's my problem, though: while I love hiking at night, I prefer going to the gym in the morning. This has led to a sort of paradox in my daily schedule that has caused my gym attendance to grind to a halt. The problem is that, on a day when I go to the gym in the morning, I don't like walking at night, and on a night when I do my walking, I don't like going to the gym the following morning. Result: I've ended up doing neither. Ideally, and as I discussed a month or so ago, I should be doing everything in the morning: my creekside walks every Monday-Wednesday-Friday, and my gym-plus-staircase routines every Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday. But such a schedule means waking up very early every morning, something I'm still constitutionally averse to doing.

"So what's to prevent you from doing gym + walks at night?" you ask. This is going to sound weird, but what I like about hitting the gym at 6:30AM is that there aren't any expats in there: it's all Koreans. I don't know why, but it'd weird me out to be grunting and sweating away with a fellow Westerner in the room. Am I a racist? Maybe, but I think it's something else because I don't get weirded out when going to a gym in the States. What's going on may actually be a form of GOMAS, a syndrome that I wrote about long ago.

Before I head out on my walk, though, I have to swing by a contact-lens store and buy myself a new lens. I have no idea whether lenses are sold singly, but if they are, I count on paying W35,000 for one instead of W70,000 for a pair. After coming home from my abortive walk yesterday, I was so exhausted that I crawled into bed without removing my contacts, and I can only assume that my right-side lens crawled off, and out of, my eye while I was sleeping. This has happened before, and it's a fairly common occurrence for wearers of contacts, but I was troubled that I couldn't find the lens once I woke up. Normally, the lens will be sitting on the pillow, or somewhere on the mattress, or it will have tumbled off the bed and onto the floor. I've looked everywhere, and the lens seems to have disappeared. One other sinister possibility is that the lens is still inside my eye socket, having somehow crawled around my eye and tucked itself into the orbit somewhere. While there's a chance that that might have happened, it's been more than 24 hours, which is plenty of time for the lens either to make itself felt or to have crawled back around to the front and ejected itself from my eye. None of this has happened, so I'm assuming the lens left my eye and has simply gotten lost at sea.

Anyway, I'm hitting the lens place before going on my walk, and I'll make an effort to take my lenses out before sleeping from now on. Something tells me that my dried-up lens will turn up eventually; that's happened before. I've been wearing contacts since high school, so at this point, I've (forgive the optical pun) seen it all.

ADDENDUM: barely ten minutes after publishing this blog post, I found my fucking lens. I don't know how it got there, but it was sitting, tucked away, on the shelf where I keep my contact-lens-related supplies. It must have dropped off my unfeeling fingertip while I was trying to transfer it from my eye to the lens case (after I'd woken up from several hours of sleeping while wearing the lenses, I mean). The lens is as dry as a bone right now, so I'm letting it soak in saline solution for two hours before I risk putting it back on my eye. But at least that saves me a W35,000 trip to the contact-lens store, eh?

ADDENDUM 2: out of sheer monkey curiosity, I checked the soaking lens after ten minutes. Poof—like magic, it was ready to wear, so it's on my eye now.