first long walk in a while

Since my toe infection, I've done several very short walks of about 11,000 steps each—nothing special. Tomorrow (Saturday), however, I plan to do a walk from Bundang back to my place with my buddy JW, who had texted me a few days ago about doing a nighttime walk from 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. JW had basically read my mind: with summer now in full swing (and with the monsoon season finally waking up and doing its thing), nighttime walking, rain or not, is the way to go. The Weather.com forecast seems to be showing a break in the rain tomorrow afternoon, evening, and night: the chance of rain will be low, around 5% (I just now checked to confirm). I'll be bringing along my poncho anyway, but I don't think I'll need it.

It'll be good to get back into walking. God knows I need to get moving again, and I need to learn to stop doing stupid things to my feet, e.g., cutting too deeply into callused skin with nail clippers, thus allowing infections to happen. Many of my problems in life are self-inflicted, so this is a chance to learn something from my experiences.

Thoughts of short walks lead to thoughts of long walks. Still no definite word from my boss on whether I'll be permitted to take a month off to walk in October. I have almost 40 comp hours to my name, so in theory, I could apply those hours to the month-long vacation, thereby reducing the unpaid amount of the vacation from two weeks to one week. October also has a couple national holidays, if I'm not mistaken: there's Hangeul Day on Friday, October 9, and more important, there's Chuseok, which is officially on Thursday, October 1 this year. That means we'll be getting September 30 and October 2 off as well, thus giving us a five-day weekend. What this means for me is that I'll be getting those national holidays off like everyone else, but I won't have to suffer through as many unpaid vacation days: instead of taking five unpaid days, I can take only one. Here's what I mean:

If I'm lucky, I can squeeze in another comp-time day (boss permitting) and not have to take any unpaid days off. If I'm lucky.

Upshot: I'm hopeful that I can do a big trans-Korea walk this year, but in the meantime, I'm looking toward to tomorrow's 17.5-kilometer walk with my good friend.