back from my errand

Back from my bank errand as of a few hours ago. 

When I got to Daechi Station, I elected to walk up the steps on the Mido side of the street instead of going the other way and taking the escalator up—the lazy-man route that I normally use. Feeling perhaps a wee bit suicidal, I wanted to test my heart by going up the steps on the Mido side. When you get off the subway, an escalator takes you partway up the huge underground level. You then have to do two flights of 13 steps each. After that, you're through the turnstile, and there's a choice: go left, and an escalator takes you to the street level, but you're now across the street from Mido Shopping Center, the destination. So there's a little bit of extra walking, but it's all on flat ground. Or—go right, then go up the steps of Exit 5 to reach the street level, and Mido is right there. The Exit 5 steps are in three flights: 15 steps, 13 steps, then finally, 19 steps. This is nothing if you're at all healthy and in moderately decent shape, but I hadn't done such steps in a long while, so I was, as I implied earlier, suicidally curious. I went up the steps at a slow-but-steady pace and managed to get to the top without stopping. Funny thing: I reached the top and didn't feel winded at first, but after I started forward on the sidewalk and had gotten maybe ten or twenty meters, I suddenly felt it. There was no angina or anything, but there was a kind of breathlessness that came over me. Not serious, not enough to make me faint, but enough to hint that I had tempted fate and needed to walk slowly until I'd gotten my breath back. And that was that. I'm totally fine now.

Since I was out and about during the day, I couldn't help noticing that the reign of terror known as Korean summer does seem to be fading, even during the daytime. That's nice. My walk earlier this week (and there's another one coming tonight) was also fairly cool and pleasant, with minimal sweatiness. Nighttime walks will continue for now, but once it's cool enough during the day, I'll again start walking during more human hours so that I'm not always out with the ghouls and goblins and ghosts.

While at Mido, and after my bank visit (during which I'd sent $700 Stateside), I trundled over to a stationery store and bought four 3-ring binders along with ten transparent binder sleeves so I can sort a bunch of paperwork that's been needing sorting for a million years. I'll do all of that over the weekend; it's a daunting project. The total cost of the four binders and ten sets of clear binder pockets was an astounding W50,000, and for a while, I thought the old lady running the store had fucked me over. Fuming a bit, I checked Coupang's prices for the selfsame products, and... lo and behold, the price the lady had charged turned out to be cheaper. To her credit, when I complained about how expensive everything was, she apologetically agreed that, yes, it was all expensive. But she hadn't gone over the market rate, and now, I feel kinda' bad for fuming and complaining. I didn't yell at the lady or accuse her or anything, so I at least don't have that on my conscience.

And now, it's time to get on with the rest of my day: I need to finish proofreading the Substack posts that are going out tomorrow, then I've got yet another Substack post to churn out. This one's on verb tenses and won't be out until October 6. That's around Chuseok, right? Aha—that's Chuseok right on the nose, and since it's on a Monday, the Chuseok holiday is going from Sunday through Wednesday the 8th. Nice. I'll probably do a four-day practice walk, from Incheon to Yangpyeong (120 km), in that case.