Rats!

So much for staying on top of my writing duties. But this time I have a good excuse: I spent last week out of town and with limited computer contact. I was on my annual Back East tour, visiting Caroline and her family in Boston, and then on to New Haven, CT for some serious past reliving. I will write more on this in the next few days, but I've been busy at work catching up on e-mails and projects that have been lagging behind, and the weather has been so nice in the mornings and evenings that I haven't been taking the time to sit in front of my keyboard and screen.

Tangentially related, I've been toying with the idea of taking up running (next year's San Francisco AIDS Marathon or this winter's Honolulu Marathon, perhaps... Am I crazy?!), and later we can delve into why that may happen if I fully commit to it, but since I haven't formally exercised in years, I actually went out on a trial jog last night when I got home from work. It was a beautiful sunny evening in the low 60s, and I ran/walked down to the Wharf and then around to Levi's Plaza and then climbed the cliffside staircase up the east face of Telegraph Hill and back down to home. It wasn't a long distance and I was only gone for 45 minutes, but I gotta start somewhere.

Anyway, while pausing for a drink at the fountain near the base of Coit Tower, something came bursting out of the underbrush towards me, and I thought at first it was a chipmunk or squirrel or one of the rodents I'm more used to seeing scurrying around in the wild. But no, this isn't the woods, this is a city, and as it brazenly streaked past my shoes I saw its long thick hairless tail and recognized it at once as an enormous rat. Fortunately no one was around to witness my little don't-chew-my-toe-or-climb-my-leg dance.

Given that I haven't seen a rat in ages, it was weird then, that this morning as Janet and I walked to work, there was a second gigantic rat, though this one considerably more dead, laying in the middle of the sidewalk just outside the Clown Alley burger joint where I shall now never eat. First spiders, now rats... I'm a little afraid of what may be lying in wait for me next. If it starts raining snakes, I'm moving.