2001-04-24 - 11:59 p.m.

Walking to the Hospital

Note: one of the exercises suggested in the book I am reading is something called "free writing." Basically you sit down and just write for ten minutes. It's a way to get yourself unblocked, even if all you are writing is: "I don't know what to say," over and over again.

Below is one of these exercises about something I did today. It's pretty much as I wrote it, except I cleaned up the spelling and grammar mistakes.

Since I have a doctors appointment in a few days, I had to go get a blood test at the hospital. The hospital is just a few blocks away, but I kept going back and forth in my mind - should I walk or take the car? It's little debates like this that make me late for everything.

At length I decided to walk - the weather was unseasonably nice and even though the sky was darkening, I thought the rain would hold off.

My neighborhood is just a few blocks from a river, and since the hospital is in the opposite direction the walk to it is all uphill. As I was walking I noticed a few things.

Even though the weather has been summer-like for the last few days its definitely been a fake summer - I could feel the hint of a spring chill in the air even though the temperature is still too hot for a jacket. The strong wind was also unseasonable. I noticed dark clouds blowing in, I hoped it wouldn't start to rain before I got back.

However, the main thing that told me that spring was only just beginning was the planet. Most of the bushes were only just starting to bloom. The big exception was the forsythia bushes - their little yellow flowers are the first sign that spring is really beginning around here. I saw several of the bright yellow bushes, but I was sad to notice that the high wind was blowing off the little blooms before their time.

The first couple hardy daffodils were coming up too, in a couple of weeks or so we'll be seeing a riot of tulips.

A couple of blocks from my house I saw something dark on the sidewalk. I thought it was a wad of dead leaves, but when I got closer to it I saw it was a bird's nest - blown out of the nearby trees by the high winds. Once I got closer I noticed something odd about it - it seemed to be mainly composed of animal fur. Maybe a raccoon was shedding nearby when the nest was being built? However when I was right on top of it I saw that there was the mummified corpse of a little bird in the nest too. Kind of sad.

Once you get past the halfway point to the hospital the houses change, become more opulent. These are doctors houses - obviously they like living next to the hospital. Lots of well-kept yards and rich-looking dwellings.

A couple minutes later I was walking across the hospital parking lot to the Emergency room entrance. In front of the door there was a sign pained on the pavement, I don't know whether the painter was overzealous or had made a mistake, but in letters a foot high it read "NO NO PARKING."

The walk to the hospital took about eight minutes - I would have been a big lazybones to have taken a car.

The blood test was over in about 15 minutes, but by the time I left the hospital the weather was turning. The sky was darker and it was jacket weather again. I made it home before any rain started

Time: 13 mins