The thunder chicken in the title being, uh, meeeee, not to be confused with the award winning robotics team that our nephew was involved in before he went to college. Those Thunder Chickens are absolutely afraid of nothing and they absolutely rock!

I, on the other hand, am a thunder chicken because I am terrified of lightning. I am a walker. I walk every morning at 0-dark-30. That translates loosely to somewhere around six in the morning. I walk every morning in all kinds of conditions. These days I check the weather (and twitter and facebook) on my iPhone when I’m about to get up. How many layers of clothing will I need this morning. Will I need my bomber hat or my balaclava or just my ski band or an umbrella? Long pants or shorts? Or Snowpants? Layer up or layer down? This is my life.

I don’t walk when it is over 95 degrees (Fahrenheit) and I don’t walk when it is under minus 5 or 10 (can’t remember which). I don’t walk when everything is coated with a quarter inch of ice. And I do not walk when there is even a hint of thunder. I do not trust lightning. About a billion years ago, I was standing here in the Landfill Chitchen, like I am now, and it was a beautiful late spring drizzly day. Rain but no thunder et al. All of a sudden, “KABOOM!!!” What was that! It turned out that lightning from totally out of the blue struck a tree in the little woods behind our house.

Today I did not walk anywhere near the number of miles that I usually walk. This morning, I was just about to get up and take a shower when I heard thunder. Instead of walking today, I forced myself to stay in bed and enjoy the beautiful sound of the rain falling outside. Sometimes, it’s okay to give yourself a pass for that. This afternoon, the Uncly Uncle and the Beautiful Gay came to visit. The GG and the UU spent a lot of time trying to solve all of the problems of the universe and that all felt like my work, so finally The Beautiful Gay and I had a glass of whine. We aren’t gonna live forever, although me and Gay have plenty of good times left. But we may as well have some fun along the way. I often walk on weekend afternoons but I gave myself a pass on that today too. It’s more important to hang out with relations than exercise. Trust me on that.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 2nd, 2010 at 6:37 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.