Next!
Well, that was fun. Kinda. I’m glad my month of walking is done (and so are my feet, I’m sure), but I’m proud to have walked five miles almost every day for 30 days. I think I’m marginally more fit as well. For completeness’ sake: Yesterday I walked 5.3 miles and today exactly 5.
Tomorrow I start my May project: Photography on a schedule. Roughly every hour an alarm will go off and I’ll within thirty seconds I’ll take a photo. Of what? Whatever I can find to photograph within thirty seconds. This will generate lots of boring photos, I’m sure, but if there’s one thing I know about great photographers it’s that they throw away hundreds, even thousands of shots for every one they bother to print. An interesting side-effect is that it will give you a snapshot (no pun intended) of where I am and what I’m doing fourteen times a day. Fourteen? Yeah, roughly once an hour from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m.
Why do I keep saying “roughly”? Because I’m trying to ratchet up the randomness. The easiest thing would be to set a timer (or my $10 digital watch) to beep every hour on the hour. But then I’ll end up saying, “Oh, it’s just about X:00, almost time to take a picture” and start looking around for things to photograph. If, however, I make it random-get an alarm to go off near, but a random number of minutes before or after, the hour-I won’t know when it’s coming. I won’t be able to prepare for it and spontanaety, ironically, will be compulsory.
This turns out to be a bit technically tricky. I’ve been putting off coming up with a real solution to the “random timer” problem-it will probably involve writing a script that emails my phone at randomly-generated times-but for tomorrow I’ve just rolled some dice and manually entered 14 calendar items into my phone. This is less than ideal for a variety of reasons that are uniformly boring, so just take my word for it. As I’ve mentioned before, whenever possible I’ll be uploading photos directly from my phone to this web site (which involves some dreary memory card-swapping between phone and camera), so put on your voyeur hats and check back often.
As for April, sometimes soon I’ll put together a postmortem post with charts and graphs and stuff showing what I did and did not accomplish. I’m also brainstorming other ways to keep getting exercise without boring myself to death, so expect to hear about that. I can tell you’re on the edges of your seats.
Originally published at Jordan, Walking. Please leave any comments there.