Don't ever get them wet                     

Intuitively, it seems like suburbs are a safe zone outside the dangers realm of the city.  Pretty stucco-exterior homes with sweeping driveways and zillions of bedrooms punctuate tree-lined streets, families stroll to community pools with bouncy children, and runners make their merry way through well-manicured greenbelt trails.  It’s that last part that I chose to indulge last night, and the experience revealed a bit of the suburbs’ edgy side. 

While housesitting for my canine niece and nephew last night, I decided to take advantage of the clean air in lovely Kingwood and go for a run on the trails that lace throughout the small suburb.  I tied my key to my shoe, grabbed a water bottle and my phone, and hit the trail.  The greenbelts, if you aren’t familiar, are wooded, paved trails that snake throughout the maze of streets up there.  Since they weave through and across the whole twisty, cul-de-sacky mess, they aren’t exactly straight.  Can you see where this is going?

I decided to go 15 minutes out and head back—I’m used to running inside and while it wasn’t especially hot, it wasn’t cool, either.  After 15 minutes, it was getting pretty dusky.  The alarm on my phone told me it was time to head back to the house, so I turned around and retraced my steps to the last turn I had made.  It’s not possible to stay on the same trail for very long, because they all deadend into each other.  To make things easier, I had taken only right turns, so everything should have been a left on the way back.  Somehow, somewhere on the return trip, I either missed a turn or took a wrong one, because I found myself on a street that wasn’t anything like the right one.  This was after making several wrong turns, finding myself on other wrong streets, and heading back into the trail.  At this point, it was getting really dark and it seemed like continuing on the unlit trail was a b-a-d bad idea.  Surely, I thought, that street would bring me out to the main road I knew and I could find my way back to the house from there.

That ended up being true, but only after about 40 minutes of wandering around. 

Recall the contents in my hands at the beginning of this story—my phone and a water bottle.  During the active running part of the evening (once I figured out I was lost, I started walking because I wasn’t sure how long it would take me to find my way and I didn’t feel like wasting energy I might need for lots of wandering), I (foolishly) kept switching the phone and water bottle between my hands.  After a while, I think the phone was in a pretty wet hand nonstop.  Shortly before I found the right street, a friend in Austin called, and I added to the phone’s water experience by holding it against my sweaty little face so we could talk. 

To say the phone didn’t like that would be a rather offensive understatement.  It actually hissed at me.  Then it started pushing its own 3 button over and over again.  Finally, it just gave up.  You can turn it on, and you can push buttons all you want, but nothing happens. 

So I went to a Sprint store today and bought the phone I’ve been eyeing for a month or so.  It’s pretty great, though I’m kind of cranky that I had to buy it after all—I had only recently decided to forego this purchase as there was nothing wrong with the old phone.  So it goes. 

In other news that makes me look silly, I accidentally put my fingers in my coffee this morning, thinking I was reaching into my slinky.