Nocturnal Perambulation

If you want to cut down on the syllable count, just say “night walk.” A storm has been headed our way all day long. And after all the family business of the evening had been transacted, by which I mean dinner (I’ll admit it: frozen pizza), 1.0 episodes of regular old-school (i.e. Michael Moriarty era) “Law and Order” and .5 units of “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit” on cable, “The Daily Show,” which did a nice bit on Falluja’s impact on the future of Iraqi democracy, and the beginning of the KTVU’s “10 O’Clock News,” which had thrilling local jet-fuel-pipeline-rupture video to show, I headed out for a short walk before the rain. Stopped at the open-till-midnight drug store and bought some unneeded “athletic energy” (or ‘fancy candy”) bars for future consumption. Headed north on the streets that cut across the lower part of the ridge that marks the beginning of the hills here in North Berkeley (our house is about 120 feet above sea level, and the high point on the walk, as I know from my new mapping software, was 400 feet). All was quiet, except for the airline flights climbing as they headed east on all-night trips (if the wind shifts to the south or southwest as the storm moves in, the air traffic pattern will reverse and we’ll have incoming flights descending to the west over the hills). Got home just as the rain really started to come down.