The Old WestToday I walked down to the other end of the 16th Street Mall to get calendar pages for my DayRunner from Office Depot. On the side of the building were tethered three police horses, piled with equipment, without an officer in sight. Despite the seeming stupidity and risk of this arrangement, the scene pleased me. Denver hasn't many vistas of its life as a frontier mining town, but here were horses munching at nosebags as if their cowboy owners had just stepped into a nearby saloon for a whisky and a gunfight. I stood admiring the horses for a minute, and the officers returned. One acted much more friendly than the others and he told me the bookends--his word--were Morgans and the middle one was something else that I forget. Anyway. The scene struck me as Old West and that pleased me.
In the Office Depot, near the calendar display, on the fifth day of the year, during lunch hour downtown, a scattered few browsers idled among the plentiful stock.
I bought a deck of dated Page-a-Day sheets, which I hope I shall make use of. The Week-at-a-Glance didn't have room for personal and work notes; if I jotted a note to remind myself of a layout task I didn't have room to remark on my internal jukebox selection. But the OD was out of Month-at-a-Glance calendar pages, and the only stockperson serving the pulsing masses was in a wheelchair. Slap my hind with a melon rind, but that's my penguin state of mind: when most of the overstock is stacked eight feet up, so that stockers with use of their legs need a ladder, is a worker in a wheelchair the most efficient choice? Her affliction affected her hands, too, so that she couldn't write down stock numbers. Does thinking so make me intolerant or just ruthlessly capitalist?
GearsI had more luck buying a watch battery. The one I bought in March 1997 died in September: in the eight years I've had the watch, that was my third battery, and I was so disgusted by its short life I've gone watchless for over four months. I bought it from a jeweler's that has since gone out of business, whose proprietor was rude to me. It all makes sense now. This time I bought from an individual with a cart who told me the gears are beginning to rust. Well. I guess that could be my fault.
ExerciseThirty minutes on the Nordic Track
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