I’ve been feeling frustrated waiting for news about a couple of work things, so I decided to go for a long walk on this sunny day, in hopes of improving my mood and hopefully getting some ideas for a story I’m trying to work out. I decided to go to Fairview Park, the overlook park that’s a moderate walk to the west of my apartment, where I’ve sometimes gone to think through story ideas and scenes over the past couple of years. The nearer overlook area and adjacent playground were too crowded for me to get any thinking done, so I decided to keep walking up the long north-to-south drive that goes through the narrow park. I was unsure if I wanted to go all the way to the McMillan Avenue entrance to that drive, though, because I knew from past experience back in my college years that there was only a partial sidewalk on the park’s side of the street, and no stop light or crosswalk on that part of McMillan, which is just past a sharp blind curve, so it’s a dangerous place to cross (and if I recall, a part of the road prone to collisions). I did cross there from time to time back in college, but it always scared me to do so, and in my recent trips to the park I’ve generally avoided going all the way up to McMillan, instead just doubling back and going home the way I came. The one time last year that I did cross there, I saw that there’d been some improvement in the safety of that curve in the road — divider posts along the center line and painted no-drive areas along the sides narrowing the road to one lane of traffic either way. That made it relatively safer to cross there, but I still wasn’t comfortable doing so.

Still, after sitting and thinking for a bit at the other, emptier overlook area today (during which I did make some good progress on my story idea), I decided to go all the way up to McMillan and chance the crossing instead of doubling back. But upon arriving at the corner, I was very pleased to discover that in the time since I’d last been there, the city had put in a full sidewalk along the south side of the road! Just like I’ve always wanted since my college days decades ago, I was finally able to walk all the way back without having to cross that dangerous stretch of road. That was so satisfying that it evaporated my bad mood. It improves my options for walks around the neighborhood going forward, which is good, since I prefer having a variety of different routes to take to keep things fresh. Next time, I’ll have to try it in the other direction.

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Meanwhile, it’s now been a bit over three weeks since I got my desktop mini-PC back from the shop, and even though they said they didn’t discover what was making it crash and didn’t do anything except clean it, it hasn’t crashed even once since I got it back (though I’m afraid of jinxing it by saying so). Maybe there was some physical problem that cleaning it fixed. Or maybe it was being caused by the unnecessary antivirus program that someone at the shop must have uninstalled even though the guy I talked to insisted he hadn’t.

Unfortunately, the problem of the computer occasionally freezing up on shutdown hasn’t been magically fixed, since that happened once not long after I got the computer back. A couple of times, it’s seemed to happen if I shut down too quickly after closing the open programs, and though it may be a spurious correlation, I’ve been avoiding that and haven’t had another freeze so far.