dawn at Lake Ella

3/11/2020

Keely doesn’t push me out of the door too often, but when she needs to, she does. Apparently she had a bit of the runs and needed to “go”; of course, given her health scare last year (that long ago already?) I’m paranoid about anything that might suggest a flare up of that, so my nerves are shot even though it might just be that she ate a bug or something (because I love dogs but they are disgusting, ewwwww). She ate up her breakfast just fine, so we’ll see how she fares this evening.

With the adrenaline pumping before even 5 am, I’m here now with…coffee! My precious bean juice! I have been without it since the Fat Tuesday of Doom (aka the day the stomach flue hit me like a locomotive) so this morning is a literal acid test of whether my system is recovered. *sips coffee* So far, so good!

Anyway, the morning walk: it was early enough that even the regulars were not there yet, and traffic was mostly cops out circling, looking for trouble. The park is so still and quiet, and I think about how for most people that would a strange thing given how popular and busy it normally is. The only people I saw there were a couple canoodling on a bench, probably up late as opposed to up early. A good date for them, I suppose!

As we came around back toward Monroe Ave. I saw a stream of about seven men wandering through the U-Haul/Storage parking lot, headed for Sonic, which is well and truly closed at 4:45 am. Homeless people rarely travel in groups of three or more, in my experience, and it was the wrong time for the night bus to let off a group of people anywhere. Where would they be going, even? It was weird.

By the time I got up to the park’s parking lot facing Monroe, I saw a cop talking to a person in the sonic parking lot, and I wonder if he had been trailing those guys. They hadn’t been running, though.

Nightlife is a mystery sometimes.