So it’s a little after 11 PM. I stayed on the treadmill for over 2.5 hours watching Expendables 3 and talking on Facebook Messenger. When the movie was over I looked at the goals on my fitbit and noticed i only had 6 flights of stairs for the day and my goal is 10. I knew i could go get the mail at the end of our driveway at the bottom of the hill and walking back up gives me 2 flights of stairs or 20 feet of elevation. Two trips down the drive way and back would give me the 40 feet of elevation to get my 100 feet elevation for the day. As I was walking down the driveway in the cold night air nicely lit by the moonlight i kept looking back over my shoulder with the flash light for anything that may be attempting to ambush me. You know the usual suspects, panthers, coy’otes (like the old prespector on SNL would say), and wolves.
The idea of wolves reminded me of an ongoing joke I had with a former coworker and a bizarre incident. Years ago I made some walking trails on the wooded property here and often walked on them alone at night. It was creepy sometimes and I tried to imagine what I might encounter here in the Florida woods at night. I playfully came up with the idea of encountering one or more wolves and started kind of playing with the hypothetical idea trying to think of how i could best protect myself. Some type of club, a baseball bat, a machete, a morning star, a ninja sword, or a gun of some kind maybe. Oddly enough I do have all those items although the morning star isn’t for real use according to where i bought it. I’m not sure what that means since i think they were originally used for attacking someone in metal armor like a medieval knight. LOL.
Before my former coworker got another job, i used to run wild and crazy ideas by him. Ideas like what would be the best defense against a wolf or pack wolves if i was attacked at night while going for a stress-free walk on my trails. We had several interesting discussions on it and I think he finally said a baseball bat and go for their back legs which are kind of weak. Some weeks later on a windy Saturday afternoon, I was picking up fallen tree branches and various debris in the front part of the property when I saw a very large dog that looked exactly like a wolf. He kept running and didn’t stop thankfully. Later, I went inside the house and mentioned it to my wife. I told her it looked like a wolf but that should be impossible. She wasn’t at all shocked like I was expecting and she said, oh it’s probably an escapee from the wolf preserve down the road. After a moment of being shocked at the idea I then thought how cool is that, we live near a wolf preserve. LOL. And don’t worry, I’m not going to attack them with any items from my thought experiment and they are quite used to being around people and are hopefully just as harmless to me as i am to them.
One last funny morsel related to this topic. Much later than the stories above, my daughter, who was 8 or 9 at the time walked into my home office while I was working at my desk and where I have the decorative weapons such as the morning star and ninja sword. She asked me if I still used the ninja sword and I stopped for a moment and said oh no, all this stuff is just for decoration. Then I thought about it and my daughter doesn’t usually ask random questions very often so I asked her why she asked. She said well she remembers I used to walk on the trails at night for exercise and sometimes I would take the ninja sword. I kind of laughed at the thought and told her she was right, I did used to take the sword with me at night and use it for a defensive weapon and luckily I never had to use against any wild vicious animals.
JasonFLBlog 