Appointments with cats, and a review of January

Since we are at the beginning of February, it is a good time to look at how I am doing against the walking target for the year.

Unfortunately, I have to say that it is not so good. I am not on target. It is not irrecoverable, but I need to improve.

The target for the year was to equal last year’s total steps and achieve 6,300,000h. That averages out at 17,300 per day. In January, I actually achieved 490,422, or an average of 15820 steps per day. That does not compare well with January 2017, when I achieved a total of 515,352, or an average of 16624 steps per day. So there is quite a bit of catching up to do.

The reason things have not gone as well as I would like in January is that I have been largely office-bound during the month. Indeed, it has been a struggle even to achieve what was done in that month. And the offices involved have not been in Basel, where a normal day would involve a certain amount of walking around the campus. No, they have been at distant locations, where I have been in long meetings, and the longest walk in the working day was to the coffee machine or to lunch.

That means that what was achieved was very much dependent on walking early in the mornings and late in the evenings. And that is what brings me to the cats.

For the last week of the month, I was visiting a company location in the US and staying in a hotel in Parsippany, New Jersey. I would rise at 5:30 each morning and go for a walk before breakfast, usually walking for about an hour. The hotel is in the middle of an office development, and the walk around the hotel property was 800 steps. I could walk around the hotel grounds about nine times in an hour. At 5:30, there was no one and almost nothing moving. There were two mornings when I disturbed deer in the hotel grounds. As soon as I came within 50 metres, they would stop their grazing and run off into the nearby trees. But on most mornings, by 06:00, I would encounter a cat. It was always a black cat, and always sitting in a shaded spot about two or 3 metres from my walking route. It was a different spot each day, but always somewhere out of the light from the car park lamps. They would not move away, but calmly sat there watching silently as I passed. By 06:15, there would be two or three cats. They were again always black, but at that time, they would often be somewhere better lit. They would never be too close to each other, usually a few metres between them, as if they did not totally trust each other. On one occasion, there were four cats, three black and one grey.

Cats have an association with witches, and having seen the behaviour of these cats I can understand why: sitting in darkness, silent, watching. And when there was more than one, it was as if they were communicating telepathically with each other. Maybe they were. Maybe the grey cat was a visiting delegate from a distant coven. Who knows? At times, when the group was there, they seemed like desperadoes meeting up after completion of some nefarious enterprise. Perhaps they were comparing notes on the night’s hunting. Once again, who knows?

The first time I saw them, I was surprised. The second day, I was interested. The third day, I came to accept it as normal, and by the fifth day it was routine. In any case, it meant that by the third day rising early was less of a chore, as I wondered would I see them that day. It helped my step count, giving me over 7000 steps each day before breakfast.

I did not take photos of the cats that I met. After all, you never know what witchcraft might follow. So I indebted to Dreamstime for the heading photo here.