Cycle 4

I don't plan on doing this map thing forever.  I just want to get maps of my routes and get a good record of how far I walk on each one.  This is my regular cycle 4, which is a rough route.  By rough I mean the terrain is actually rough, uneven, so forth--and it's also very long.  Not many sidewalks, and where there are sidewalks they are broken and hazardous to walk on--and the meters are all over the place--you can't count on them being lined up.  Maybe one is right down by the street, maybe the next is way up in the yard close to the house.  It's a mess.

This one is done in two parts.  It's sequenced so that you park at Sabinas & Cincinnati and do that part that I drew in blue first, then you drive down and park at Cincinnati & Zarzamora and do all the red stuff.  Today I decided to do the worst part first, so I did the stuff in red, which is 6 miles long.  Then I did the other, smaller part, but the app didn't work right and for some reason it couldn't save or upload the map, so I didn't get a record of it and I'll have to do that part again, but I think it was around 1.5 miles.

This map might look a little strange because I had to stitch on that blue part.

It's sometimes an interesting area, and sometimes I see things that I think are...er...interesting.  Today I saw two ducks fighting.  At first I thought maybe they were attempting to "mate" but after a minute or so I decided that no, they were definitely fighting.

There are also lots of college students around here--there's at least one sorority house on this route, so there's sometimes some pleasant "scenery."  One time, that sorority house was holding some kind of barbecue fund raiser, and they had four different barbecues going all at once.  I could smell that stuff all over the place that day.  Having to smell food cooking when you're working is just torture.  It's almost impossible to do this route and not smell someone, somewhere, cooking frijoles.  One time the manager of a Mexican restaurant on this route gave me a free breakfast taco when she saw me outside.

This is one of the routes that I was put on when I was first hired, and have done it regularly since (regularly meaning almost every month, but not every month).  So when I first started, there were these two meters with a Cincinnati address, numbered A and B at the same address, and I couldn't find them.  Whoever had been doing that route before me had sequenced them where it appeared they should have belonged according to their address.  But I couldn't find them.  Since they were still fairly new meters, there was no location information available for them.  According to the address, they should have been somewhere on the north side of Cincinnati between Elmendorf and Alexander.  I walked all over that place and couldn't find them.  So eventually the guy who was our lead meter reader back then (he retired since then, and his replacements are worthless) went out and somehow found both of them.

It turned out that neither of them were anywhere near where it seemed they were supposed to be.  One of them is near the intersection of Vollum and Josephine Tobin, about 3-4 steps off into the grass toward the lake.  The only thing it services, as far as I can tell, is a water fountain.  The other one is somewhere on the other side of the lake.  So it wasn't even on the right route.  The other side of the lake, and yet it has the same address as the other one--neither of which are even close to Cincinnati Avenue.

Another thing that makes this route bad is the number of loose vicious and semi-vicious dogs on it.  There was one that kept jumping his fence and coming after me.  He's still there, but one time I threw a beer bottle at him and luckily whacked him right in the face with it.  Since then he never has jumped the fence.