Kuliouou X: My penultimate summer hike. By running longer and more frequent stretches, throwing in those 10- to 20-second sprints whenever I could manage them, and really pushing the end, I shaved 39 seconds off the last hike's time. Now I have to decide whether I want to push or coast on Wednesday. Pros for pushing: It'll be my last summer table hike and I could come up with a better personal best. Pros for coasting: It'll be my last summer table hike and it would be awesome to really take in the sights, sounds and smells without constantly checking the time. Oh, and without being in pain. That would be new, and great, too.

I think I could actually do better if I had a more streamlined load (I shouldn't make fun of the camelbak, I know!), and if I left the dog at home. He doesn't necessarily hold me back - if anything, he runs circles around me as I huff and puff my way up the mountain - but it is one more bottle of water in my pack, and he does need to be looked after and prodded at times when a tree or another hiker or a mysterious pile of something on the trail is just too interesting for him to pass up. Plus, the re-arranging of selves after we've tripped over each others' ankles for the fifteenth time each hike could be eliminated if I went on my own. However, he has been such good company on all 10 of these hikes that I can't imagine not having him with me. It's no secret that I am not the president of my dog's fan club, but we really do bond on the trail. We look after each other, and much as he loves to run ahead, he always stops and waits for me to catch up.


Anyway, we're home now, taking a breather while I decide if an afternoon swim is a good idea. I just stuffed K's platypus, Bubba, into the washing machine because K peed on him when we weren't looking last night - S. thinks we waited too long to take him out, but I think he was just trying on his dominant hat, showing the plat who's boss around here. Yes, we'll get him fixed sometime soon - I don't think our dream beagle girlfriend is ever going to materialize. So much for Juggles.

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No afternoon swim. Instead, I went to Wal*Mart (once again, I hate everything about Wal*Mart except the prices. That includes its location, the parking lot, fellow shoppers, the store itself, the cosmically weird fact that they usually have one crinkled, smudgy package of whatever it is I need left in stock, the mile-long and molasses-slow checkout, and, today, the woman in the SUV who came barreling the wrong way down a one-way aisle, then made over-the-top beneficent gestures for me to drive around her big, gas-guzzling ass.) Uh, yeah, I went to W*M. Got some pics done, picked up more frames, bought BRADS (I knew there was a name for nails that aren't really nails). Then had a most wonderful, unhurried lunch at Kaka'ako Kitchen, where I almost finished Autobiography of a Face (and would have, if a group of tourists had not inexplicably started dragging tables and chairs in circles, eventually creating a seating space to accomodate 20 people when there were only five of them.) Otherwise, it was a blissful hour and a half.

And now, I think, a nap ...