post by Heather Goldberg, good stuff!

"At 9:52pm, I stepped foot in my house drenched in sweat because I randomly decided to hula hoop with an unevenly weighted, water filled hoop all the way home, in the dark, while carrying a 1 liter bottle of water at shoulder-height from 1.3 miles away (which became 1.5 miles after an unfortunate wrong turn.) It took over an hour and I had 8 drops, but I did it! On my way home, I learned many things which I’ll list right here:

1. I’m very fortunate to live in a place where I can walk alone at night practically humping the air and make it home alive.
2. Even so, SE Portland needs better street lighting.
3. SE Portland also needs more wheelchair ramps. @melissa, let’s make this happen!
4. If I ever do this again, I really need a Camelbak because that water bottle was cumbersome.
5. I also need an evenly weighted hoop.
5. If 2, 3, 4 and 5 happened, I feel pretty confident that I could have made it the entire way without dropping my hoop.
6. Feral cats seem to really like watching spinning things.
7. Hula hooping is addictive. My pelvis is in denial that the adventure is over.
8. I had no idea that I was pretty good at this. Now I do.
9. “If anyone doesn't believe it happened, call me!” would have been a really effective pickup line if my neighbor was cute.
10. I think I’m officially a Portlander now.

Thanks to all the pedestrians who walked around me, thanks to Olive and Dingo for being the queen and king of unorthodox transportation and last but not least, special thanks to Hayato and Lizz for letting me borrow their hula hoop in exchange for some alone time. ""