Blue Hills Skyline Trail loop

For Halloween I was going to jam with a group of parkour ladies (that's what we parkour people do, we jam) but it snowed all day yesterday, and apparently we ladies don't jam the day after it snows? I was a little surprised, but they made the point that things would be wet and slippery, which I believe is true. We will jam next week. I thought about heading up to NH to hike instead, but it's getting dark earlier, Somerville is in the red zone again for COVID and I wasn't really psyched about the idea of a drive. Staying close to home seemed like a better idea. I decided for a change to do the Blue Hills, which was a really good choice!

I love that you can see the city from the hike, but also it does feel like you are away from things, and it's pretty woodsy and relaxing. I decided to go away from Great Blue Hill, and do a longer hike, and so I did a big figure 8 that went over 4 hills of various heights, crossed one busy street, was 8 miles long and had 1316 feet of elevation gain. There were some serious uphill spots, but since it was such a long hike, for the most part you don't really notice the hilliness except for the obvious areas, which were intense but not too long.

Because of the snow from yesterday and the leaves, it was really slippery and so a few times I slipped on some rocks, but managed to not fall. Also, at one point I was walking up a hill and a huge branch came crashing down right in front of me - like a foot in front of me. It was pretty sketch. There were some people coming in the other direction and they were even more freaked out than I was - they were like "holy shit" and I was like "wow"... If it had hit me I would probably be in the ER right now. I was really lucky. Halloween has been a bad day for me in the past, but maybe this is a sign that my luck has turned around!

After I went in to work last week on Thursday, I got an email from HR saying that I had potentially been exposed to COVID from one of the students I met with, and should work from home this week. My first though, of course, was "but I haven't voted!" Fortunately I feel completely fine. I thought about mailing in my vote, or early voting, but I just really like going on election day - it just seems like the right thing to do. I'm so nervous about this election. I hope people can get it together and think about what's right for our country, and that we can prevent outsiders from meddling. This next week is going to be a crazy one - I'm glad that I spent some time over the weekend chilling out.