I didn’t get a bike ride in on Sunday, but I did manage to go for a nice long morning walk with S. and J. We were all tired from the previous night’s dance party, so we decided to make our Sunday morning hike a walk around our neighborhood. Walking is many times slower than biking which means a whole different kind of looking around. Walking just requires and enables a different kind of attention altogether. We walked around Charles Village checking out the new mural going up on 26th and Maryland before taking a right for a trip through the Johns Hopkins campus and its Italian sculpture garden. That place has some huge squirrels, and we stopped to watch them gather their nuts and the run to safety to eat them in semi-privacy. We turned toward another park but were waylaid by tired feet, so after a brief stop at a park bench we turned to home. J. wanted to walk up that block, though, to check out the odd decorations dangling outside a house on Stoneyford Road and Stony Run Lane. Trussed up on chains were two child-sized mannequins in bondage gear surrounded by Christmas lights against this sign reading “OBEY.” I’m guessing the folks who live in this area are none too happy about the holiday decorations chosen by their neighbors, but that’s the thing with free speech and private property–sometimes we have to share the neighborhood with stuff we don’t like. Personally, I enjoyed having a reason to turn up Stoneyford Road for the first time; thanks for giving me something to look at. We continued on our merry way, slowing up to look for fully intact pine cones, a task made much easier by feet on the ground rather than on pedals.