George is back on his UPS route! The bridge and "Sea Squirrel" are open again and the village is sprouting green Mystic Community Bikes all over. The two dogs and I venture farther in the clement weather, and hail folks we haven't seen in a season, often hearing "Howfarjago?!" Buoyed by new "Guesstimation" skills, the bigger dog tapped her mental calculator to see a few strides over 5,000 miles strolling the village to date. Nowhere close to George's grand total but hold on, the littler is more literal than the small print in extended warranties; they were just gearing up.

The duo suspects a math class at Cutler Middle School occasionally double checks their arithmetic. Before those students escape for the summer the dogs pursued the ambiguous question further. They estimated folks doing nothing beyond sitting on the equator still whiz around at a little over 1,000 mph relative to the center of the planet, covering about 25,000 miles per day because that's pretty close to the circumference of the Earth, which rotates once every 24 hours.

"Actually it's 24901.47 miles in 23 hours 56 minutes and 4.1 seconds, approximately, against the starry background of the universe" the younger corrected.

"But we aren't down at the equator. Mystic sits up at 41°21'15"N latitude" the bigger measured.

("A popular Main Street eatery rounded that down to 41 North" the younger added sniffily.)

"The number of footsteps roaming around the earth here is also close to distance around at Rome, Italy (41°54'0" N)," the older inserted circumspectly. "That's less than way down there at Quito, the capital of Ecuador (0°13'0"S)."

Employing a simple bit of geometry the pooches found online, they worked out that the small circle here at Mystic is a smidge over three quarters of the equatorial circumference, so we're twirling around at a leisurely 780 mph, slower than New York City couch potatoes but faster than Boston marathoners! Pawing that speed into their calculators, the mutts dizzily toted up approximately 6 million miles merely lollygagging around the village.

Warming to their task, the pups rummaged deeper into the trunk line they've traversed with the earth as it orbits the sun. You might check their calculations. They came up with about 5,250,000,000 miles in nine years. Rarin' to hop aboard the mainline after that, they found that our whole solar system is tracking the edge of the galaxy at nearly 483000 mph, so they've hustled more than an additional 38,000,000,000 miles relative to the Milky Way's nougaty center whether out globetrotting or merely dozing on the edge of the oval rug by the backdoor. Their eyes widen contemplating all the "pi" calories they could justify chomping to hike that far.

As we futilely stretched our minds after the incomprehensible distances and speeds, an Amtrak Acela Express raced passed, trying to reach speedy New York.

"Given how fast we're going just standing here watching them crawl by," the littler engineer espied, "it's amazing some early 19th century doctors worried passengers back then would suffocate with the air pressure crushing their chests at a breathtaking 30 mph."

"Others feared peoples' brains could fall out traveling that fast," the older conductor nodded, tossing a brow feint toward me. "Later that century psychiatrists predicted the 'perceptual annihilation of space and time' would erupt world wide, instigated by the mental disassociations caused by rapid rail travel. Physicians during early space flights expressed similar concerns for astronauts in the 1960s."

"How they all might swoon over the space-time disassociations we encounter waiting at airports," the two mutts huffed as they scanned the tracks near the depot for ejected traces of my gray matter.

The transcriber has drifted around Mystic for some time, much of it with dogs.