So I’m trying an interesting experiment this week – I’ve actually started eating sugared cereal again.
My reasoning is this … my sweet tooth has really been aching a lot lately, and it’s driving me to splurge on cookies and candy bars and other high calorie treats that don’t really have any place in my diet. For a while I’ve been going through various flavors of Cheerios – I’d have a bowl when I got back from walking the dog each night – and I had settled on Cheerios simply because of all of their heart health claims … it just always seemed like it was a healthier cereal, even though I was eating Honey-Nut Cheerios and Chocolate Cheerios and Peanut Butter Cheerios, not necessarily the plain, old boring ones…
Well, the other week I finally thought to stop and look at the boxes, and I realized that honestly, a serving of Honey-Nut Cheerios isn’t really all that different than a serving of something like Cinnamon Toast Crunch (which I looooove!), so I figured – why not swap out one for the other, and this way I get a little more sweetness for my itch without splurging on half a package of cookies that I know I don’t have the control to keep in the house right now anyways! So far it’s worked out quite well – I do have to be careful and make sure that I leave the box in the pantry because otherwise if I bring it to my desk with me, there’s a tendency to want to fill up a second bowl instead of sticking to my predetermined amount, but I’m not craving chocolate afterwards and I can kind of look forward to it as a little reward when I get home, so ultimately I think that’s a win-win! 
P.S. I couldn’t possibly use that headline without also including this video, so rock on, Beets fans…
Last link for the night!!!
86 year-old guy lives on his own private island that he bought in the Indian Ocean 50 years ago for £8,000 - not too shabby of a way to retire, if you ask me!
Just a man and his giant tortoises, in a veritable paradise…
I stumbled onto this show earlier today and thought it was kinda unique and cute. Curious to see where they end up taking it…
Dear Internet,
Why don’t I have one of these in my kitchen, and how quickly can we get this situation alleviated?!?!?!
Yours in love of Monkey-Based Culinary Tools,
- Scott
I honestly can’t say that I’ve read any of his books, but all in the same this essay from Stephen King is probably one of the most eloquent rants about the rich paying higher taxes that I’ve ever heard! It was an absolute joy to read, and not just the parts where he was swearing left and right…
Stephen King: Tax Me, for F@%&’s Sake!
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/04/30/stephen-king-tax-me-for-f-s-sake.html
It still baffles me how the lower classes have become so brainwashed into thinking that they need to protect the rich because expecting them to pay their fair share for their successes is somehow anti-American. I don’t know many billionaires who I’d be willing to take a financial bullet for just so that they don’t have to cut back on that 8th vacation home up in the Poconos.
Granted, it doesn’t look like they ever use his breath weapon while he’s actively flying, and sure, his wings don’t technically flap, but it’s still pretty bad ass…
Be sure to also check out this blog post about the beast, featuring some making-of and actual close-up pics of the final paint job, as well as a look at some of the electronics. Very, very cool!
I don’t mean to brag, but … well, yes I do – I just had an AMAZINGLY SATISFYING WEIGH-IN!!!
Lost a total of 4.4 pounds since last week, which is particularly significant because pretty much the entire month of April has been nearly stagnant for me – one week I’d lose 0.2 pounds, the next I’d gain 0.4 – very demotivating, so to actually step on the scale this morning and not only see an actual integer’s difference, but arguably several weeks’ worth just felt really, really … really good! 
What exactly I did – right now that’s kinda hard for me to say. I know that I’ve been trying to curb my calories back below 2,000/day, which has been a real challenge because I seem to have snacking on the brain more and more, and I guess I’ve been ramping my walking up just a bit to see an extra mile or two randomly on top of the 3.5 – 4.5 miles that I typically average, but other than that – who knows?! My sleep schedule is pretty much just as chaotic as ever, and I’ve been super stressed because I’m still buried in a writing backlog that I wanted to long-since be out of by now, so … I don’t know!
That said, what I do know is that this time I want to work harder to try and ride this success into next week, whereas the last time I had a larger than average loss I think I celebrated by bingeing on armfuls of candy and potato chips. The time towards my goal is still a little ways off, but I know that it’s only going to get rougher (and eventually impossible) if I just drag my feet because it still feels like I’ve got a ton of time left to kill, so I really want to work hard at making May in particular a super productive month for me from a weight loss perspective. Hopefully my new incentive system will help to keep me focused during the day-to-day, and my wife is also trying to make May count in her own efforts, so sometimes seeing another person really putting in the extra effort helps, too.
If I could see another 10 pounds gone in the next five weeks, that would be fantastic! I’m trying not to get my hopes up to much, but also leverage today’s confidence as much as possible … it really is a fine line, but at the end of the day most fitness peeps will tell you that 2 pounds/week is perfectly reasonable with moderate exercise and the right kind of diet, so we’ll see! Right now I’m exactly halfway to my ultimate goal from when I first started these latest weight loss efforts back at the beginning of 2011, so it’s a good milestone … but one that I’d still be perfectly content blowing by without so much as a lunch date if I somehow can.
Here’s to the next 4.4 pounds!!! 
…and yet for the life of me I cannot stop watching this show!!!
I don’t know what it is, but I’ve literally been watching 2-minute clips from TruTV’s Hardcore Pawn non-stop since I got home from my walk two hours ago … they’re like potato chips – once you pop, I just can’t stop!
I actually sort of got sucked into this show on Christmas night last year – we were back at the hotel winding down after a full day with the family, Sara and Cleo had both fallen asleep, and I was left up by myself to do a little post-holiday writing. I ended up setting up shop in bed so that I could watch TV, but there wasn’t a lot on at 1:00am and I ended up settling on Hardcore Pawn. I think I finally turned it off when the marathon ended at like 5 o’clock, which was a little rough considering that we had to drive a thousand miles up to Michigan the next day!
I don’t know – it’s just a fun, goofy show … like most reality TV shows … and if I can spend hours on a weekend watching a crazy rocker pull snakes out of people’s attics, then what’s a little pawning between friends?!
So we ended up deciding to give the reward system the good, old college try anyways. When I first mentioned the idea to my wife, she was a little hesitant because our budget is kinda tight right now and it sounded like it had the potential to add up pretty quick. Then a few days later, she’s the one all excited about the idea, so … I don’t know … I never claimed to understand women… 
Anyways, what we ended up doing is picking up a couple of large, glass vases at Walmart along with a variety of colored, glass beads – both from the crafts department, right next to each other, in fact. And the system is actually pretty simple – a bead equals $1, and each of us has the potential to earn two of them each day. She’s splitting them up so that exercise earns her a bead and staying within her calories earns her a bead, whereas I’m a lot more concerned about just curbing my snacking and staying under 2,000 calories right now so I’m giving myself two beads a day for each day that I meet that goal. In a few weeks I figure I might change it up and incorporate exercise into the reward as well, but we’ll see.
Also, there’s a potential to get a bonus if we’re able to meet our goal for seven consecutive days in a row, so if I earn $14 worth of beads and make it through a given week, my bonus is an additional $6 to make it an even $20 for the week. Miss a day and the ticker for the bonus starts over.
As far as the actual money is concerned, I guess you could call the beads sort of a fancy IOU - it’s not practical to use actual cash right now and a jar full of paper IOUs would just look silly and not very inspiring, so instead this seemed like a neat way to track, “See, I’m doing good, and when the time is right, I deserve to indulge myself.” We don’t really know when that point will be – if we’ll both save and save up until the very end or want to dip into it once we’ve got $50 worth saved up, but that’s where we’ll kind of defer more to our budget and just see what’s possible at that point.
I guess we’ll see what happens! So far I like it because it gives me something to focus on aside from hoping that the scale looks better a week from now, and hopefully as we work through the week the bonus potential will make snacking less and less desirable because now instead of just blowing your calorie limit for the day, you’re also potentially ruining several days of discipline and forcing yourself to start back at square 1. Clearly a big portion of fighting weight loss is mental, so if this somehow manages to help keep my brain focused so that it doesn’t jump to snacking nearly as much, then that’d be a win-win for both of us!
Looking forward to posting an update in the next week or two to report how it’s working…
Apparently today is just one of those days!
So I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that we’re seriously considering switching from cable over to Verizon FiOS again – Bright House has already given us their ”best offer” (much like Progressive did?!), so now it’s really just waiting for the best time for us to make the switch.
That said, we had one of those FiOS door-to-door pushers come through the neighborhood today. I didn’t really want to talk to her because I’ve done a lot of research and I figured I could already get the best deal online anyways, but Sara noted that maybe we can get a little something extra through a special door-to-door promotion like a free gift card or something, so I decided to give her the time of day anyways.
What. A Waste. Of Time.
Even though I already knew what Verizon’s lowest online price was that I was interested in, I decided to just hold back and let this lady try to haggle with my current Bright House bill, knowing that with determination she could’ve beaten it by a healthy margin. But instead, she proceeded to try and sell me the biggest triple-play package that Verizon has, running through every stupid marketing buzz term in their repertoire that I really don’t give two shits about.
400+ channels? I’ll never touch 3/4 of them.
30,000 movies on demand? Netflix offered 20k streaming and most of them were garbage.
Free phone?! a) I already have a VOIP line that I prepaid 2 years in advance for dirt cheap, and b) it’s not free - I know how bundles work.
The kicker was eventually I even tried to throw her a bone and just tell her what I really wanted - a two-play combo instead of three, with just their lowest tier digital cable package, the full movie pack, and 25 Mbps Internet. But she didn’t want to sell it to me because she thought that I needed more! She showed me the channel lineup and gestured at how insignificant the lowest package was to the others – I’d hardly get anything at all – despite that I had already done the exercise online and confirmed that the lowest package would basically give us everything we were satisfied with from Bright House plus a little extra. Her response was that the website was probably wrong, and that she was the expert so she had more accurate information than the website would. That’s why she was going door-to-door – to help make sure that I understood everything!
It wasn’t until after she left that I noticed the date on her channel lineup – effective June 2011.
It was also later that Sara and I sat down with the lineup, literally went through it line by line, and singled out all of the actually differences between the base package and the one that she wanted to up-sell us…
Sure, the difference was about 75 channels, but they were almost all sports channels and international channels and other random obscure crap that we had just recently dropped from our Bright House package! At a quick glance, yes – the lineup makes it look like the bigger package is better because it’s bigger, but that’s an issue that a lot of people face with TV lately – they really only watch a handful of the channels and they’re getting tired of having to pay bundled pricing for hundreds of channels of crap that they’ll never in a million years actually watch! It may be neat to have 540 channels, but if I can save a few bucks by dropping back to half of that and not even miss them anyways, then who’s cooler – the guy with a butt-load of channels or the guy who doesn’t pay for something that he’s never even going to use?!
Anyways, there’s another customer service moral for you today – give the customer what they want, not what you think that they need. Maybe that overselling crap works for some people, but for the guy who’s done his research and doesn’t really give a shit if the commission goes to you or getfios.com, it might actually be worth hearing what they have to say instead of going into mildly informed saleslady speak that a technophobe like myself can see through a mile away.
This could’ve been a really easy sale for that lady had she just not gone all overkill on us.
Also, one more thing – just a quick note: If you work for a telephone company but don’t actually know what VOIP is, you’re not allowed to call yourself an expert.
