Second day of 2011 318.4

January 1, 2011 allowed me to watch a pretty decent football game ...... The Rose Bowl where TCU beat favored Wisconsin by two 21 to 19. I'm really looking forward to January 3rd when Stanford faces Virginia Tech ..... I see Stanford cleaning their clock. I have a five dollar futures bet which pays 20 to 1 if Oregon beats Auburn.

After an on again off again start with Medifast, I restarted the program with vigor. It's not that it's hard, it's just that my habits aren't the easiest to break, however, I did try something unique yesterday as a reminder to stick to the program. I took a two pound hand weight (dumb bell) and put it in my pants pocket the entire length of the day. Folks two pounds in a pants pocket lets you know that you are carrying around two extra pounds, that's for sure. As I type this I can feel the pulling from the weight of the dumb bell in my left front pants pocket. To put this in perspective, if I were to multiply that two pounds times 50 I'd come up with one hundred pounds; one hundred pounds less would have me weighing in around 220 lbs which is still forty pounds over an ideal weight of 180 lbs. Yet with just that two pounds in my pocket it now makes me more aware of being overweight than when I do a daily morning weigh-in.

I read somewhere that the best way to keep dogs and cats from spraying flower beds is to mix cayenne pepper, black pepper and crushed red pepper in equal amounts and broadcast the mixture on the ground. Yesterday I did this and this morning I found not one shred of evidence ( wood chips all over the driveway ) of a furry friend helping to fertilize the flowers. As an added bonus I added a half a tea spoon of the mixture to my morning breakfast of Maryland Crab Soup and spiced it up perfectly.

I purchased a worm composting system. I probably have two thousand worms in a 2'X 2'X4" tray with an assortment of materials designed to hold moisture and provide feed. I did put a few out in my garden, but not too many until I figure out how to heat up the area where I placed them. They're free to roam, but I'm not sure of their movement patterns. I think what I am going to do is place some opaque plastic over the insert area to make it warmer and thereby break down the compost faster as well as create a friendlier environment.

This morning I got in some meditation and a self induced pep talk to clean up the house ..... we'll see how peppy that talk was.