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10 pounds down 32 pounds to go!

Sunday, May 16, 2010

"She's as nervous as a very small nun at a penguin shoot."

The thing I hate most about sparkpeople is that I started it ONE THOUSAND years ago and it tells me about how I used to be skinnier. Rub my face in it sparkpeople, cold. Anyway, I'm using spark again just to see where I stand with things and it's not so bad. Smart dogs and eggs are just not high calorie food, so yay for that. On the other hand when I ask Matt about how long he thinks a particular walk is he estimates low and this weekend after walking with us he decided that we do in fact walk at least 4 miles a day. Adding today's exercise into spark people i've burned almost 1000 calories without any of my indoor planned exercise. So I'm left to wondering as I did when I was doing weight watchers that I'm not eating enough calories or drinking enough water. The water I'm working on with a chart on my fridge white board. I put eight slash marks on the board and I wipe one off every time I fill my water glass. If I have a soda...sigh...or lightly sweetened iced tea I add a slash mark to make up for the caffeine. It's my intensely complicated water drinking system because I can't be trusted to fill a water glass an appropriate number of times to sustain life...and/or weight loss.

Even if I can't be trusted to drink enough water I can be trusted to blow dry the rear ends of my baby chickens. Last year we monitored the rumps of our chicks very carefully and nothing ever happened. This year I'm hardly even trying to find butt problems and they keep throwing themselves in my face. Did you want to know about that? No? Shocking. Maybe we're just paranoid but when a chick has a bumper problem we have to wash it...and the downy fluff gets wet and when you put the chick back in the box: A. the other chicks are way too interested and B. the wet chick is then wet and cold. So I blow dry them. On low as to not burn the, err, region. It really seemed like the most reasonable thing to do but probably perdue doesn't bother. Lo the worries of the small and anal retentive farmer.

3 comments:

The Fat Foreigner said...

You could always jsut re-sign up to spark to get a fresh account, that way it's not thrown in your face. I use spark too and when it tells me I burned over a thousand calories cycling for an hour at the speed I'm at I get suspisious too. But then, I've heard frm a few places that 1 mile will burn 100 calories so it makes sense if I'm doing 18km (11 miles) that I would? I guess? Mapmyrun.com is good for checking distances out.

The mental picture I have of a blow-dried chick is adoreable.

The Merry said...

Even if I can't be trusted to drink enough water I can be trusted to blow dry the rear ends of my baby chickens.

Bloody hell, the things you read on the Internet ;)

In my suburb there's an Urban Chicken movement afoot. (I still think that sounds like the name of a punk rock band.)

Maybe I could get a few chicks and also a young energetic pup to guard them from the neighborhood cats. Not sure if that's a good idea or an awful one. I shall watch your chicken escapades closely.

Amy said...

the baby chicks are adorable no matter what they're doing.

Chickens are incredibly easy, but many towns take issue with them and many states have limits as to how many you have to purchase/own. If we lived in NH we'd have to buy 12 at a time, in ME it's 6. I hated this rule until I watched a group of teenagers try to buy 1 baby duck. Ahhh.

My energetic pups are more interested in cornering and chasing and very possibly accidentally killing the chickens. The dog smell does protect them from coyotes but we also keep ours in a run, we don't have outdoor cats here (read: coyotes) so I don't know how that would play out but a rooster would probably be sufficient. They like to watch out for their harems.