Gardon't

My mom asked me what I was getting out of my garden so far. My answer: frustration with the local wildlife.

I planted eight cherry tomato plants, six have been destroyed. I planted six roma tomato plants, two have been destroyed. Whatever is getting past my fence also destroyed all of my sweet peppers, eaten over half of my zucchini, and all my radishes.

I had zero problems with critters last year, so this is a surprise. All the traps and repellents in the world aren't working. More to the point, I don't actually know what is doing this. My wife caught a groundhog sulking around in my back yard, but on another occasion I saw something jump out of the garden bed, but I was too far away to see what it was.\

I couldn't blame it all on rabbits, as much as I want to.

I need a backyard fox.

Sizing

Losing weight has its perks, but your clothing never fitting was unexpected. I had to buy new pants because my olds ones were too big (yay) and a month later I had to do it again.

yay?

Then I get stuck in between sizes. I have to go out of my way to find odd sizes, but I ask myself if it's worth it if I'm just going to have to replace them again in a month.

When my wife went through this, she wore stretchy clothes and skirts. Not an option here.

The app cheat

I use an app to track my workouts. The goal is to track what works and what doesn't, and how much weight I'm lifting. I use the same app to track my food intake, so it also has a calorie count for everything.

Wasn't my goal, but there it is.

Just keeping track of what I eat has had a strong impact on it. Being accountable - I want to eat half a cake, but I don't want to log it in the app. 

I use the stair climber at the gym. (I'm planning a mountain hike in the Adirondacks, so I adjusted my workout to that end). I log how long I was on it, and it also tells me how many calories I burned. Again, logging the calorie burn wasn't the goal, but there it was, and I found myself enjoying watching that number climb up as I went through my workout.

Then the numbers changed. 15 minutes on the stair climber used to burn X calories when I first started, but since then it's slowly gone down, one by one. Right now it's down by eleven, and while it was never my goal, I still feel cheated.

Familiar faces, unfamiliar places.

My gym opens at 5 on weekdays. Since work starts at 7, I usually get there pretty much right at 5. 

Yes, I'm a morning person. Always have been.

But the gym opens at 7 on Saturdays, and that always feels weird. 7am, I'm normally long done. So many Saturdays, weather permitting, I'll go to the park near my house. It has a pretty long trail on the lake. I've been coming to this park since my parents were strapping me into a car seat, I love this park. But on these early Saturdays I've started to notice things. Or rather, I've started to recognize them.

The people from the gym. Also there in the wee hours of the morning. Not many of them, no. You can really only do cardio on the trail, but the ones that are always doing a lot of cardio are the ones I've started to recognize. 

My idea was not as unique as I expected.

Boom boom boom boom

We always do a fireworks show in our driveway.

We live in the suburbs, so shooting anything off into the sky is generally considered impolite. Also we live close enough to the airport where it also would warrant a visit from someone with either a badge or a three letter job title.

So, ahem. We always do a fireworks show in our driveway. The wife is always the one in charge of procurement, and she told me we never bought enough. So I reminded her who always got them, and told her to just buy more.

So she did.

Fast forward to the big night, and we had some family and friends over. I was then surprised to find that my brother in law had brought some of his own as well.

The show lasted much longer than my dear wife had the energy for.