After all the helpful encouragement…

… about the food and my weakness for lots of food, I went to Costco today and bought this! I am so happy to finally be eating healthy!

Earlier in the day, I decided to become a barebummed runner clean out the pantry and purge all the white/processed/trash that had accumulated in there. Over the course of the next hour this happened.

 

Much better. I have some items left over that don’t seem to fit into any category, so I am pretty sure they will get chucked. I did have quite a fun time throwing out the many pounds of un-touched chocolate whatevers. I actually don’t know when these were put in the pantry, but I am glad they are gone. I may have had a weak moment and they would have been too handy.

The other item I chucked was a big box of Minute Rice. Like sands through the hourglass, so does the garbage can.

Overall I didn’t enjoy the process of cleaning out the pantry, it seemed too much like work. I am happy it got done, but I would have been just as happy if someone else had done it.

I went to Costco. On a Sunday. On a long weekend Sunday. Yep, it was busy.

Side tangent: Do you ever notice that when you are by yourself, that long lines or heavy traffic or other inconveniences don’t matter? But when you have someone with you, it feels like there is all kinds of pressure on you to be more efficient or do whatever you are doing faster? Why is that? Costco was JAMMED, wall to wall people, but I just went with the flow, waited longer than I usually would to merge into the main aisles. I had a great shopping trip. Got everything I needed, and a couple things I wanted!

I was going to buy a 3 pack of fryer chickens and just cook them on the Rotisserie. 3 raw, plucked birds were $26.00. One already cooked and ready to eat was $7.00. Does that make sense Keith?

I got a lot of good stuff! The total price included a big jug of laundry soap, A giant box of garbage bags, a huge 3 pack of ziplocks ,and an enormous bundle of toilet paper.

Got home, started to put away the goods.

I took the frozen berries and the Sweet Potato fries, and separated them into serving sizes for easy eating later.

I then took my bbq’d chicken and ate some “like a caveman” (josh). Yum, I love that tasty bird. I worked for the rest of the evening on a design project that was a day behind,

it’s a very big deck project.

Got that done and was feeling a little peckish. HEY, let’s make a  smoothie. Wow, they are tasty. I am so stoked about eating these now instead of other sweet snacks! yuuu-uuum!

 

This was a super day. I spoke to the home team tonight and told DW what I did, and she is totally stoked for this new life of responsible eating. I am probably going to make a soup or a chili tomorrow night. I have my 5k Sheep River Road Race tomorrow morning. I have a couple people to see there, that have corresponded with me via this blog, so that should be fun. I will report back tomorrow with photos and a report!

In other news, Adam, from The Boring Runner asked about my photos, and how I make them look so vibrant. Well, sometimes I get lucky, and other times I use “get lucky”. You see, in the Picasa photo editing software that you get for free from the internets, there are some very intuitive controls for improving your photos. I’ll use the Rose photo as an example. (it always helps to have a nice starting photo, btw). The other secret is MS Live Writer. The writer program I use to produce this blog and my 6 others, is an amazing photo input and editor too! Once you insert your photo, you can alter the contrast, color, sharpness. You can resize and crop, as well as rotate!

This is actually the original photo, my Canon XTi does a pretty nice job. (a good camera, with a good lens helps a ton!)

Here it is with it being edited a bit with the photo functions of Live Writer. I sharpened and cropped it.

Pretty cool hey? Don’t you just love the water droplets?

Now here is one that will show how good Picasa is for your photos. Now there is lots going on in this picture. It is kinda dull and a little tilted. let’s see what we can do with it in Picasa.

Big difference hey? I used the ‘I’m feeling lucky button’, Straighten and Saturation buttons. Sometimes the saturation button can make already bright colors look TOO bright, like the cones in the bottom of the pic. Not too bad in this one tho…

Once it’s edited in Picasa, I can still use the edits in Live Writer to further improve the photo…

Pretty cool hey?

Now here is my pretty awesome photo of the day!

I took this while driving down the freeway! AND, Congrats to Barefoot Josh for winning the comment contest. No one knew I was having it, but since he commented the best in the last 2 days, he wins a “Cool Kids Run Club” tech shirt. Please email me with your address! nzeller at shaw dot ca.