Goal #4

What a beautiful Monday! D called when he got to work to report to me that it's supposed to be in the 90's - record highs for this time of year, I guess. Anyhow, he called to tell me to open the windows in the morning so we could avoid turning the air conditioning on this evening, to support Conscientious Citizen Goal #2.

In that same vein, I have come up with Conscientious Citizen Goal #4: add two vegetarian dinners per week to menus. My 60-menu development goal is only to come up with 4 menus per week, so 2 being vegetarian is 50% of our planned meals. Eventually, I would like to become a vegetarian, but I am quite sure that I wouldn't succeed at that at this point in my life for a number of reasons. I have also toyed with the idea of not cooking meat at home, but eating it when I went out to dinner with friends or to their houses. That would cut down on my meat consumption significantly, but wouldn't impose my choice on friends. Not eating meat saves immense amounts of water, gas, and other natural resources in a far greater quantity than almost any other single thing we, as individuals, can do. I'm a bit surprised that with all the environmentalism and talks about resource consumption, our single biggest culprit doesn't come up: meat. In any case, I figure it's good to take some baby steps with this goal. I believe this will be my most difficult goal yet, since I do truly like meat and I'm still not very organized with buying fresh vegetables. But better to try and fail than not to try at all. I'm doing well on my other three Conscientious Citizen Goals: still haven't turned on the air conditioning; haven't washed my face with hot water once; and no baths.

Our workout on Sunday was good - see that - two whole days in a row! I decided to take the fitness test on the elliptical machine. It wasn't much of a test, in my opinion, but since I liked the results, I will share. I am in superior shape. Go dog walking! I had to keep the elliptical at 70 strides per minute - very slow - for a total of 6 minutes while it checked my heart rate. I guess my heart rate stayed sufficiently low.

I just got back from walking the dogs, who both did perfectly on our walk. We may only have one walk today if it does get really hot. Turtle doesn't do so well in hot weather. I have been thinking of buying them these coat-things that you soak in water before you go out on a hot hike and it keeps them cool. I was so proud of Eddie since we had to walk behind a Belgian Shepherd and his owner for a good chunk of the walk. The woman walking that dog was my idol. The dog walked behind her the entire time (on a flexi-lead!) and never once passed her, or even tried. Very impressive.