I made a thing

Saddened that I couldn't find any existing Chris "Boomer" Berman WHOOP notification sounds for my phone, so I made one.  What is this world coming to when you can't get crazy sounds from TV sports personalities without having to make it yourself?  Come on guys.

Chris "Boomer" Berman  - Whoop (MP3) or (WAV)

Now hurry up and index this, google.  There are many others just like me anxiously awaiting this file.  FEAR NOT, BROTHERS.

Count Calories, Save Money

Every few months or so I reflect on my poor diet and lack of exercise and get serious for approximately one week where I'm super diligent about keeping track of what I eat.  Not unlike personal finance, to "do better" you have to first get a clear picture of what you're doing, whether it be calories you're inhaling or money you're spending.  Without that knowledge your brain isn't going to make the solid connection of "boy that's a lot of money on x" or "thanks to the burger king for lunch, I'm not allowed to eat the next three days".

There are a million different ways to diet and if you look at me you'll know any diet advice I hand out should be  mostly ignored, but I tend to go for the simple approach.  If I want to shed some pounds I'm going to ignore my fat/protein/carb split and just do some old fashion calorie counting.  To oversimplify and ignore some exceptions, if it's high in calories it's probably not that great for you.  It's probably sugary, processed, fatty, fried, or all of the above.

Where'd all them calories get to

Just like being frugal with your money, you're first going to need to know where you're "spending" your calories.  Once you're dreams of eating 3 bags of cheetos a day are shattered, you're going to get a good idea of what your problems areas are and what needs cut from your gluttonous routine.  This is going to be difficult if you don't have easy access to a computer/smart phone, but I track my food consumption/exercise with the website (and smartphone app) Fat Secret.

Make that food your bitch

Here is the part where you're going to need to start planning ahead, what meals are safe for your diet, and if you're like me, what will produce ample left-overs to take for lunches.  I will admit, I hate trying to plan ahead, but it does really take the guesswork out of "what's for lunch/dinner?"  Congratulations, you're now practicing portion control as well.  Popular diet plans (Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, Nutrisystem) simplify the calorie counting and portion control for you, but it's accomplishing the same thing.

Sweet, sweet financial reward

Finally, saving some money up in hurr.  You're now eating less, and planning ahead to make sure you're going to stay within your limits.  When you go to the grocery store you'll avoid impulse/snack purchases, and the aforementioned planning will give you a smaller shopping list with much less waste.  That's all well and good, but the biggest saving of eating less and planning more is you're going to eat out less because it typically carries a heavy caloric cost and most daily diets has no room for junk/fast food.  Bam.  Money saved.  In the 3dollarbicycle household, most of the reason where we go out to eat is because we're too lazy to figure out what we want to have for dinner.

Simple, boring, ????, profit!

While extremely boring, I will eat the same breakfast every day during the work week.  I'm lazy enough that I'm fine with the lack of creativity for trade off of a filling, easy breakfast that I don't need to prepare ahead of time.  I take coffee in from home, have some instant oatmeal and a sweet and salty granola bar thing.  Coffee always fills me up pretty good and the two spread out "snacks" carry me to lunch without much dramatic grumbling from my stomach.  Some argue a large breakfast, but at least this leaves me with a bunch of carlories left for the day.

Caveats

I try and head-off arguments and flaws in my logic ahead of time.  I'm not saying "eating healthy" and "counting calories" are necessarily the same thing.  You can very easily spend a lot of money on fancy organic foods that I don't know how to pronounce and in the end not save any money.  What I try to do is  stick to what I would consider "normal food" for me and just eat less of it.

Random dieting tips not necessarily tied to financial benefit

While most of these are pretty common sense, I thought I'd throw these out there that I've found are true for me

• Drink water.  It's calorie free and good for you.  "What about those zero calorie sodas, etc?"  I have no idea, but I assume they're still not good for you.
• Don't starve yourself.  If you think you're going to drop 20 lbs in two weeks by eating 500 calories a day, you're doing it wrong.  I'm told you're body needs to keep it's metabolism going and if you're starving yourself your body will slow your metabolism down to conserve calories, yes even if you're a fatty fat fat.
• Avoid eating late at night.  This could be just me, or that I weigh myself in the mornings, but if I stop my eating hours before I fall asleep I think the food gets processed quicker.  Also I get indigestion fairly often and dieting and not eating close to bed time has all but eliminated my nightly feast of tums.
• Rome (your fat ass) was not built in a day.  It's actually kind of discouraging to learn that one bad day of eating isn't going to make or break your diet, it's consistently eating more calories than you need that makes you gain weight.
• Find a sort of exercise that you enjoy.  If you're exercising, you can eat more calories!  Beware  however, that the calories actually burnt are far less than it feels, so 5 Big Macs are not a reward for a 3 mile walk.  

Purchasing goods using craig and his list

I originally started this blog to share some helpful money saving tips, my thoughts on being a cheapskate and also write about my day to day personal stuff.  I've hit the personal stuff pretty hard recently so it's time to be Mr. Helpful and share some pro-tips for scoring on craigslist (HEYYYYOOOOOO - Perhaps the phrasing on that is a bit misleading, though the same principals may apply).

As great as craigslist is, it has it's drawbacks.  Any free site is going to attract scammers and spammers, so that is a given.  It also really limits your search radius to what it considers your other nearby craigslists, sometimes that's helpful and others it's not.  I live in an area that is lucky enough to have it's own specific craigslist site, but that doesn't mean the "market" is so large here that I never have to search other craigslist regions depending on what I'm looking for.

Being awesome:  A case study
My leaf vacuum was a recent craigslist find, one of my best to date.  A leaf vacuum is somewhat specialized enough that you're going to have to cast a wide net to find what you're looking for.  I found this one a few hours away, corresponded with the seller over a period of time and in the end he even delivered it to me.

A few things that really worked to my benefit were:

• Motivated seller:  He no longer had any use for it after moving.
• There were some missing parts, I was able to quote the cost of replacement parts and whine about how it's not all there to negotiate a better deal.
• Early and often:  I started looking early enough so that timeline wasn't a problem.  If I had waited until now that the leaves were falling I'd have a lot more competition and would have paid a lot more.  
• Blind luck:  The seller travels a lot, and he just happens to head up my way on a weekly basis, give or take.

I ended up paying $400 for a machine that was used approximately 5 times and looked brand new, and while it was technically incomplete, $45 worth of parts was all I needed to make it, and me, whole again.  Retail on these bad boys is about $1200 and a comparable used ones, going by other craigslist ads, were in the $800+ range.  Awwwwwww yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee [muffins]!

Get by with a little help from your friends

In this wonderful technologically advanced age we live in, there are some tools to help a brotha out.  Personally I use Craigslist Search Helper (CSH), an extension for Chrome, Firefox, or Safari web browsers.  There are other options as well, but this one is my favorite so far.  It basically sits "on top" of craiglist, formats it a little differently, and adds a bunch of nice features to make navigating and searching craigslist much easier.

A lot of fish in the sea

You may need to broaden your horizons and leave your mom's basement and search a larger area.  CSH does exactly that, allowing you to put exactly how far you're willing to travel that's not limited to what craigslist considers your nearby regions.

Early bird gets the worm

CSH lets you set up search alerts to run every XX minutes/hours/days so that you can keep on top of whatever you're looking for.  Your browser needs to be open, and the alerts seem specific to the computer you have the extension installed on.  I may be missing an option to create an account and logon to that so it would work over multiple computers, but I haven't really looked for it, either.  When it finds new stuff you haven't looked at yet, it will pop up a little alert.

Zen and the art of helpful stuff

CSH makes the craigslist results more helpful by allowing you to mouseover the ads to read the text, view pictures, flag as spam, set a flag that you want to follow up with that, and even take notes all without even clicking into the ad.  

And I thought we were friends *harumpf*

The downside to all this is that CSH injects ads in it's layouts and overall it's "skin" for craiglist is not really that great to look at, but since we're all flawed in some way or other I've decided we're still going to go to prom together.

Bring forth into my RSS reader, peasant!

An alternative to CSH I've used in the past is the website crazedlist.org.  It's a bit clunky, you have to use Firefox (after making a change in the hidden browser settings), but one options is that you can save your search as a .OPML file that you can import into your RSS reader.  This was is pretty nice in that you can set it up in Google Reader, for instance and from any computer that has internet you can check to see if there are new ads.  

I find myself using the RSS method for long-term searches that I be creepin' on, and CSH on a daily basis to browse around craiglist and do my "Hmmmmm I wonder what kind of XYZs are for sale within 100 miles of her" type stuff.  

Slow thy role

Do you remember that time that I told you a story about my lawn mower not working and I heroically wrestled it back from death's cruel grasp (and dude, my arms look so cut while I was doing it)?  Yea, well this time, the next day, I was the cruel mistress raining down misfortune upon it - what a whacky turn of events, reader!  This is why I can't have nice things.

Last Friday we (Adam) had some company at the house after I got home from work so I thought it would be an excellent time to start being a doer and do some stuff that required doing in regards to my leaf vacuum or "leafpocalypse" setup.  Really, the last piece of the puzzle was that I needed to cut the mower deck boot to fit on, well, the mower deck (duh).  In some startling turn of events, I cut it and got it properly mounted exactly as planned without any major problems.  Surely I should have should have had some alarms of This is going way too easy, Mr. Guy going off in my head, but instead I felt smugly smug with myself and rode off back to the shed where the second half to this project was waiting for me.

I got the hose mounted up to the mower deck, the hose clamp all clamped down, and I was ready to go.  I hooked up the trailer to the hitch point, and slowly crept forward mowing and sucking and mulching leaves for a solid 10 minutes.  Amber can attest my next mistake:  Grinning, bouncing, and other outward acts of joy and pride only a father (of a leaf vacuum project) can feel in his heart.  That heart, ladies and gentleman, was about to be broken just like my mower.  It was a young and foolish early-fall romance, if we're assigning labels here, it wasn't meant to be.

Needless to say the mower came to a slow crawl and refused to move forward or backward.  The engine was still running, but it strained as it tried to move.  "Well, shit" said the author of this blog.  In my haste to mow/suck/mulch, I foolishly put the brake on, that I never use no less, and I had been riding around the yard for 10 minutes riding the brake.  "Double shit" soon followed as well as feeling like an enormous dumb guy.

To make things as entertaining as possible for everyone who isn't me, I had to drag the tractor back to the shed with the four wheeler, stopping every 5 feet or so to adjust the steering wheel on the tractor to dodge the mine fields of trees and other solid objects.  And when I say drag, I mean that word that I said I meant.  The rear wheels were locked up even with the transmission disengaged it wouldn't budge.  By the time I got it in the shed it was dark so feeling defeated, I packed it in for the evening.

Now that I have you on the edge of your seat Imma ruin it for you:  The brake was just locked up, no catastrophic transmission failure that I was worried about.  I've since disconnected the brake, as I've said, I never use it other than to try and ruin my life, and we were once again in business.  I made a few passes in the back yard and booyah, leaf and grass all up ins:

Important life lesson:  Never be happy or excited about any project you take on, because you already made a whole lot of mistakes that will come back to Wanye-Brady-Choke-a-Bitch you.  With that in mind, this is a close approximation of my emotion level having my leaf cleanup infinitely easier this season:

Let's be honest, you only come here for my impeccable taste in animated .gifs anyway.

In other updates, I got the dishwasher project finished up last night and spent a lot of money on a new snowblower which will virtually guarantee that we don't get any snow this year.  So either way, probably a good buy!

Projectus Maximus

Today, I am humbly blogging from the bottom of a figurative avalanche of projects that are threatening to snuff me out and/or force me into making a decision of who to eat first. It seems every time I start on something I want to do, it involves fixing something else along the way, not to mention taking away time from squishing Adam's cheeks.

Last weekend I tasked myself with installing our new(er) dishwasher we bought from some friends to replace our old-but-still-working dishwasher. Immediately you can see the problem in this, there wasn't anything technically wrong, and yet I thought it would be a good idea to fix it. I've been petitioning the Oxford people to reconsider the new definition for "fix"

fix [fiks] verb, fixed or fixt, fix·ing, noun  To make things worse in every way, you big dumb fat dumby face

First of all, removing the old dishwasher was much harder than I thought it would be, it eventually took a large crow-bar to pry the one side up enough to free it from it's wooden tomb. Unfortuantely that was just the beginning.  The old unit ran off a standard oulet plug, the newer unit was hard wired. Not wanting to smash up the wall to hard wire it I bought an electrical cord to wire it up. Inconvenient, but not a day-ender.

Where I'm stuck now is the plumbing, after the shutoff for the supply line there are a bunch of weird adapters, where I thought it was going to hook up was incorrect, so I now need to find a very specialized fitting, or man up and do some cutting and torching and soldering. I've hit my comfort limit so that's where it currently sits.

Last night, finding a bit of free time, I thought I'd try and mow the lawn. Our tractor has had a hard time starting lately but I figured I could eventually coax it to life as I have in the past. Once my coaxing skills ran out, I pushed it from our shed over to the garage where I worked on it for the next hour and a half, eventually finding the problem.  Seems that some of my furry rodent friends made a nest underneath one of the engine covers and ate half of the ignition wire.  Since I can't replace just the wire, I "fabricated up" (whenever I refer to something like this, run) a healthy portion of electrical tape to temporarily solve the problem.

As luck would have it, by the time I finished up it was too dark to mow. While it's great the tractor is now running, the real work has just begun since I still need to mount up my mower deck to the leaf vacuum I bought last month.  That is the most important project I need to work on this weekend by far because

The leaves: they are coming.

My tentative project list for the moment:

• Get the riding mower and leaf vacuum to make sweet leaf-mulching love so I can:
• "Prepare my anus" for the upcoming leafocaust and general yard work that should be done.  
• Get the plumbing sorted for the dishwasher, cut some scrap wood to get the dishwasher to the proper height (it sits a bit low).  Pray to Cascade, the dishwashing god, that I haven't messed anything else up.
• Leaf-blow the gutters out at least every other week until it stops raining.
• Speaking of gutters, I really need to install two more downspouts.  You know, another thing I don't know how to do.
• Wrangle up a large number of able-bodied men to help me remove my wood burning insert from our fireplace.  This weighs many hundreds of ell bee esses.  
• Get the pellet stove mostly in place, figure out what I need to connect it to my chimney.
• Install new top on the Miata (I've only been putting this off for almost two years).

The man, the myth, the weeee wittle wegend

On 9/9/11 our little man, Adam Scott Dreese, was brought into our world by a crack team (in this context crack means good, not referring some professional league of drug users) team of belly-slicing doctors with rapidly approaching tee times (this implies that doctor's play golf and they did it so fast I can only assume they needed to change into their spikes and abscond to the links post haste with the mayor of Senatorville).

Adam, aka Little Dude Cutesy McSqueezyCheeks would even out a scale with  8lbs 5oz of pure, uncut awesomeness on the other side and took up 21 vertical inch units of space.  His favorite pastimes are long limb-flails on the beach and watching his favorite sports team, the Williamsport Can't See Much Yets.

So far we've been home for two weeks and things are going well.  We're slowly getting the hang of the cry-eat-sleep-poop cycle, which can be a tough nut to crack.  Amber is simultaneously enjoying her time off work as well as wishing I could teleport home to give her a break now and then, while my transition coming back to work has been less terrible than I had expected it to be.

Enough words typed from my fingers, pictures!

Hey about that stuff

So about that room and baby, eh?  Well, the room is done and the baby is scheduled to be delivered via C-section one week from now which means this is my last ever weekend not being a parent.  Ho-lee crap.

For some reason I don't have any good pictures of the finished nursery on my phone so here is one of the closet organizer I put in a few weekends ago.  The snaziness is immense.

In other news directly related to the name of this blog, I've been slowly trying to count some gosh darn calories as well as getting back into biking.  I've been doing some rides around the general area of my home as well as going to the riverwalk to enjoy biking paths filled with inconsiderate people who walk in the middle of the damn path.  LEFT YOU SONS-A-BITCHES, ON YOUR LEFT!

On my most recent ride the trusty bike whose cost was 3 dollars USD has developed an ominous creaking noise, no doubt from the millions of pounds of pressure my thunderous leg muscles have been applying on the pedals.  That, or it just needs greased up or something.  For the time being I may be back on the trusty Trek mountain bike that makes up in gearing what it lacks in efficient means of going down the road.  

More likely I'll just stop riding because I'm going to be busy with a baby and stuff.  So yea.