I’ve been saving a bit of money on fresh, organic produce lately because my experiment in square foot vegetable gardening has gone from this:

To this:

And finally, to this:

This is the coolest present my boyfriend has given me yet. It’s like a pet and a science project all rolled up into one big package.

I guess I don’t have a brown thumb after all.

Last year I tried out the P90X home workout system from Beachbody.com and had some decent results on it.  I liked the hardcore nature of the workouts (pull ups and push ups, yay!), and the no-nonsense cueing from the instructor, Tony Horton.

That’s why I’m a little leery about trying out the Beachbody Turbo Jam kickboxing workouts.

I have heard good things about it from my sister, who is the princess of DVD home workouts, but there’s something that just scares me about the program.

The instructor and all of the TJ posse behind her just look so $%#!! peppy that I can’t bring myself to put the first instructional DVD into my player.  I can’t help it.  Maybe I was traumatized in a past life by a bevy of chipper cheerleaders or something, but perky rah-rah types have always struck me as a little, well, phony as hell.

I’m posting about this openly so I can’t back out of it.

Tonight, despite my aversion to bouncy flouncy pouncy workouts, I *will* give Turbo Jam a fair shake.

Really.

I will.

This is the beginning of a new era for me. About a month ago I purchased an unlocked Treo 650 from the IT guy at work who had decided to switch to yet another new phone. This meant that I acquired a $599 pda/phone for $240. Except for a few cosmetic blemishes, it’s in great shape.

I thought my old separate pda and phone setup was just like having one of these all-in-one gadgets, but I realize now that I was sadly deceived. I looooooooove my Treo, I really do.

It runs all of my must-have programs–date book, HanDbase, Diet & Exercise Assistant, Shadowplan, Adobe reader, Docs to Go, and my collection of PDAmill games–and adds on the functionality of a mobile phone, audible-ready mp3 player, digital camera, and mobile web browsing and email.

I even have the incredibly useful Directory Assistant program installed, so I can locate a gym no matter where I am.

By the way, guess how this message was posted…direct from my Treo to my blog.

I tell you, I almost have a tear in my eye right now.

I have reached tech geekette nirvana.

Whew….  The upgrade was completed with a minimum of trouble.  I had to tweak the wp-grins plugin so my cute custom smileys would show up again, but otherwise things went without a hitch.  My existing theme for Wordpress 1.5 didn’t even need to be altered.

I’m not sure if I like 2.0 yet.  There are a lot of cosmetic layout changes in the backend that make things prettier but not necessarily more convenient, at least not for me.  They’ve added a WYSIWYG editor for creating posts, replacing the old “I sure hope you know some basic HTML” interface, and an improved preview pane.  Post options are now being hidden in a set of collapsible menus on the right side of the screen.

I kind of miss the low-rent interface of versions 1.2 and 1.5.

No doubt I’ll get over this in a week or so, just like I got over my discomfort when I upgraded from Windows 3.11 for Workgroups to Win 95, and then again when I upgraded to Win 98 and Win XP, respectively.

While we are on the topic of Wordpress, I’m going to do a shameless plug for this great blog script.

If you have your own webhosting with MySQL database access, you can download and install Wordpress yourself for free. If you don’t have your own hosting plan, you can open a free account at Wordpress.com and be up and running with your own WP blog in less than 2 minutes. You can even import all of your Blogger/Blogspot posts into your shiny new Wordpress.com blog to save time.

To give your blog clickable smiley capabilities, visit Alex King’s Wordpress resource page and grab the WP-Grins plug-in.  He also has a nice collection of WP 1.5/2.0 themes to make your blog pretty.

Here’s another sale for my fellow handheld Palm/Pocket PC/smartphone addicts: Through 4/28/06, use code “SECRET15″ to receive 15% off your entire purchase at Handango.com.

Many thanks to Melanie for letting me know about two errors in the formulas in my Lazy Gardener’s Seed Starting Chart spreadsheet. The dates for planting tomatoes and tomatillos were being calculated incorrectly as 1-2 weeks before the frost-free date instead of 1-2 weeks after as they should have been.

If you downloaded the spreadsheet before 4/21/06, please download it again now to get the corrected version.

Download corrected V.2 of the Lazy Gardener’s Seed Starting Chart

Since I moved across town in December and increased my work commute from a negligible 2 minutes to over 40 minutes each way, I have been slowly going insane listening to the commercial-laden, canned pop/rock/emo/R&B music and brainless DJ blatherings on the local Orlando radio stations. For a while I entertained myself by using my drive as karaoke rehearsal time, but eventually I started to resent the length of unproductive drive time I was wasting each week.

Think about it: (40 mins/trip) * (2 trips/day) * (5 days/week) = 400 minutes/week

400 minutes/week = 6.67 hours/week

6.67 hours a week completed wasted! No wonder I feel like I don’t have enough time to read for fun anymore. My reading time has been eaten up by traffic and miles on Interstate 4. :mad2:

If I could just get an unbiased news broadcast during the drive, at least that would be somewhat educational, but for some unknown reason NPR news is never on when I’m on the road, and the only AM “news” radio station just features ultra-conservative political news hosts who make me want to scream in annoyance at their ignorance.

I hate Orlando radio.

In frustration, I upgraded my Audible.com subscription from the $9.95/year 30% off regular price discount membership to the $14.95/month gold membership that includes a Monday through Friday subscription to the audio edition of the New York Times and one free audio book each month.

I’ve also been cross-referencing interesting titles from Audible with the collection at my local library to make sure I don’t squander my credits on something I could check out for free.

This week I am learning Japanese through Pimsleur’s Quick and Simple Japanese CDs and realizing that I am already doing everything I need to do to become an Automatic Millionaire thanks to the Seminole County Public Library. When I am tired of being educated, I will pop in my Audible download of Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys for some entertainment.

With proper planning, I’ll never have to listen to a local radio station again.

:claplow:

Kyra is running another fitness challenge on the Pink Dumbbells forum. Technically, it started April 2, but since it will fun 3 full months, you can still hop in and join the Spring Fling Challenge if you would like to work on your fitness goals (fat loss, muscle gain, training for an event, anything really) with a group of highly-motivated, positive women who share your go get ‘em mindset. No pity parties at Pink Dumbbells!

Sign up for the Spring Fling here and jump right in on the latest daily check-in thread in the Fitness Challenge forum.