Bored

I'm starting to get bored. Bored with the treadmill. Bored with the food. Bored with thinking about it all the time.

This worries me.

So this weekend, I tried to do something different for exercise. And I tried to eat some different things. Because I don't want to get bored and then invent reasons to not do the things I need to do.

New Exercise

• Picking up a winter's worth of dog poop in the yard: Instead of carrying a paper grocery bag or 5-gal. bucket around, filling it up and dumping it once, I filled up the little "dust pan" scooper and walked each scooper full to the hay field to dump it. It made for a lot of little trips up and down a little hill in my butt-shaper tennies.
• Cleaning the garage: And cursing the fact that my push broom was only about 18" wide. It made for a lot of extra pushing, but I guess that was the point.
• Handweight Routine: Using 2-lb. or 3-lb. weights, I do a rotation of the following exercises as many times as I can in a row. 
• Lift arms straight out to the side (making a T shape)
• Lift arms straight out in front (like picking up a baby)
• Monkey curls (arms straight out at sides and bend at elbow to move weights into armpits like a monkey)
• Divebomber (bend 90-degrees at waist and lift arms up parallel to floor
• Lawnmower (put one knee on a chair and pretend like you're pulling the starter string on a lawnmower ... I usually put both weights in one hand for this one)

New Food

• Sweet potato hashbrowns: Grate a sweet potato on a cheese grater, fry on stovetop with a little canola and onion. It's not great ... because there is oil, but I just needed a change of pace and needed to feel like I was eating "meat and potatoes." At least there's nutrition in the sweet potatoes.
• Chicken sausage, peppers and penne: Cook an Italian chicken sausage (Woodman's), cut into diagonal slices and set aside. In the same pan, with a little olive oil, saute red peppers, onions, can of fire roasted tomatoes and a slightly spicy light green pepper like a Cubanelle or I used Anaheim. Season with basil, oregano, garlic ... whatever Italian blend you like. Toss it all together and serve over whole wheat penne.

Bring on the warm weather, already! My head needs a change of pace and I'm thinking some time in the yard (raking all the gravel that was pushed with the snowplow back onto the driveway ... ugh) and some time by the grill will be just the ticket.