2 Notable Items

Last night, after 375 days, my self-imposed restaurant boycott ended. How did it end? I closed the circle, ducked into Fire on the Mountain and ordered the exact same meal I ordered in December 2010, the last time I ate out. Then I ordered another beer and a side of fries and hung out and watched another quarter of basketball. I don’t know if Chris Paul and Clips had a bad night or my beloved Blazers finally figured out how to defend the pick and roll, but it was hard to walk away from the game. My favorite part, Chris Paul, stuck his elbow into a defenders neck right in front of the official and then bitched when he was called for the foul. Basketball may be the greatest sport ever invented and realized but there are parts of it that really need to change - it isn't a problem in college or europe but here everyone feels their opinion is equal to the Truth - yes I'm talking about basketball (mostly).

Back to the end of the resolution…I’m happy it’s over, it was becoming a thing – what meal would be good enough to end the experiment. Instead the decision was oddly non-food centric, circumstances dictated the occasion, coming home from class, after a week of fighting a low grade flu, cold, fever, I had a refrigerator full of food, but it would have taken an hour to get something made and on the table or it’s bachelor analog, ready to eat over the sink. I was tired, hungry and just wanted someone to take care of me – if only a small comfort and even if I had to pay for that pleasure. That plus televised basketball and it really was an easy choice.

I can’t quite summarize how my resolution/goal in a sentence, that will be written up in a longer piece, but everyone should try a variation on this – pack a lunch once a week, spend a week making everything from scratch, to go a month without entering a restaurant, drive thru or dialing a to-go order. The act of doing going without something as fundamental as grabbing food, will change the way you think how and why you eat out. I bet, like my choice to end the streak, eating out will have more to do with circumstances than craving food.

The 500

Nearly 4 full years into my blogging adventure, this is the 500^th post on Saucyman. A milestone of sorts, except milestone implies a more noteworthy event than is actually occurring.

I started blogging because I need to write more and was frustrated by periodic adventures in Freelanceville - both in frequency and topics. I had a dual endgame in mind – get better at writing and produce a body of work that could serve as a living resume - with the added bonus of getting to write about what I wanted to write about. I assumed if the plan went well, at some point I would get paid for producing content for the web.  

I have accomplished both: Make a plan and execute it. It’s a good feeling.

Now that I have realized my initial goals, I want to keep on blogging. Even if the Market gets more of my word energy these days, even if it’s harder to find time to post at least twice a week, even if I can see the set of circumstances, not as improbable and maybe not that far off in the future, where this site evolves into an aggregator for other things I am writing. Still, I am very attached to what I accomplished with this blog, here I really learned the value of consistency. (True story, consistency has been a lifelong problem: being smart, thoughtful, having good ideas and occasional flashes of brilliance - never a problem. Working steadily and dependably on a goal/project/issue, I've come up flat - this body of work has helped more than any other idea I've stumbled across.) So maybe I'm overly proud, but who cares, lessons that come late and have a steep learning curve are the ones that t are most valuable.