#like my rabbits were relatively poorly socialized

[kedreeva]

I saw your post about how peafowl are ... resource and knowledge intensive to keep. Is there a bird you would recommend for beginners? Are quail easy?

Compared to peafowl or even to chickens, yes, but that also depends on what you mean by quail. There are a BUNCH of species that are able to be kept in captivity, depending on where you live. If you're in the USA, coturnix and button quail are both domesticated species that do well in relatively small enclosures (think, a large rabbit hutch or one of those little "coops" from tractor supply co that they think are for chickens but are only suitable for babies at best). Most people that want to keep quail for meat or eggs are keeping coturnix not buttons but if you just want cute pets, button quail are adorable. The males of both species are LOUD though.

Coturnix do well eating game bird crumble mixed with layer crumble, as they need around 2.5-3% calcium if they're laying, which is about half what chickens need. They also need a higher protein than chickens, especially as babies (28-30 as babies, 21-26% as adults), or you don't get much in the way of eggs. Other than that, fresh water and a clean home and they're good to go.

The hens typically start laying by around 6-10 weeks (the Celadon gene can cause laying delays), the boys will be crowing on a similar timeline, so be sure you are okay with the noise or know what you're going to do with culls. Coturnix can be kept outdoors year round... button quail cannot, they need to be indoors if it's cold out. The biggest problems I've had with the coturnix is a) noise (which I've mostly bred out) and b) water in the winter. My water system only works when water can stay liquid. So, in the winter, the quail switch over to water bottles with 3D printed drinker bottoms, and those get changed 2+ times a day. They look kinda like this:

and c) aggression in a poorly-bred line. I don't see it much with my Celadon line anymore, but when I first got them, and in the new outcrossed babies, the males would be relentlessly either on the girls or fighting each other, and sometimes a girl would also do this, just start attacking everyone. I culled against it from day 1, and now they're fine, but I had a group of outcross boys that came from my Celadons x fresh blood and the boys were unmanageable immediately. It doesn't matter because I'm not keeping any of them, but I do worry it'll come back on birds I /want/ because the girls may carry that. So that's just something to be aware of, I guess. Ask the breeder about it before you buy.

If you just want "A Bird" and not specifically farm fowl: you want a pigeon or two! They bond to their humans or to each other, they do silly things and have Antics, there is a ton of easily accessible info about their nutrition (and their food is easy to acquire), care, and behavior, and there's always ones looking for homes. Since they were bred as companion and even work animals, not just as food, they socialize easily with humans and they can be kept indoors and unlike quail, their noises are pleasant.

Of course that doesn't dismiss the need to do your research on what it would entail to keep one (or two!), but at least that's easier to do well.

[bibliolokust]

‘quitters, inc.’

‘When a romantic tries to do a good thing and fails, they give him a medal.  When a pragmatist succeeds, they wish him in hell.  Shall we go?’ king’s ‘quitters, inc.’ seems, on the surface, to be another of his his attempts at hardboiled pastiche and, while it succeeds very well at this, there is a philosophical depth to it that belies the shallowness of its basic conceit- a nonprofit that helps smokers quit smoking through sadism, torture, and potential murder.

richard morrison sees an old friend while sitting at an airport bar, one jimmy mccann and discuss the idea of quitting smoking, which jimmy has done (and looks far better for having done) and everything seems harmless and relatively innocuous as jimmy gives morrison the business card of the group that helped him quit and, he claims, turned his life entirely around (although the notion of signing a non-disclosure contract over it is something that mccann finds slightly puzzling.)  after the two part, mccann swiftly forgets the encounter, only remembering it when the card (for an outfit called ‘quitters, inc.’) calls out of his wallet at the bar.  deciding that, with aspects of his professional life  going poorly, maybe he would give it a shot.  for ‘chuckles.’

after noticing that the group operated out of the entire floor of some prime real estate (signifying a great degree of financial success) what follows is the sort of intake procedure anyone who has gone to a doctor’s office would be familiar with, the routine questions, the awkward waiting with strangers, the sort of  liminal experience which somehow simultaneously bores and frustrates, with morrison already annoyed at not being able to smoke.

after the wait, morrison meets vic donatti, who is to be his caseworker, and is led to  a nearly empty room (with a green curtain in front of a small window) to begin the secondary interview, after having morrison sign the non-disclosure contract, where the series of questions becomes more personal, angering and unsettling morrison before donatti pulls back the curtain to show the room beyond the window.  a room which is empty other than a rabbit and a bowl of food. 

as the rabbit begins to eat, donatti pushes a button on the wall and the rabbit begins to jump as if in pain, it shair standing on end.  morrison realises that the rabbit is being electrocuted and donatti explains that, eventually, the rabbit will choose to starve to death rather than eat.  morrison becomes horrified as donatti, expressing the value of pragmatism, lays out the rules of the program- that his wife and ‘retarded’ son (the description and portrayal of which is deeply troublesome and appalling ableist, even for the seventies) will be tortured, brutalised, and beaten for every cigarette that morrison has.  he decides against the treatment but his attempt to leave is thwarted by the door being locked and donatti explains that he cannot quit the quitting, as it were, as he has already signed the contract and that morrison misunderstands something- at his first transgression it won’t be he that gets put in the ‘rabbit room’ but, rather, it will be his wife and he would be forced to watch and that quitters, inc. will be keeping a close eye on him.

after a particularly tense night where he goes into his study, takes a cigarette, and contemplates lighting it (before thinking he hears a slight noise in the closet, a bit reminiscent of the stark terror that came from the closet in king’s previous story, ‘the boogeyman,’) the days go by and morrison’s resentment and anger shifts into something a bit more pragmatic, the notion that he can actually do this.  until, that is, he finds himself stuck in traffic, tense and furious, believing that no one could possibly see him.  he lights a cigarette (after blaming, in his mind, his wife for not getting rid of them) takes a few drags, and throws it away, disgusted.

as he anxiously calls for his wife when he gets home, the phone rings, donatti on the other line.  he breathlessly asks if they have his wife and he’s assured that they do and that should should come in for a five o’clock meeting.  having no other choice, he goes and is met by donatti and a monster of a man with  a.38 handgun.  they step into the room and morrison watches as his wife is put through the rabbit torture.  after, he sits with her and explains everything and, to his surprise, she is not resentful but, rather, is grateful at him given this opportunity to really and fully quit smoking (and this, to my mind, is another misstep with king defaulting to the caricature of the obedient housewife instead of allowing her any real depth.)

a week later, the phone rings, again, and donatti asks morrison to come in to the office, one more time.  after assuring him that there’s no problem, morrison aggrees and is further unsettled by donatti mentioning the promotion he’d been given and saying that quitters, inc. have been ‘keeping tabs.’  in the office, donatti has morrison get on the scale, and tells him that he is now going to work on losing weight and keeping it off (with the assistance of some illegal diet pill) under the threat of quitters, inc. having someone cut off his wife’s little finger.

eight months go by, and a fit and happy morrison meets an acquaintance who is anything but fit and happy and, after some thought, gives him the quitters, inc. business card.  finally, twenty months later, morrison runs into jimmy mccann and his wife, realising, with horror, that mccann’s wife is missing her little finger.

what’s fascinating about the piece is that each conversation between morrison and donatti is, beneath the threats of the latter and bluster of the former, part of a rich philosophical argument where the surface is shot through with implication, not just of violence and its necessity, but of whether or not that looming threat of violence is what holds the entirety of civilisation together (the likes of which would be echoed in a few years time in bill watterson’s popular comic strip, ‘calvin & hobbes.’)  donatti, through methods that resonate with fascism and notions of the weight of personal responsibility that harken back to john calvin, seeks only to use thomas hobbes’ notion of the social contract to manifestly make the world a better place.

when most people think if stephen king’s ouvre, the notion of ‘philosophical depth’ rarely comes to mind and, when it does, it tends to focus around his use of the supernatural to explore death, the afterdeath, and the notion of a greater world that we can never truly have the means to understand but, when all is said and done, this seemingly simple story of a man using a brutish and nasty service to help him quit smoking is a complex and artful exploration of the nature of choice and whether or not the question of ‘free will’ even matters, in the end.  using tight prose and a deft touch, king manages to create a story that is suffused with such personal resonance (especially in light of his own struggles with addiction) and philosophy of (and in) the world that, even given its few unfortunate missteps, rises to challenge the notion that he’s a writer without depth and it stands among the best of this first collection of his.

[a380flightdeck]

Pets On A Plane.

When airlines are in the news, it’s almost never for a good reason.

As the headlines have it, United’s brutish handling of its human customers seems to be outdone only by the way it treats pets. First we had the demise of Simon, the giant rabbit who perished aboard one of United’s London-to-Chicago flights last year. Then, a week ago, on a United flight between Houston and LaGuardia, a flight attendant demanded that an exit-row passenger put her ten-month-old French bulldog in an overhead bin, where it subsequently died either from suffocation or stress. And stop the press: a day after formally apologizing for the overhead bin incident, United accidentally shipped a German shepherd to Tokyo instead of to Kansas City.  

In the case of the bulldog puppy, I can’t imagine the flight attendant thought the dog would be harmed, but still it was a terrible decision. So what’s going on here? Is there something endemically dysfunctional at United that’s leading to screw-ups like these?

I’m not sure. United’s record does compare poorly against the other biggest airlines. United recorded 18 animal deaths in 2017, out of around 75,000 that were carried. On the other hand, the numbers overall are small, which makes comparisons like this tricky. Each of the nation’s major carriers operate thousands of flights every day of the week. Unfortunate (and avoidable) as these accidents are, they’re bound to happen, and the numbers, through little more than chance, can paint one airline as guiltier than another. The media, meanwhile, both the social kind and the kind that used to matter, is out for blood, and pity the airline — particularly the one whose name begins with U — that so much as looks crossly at a customer’s doggie or kitty.

Unless of course that doggie or kitty — or pot-bellied pig, or iguana, or llama (yes) — is playing dress-up and posing as an “emotional support animal.” Yeah, the whole faux service animal thing has been simmering for some time now, and the airlines — most of them — are finally cracking down. The timing is bad here, maybe, as the new policies, together with the death of the bulldog puppy and the wayward shepherd, could make you think that airlines are decidedly hostile to pets. Which they are not.

I’m not gonna get too deep into the service animal thing. As an animal lover, I’m of the mind that we should have more animals — and perhaps fewer passengers — on our planes. Also, and despite my protests, my mother once attempted to have her beloved miniature greyhound dubiously certified in this manner.

“I cannot ship him below deck!” she insisted. “There’s no heat or oxygen down there!”

That, incidentally, is false. Which brings us to the real point of this post, which is to give some comfort to those people who are anxious about shipping their pets in the freight compartment. I can understand how tempting it is to want your critter with you right there in the cabin (though no, not in the overhead locker, unless perhaps it’s a python or a bat), but fear not the lower holds.

A lot of people are under the impression that the underfloor spaces are freezing and unpressurized. Not true. At 35,000 feet the outside temperature is about 60 degrees below zero and there isn’t enough oxygen to breathe. That’s worse than economy, and transporting animals in these conditions would rightfully displease their owners and animal rights groups. So, yes, the underfloor holds are always pressurized and heated. On most planes there’s a particular zone designated for animals. This tends to be the zone with the warmest and most consistent temperature. Maintaining a steady, comfortable temperature while aloft is relatively easy, but it can be tricky on the ground in hot weather, and for this reason some airlines embargo pets during the summer months.

Of the two million or so animals carried in the United States each year, a small number perish, whether due to stress or mishandling. How well a pet endures the experience depends a good deal on the individual animal’s health and temperament. If your dog or cat (or rabbit or macaw) is elderly, ill, or easily stressed or spooked, perhaps sending him or her through multiple time zones in a noisy and confined space isn’t the smartest idea. My best advice is to consult with a veterinarian.

The flight crew is always told when animals are aboard. Passengers are known to send handwritten notes to the cockpit asking that we take special care, but this isn’t really necessary, and, in any case, there’s not a lot we can do. There’s no access between the main deck and the lower holds, so we can’t carry treats to your friend below.

[thecrucibleffxiv]

7 WAYS TO CHARM YOUR LIFE INTO A BETTER FORTUNE

Fortune is the blessing of Nald, and it’s important to understand how to curry that favor. The Crucible has you covered for all your Church of Nald’Thal-sanctioned means to curry Nald’s favor, and therefore increase your fortunes.

1: MARRY RICH

It might seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how many people foolishly think to wed out of something as pointless and trite as “love” or “sexual attraction”. Don’t fall for that trick, everyone - instead, use them as weapons to ensnare someone far wealthier than yourself, ensuring your advancement through the social elite of Ul’dah. It’s easy!

2: CARRY A RABBIT’S FOOT AT ALL TIMES

This one’s a much more obscure ritual - you’ll need to somehow find a rabbit. Easier said than done, I’m aware. But you must do so nonetheless. Then, once you have found the rabbit - this is the most important part of the process - you must grab it by its hind legs, hold it upside down and explain to it in a calm and courteous manner why exactly you need good fortune and what you are going to use it for.

Then you [redacted] it against a [redacted] until the legs [redacted]. Simple, right?

3: PLAY THE LOTTERY WITH MY PATENTED TRICKS! PROVEN TO WORK 100% SUCCESSFULLY WHEN THEY WORK!

It might seem counter-intuitive, but it’s true: the more you rely on luck, the more often it will come through for you. This means that you must demand luck in your daily life as often as possible, which poses an obvious problem: it’d be lucky to get thrown off a cliff and survive, but if you’re not lucky it goes poorly. So what do you do?

Lottery tickets. So many lottery tickets. Other gambling is good, too, but lottery tickets are easy and take almost no time. At the Manderville Gold Saucer you are welcome to buy mini cactpot tickets on a daily basis, and consider this a ‘training ground’ for your luck.

Just remember: always go for the 1-2-3, and when it doubt, pick the most vertical line. Never go horizontal.

You’re welcome.

4: JUST CHEAT, JUST DO IT YOU OUTRAGEOUS ASSHOLE

Next time you and your friends are throwing dice to determine who gets the thing you just found in a treasure chest, cheat. How do you cheat, you ask?

By punching them in their stupid faces when their guard is down, grabbing the loot and booking it out before they realize what’s happening.

(Who cares about being sanctioned by the Adventurer’s Guild, anyway? They have a Limsan branch, they can’t possibly be that worthwhile.)

5: TRY NOT BEING UNLUCKY

At this point we’ve exhausted several other options, so let’s just consider the obvious: have you tried not having bad luck? It’s pretty simple, all you have to do is not screw up dice rolls and serendipitous encounters. I mean, honestly, being unlucky is such a poor people thing to do. I suppose that’s what separates us from you, though.

6: GET FRUSTRATED AND CAST A HEX

“Lucky” is an inherently relative term - it’s not an objective state of being, it’s in comparison to your peers. If you’re lucky in one context, you might always come across people so much luckier than you that you no longer are considered “lucky”.

So maybe you’ve tried everything else. Even cheating doesn’t work. But there’s one foolproof method: Hex EVERYONE around you to permanently destroy their luck, so that by comparison you come out smelling like a rafflesia (for the uneducated: it’s a huge flower. If you studied alchemy like a good Ul’dahn you would know that.)

To hex everyone around you, you will need:

The blood of an orphan (chilled and fresh - use all of it, just to be sure)

The skin of an unwed mother’s uncle (no less than a ponze, no more than three - it needs to all be the same donor)

A young frog born on the night of the tenth full moon of the year

The tenth cactuar in its brood

The knife of a tonberry (just to have - it doesn’t actually do anything, it’s just nice)

Horns from those humanoid aldgoats walking around, the ones with the scales

A ponze of everything you find in your kitchen

A napkin used by the Sultana Herself

A prayer rosary to Nald’Thal

A three-eyed bat’s second son (ground into paste and dried for two moons and ten days)

Vials of blood from each of your intended targets

A cauldron, for mixing

The blood of the fools who try to take your legal right of autonomy away from you so they can steal your money and try to get the inheritance they think they deserve (joke’s on you brats, you get NOTHING BUT MY IRE and your sisters get EVERYTHING! Because they’re not WORTHLESS STAINS ON MY HONOR!)

What happens next is so obvious that I don’t feel the need to explain it. If you can’t figure it out you don’t deserve to call yourself a witch.

7: CATCH AND HARNESS THE POWER OF A LEPRECHAUN

There are many opinions you will get about Leprechauns, should you ask around: “What in the hells is a leprechaun?” “why are you in my house?” “what smells like blood?” “Why do you have a knife?”

All these questions are wrong. Leprechauns are real. I know, I caught one. I kept him in my basement until my daughters let him out. It was infuriating. They insist they didn’t actually let him go, and that he was never there at all, which means they have yet to open their eyes fully to the world. If they do not before I die then I have failed as a mother.

Leprechauns look like lalafell, bedecked all in green and with a sly grin and deft hands. You will be tempted to cook them in a stew, for they are far more delicious than any other sort of lalafell, but that is the sort of stupid decision only a midlander would make. What’s more important: one good meal, or a lifetime of luck?

I thought so.

Now, to harness its power, you need to capture it. They are quite prone to alcohol, though they can put down far more than you’d expect, so you’ll need to drug them, too. Then drag them to your house and lock them up somewhere they can’t escape. When they wake up, get a very long and sturdy tree branch from one of those pink-leaved trees the foreigners love so much and poke them with it, chanting “GIVE ME LUCK AND GIVE ME LIFE OR FEEL THE STING OF THE CARVING KNIFE” for hours on end.

It may take awhile, but eventually the creature will cave to your whims and cast his lucky charm on you, and from then on your life will be smooth sailing.

Nailed to the door of The Crucible’s offices by a cackling old woman who signed her name as “The Crimson Witch” and, when questioned, turned a random passerby into a toad as a warning. This article presented as mostly written due to an intense fear she will come back if we change anything or refuse to publish it, all edits were done at the behest of the lawyer who is equally as terrifying. -Anthony Hawke

Twitter || Facebook || Patreon

[allomammal]

Resolutions for 2K18

1. Flexitarianism

Last year, one of my resolutions was decreed: Thou shall not consume mammals. The rationale behind this goal was inspired by the rabbits I’ve been raising for the past few years. Rabbits are far more socially intelligent than you might think. Especially if you’ve only had dogs or cats as pets, you might not realize that rabbits will present themselves to be groomed by curiously running up to you, nuzzling their heads beneath your hands as if to invite you to gently stroke their heads and ears, and licking you when you stop petting them as if to say, “Come on! Pet me some more.” And when you do engage them in a petting session, their eyes have this sweet expression that I like to believe is analogous to what humans might describe as companionate love. While it is not my field of research, I think about Frans de Waal’s ideas on heuristic (or critical) anthropomorphism - that is, the idea that it may be evolutionarily parsimonious to regard the cognitive faculties of closely related species as similar since these faculties are derived from a common ancestor. Now, by no means do I intend to project onto rabbits a very human and very romanticized ability to perceive or experience love. Rabbits are very different from humans. Rabbits are very different from primates and other mammals. Still, we share ancestors with primates, lagomorphs (rabbits and hares), rodents, canids, felids, ungulates, cetaceans… So, our own endocrine and nervous systems - which give rise to our psychological and emotional repertoires - are derived from some ancestral, mammalian endocrine and nervous systems. That is, while humans and other mammals may have their own distinct Umwelt or cognition adapted to different sets of ecological circumstances over millions of years, allomammals have, at least, some basal mental faculties homologous to the socio-emotional intelligence we, humans, understand. And there are numerous other reasons why a person might choose to stop eating either red-meat or meat all together (environmentalism, animal rights, etc.) but this was the primary reason I decided to take a break from eating my mammalian cousins. However, by the end of the year, my life-partner, Azaneth, (who had also been practicing a no-mammal diet) tried to donate blood but was turned away due to low iron. I realize that we could remedy this deficiency with legumes and dark, leafy greens, but this year, I wanted to give room to consume the double, bacon cheeseburger -- in part to compartmentalizing my simultaneously-held, contradictory urges but also because I don’t hold strong moral judgements against people who do consume meat. But, appealing to some vague sense of balance, I decided a good compromise would be this resolution: Meat may be consumed 1 week out of each month; of the 12 ‘meat-weeks’ in the year, only 3 may be mammal-meat. This scheme should work fairly well with our meal-prep schedule; that is, we usually prepare one major dish on Sundays to be eaten for either lunch or dinner throughout the week. And the balance is struck by allowing for the occasional red-meat meal (carne con papas, beef fajita quesadillas, double, bacon cheeseburgers), while significantly reducing my overall meat consumption (mammal or otherwise). I imagine these dietary projects will, at some future equilibrium, yield a more nutrition-conscientious, vegetarian me.

2. Run 400 Miles

For 2017, I was most proud of the modest exercising goal I set for myself to run at least 20 miles per month (a total of 240 miles by year’s end). That goal was surpassed sometime in July - a fact for which I was extremely proud. As I wrote in my previous post, I decided to up the ante by trying for at least 365 miles by the end of the year (a mile for each day). Again, I was able to surpass that goal with a final mileage of nearly 383 miles. I was not an avid runner until around the age of 19 when I was in college. A close friend of mine was about to begin training for the Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon in San Antonio and asked me if I’d like to run with him regularly. Our college campus was small, essentially bounded by a street we affectionately called “the loop” - it was an ellipse with a roughly 1 mile circumference. In the evenings, we’d run a couple to a few miles, but eventually we worked our way up to 11 miles. We had friends that often ran upwards of 20 miles - they had been cross-country runners at least as early as high school. Still, this was a major accomplishment for both of us. Eventually our schedules diverged and my friend transferred to another school, but since then I’ve been running a my primary form of exercise. I’ve befriended runners who routinely run as far as 50 miles in one go. That’s pretty fucking amazing. It’s the kind of thing that might discourage some from even trying to become a runner. I doubt I’ll ever complete a 50 mile run, but what these friends demonstrate to me is (1) human bodies are keenly (evolutionarily) adapted to running incredible distances, and (2) human bodies are extremely plastic and it is not impossible for the average person to become an ultra-marathon runner. I get a lot more out of running than an increased heart rate. Most times, I’m able to work through and process many of my feelings, thoughts, and ideas while on a long run. In my view, whether becomes an avid runner (or an ultra-marathon runner) has a lot to with the circumstances of your birth. It seems pretty clear to me that if you’re born in a high-SES household, you’re more likely to pick up running as a hobby because you’re more likely to have access to a wealth of good health-related information. If you’re born in a high-SES neighborhood, you’re more likely to have sidewalks, access to well-developed parks, access to upscale grocery stores, and exposure to people of a health-conscious culture that make regular use of this kind of health-infrastructure. I’ve briefly explored the data on parks in San Antonio, and while low-income areas of town have more parks, they are often very small and poorly maintained.

3. 100 Push-Ups a Day

Towards the end of 2017, I had begun doing push-ups sporadically (50 here, 100 there), but nothing particularly consistent. It wasn’t a codified resolution or anything. I’ve always been insecure about my body, and push-ups just seem like a simple way I can achieve a lean upper body and sculpted chest. For context, I grew up in what some have described as a ‘pus pocket’ suburb in Northeast San Antonio where my parents were reluctant to let my brother (10-months my senior) and me roam outside of our relatively safe and stable cul-de-sac. By the time were were old enough to venture around, we really didn’t have many places to go so, often times, we’d walk a mile up the road to the local Diamond Shamrock to spend our hard-earned allowance on junk food - Starburst, Airheads, Sour Punch, Sour Parch, Sour Skittles, Hot Cheetos, etc. As I’ve gotten older and become more educated with respect to biology, nutrition, and public health, I’ve realized that we were very much playing out instantiations of an individual-based-model of the epidemiology of metabolic-disease for low-SES children living in a food desert. In other words, I was a chubby kid who enjoyed candy. So, the insecurities I developed as a child regarding my physical form as well as the inclinations to consume goodies high in fats and sugars are still very much a part of my adult psychology. Only through continued metacognitive awareness and effort am I able to stave off temptation. And that’s not always a fight I win. But I hope that if I can commit myself to at least 100 push-ups a day, that I will have just one more tool to help control my weight and form.

4. No Lattés

Nowadays, I think about how sociological and cultural systems maintain negative health outcomes for low-SES minority communities. The last few years of my life, I’ve lived in 4 different locations in San Antonio, each with stark differences in the structure and configuration of the built environment. Some places had more, direct access to fast food or gas stations (junk food purveyors that, luckily, “NOW ACCEPT EBT!”). I noticed the most extreme fluctuations in my weight at these spots. More recently, I’ve had quicker access to the nice HEB, Sprouts, and Whole Foods. Here, I’ve enjoyed a much less fluctuation in my weight. However, the newest problem I face is an increase in my sugar-consumption due to upper-class, obseogenic enterprises - Starbucks - which leads me to my next resolution: No Lattés. By no means is Starbucks the only perpetrator peddling coffee with inordinate amounts of sugar (and, thus, calories). Often I entertain jokes about “coffee” drinkers who only drink the beverage if it contains lots of milk, cream, or sugar (The joke is that these people like milk, not coffee), but - I confess - I also enjoy a good latté. However, this year, in addition to abstaining from latté consumption, I’ve also barred myself from consuming highly sweetened creamers like the Coffee Mate French Vanilla that I enjoy so much because I suspect that the sugar functionally overpowers the caffeine making my morning pick-me-up and morning let-down. In addition, I really do need to be limiting my sugar intake. I’d like to have a significant draw-down in the amount of added sugar I consume this year in hopes that, with my previous exercise and diet themed resolutions, I can gain better control of my weight and overall health.

5. Limited Take-Out Finally, knowing that eating out - whether to-go or in a sit-down restaurant - can be very expensive (on your monetary and dietary budget), I’ve decided to limit eating out to at most once a week. That is I can order food either 0 times per week or 1 time per week. To be honest, this still seems like I’ve allowed myself a lot of wiggle room. Perhaps too much wiggle room. However, I think the flexibility is providing for those unforeseeable, stress-filled where meal-prep schedules get thrown off by a day or so. So, on a good week, I imagine that I will actually not be eating out at all.  Hopefully, most weeks will be good weeks. But, those weeks where I do order out will still need to abide by the resolution on Flexitarianism and, usually, I tend to consciously run more miles immediately following eating out. So these are my explicit resolutions for 2018. They are an interconnected framework of health goals that I hope will support one another and make for another disciplined and accomplished year.