Yesterday I personally contributed to the destruction of an entire rain forest. Well… that may be a slight exaggeration. I did cut my back yard, though, which was pretty darn close to the same thing.
You see a couple of weeks ago I broke the handle to our lawnmower. And when I say broke, I mean broke. The metal just snapped in two right near the base of the handle where it attaches to the actual lawnmower. Sometimes I guess I just don’t know my own strength! We didn’t (and still don’t) really have the money to just go out and buy a new lawnmower or have it fixed, so our yard went into wild mode. Our neighbor (a lawyer) mowed our front lawn last week out of pity… or perhaps our yard was so bad that it reflected on his property value.
Anyway, my wife’s grandfather was able to procure a lawnmower handle for free (MANY THANKS!) and so I was able to fix it yesterday and mow the lawn. It took several hours even though we don’t have that large a yard. The “wheat field” in the back yard (as the kids called it) was up to my knees and so it was slow going just so that the engine didn’t bog to a halt.
All this was after I ran 6.36 miles yesterday as well! I actually lost a total of 8 pounds during yesterday, which I attributed to water weight. But when I checked this morning I kept about 5 of it off! So the formula works: burn more calories than you eat = weight loss.