2) Speaking of Butler and crawly things, I found a tick on him last night! Yuck! I thought he was on medication to deal with ticks, but apparently we had been misinformed about that. I suppose we're lucky that he isn't covered in them, since he spends his days wallering around in the grass, but that one tick was enough for me to feel itchy the rest of the day. I went to the vet first thing this morning and got something for them. I can't stand the thought of the little critters being on him or on us! When I was a kid, our house got infested with them somehow (I remember seeing them on the curtains and crawling up from the carpet) and ever since then they've given me the wiggins something awful. As God as my witness I will shave the dog and have him shrink wrapped before I let him get all ticky! Bleh. Even writing about this has made me itchy.
*IN FRENCH SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS NARRARATOR VOICE*
Two. Days. Later.
3) I recently got a Fitbit Force! It's a really neato little gadget that you wear around your wrist that acts as a watch, a pedometer, an alarm clock and sleep analyzer, and it connects to an online program to help you keep track of all manner of health stuff, like water consumption and calorie intake. Basically it's a shaming device unless you are really active, which I am not. I wanted it for two reasons: A) I'm hoping that by seeing how very little I usually do in a day, I will be motivated to move my carcass around a little bit more and hopefully restart whatever healthy lifestyle changes I need to make. B) It also connects to a program online that Steve's company is a part of called Vitality, which (I think) keeps track of the ways that you are exercising and making good health decisions so that you can get discounts on insurance. Barring those things, I'm sure the NSA can use it to track me down in case they decide I'm a threat due to the sheer amount of yarn I buy. There's a joke about afghans/Afghans in that, but I'm not feeling very clever today.
Anyways, one of the things I really like is that you can set a goal of how many steps you want to take in a day. If you meet that goal, the bracelet/watch thing buzzes and it does a little digital light show in celebration. You also get a big green smiley face on your Fitbit dashboard. If it could just dispense a small pellet of chocolate once you reach your goal, it would be perfect. Inversely, one of the things I'm kind of iffy about is that the pedometer doesn't seem to be totally accurate. While I'm walking, it seems to be doing the job correctly, but there have been times when I've been in the car and noticed that it is advancing my step number. I'm not 100% sure why it does that, but I'm assuming it's the way I've moved, or maybe vibrations or something. Who knows?
Last night I'd been sitting in the living room crocheting when I decided to check the app that the Fitbit syncs to and see how far away from my goal I was. I was surprised to see I was only about 800 steps away from my goal, because I'd been crocheting for a long time. I just guessed that I must have done a lot of walking during the day, so I got up to walk around the house for a few minutes to see if I could get closer to the goal. I walked around for a while before I got bored (my house is not big, nor is it interesting to walk through) and I decided to sit down again and continue my crochet project. I checked my Fitbit again and saw that I was only about 400 steps away from my goal and figured I could do that before bed without a problem. I settled back and began crocheting again, and after a while my Fitbit buzzed. I looked down and saw that it was doing the "Hooray! You made your goal!" thing. Apparently, the Fitbit had been counting my crochet stitches as steps! I hadn't walked that much at all, I'd just been doing something with repetitive motion that triggered the pedometer! I also found out that I crocheted about 1.7 miles. If only that burned calories...
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