Happy New Year
I celebrate the New Year in my regular fashion: Meet at the drinking club with friends and family at 2:30 to watch bowl games and drink beer. Afterward, I go home and meet the glare of my wife, who's been racked with eleven children (my seven and my brother's four) all afternoon and now has a somewhat-inebriated husband who's not much help. It gets the marriage off to a lousy new year start, but we eventually get over it . . . by March, anyway.
Speaking of bowl games, Michael (10) got a book of sports trivia. One section contained a list of over 50 defunct college bowl games. I thought about re-keying the list, but instead, found this partial list and this partial list. My favorite defunct bowl name: "The Gotham Bowl."
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My New Year Resolution for 2009: Start square-foot gardening. I'm reading about it in this book. The potential results sound impressive. It should slash our vegetable costs during the summer and fall and give my children a healthier diet, but it's going to be a lot of work to get started: gotta build the boxes (though I think I have found four boxes already, rummaging through my office basement and parents' basement) and mix the proper compost. I was heartened to see that Bill Bonner (the intelligent pessimist at The Daily Reckoning) mentions gardening three times in his 12/29/2008 post about the bad times coming and how people could help guard against it.
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Is your News Year Resolution to lose weight? Planning on using diet pop? These guys are killjoys:
Just because diet soda is low in calories doesn't mean it can't lead to weight gain.
It may have only 5 or fewer calories per serving, but emerging research suggests that consuming sugary-tasting beverages--even if they're artificially sweetened--may lead to a high preference for sweetness overall. That means sweeter (and more caloric) cereal, bread, dessert--everything.
Guzzling these drinks all day long forces out the healthy beverages you need.
Diet soda is 100 percent nutrition-free, and again, it's just as important to actively drink the good stuff as it is to avoid that bad stuff. So one diet soda a day is fine, but if you're downing five or six cans, that means you're limiting your intake of healthful beverages, particularly water and tea.