Monday, July 26, 2010

How to Lose 9 lbs In Four Hours

How To Lose 9 Pounds In 4 Hours, in Phoenix: Trim away years of pygmy palm neglect, in the summer time. If you wake up at an hour or two After sunrise on a weekend (instead of an hour or two before sunrise, as on a normal week day) and the sun is still low in the sky, with the ambient not yet climbing over 110F, get out your Fiskars power gear pruners, several sheets of cardboard (or old, low profile boxes), a pair of long trousers, a long sleeve shirt, double glove, and a hat to keep your head and neck from being sun burned. Then, sit yourself down under a cluster of palms, and begin trimming away the gnarly, sharp, spiked, dangerous stems that previous owners never trimmed correctly.

Move all around under the palms, looking at the trunks from various angles, to make sure you've trimmed off all the nasty spikes. Why does removing such spikes matter at all? Well, if you try to weed around the untrimmed trunks to pullout invasive grasses or other weeds, you'll gash your fingers with all the spikes. If you try to trim the fronds to make the palm less "bushy", and your knee or elbow bumps the jagged untrimmed trunk, you'll draw blood. Besides, bushy, gnarled un-kept natural growth bugs me. It's unorganized, and unsightly, and I prefer order to chaos in my life.

And, it's a great way to lose 4 or so kilograms of body weight, all at once. The first weekend I did this, I dropped 9 lbs. Most of it water weight, that was replenished after re-hydrating back in the house. The next weekend I finished the rest of the palms and did more yard work, and dropped 6 lbs, only 2 of which were water weight. Yesterday I worked on securing the lemon and removal of copious undergrowth leaves (before they blow into the pool from monsoon winds) and dropped 10 pounds, only one of which was then restored as water weight. And the geared rotary motion of the pruners went from small inconvenient blisters the first week, to robust calluses the 2nd and 3rd weeks. No permanent damage =)

Highly recommended to keep the Brita pitcher full and in the Fridge before heading outside, and go with just water and a little potassium when replenishing. Avoid empty sodas and sugary juices - the water will do just fine in thirst quenching, in my 3-consecutive-weekends of plant maintenance data points has demonstrated.

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