Excercise for the heart and mind

Ever since reading Cheaper by the Dozen as a girl, I have been fascinated with efficiency experts.

If anyone knows me, they will know that I hate wasting time. (One of the reasons why I stopped reading after childhood, is that now as an adult, I have too many responsibilities to feel good about sitting on my ass reading when I could be doing something constructive.)

Well, today was an efficient kind of day. I tutored for two hours at school (every Saturday morning before the TAKS test we have tutoring for the weak ones). That made me 50 bucks. Pretty efficient use of time

Then, I went to the Wal Mart Neighborhood Market because the Super Wal Mart wastes too much time. I figured I could buy the basic things I needed there and avoid the pit of hell that the Super WM has become. I bought batteries, light bulbs, deodorant, toothpaste, paper plates-- all that kind of non-grocery stuff for Wal Mart prices. I was proud when I left. I fought the crowds and I won.

Then I ate lunch and set the Roomba down for a bit.

This past week I bought the accessory to the Roomba, the Rooma Scheduler.
This has a remote control that you use to zap your Roomba to tell it when to turn on and when to turn off on a weekly or daily schedule. I set the Roomba to clean three rooms of my house and decided to get on the treadmill for a bit.

As I walked into the room where the treadmill was, I pondered not getting on it and instead --watching a movie! Will Smith's "I, Robot" was on the local Fox station. I thought that movie was appropriate since my little iRobot was in the other room cleaning for me.

At about the same time, I saw my lonely electronic keyboard laying on the table. "I need and want to play that too!", said I.

Then it hit me. Why not do all three?

I set my keyboard on the treadmill, set the speed for 3.2 mph (any faster and I couldn't hit the keys right), and turned on the TV.

After mastering Chopin's "Polonaise", I looked at my distance and it read, "1.25 miles".
I had hardly noticed that that much time passed.

The people re-programmed the robots in the movie and peace was restored.

Click on picture to enlarge to see notes.

Then my Internet Explorer decided to stop working correctly. Any link I clicked on or window that tried to open never would. After tirelessly trying to fix the registry, and using all the fix-it tricks that Microsoft could throw at me, I had to cave in and download FireFox. I hate Mozilla. I hate the name, I hate that little spinning fox. But I have to admit, I think it's faster. Then I found some Firefox themes and the "Miint" theme made me happy.

P.S. Blogger doesn't work as well with FireFox. Just sayin'.