Dream Day Friday: Exercise Equipment (With a Kick!)

I'm sure I'm not the only one who has ever wished there was a bit of magic embedded in their exercise equipment.  It would make for a lot fewer machines being used as coat racks and clothes hangers, for sure.  I mean really, why do we have to burn 3,500 calories just to lose one measly pound of fat?  And using stationary bikes, elliptical machines, treadmills and the like can be so freaking boring!  When I'm ambitious enough to actually use my bike or treadmill, it can be really hard to do it with any enthusiasm unless I let my mind start daydreaming.  Most equipment has a display that tells you the time you've been exercising, the distance, and calories burned (however grossly inaccurate that last one may be!).  It's hard to feel like I'm making any difference when an hour walk on the treadmill barely burns 300-something calories. Gee, at this rate it'll only take 11 hours to burn off one pound of fat.  Oh, goody!  At least the stationary bike burns a few more calories - closer to 500 in a hour at my weight.  That whittles it down to only 7 hours per pound.  Can you see why I need some sort of more optimistic distraction to motivate myself? 

If I'm feeling particularly unfit, or if I've been eating really poorly, I might pretend that every five minutes on the bike is actually burning a full pound of fat.  And as I'm pedalling away, I'll imagine how handy that would be.  If I've been putting on weight or know I'm going to be stuffing my face with lots of yummy food (like around Thanksgiving or Christmas, for example!) I could just hop on the bike to melt away the fat.  Boo-yah!  And see how reasonable I'm being by wishing that I'd only burn 1 pound of fat in 5 minutes of exercise?  I could totally say 5 pounds in 1 minute.  But that would be silly!  Awesome Hawaiian vacation coming up?  Last year's swimsuit making me look like an overstuffed sausage?  No problem!  I'd just hop on my magic stationary bike and pedal, pedal, pedal until I'm all trim and svelte.  Think of the time this would save!  As much as I love food, especially anything bursting with sugar or chocolate, even maintaining a healthy weight seems to be a battle I will forever be falling behind in.  I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I'd rather be a little bit overweight than give up yummy food.  So instead of spending hours and hours exercising and not having a whole heck of a lot to show for it, I could spend 15 to 20 minutes a week on the magic bike to maintain my weight, and still eat all the donuts and Mexican food I want!  And in case any of you are getting worried, my magic bike would not let me lose an unhealthy amount of weight.  I'd never have to worry about losing too much weight, because it would never let me go below whatever weight is healthiest for me.  See, I'm being responsible and reasonable again.  And it is a magic bike, after all.

Image found here. 

Dream Day Friday! The Magic Scissors

Magic Scissors are awesome.  If I had a real pair of these, I'd be a cutting fool!  The idea for this was actually shop-lifted from a former coworker of mine.  She was from Russia, and I'm not sure if this was a fairy tale-type story that gets told to the Russian kids, or if she just made it up herself.  Either way, this is now one of my favorite day-dreaming tools! 

You're probably wondering what could be so great about a pair of scissors.  My friends, Magic Scissors are even better than having a genie in a magic lamp.  With these scissors, you can cut out pictures of things you want, and POOF!  Those objects are now real and in your possession!  Legally! Do you see a picture of a fabulous car that you'd love to own?  Just cut the picture out and it's all yours.  Do you see how much fun this could be? 

Now, according to my coworker's story, I think you are supposed to cut out the picture in its entirety.  But that's amateur day-dreaming.  You could seriously limit the possibilities with that rule.  What if the picture doesn't show the whole car? What if a third of the car is cut off the page?  Then you'd only get part of the car, and where's the fun in that?  So MY Magic Scissors have a few extra special qualities.  All you have to do is make a cut into the picture.  If the scissors cut any part of the picture of the object you want, it's yours.  This is also helpful if you find one picture of something you want, but you'd really like more than one.  Like money!  There are some things you just can't really use Magic Scissors to get, and you need actual money.  (I know, right?  What's this world coming to?)  In this case you can just trek on over to a magazine stand and find the financial magazines.  Flip through them until you find one with some good pictures of cash, and then buy that magazine.  (No stealing or cutting up magazines that don't belong to you!)  Then when you get home - or into your car, or as soon as you step away from the cash register - you can start slicing into the pictures of cash.  Being a practical person, I would like to have the Magic Scissors deposit the cash directly into my checking account.  Then I could just pop by the ATM whenever I needed cash.

And of course my Magic Scissors are intuitive and can sort of read my mind and know what I want.  So if I've got a friend who's been out of work and is struggling to pay the bills, I can slice into some money pictures and have my Magic Scissors magically deposit the cash into my friend's checking account.  I don't even need to know their bank account number or even where they bank.  My Magic Scissors will know all that for me.  Pretty sweet, huh?  Know what else?  The Magic Scissors know exactly what size clothes you wear, so if you find a fabulous item of clothing or a pair of shoes you just have to have, snip away and they will be yours, and a perfect fit no less.

One of my favorite ways to imagine using the Magic Scissors is when I'm flipping through the latest issue of Homes & Land and perusing the multi-million dollar estates in Hawaii.  I would make a little snip into one of the pictures, but my Magic Scissors will know I want the whole estate, not just that one shingle or the palm tree or whatever. Yet at the same time, if I want to Frankenstein an estate from parts of several different ones, I could do that too if I wanted. 

I love you, Magic Scissors!

Photo found here.

Dream Day Friday! Episode I

Today folks, you will get to witness the overzealous ramblings of my daydreaming mind!  This example of my daydreaming-ness is actually quite mild compared to many of my mental shenanigans. 

Background: Anyone who has read my blog before probably knows that I'm doing my best to get a job as an art teacher.  Unfortunately, since I don't have an education degree or teacher certification, I have to either worm my way into an alternative certification program or go back to school to get my MAT (Master of Arts in Teaching).  Ideally, I would prefer to go back to school so that I could actually learn HOW to teach and handle a classroom.  If I do the alternative certification (PACE), I'd just be tossed into a classroom with little to no preparation and I'd have to wing it for 3 years, after which I'd get my permanent certification.  Assuming I fulfilled all the requirements and passed all my evaluations, that is.  It is assumed that if I can do that then I am fully capable of teaching and they'll let me have my certification despite my lack of educator training.

I've been working toward doing alternative certification since March 2009.  At the time I had a job and didn't see how it would be feasible for me to quit to get my Masters.  I couldn't work and go to school at the same time because I couldn't be in two places at once.  It was hard enough to figure out how to pay for the schooling if I KEPT my job, and quitting my job to go back to school would only make it that much harder to pay for it.  There was lots of dreaming about winning the lottery. If I could just win enough to cover tuition, books, and fees, and all that other stuff they charge you for, plus cover 2 years of lost wages so that I could still pay my bills while I was in school and not working... 

That mushroomed into imagining winning enough in the lottery so I could pay tuition, cover lost wages, and pay off our mortgage, car payments, previous student loans, make upgrades and repairs to the house, and so on. And of course I'm listing and picturing in my mind specific things I want to do for the house (including some major landscaping with someone to help come up with a design and other people to do all the work).  At that point I decided that if I'm going to win the lottery, I may as well imagine winning the Big Kahuna - the Powerball Jackpot!  Which would of course be at least $300 million at the time, I'd be the only winner so I wouldn't have to share it with another winner, and I'd be able to do all the things I'd listed before AND help out all my family, friends, and favorite charities!  Then I realized that since I had all these millions I wouldn't even HAVE to work anymore, so I would go back to school just to take classes for fun.  Oh, and I'd move to Hawaii of course.  Duh.  :)

They Have Voice Recognition Software - How About Thought Recognition?

I've been thinking for some time now that I need to get one of those little Digital Voice Recorders to carry around with me so I can record blog ideas as I have them.  Sometimes I'm able to get a piece of paper and a pen to scribble the topic down, but it would be so much easier if I could just record it on a little dictation thing like the doctors use! Then I could use it even when I'm exercising or doing something where I can't write it down.  Plus with a voice recorder I could just say everything I'm thinking instead of just jotting down a couple words. Usually when I'm thinking of something and thinking about blogging about it, my thoughts start stringing together as if I were already writing the blog in my mind.  And sometimes it's really good stuff - I can be witty and charming and funny. (No, really!) But when I actually get on my laptop to try to write it, there's just nothing there.  It's like the sight of the blank screen gives me instant writer's block.  The plan is that by having the DVR I can just think out loud and then when I get time to write the blog I've got it all right there!  I figure at least having some of it in the original spontaneous format might jog my creativity once I'm actually writing the blog post.  Could be wishful thinking though.  I'm good at that. 

But then I started thinking about how most of my great ideas come to me as I'm drifting off to sleep or am in serious daydream-mode.  Technically I could still use the DVR, but I'm sure if I kept jabbering into the machine at night (I wake up a lot during the night) my DH wouldn't be too pleased.  That's when I decided someone needs to develop a Thought Recognition Recorder!  I could just hook myself up and slip off into sleep and all the thoughts that run rampant through my mind would be recorded all on their own.  So when morning comes I can just review everything and type out the good stuff.  Wouldn't that be awesome?  Granted, my thoughts are often jumbled and even more often jump track halfway through onto another thought, but I'm sure I could sort through it.  If nothing else, I'm sure transcribing it all verbatim would be hilarious on its own, like some sort of wonky Mad Libs.

Photo found here.

Dream Day Friday

So I was thinking that Fridays would be a great day to post about all my daydreams and mental hijinks.  I've got quite an imagination and can easily get carried away.  A simple "Gee, I wish..." always turns into some monster-sized fantasy world as my imagination takes hold and the wish grows. The way I see it is, if I'm already dreaming, I may as well dream BIG! I thought I could make Fridays my day to post my little fantasies on my blog.  And then of course I started imagining the things I would write, and then thought that maybe other people would want to participate too and then we could have a Fantasy Friday meme!  But I hate to name things something that everyone else is already using.  I have ideas sometimes and then find out someone else already had the idea and I'm not as creative as I thought I was.  Boo.  So I did a search for Fantasy Friday and there were a few things that came up although the topic is not the same as mine.  I tried a search for Friday Fantasy as well.  And let me just say, I will not be using either of those!  Turns out some of the people using those phrases take the word "fantasy" at it's perverted best.  Yikes!  I certainly don't want to be associated with that. So I think I'll just go with Dream Day Friday. 

Sometimes I just daydream about small things that may actually happen one day, and other times huge fantastical things that will never happen and aren't even possible.  So stay tuned starting next Friday to hear some of my mental daydream ramblings.  Feel free to follow suit and post some of your own favorite daydreams!