Frugally Fit Friday: Yardwork

This week for Frugally Fit Friday (err... Saturday) I want to focus on the amazing workout of yard work.  It may not be a glorious task, but it can definitely be a workout, which I have learned more with this new house.    So before you go out and buy a riding mower, or pay someone to landscape or mow check out some of the numbers that I ran this week.

On Thursday, I decided to be nice and mow our yard.  Normally this is something that my husband does, but with his new job he gets off work later and he's been doing a lot of side jobs, so his "to do" list was getting long.  We have currently have a push mower on permanent loan.  At our old house that we rented just our front yard was over 0.1 mile long, so there was no way that you could push mow it, so we used the owners' riding mower.  At our new place we have a medium/small yard (in rural Indiana terms), so push mowing is an option.  This was the first time that I have push mowed it.

I thought I would surprise him and have it all done.  Well, it was just a trick to get the mower started.  A little bit of shoulder strengthening exercises is what I could label it as.  Then I had to push it through our grass.  I hadn't thought that our grass was super tall, but my husband has informed me that I am weird in that I like tall grass.  Apparently the grass was long because I could barely push the mower through the grass without it almost dying.  Also, it was hard to push the mower through the grass because of how long it was.  Maybe I'll have to rethink my long grass love, or else I'll have to learn how to raise the deck of the mower.

I only killed the mower once.  I'm still not sure whether it was lack of gas or too long of grass, but it definitely died.  I gave it some more gas (even though, from what I could tell it didn't need a lot) and promptly partially flooded the mower.  I found out later that you don't need to push the red ball if the mower is "warm."  I pushed through the back yard and the sun was blazing down.  It felt good though.  I definitely felt alive.  Our carpenter bees (who's days are numbered) were very upset though.  I rolled my eyes at them and kept moving (they don't sting, just act very territorial).

By the time I reached the front yard I was getting pretty tired, but I was determined to finish it all.  We have a half mound septic system in our front yard and a ditch, so I really worked hard going up and down the mound.  This is how I felt like I looked.



Luckily when I was about halfway done with the front my husband came home and I went in and made us up some food.  All in all I had push mowed for two hours- non - self propelled.

Being the curious person that I am, I looked up the calorie count.  With my weight, I burned over 500 calories!  Not too bad if I say so myself.  I think all of the neighbors thought I was crazy though because they all have riding lawn mowers.  I want to put off buying one as long as possible, because a 500 calorie workout is something that I need on a regular basis.  I like workouts like this one because I am accomplishing something other than just exercising.  Maybe I'll take over more of the mowing chores this summer.

I figure doing yard work like push mowing saves me money in two ways.  First, we currently have a free to us (permanent loan) push mower.  We would have to go out an buy a riding mower.  Push mowers cost only  a couple hundred bucks (if you can convince your significant other to get a reel mower they are even cheaper).  Riding mowers are easily $1000-$3000, and some are more than that.  Push mowers also use less gas (once again- if you can convince your significant other (I can't yet) to get a reel mower, gas isn't an issue, also there are electric mowers out there as well).  Having someone come mow our yard would cost at least $30 a pop.  Finally, if I went to our local gym to get that amazing lawn mowing workout it would cost me $40/month in membership fees.  So overall, push mowing our yard is a huge $$ saver and helps keeps me and the Mr. healthy!

Here is a website that you can go to to look up calories burned by yard work activity and by your weight: Calorie Lab.  They have lots and lots of other calorie calculators.  I find them motivating when I'm not feeling like doing a certain job.



If you need motivation here is a good video I found online (I think Mr. Money Mustache posted it) about the benefits of fitness (and my kind of fitness - low/medium level- not the gym rat level).  Enjoy!

Friday Favorite Finds: A Bit Late

Ok, I know it is no longer Friday, but I thought I would participate anyway.  This week has been really busy at school and at home.  I stuck with my early morning wake up time and it was terrible, but very very needed.  In fact, I might switch to 6:05 next week (6 just sounds so early) that way I have a bit more time in the morning to get things done.

I rode my bike every day, but one because of weather.  I have to say I really look forward to riding it!  It kind of wakes me up in the morning and gets me outside, since I'm not a natural outdoorsy person.  It is really funny how many random comments I get from students.  They are really curious about it, and I hope maybe at a later point in their life they will think about riding as well.  I have found that it is a nice way to sneak in a bit more exercise into my life without it feeling too, excersy (yes I just made up that word).

Well, I am definitely looking forward to the summer just as much as my students.  I am really trying not to get to hyped up about it, because I really really need to make a list of my goals for the summer.  I have a tendency to go great guns for the first week or two and then fizzle out and get really really lazy.  This summer I want to be more purposeful and have weekly goals.  We have a lot of house projects, and I want to completely revamp my Discrete Math curriculum and tweak my Algebra II curriculum (make it more common core friendly).  There's no way I'll get it all done without some kind of plan though.

My first find comes from my desire for summer.  I am really looking forward to free zucchini.  I feel like everyone around here has that friend that some how grew 5 zucchini plants and has zucchini coming out their ears.  I am always a grateful recipient of their surplus (and an understanding one, because we had one zucchini plant and it was too much for me, since my husband will eat, but is not in love with zucchini).

Fried Zucchini Spaghetti from the A & B Stories.  I will definitely add some more veggies to this and maybe pair it with a the Heroin Chicken Strips from Low Carb Crock.











When I was in college there was this delicious Greek/Mediterranean tiny restaurant that was cheap.  It had the best wraps.  Anyway, I found a wrap that looks just as good.

Chicken and Spinach Wrap with Greek Yogurt Sauce from Magda- What's for Dinner.




Avocados have been really cheap here lately and I've been reading all of the amazing ways you can substitute it in recipes.  The main problem is that I am only one person.  By that I mean, my hubbie is not as much a fan of the green stuff which means if it is in guac or something similar, I end up eating the entire avocado (that's a lot of avocado).  I found a way that I can freeze it though, that might help me from having guac overload.  I'll be able to just use as much as I need.

How to Freeze Avocado from My Gutsy.





My Friday Favorite Finds would not be complete without a yummy chocolate recipe.  This week's deviant delight is Warm Chocolate Pudding Cake with Caramel Sauce.




Enjoy more finds at Finding Joy in My Kitchen!

Menu Plan Monday: Early Morning Challenge Week #2

Here's the update on my early morning challenge.  I was able to get up early (not even hit snooze once) on Wed/Thurs/Fri.  Woo hoo, go me!


However, I was just not able to do it on Saturday.  I woke up when it went off, groggily got out of bed (I've moved it to the other side of the room), and turned it off and went back to bed.  I actually remembered my challenge, but said screw it, and jumped back into my really amazing bed.  It is seriously, the best bed ever, which doesn't help.

That probably was actually a good thing, because my husband and I ended up going to prom to supervise a bit and ended up staying up way past when we usually do.  It was seriously such a super fun night.  The music was great and it took everything in me not to get up and get my groove on (my students would be just rolling their eyes at me now).  My husband laughed because my body just automatically starts to move to the beat and when they have that much bass playing you can really feel the beat, literally, like I think my rib cage was vibrating.  I was hard to focus on conversations with the other teachers (many who I had when I was a student) with the fun music playing.  Plus, they kept playing songs from when I was in high school and middle school, so I couldn't resist singing along at least a little bit.  Maybe our music was just better and that is why they were playing so much of it.  And yes, I might have gone home and had my own personal dance party afterward to the summer hits of the 90's and 2000's Pandora stations to get out all of my dance fever.

So anyway, this week should have a somewhat better menu than last week's that was almost too embarrassing to post.  I am linking up with Organizing Junkie for Menu Plan Monday.

Dinner #1:  Ground Beef and Black Bean Enchiladas.  You might have noticed a lot of ground beef recipes lately.  That is mainly because we were able to get 90/10 hamburger marked down half off at Aldi, which made it less than $2/lb.  I'm not a huge ground beef fan (I don't mind it, but I'm not like gosh, I just have a hankerin' for ground beef), so I have been trying to find some good recipes.  This one looks like a good one.



Dinner #2:  Hot dogs!  We didn't end up having them last week, and I always feel terrible, but I really do like hot dogs.  Something about a hot dog with relish and ketchup just says bring on the warm weather to me.  Also, we pair them with peas (my hubbie's fav veggie), cut up oranges/pineapple, and salad which I think more than evens out any unhealthiness(apparently that is a word because there's not any red squiggly line).



Dinner #3:  Roasted Chicken Thighs.  I have been trying to get around to making these and we always end up eating leftovers.  This is our back up meal if there's not leftovers, but it seems there always are some to use up before the weekend.



My goal for this week is to get up by 6:15 weekdays and 7:30 Saturday.  I think that is a more reasonable goal and if I've learned anything is that I have to set easy goals.  It wasn't until I set my 10 min weekly exercise goal (no that was not a typo- it was a weekly goal of 10 minutes total for the week), that I finally started exercising regularly.

So far I have noticed that the early wake up is not that bad during the week.  I pretty much feel like crap when I wake up whether it is 5:30 (my old job wake up time) or 6:50 (my oh poop I hit the snooze too many times and today is a work day), so I might as well get up a bit earlier.  My husband says my body's get up function is broken and I would agree, because getting up is just terrible (even if I went to bed early), but somehow I manage to do it each day.  I found this on Pinterest and it pretty much describes me to a T, except that I have been doing a much better job (in general) of going to bed early.


If anyone has some magical cure other than coffee (that requires getting out of the bed which is the hard part), let me know.  Anyway, it does make my day feel a bit more calm and put together in the morning when I am up a bit earlier.  It was really helpful this week especially because there was some stuff that happened at school that slowed down my day to a crawl, so I needed every extra minute.

Good luck with your menus and your goals for the week!