Another Great Idea From a Mind That Never Rests

    I was speaking to my daughter Autumn this evening and found that we both have a penchant for the delicious flavor of Almond Joy candy bars. As a general rule I never bother to buy candy bars. I'll admit that I do pick up a few of those little bite sized Reese's Peanut Butter cups when I'm in shopping at the store, and I imagine if you ate enough of them in one sitting it would be the equivalent of a full sized candy bar, but I try hard not to put too fine of a distinction on that. Anyway, with the recent passing of Halloween I found myself the proud owner of a number of M&M's, Snickers, Twixt,Milky Ways, Reese's Cups and the afore mentioned Almond Joy candy bars. When I was in Juneau shopping, I picked up the economy bag of candy at Costco. It had 150 candy bars and packs of M&M's inside. I didn't want to run out. Kids can be viscous when they come knocking on your door expecting a treat and you don't have anything. Better to play it safe than sorry. The unfortunate part of having so much candy is that I only had between thirty and forty Trick or Treater's come around. What was I supposed to do with all that extra candy? I couldn't just throw it out, that's wasteful. Of course I set aside the Almond Joy's for my own enjoyment, along with a few bags of peanut M&M's. The rest I took up to the post office to share with my neighbors. The candy pictured here is supposed to be for Jan. I keep it in the freezer so it's out of sight. The thing is, she's visiting her mom and won't be back for another two weeks or so. Hmmm.... Anyway,  Autumn and I were speaking of the dilemma of having candy hanging around the house and what a poor idea it is. Frankly, I was shocked when I stepped on the scale a few days after Halloween  and saw that I'd gained several pounds. Now granted, it could have been water weight, but it does seem like that would be a convenient coincidence if that were the case. I mentioned to her that if we immediately felt the extra weight hanging on us, we might be inclined to make wiser choices in what we allow past our lips. At first I thought about strapping a few ten pound potato bags around our waist for a convincing argument against that extra treat, but that would be bulky and uncomfortable,especially if you were exercising. Of course if you were exercising regularly, you probably wouldn't be packing around the extra weight anyway. In any event, I came upon the rather genius idea of just buying some large baking potatoes and sticking them in a potato belt that could be worn around your waist. The potato belt would have little pockets like a holster for a gun or perhaps a cartridge belt that you could fit the potatoes in. I suppose the big baker potatoes would be the best. If you had to pack ten or twelve of those bad boys around all day, it would be a good reminder not to over do it. Since it's getting close to Christmas, and we've already started down the holiday path with even more fattening food on the way, I think the potato belt would be a great gift. Unlike buying someone extra large underwear, the potato belt wouldn't really be saying -"you're fat" It would more like - "can you imagine packing around this much extra weight?" A kind of subtle hint. The nice part is, packing around all the extra weight of those bakers, you'd be bound to lose a few pounds just walking the dog or vacuuming the carpet. Of course the downside would be if you decided you were hungry and ate the very thing that was supposed to be helping you lose weight. That might be a problem, but hey, lets solve one problem at a time.