News From Hawkhill Acres

We stopped getting the daily paper sometime last year shortly after we figured out that, if we didn’t cut expenses, we’d be using newspapers for fuel thanks to the rising cost of oil. Now, I buy one when the mood strikes me as it did yesterday. I’ve always read most of the paper, but now that I only get one once in awhile, I find myself reading all of the paper, right down to the legal notices and police blotter. (But not, of course, The Phantom cartoon strip. Why is the racist thing still in the paper? But, I digress.)

Yesterday, there were two things that struck me. In the police blotter, there was a paragraph about a young man who had held up a grocery store with a bloody syringe. Horrifying enough, but what the paragraph seemed to dwell on the most was the fact that he was also charged with “committing robbery while concealing his face from the victims.”

I don’t know what they tack on to your prison sentence for that charge, but to me it smacks of penalizing someone for being intelligent. What, is there a rule book somewhere that you can look up the rules of robbery and see if it’s “cheating” to hide your face? To me, it’s right up there with “the rules of war” and “giving deer a sporting chance” by not using bait to toll them in.

I guess I’m just a simple soul, because it seems obvious to me that it’s part and parcel of being a miscreant to hide your face, just like it’s inherent to cats to sneak up on their prey, which we call sneaky, rather than rushing up with a lot of noise, which cats call starving. And when humans feel that they have to resort to war, the rules of human interaction have already broken down and the two sides should just get it over as soon as possible and have it over.

Making rules for killing people is ridiculous, except for the one that they used to have back in the good old days before guns, when armies met away from civilians and fought it out with each other. A better rule for war would be that the people who want the wars (and Homeland Security will no doubt be calling me on this one), such as the Neo-con chickenhawks in Washington, should fight the wars. They could bring their friends and the talk-show hosts who urged people to vote for them.

The other interesting item I saw in the paper - you remember the paper? - was a Notice of A Request For Permission To Enlarge a Suit. I mean this anti-obesity campaign is all very well and good, but really! Turns out it wasn’t what I thought at all but rather a bank trying to get more time to notify someone about a foreclosure. (I wonder if they’ve checked the homeless shelters?)

However, it did tie in with something I saw in a magazine. I believe it was Woman’s World, this week’s issue. It’s the “S” diet and it’s taking the weight-loss world by storm. Apparently, it’s so simple that a tubby child could do it. You simply eat 3 meals a day with no seconds, snacks or sweets - except on days that start with s. That would be Saturday and Sunday, so you can pig out on weekends.

I was on a similar diet this winter, only it was the “Y” diet. I could eat what I wanted, but only on days that end in y. For some reason, I didn’t lose an ounce, but rather gained about 15 pounds. I figured it was water weight, so I went on that diet where you drink a gallon of water everyday. You know, the “P” diet, but that didn’t work either, although I drank water with every meal and snack. Must have been six or eight times a day and even with my midnight snack.

So then I figured I’d try another letter. I googled letter diets and came up with the “W” diet which I followed faithfully for almost two weeks, until I went back to the web site and read the thing more thoroughly (I’d only skimmed it the first time) and realized that the diet was for skinny folks and guaranteed to “double you” in a year. Geez, that would explain why I needed a whole new wardrobe - including socks!

I’m no quitter though (especially when it comes to finishing dessert) so I continued to look for ways to cut down on the calories. I was overjoyed when I found “The Knitting Diet”, because I’m an avid knitter. The theory was that no one could knit and eat at the same time, so keeping your hands busy with knitting projects would just automatically cut out 250 calories a day. It’s a nice theory, but it doesn’t explain how I ended up with 12 pairs of socks, all with large chocolate stains on them.

Nope, I’m afraid I’m going to have to go on the only weight-loss plan that’s ever worked for me. I’m going to have to eat sensibly and move around more. I don’t know what the letter is for that - maybe the S and M diet? Anyhow, I’ve started using my gazelle exercise machine in the morning, planning what I’m going to eat for the day instead of just randomly grabbing whatever looks good and doesn’t take long to prepare, and I’m back on the ol’ cranberry juice spritzers instead of wine, except for two glasses on Friday night with two slices of pizza.

I figure by the time the snow is gone, I’ll be down ten pounds and maybe we can just let the last five pounds slide. Hey, we’re down to two feet and we even have bare patches that are big enough for a robin to stand and look disgusted in, so I guess I’d better get going with the ol’ diet. I don’t have the money to hire a lawyer to get me Permission to Enlarge.