This is just an idea. The other night Becca and I were figuring out how to properly plan our meals out for the whole month. We try to save a little money and time by planning out everything before-hand and buying almost all of our groceries at the beginning of the month. Hopefully this will lead to increased efficiency, fewer trips to the grocery store, and less money spent on eating out. We are so close. Some things are missing from our scheme though, software. There is a great iPhone app for grocery lists, and there are some pretty good online apps for browsing recipes and generating shopping lists from them. Why no integration? Evernote - fail. Big oven - fail. Kitchen Monki - closest - but no iPhone app, and some real annoying problems. Tasty planner, also close, but small community and again no iPhone app. It seems so obvious to me that there should be a site with a recipe database - a calendar view planner just like Google Calendar - and a nice shopping list application. That shopping list application should have a nice iPhone version. Trying to hit those tiny check-marks on the lists in evernote or tasty planner are pretty much impossible.

In my mind the workflow would be like this: Start by browsing recipes - favorites, seasonal ingredients, and reccomendations based on ratings ala Netflix. Then, you drag and drop those recipes onto a day of the month, setting serving sizes at that point. After that you can print off a list based on a set range of dates, and of course access that list from your iPhone app. The calendar needs to be a little more interactive than the one at Kitchen Monki, you need to be able to drag meals around from day to day, and click on them to get a quick overview of the ingredients in that recipe. This way you can shuffle around your menu for the week when your plans change. Becca can get the menu in place during the day and then I can run to the grocery store after work and have the list that she prepared right on my iPhone, organized by isle, by store.

There are a lot more details I’d love to implement in my dream app, but you have to stop dreaming somewhere. Anyways, I doub’t this perfect integrated meal planning app exists, but I hope someone gets around to building it sooner or later. I certainly don’t have the time to do it… or do I…

A slew of bear stories today. It’s the the season where they start consuming lots of food desperately so they can make it through the winter. And of course humans love to leave convenient calories just lying around rotting in garbage cans, unlocked kitchens, dog-houses, whatever. Apparently, bears are getting a lot smarter this year - they can

open car doors, open “bear proof” food canisters, and they can even use ladders. As if velociraptors weren’t bad enough.

This past weekend a friend and I competed in our first orienteering competition. At the Manitou Park Event, hosted by the Rocky Mountain Orienteering Club, we competed in the orange (intermediate) course. Originally we planned on doing yellow, but we were goaded into doing orange by the guy at the sign-up table. We’re glad we did, it was just the right amount of challenge to really whet our appetite for this exciting sport. Finding the first of 9 checkpoints was almost deceptively easy. Finding the second one took us almost a half hour. After finally stumbling across second CP, with a clue from a racer on a different course about where we might be on the map, we decided to pay more attention to our bearing as we traveled across the convoluted terrain. Every checkpoint after that went much better. I imagine if we hadn’t wasted so much time on that second CP we would have placed around 2nd instead of 4th. It was a great time, jog/hiking the whole way through brush, pine trees, and around the several recent mountain lion kills.

I was glad I wore pants and hiking boots despite the temps topping out above 80 degrees. Andy just wore shorts and was not very happy. His legs were very beat up at the end. People online always recommend trail runners, but I prefer boots. Crunching through sharp fallen tree branches and scrambling up and down steep embankments, I think in the end I would rather have the reassurance of thick rubber and leather wrapped tightly around me from toe to ankle. My knees are weak and after about 30 minutes of running my ankles are pretty weak too. I know my body has to work less to move trail runners that weigh half what my boots do, but this is Colorado, I would like think my feet have to put up with slightly more abusive conditions here than people down there deal with.

Anyway, Andy was a great team-mate, and I definitely want to do this again. I feel something that is rare for me, a competitive spirit, a need to improve my time, a desire to reach the top of a list. An attitude I never was willing to allow myself to have during school sports because of my own perceived athletic inadequacy. Now I see what this is all about. This is a great sport, thinking, navigating, map reading, and just plain slow running. It’s a blast.