I have a a lot on my mind right now how much i write about right now depends on a few things since I am at work and should be doing work related stuff (mondays are usually slow in the morning)

Food we all love it and we all need it but did you know if we were to be completely cut off, I mean Edmonton as a city being closed off so no one could get in and out, we would have enough food for three days. Or so I have read this number may differ by a couple days but I believe that it would still be less than a week. It should be no surprise though walk through your local grocery store and actually look where all your food is being shipped from. fruits and vegetables that grow locally are often shipped in from as near as the United States and as for off as another continent. What does that mean for you? For me I find that if asked to describe the taste of something, take a carrot for example, I would say it taste like a carrot and that's about it. Not like the carrots I remember as a kid freshly stolen from a neighbors garden, those carrots were tasty, fresh, crisp and juicy and full of flavor, flavor I sadly have forgotten. Unfortunately it has been so long since I have eaten an actual garden fresh carrot that I can only recall the taste of our standardized carrots from the store.

Taste aside there is another problem with our global food. It leaves a giant carbon foot print. all those resources used to bring you your "fresh" oranges from Mexico.

Where does this leave me? with a new requirement of coarse. Enter the 100 mile challenge. Only eat food that is found within a 100 miles of where you live. For 100 days starting April 1 I will cut out all global acquired food and eat locally only.

Why this will be hard and what I will miss:
Bread: probably one of the most challenging things about bread is that all the grains must have been grown within 100 miles

Fruit: Once again only local fruit so good bye some of my favorites and say hello to a lot berries.

and well just say good bye to: chocolate, coffee, salt, most fish, etc.
pretty much no eating out at all except for very few restaurants if I can find any.

there are a few exceptions mainly if you cannot find something within a new area that is within a 100 miles or if you are at a guests house and they do not have anything that you can eat.

well i probably wasted enough of your day and I should probably begin my work but I will leave an open invitation to one willing to join me on this challenge

So as I input all my numbers this morning I realized that I had forgotten to write down 3 days worth of numbers. Valuable lesson If you don't write things down you probably will forget them which is what I did which is frustrating but I can only learn from this and keep moving forward and in the future make sure that I write down everything

Craig Janzen . Silent River Kung Fu . Stony Plain, Alberta, Canada

I can't sleep anymore

Yet again it seems my sleep cycle has slipped into non-existence. Just like when I was in college though then I had a reason to be wide awake at 3am and then awake to train at 7am the next day (well technically the same day but you know what I mean). What this means is that I have been living the last week of my life on average of 3-4 hours of sleep. Interestingly enough I have found that my creativity has started to increase but then again I always did my best work when the world was asleep. From experience I know that I am going to crash probably by the end of about week 2 and it seems that there is nothing that I can do to prevent this. Trying to work myself in exhaustion so I sleep doesn't work training just seems to give me more energy. Reading doesn't work either right now If i pick up a book before bed I will read straight through till the time my alarm goes off for my morning training. So I guess I'll just make use of all this extra time that I have. It's a good time for more rounds of Kempo.

Craig Janzen . Silent River Kung Fu . Stony Plain, Alberta, Canada

An interesting start to the new year

It's officially go time for UBBT 7 and the full impact of what this means is starting to dawn on me. 1000 reps of sits an push ups are down and I've already started to not only be more mindful of the random acts of kindness I do towards others but also too those done towards me.

The new year itself has been interesting already and I can say that I yet again survived the holiday season with only minor incidence. New years day found me helping push my girlfriends car out of the ditch which I happened to be riding in when it hit the ditch but luckily no one was hurt except the car. I also learned last night that if you hit the ditch the most help to really expect from passing motorist is to see if you have a cell phone.

In keeping with my goal of volunteering I took a trip to the Edmonton Humane Society today to see what is needed to become a volunteer. Turns out everything is done online now so going there only made me really want to take home a pet or two.

So all in all it's been a pretty good two days into the new year

Craig Janzen . Silent River Kung Fu . Stony Plain, Alberta, Canada