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Eating one's own dog food

I’ve had swiss cake rolls on my mind since Kevin McGowan’s delightful guest post last week. Then today I saw a special: four boxes of Little Debbie snacks for $5. So cheap!

If only it were possible to buy them and not immediately start shoving them into my maw one after the other until stopped by physical pain. If then. You can perhaps guess where this is going. I bought 8 boxes — that’s 96 treats, 15,000 calories! — and am beeminding my consumption. These babies are going to last till May or I owe you, Dear Reader, $100. [1]

Here’s my yellow brick road:

Dreeves's not-eating-eight-boxes-of-little-debbie-snacks-in-one-day graph

Per usual with Beeminder goals, I have to stay on or below that road every single day. No inhaling all but one cake roll, saving that one till May 1st, and claiming the stash technically lasted.

For more on the philosophy behind this, see our inaugural post.

Addendum

I’m sufficiently home-free on this goal now that I might as well declare early victory. It really worked like a charm. (There were many times when, the moment the clock struck midnight, I snarfed up exactly as many of these things as would take me right to the top edge of the yellow brick road.)

Bethany and I are actually thinking of making a Beeminder-aware cookie jar (“Beemind your Gluttony!”) that sends a “1” to your sugar graph every single time you open the lid, and glows the appropriate color for how much safety buffer you have.

There was one downside to rationing these treats: The remaining swiss cake rolls are actually slightly stale now. I never knew that could happen. How could I? I don’t think I’ve ever had a box of swiss cake rolls last overnight before, let alone 2 months.

Footnotes

[1] Fine print: The first person to leave a comment here outing me, by spotting a red point on the above graph, gets the $100.

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