Hard to believe we grew all this. Not that I'm a sentimental gardener or anything.

Barking at the wind, running into the street, jumping into mud puddles instead of staying on the grass, pissing on the nearest carpet if I don't take her out every couple hours��if she were even 5 percent less cute, I wouldn't put up with her antics.

I got my first computer in 1994. We took our first picture together just last week, though (she's obviously changed over the years; so have I). I didn't know I look this dead when I'm writing.

Enough about Steve.

As you might've seen here, I recently completed the 2011 Yishan Wong Burrito Challenge, inspired by a question on Quora: What would happen if you only ate burritos?

The way this question is written  with the misplaced modifier: only ate burritos  implies that eating burritos is a disruption from your normal routine of doing other things to burritos. And I don't do other things to burritos, officer, I swear, although you might argue that ingesting 22 in a row as I try to keep down the vomit is in fact not eating burritos but using them to violate myself.

Back to the question. What would happen if you ate only burritos? Here's some of what I experienced during two weeks of just that:

Categorical loss of interest in food. I didn't step on the scale before the challenge began, because I was unconvinced the number would change. But I did lose weight, maybe around five pounds, which I now believe would have happened on any mono-food diet. After the first four burritos, every burrito made me nauseated, even the one I flew past at 85 mph. Fuck you, Chipotle, and your heinous billboard.

Dread. My bed is at eye level with the top of an old oak tree, and the branches are always twitching when I wake up. Sometimes there are two, three, four squirrels in there, and I'd be lying if I told you the number of bushy tails I can find isn't correlated on some level with my mood when I get out of bed. But even in wintertime, when the tree is bare, how can I ever wake up in a bad mood? I'm alive. This is my general outlook on life, and I never thought something as stupid as a burrito challenge would test it. New days aren't really new, though, when every meal is a burrito. When the joy in eating is lost, a substantial amount of joy in life swirls down the drain with it.

Obsessions. The longer I stuck to the diet, the more I had to lose  bragging rights, mostly, but also the opportunity to be reimbursed for all the burritos if I lasted 14 days  and the worse my preoccupation with eating "correctly" became. Would chewing and spitting out other foods would break the rules? Would eating the contents of a burrito, but not the tortilla, count as cheating? Maybe I could just do it in secrecy and get away with it, I thought, just to cleanse my palate. But I didn't. And I punished myself for that sinful thinking by swearing to eat exclusively at taquerias from then on. I was my own Tiger Mom, disordered-eating edition.

Anxiety. What if I couldn't get to a taqueria and forgot to pack tortillas in my purse? What if the social situation made rolling my own impossibly awkward, and I got stuck somewhere, hungry, with no safe options, and I cheated?

Camaraderie. I made fast friends with the other burrito-eaters at the Quora Fall Meetup. Good thing, too, because I'm the only Quora user who's an expert at nothing, and I wouldn't have had anything to talk about otherwise.

Empowerment. Honey badger don't care. HONEY BADGER CAN EAT A MILLION BURRITOS AND NOT CARE. When I wasn't feeling down, I was smug about the self-discipline I was finding in eating the same meal day in and day out.

Social isolation. Nobody else thinks you're a strong, powerful honey badger. Dieting in general is a First World problem. Dieting with restaurant burritos that someone else is paying for? That's not asceticism; it's abundance. You will get little sympathy, and for good reason.

Feelings of inferiority. Friends will tell you that eating nothing but burritos is the easiest diet in the world. Surely these are also the people who say laying down a tile floor by yourself is easy, and writing a book is easy, and making pie dough from scratch is easy, and EVERYTHING IS SO! DAMN! EASY! You start to wonder if it's just you who's having trouble and what it might mean. Is the measure of a person's success correlated with whether they can last 14 days of eating burritos without making a single cheaterrito? Did I just lose at life?

Gratitude. When it was all over, I wanted to kiss the person who invented four-course meals and side dishes AND FRESH FRUIT. That guy who cut open an orange and saw Jesus and the Virgin Mother staring back at him in the white stringy stuff, he was obviously fresh off the burrito diet.

I took this picture 18 months ago. I never thought I'd be looking back on it so soon, not like this.

Praise be to San Pasqual Retablos, patron saint of cooks! Sunday was the final day of the burrito challenge. I celebrated at a buffet-style chain restaurant with the man who dragged me into this hell. My tortilla-wrapped salad, featuring sesame chicken and balsamic vinaigrette, tasted like victory.

Wrap-up post to come.

I knew it was inevitable that if I didn't remove this half-finished Starbucks mocha from my cup holder, I'd end up with a mouthful of rotten milk. I'm less concerned about food poisoning than I am about sour curds being a non-burrito food. Did I break my diet? Am I disqualified from the challenge?

Today's burrito, stuffed with cilantro-and-garlic chicken, is brought to you by the Whole Foods in Los Gatos. All the patio tables were full, so I got it as takeout and ate it in the privacy of my own office.

One more day.

It's become apparent that my unusually high consumption of burritos isn't bothering me all that much only because I haven't really been eating that many burritos. They make up 100 percent of my meals, yes, but days pass when I have to force myself to finish half of one.

The rest of my nutrients, if you can call them that, come from a liquid diet of iced coffee. Sports drinks scare me. I don't really know much about electrolytes and all that business. I'll stick with my finely ground beans and simple syrup, thanks.

I've grown so accustomed to drinking most of my calories that I was unfazed by what appeared in front of me Friday on the patio of ViVe Sol, just off El Camino Real in Mountain View: a burrito so soaked in dairy products that it glistened in the sun. It's an old family recipe, the menu description read.

They had me at cheese au gratin.