…that this sweet little girl needs to come live with us. I think she’s a shih-tzu/maltese mix, but I’m not sure. She’s around 4 months old, I think? All I know is she is so freaking cute and I’m a person who loves BIG dogs. But this one has won me over completely. I’m therefore wh0ring for comments to help me state my case. GAH she’s so cute I cannot stand it! And aren’t you all sick of cat pictures?
You all know how much I love competition and how winning an awesome prize motivated me to eat healthy and be more active during my 10-week boot camp challenge. Well, while reading Fit Bottomed Girls yesterday, I came across a review of this awesome book. Even though the title contains the word DIET, which I detest and don’t believe in anyway, everything else in the review made me want to immediately pick up a copy of The Game On! Diet and find some friends to play with me.
As the title says, the idea behind the book is to kick your friend’s ass while shrinking your own. You form two or more teams of at least two people and try to earn more points than the other team(s). You play for four weeks at a time, checking in weekly. You earn points each day by getting at least 7 hours of sleep, drinking lots of water, making healthy food choices and eating 5 meals, getting at least 20 minutes of exercise, practicing healthy habits, and keeping in touch with teammates and opponents. When you lose weight at the weekly weigh-in you earn bonus points too! But it’s not all good: you lose points when you snack on crappy food, try to sabotage someone else, or drink alcohol.
I know what you’re thinking – NO ALCOHOL?! I can’t do that! But every week you get one day to eat and drink whatever you want. Deprivation breeds failure, at least with me, so I like this free day stuff. I call it Baconday.
Authors Krista Vernoff, a producer for Grey’s Anatomy and Az Ferguson, Body-For-Life million dollar champion teach you how to rid your diet of junk and focus on whole foods (not to be confused with Whole Foods). They give you recipes, suggestions for healthy habits and yoga and workout instructions. I’ve only just thumbed through the book, but from what I have seen this is a great way for someone whittle into shape and I can’t wait to get started. I just need more people to play with!
If you’ve struggled with staying motivated or have just begun your journey into healthy eating and exercise, join me and my friends! It’ll be so fun kicking each other’s asses, we might forget we’re doing it for our own good! And we’ll have to think of a fabulous prize at the end. This is one competition where being a loser means you’re awesome.
A letter to AllanThinks and AliThinks, 25th of March, 2009
OK. You guys were at Al’s tonight, right? For a Twitter meetup?
Well…
I had this co-worker (I will call her S) when I worked at the University of Kentucky Department of Surgery Publications Office. I always felt that she was too smart for me although we got along very well. She was very “bookish” like I was, but in a more highfalutin’ way. She once recommended I read some Flannery O’Connor and I tried, but UGH. Way over my 24-year old head. S and I both loved cats and French, and Berea crafts, and Birkenstocks, and other similar things, so we became friends. Our other coworker, C was also into cats and things so the three of us were work buddies.
We sat in one large room with our boss. Let’s call her W. In our drab room of an office, each of us sat in our own corner, with our back to the center of the room, and partitions beside or behind us to simulate privacy. So friendly! Because W demanded Total Silence so she could focus on such things as plasminogen activators, thrombocytopenia, or documenting sex change operations, the three of us with poorer work ethics began conversing via email. Considering that the office was about 20 feet wide by 25 feet long, this was not the quickest form of communication because it took so long to send our thoughts through the tubes all the way around the world or where ever they went before landing at our desks. But we were to remain mute unless a surgeon walked in needing our editing or desktop publishing expertise, so email was the only way for us to talk.
I think it was Tuesdays that were Street French days. Each week, one of us was in charge of teaching the other two a new word or phrase. Sometimes it was so hard not to snicker at what would appear in my inbox. But if I let out a giggle (or a fart, for that matter), I was afraid I’d be knocked upside the head. (I regret not backing up those emails on a floppy disk so today I could sit there and look at that floppy, thinking, “I sure wish I could see what I saved on there, but this Mac doesn’t have a floppy drive!”)
Anyway, I digress. Or did you not notice?
For some reason, just yesterday I decided to look for S on teh internets. Lo and behold, there she was! She has a web site and she is still like totally ohmigod smart and stuff too. She’s also on Twitter, but I didn’t click the Follow button for fear that she’d find my own Twitter page. I mean, it would be like Chrissie Snow requesting to follow Stephen Hawking. S does tweet some lovely poetry though. I sort of want to stalk her for that. She even has a couple of poetry books published. I have one that she sent me years ago.
Just in case I am painting a not-so-nice picture of S, you should also know that she is also a very nice, caring person with a dry wit. But, remember on How I Met Your Mother when Ted’s college girlfriend came back and they hooked up? And how Ted’s friends felt like everything and everyone seemed beneath her? That’s how I feel around S. Unlike the Heir to the Massengil Fortune on HIMYM, it’s not on purpose, and it’s not her fault. I know that I am intimated by her intelligence, and it’s like, totally me and not her, but still.
(It’s taking me a long time to get to the point, isn’t it? This is how I talk in real life, by the way. I include several unrelated details you probably don’t care about, but they pop into my head so I must include them, however haphazard they are.)
OK. So. I went through the posts on S’s blog, and one of them from earlier this week promoted a poetry event she would be attending on Wednesday (tonight). At…
wait for it…
Al’s in Lexington.
So when I saw Allan’s tweets about you guys being at a Twitter meetup at Al’s and the bar being taken over by the poetry people…
DUDE!
(S would never say dude, even for dramatic effect, by the way.)
My two universes collided in Kentucky tonight. Did the walls shake or anything?
I felt a rumble under my feet all the way over here.
*The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is an epistolary novel. It’s a really cute story, sometimes sad, but a really fun read listen. I checked out the audio book from the library.
This week I learned that American Musical Theatre of San Jose has closed its doors.
And I became terribly sad.
American Musical Theatre of San Jose (AMTSJ, or AMT, as I like to still call it) is the local professional theatre company here. I once auditioned interviewed for a job as the assistant to the Executive Producer. I heard about the position from a friend and was tired of working in accounting. The job paid little more than that of a Starbucks barrista, and I couldn’t afford to live on that, so I declined the offer. I had loved hearing about the theatre company so much during the interview process, that I decided to volunteer backstage as a dresser, helping with costumes during productions.
The first time I stepped into the studio space at AMT, I was nervous. I didn’t know anyone, and knew nothing about costumes, or sewing. But I was immediately greeted with a smile from Val, a seasoned AMT dresser. She and I became fast friends, and soon I met the rest of my backstage pals (sisters, as we called ourselves), including Jenni, Andy (a boy, but still a sister), and Kari. Working backstage became my new hobby, and I would have rather been backstage than at my office. A few shows after my first with AMT, I met Shannon and Steph. Others came and went, but our close group of dressers, the Chicks in Black (yes, even Andy), became a family.
By now you’ve probably heard that Barack Obama and Brad Pitt are related. Allegedly. Well guess what.
They occupy branches on my family tree too. Yes they do.
During Christmas vacation in Wisconsin last year, I learned from Matte’s uncle Gary (who is into ancestry stuff) that I am related to Laura Bush. Laura Bush. Not Gee Dub. Well yes Gee Dub, but only by marriage. Whew! Dodged that bullet. Anyway, today when I read the article about Barack and Brad being kissin’ 9th cousins, I learned that Barack is also a distant cousin to Gee Dub. Sooo, as Gee Dub is husband to Laura, I am therefore related to Barack Obama. And Brad Pitt. Yeah, by marriage way down the line. Minor details. This also brings me one degree closer to Kevin Bacon.
Suddenly I feel the need for a family reunion. And I think Cousin Brad should host it. At his friend George Clooney’s home in Italy.
Once upon a time, my friend Beth sent out a note about her upcoming 30th birthday celebration. She closed the note with “you’re all great fiends” or some similar sentiment. And yes, she left the ‘r’ out of friends.
It stuck. Ever since that note, my circle of friends has been known as Fiends. When our fiend Julie passed away, we started a Yahoo! group to keep in touch and email daily doses of support to everyone in the group. It was a perfect way to keep in touch, especially with those that were far away. Those first few months after Julie’s passing were difficult for us all, but having the support of each other got us through it. Slowly.
Life has been moving very fast for the Fiends lately and we don’t spend as much time together as we once did. It’s hard to get us all in the same place at the same time. But we’re still close and would drop anything to help one of us in need.
Tonight I got to spend time with 2 fiends, Tracey and June. We have all had some stress in our lives lately and it was good to just be together and talk about things, catching up with what’s been going on in each other’s lives. Tonight we didn’t want the loud “nn-tch nn-tch nn-tch” music of a bar, or to get all dressed up to go somewhere fancy. We just wanted to be. So we went to an old skool type place, that caters to a more mature crowd (the Blue Hairs, if you will).
Because I had already eaten a dinner of stir-fried chicken, asparagus and brown rice, I forwent (is that the past tense of forgo?) the meal and went along for the company, my camera in tow. I still had to shoot my last submission for the 7 Days group in Flickr. While they dined on the fine cuisine (note sarcasm), I had a glass of Cabernet. And because this was a night where comfort food was much in need, the girls ordered hot fudge sundaes. I still nursed my wine, and rather than knocking them over the head with the jar of sugar and stealing their sundaes, I shot a photo of one instead. Much fewer calories that way. The best part of the night though, was when we were discussing our trails and tribulations, the song that our beloved fiend Julie asked to be played at her funeral (Green Day’s Good Riddance/Time of Your Life) came on over the sound system. For some reason, that song comes on at the most appropriate times. And since we all became such close fiends because Julie brought us together, it was perfect that the song played tonight. It was like a little “Hey” from Julie. Interesting that I haven’t heard that song in awhile, nor had I spent quality time with my fiends in much too long.
Below is a photo of the delectable hot fudge sundae that I did not eat (nor did I taste! How’s that for will power?).
And this here is my last self-portrait of the week. Next go round, you should play with us. Click on the link to in my sidebar to join the 7 Days group. You’ll be glad you did!
And this post is too. Go. Read it. It will make you feel all warm inside. I love this post. I love the “ding. ding. ding.” It put me right there with her and her bucket. I love the way she tells a story and you will too. Go visit her and read through her archives too. She’s talented, smart, funny, and she’s also a pretty hot babe.
I will never look at Salvation Army volunteers without remembering this post. I will even give them some change, and I will make eye contact and smile. Because this post had such an impact on me, I am giving mcgee at memoirs of a gee the Perfect Post Award* for January. Because she rawks.
*The Perfect Post Awards were created by Lindsay and Kimberly. The next time you see a post and think “Whoa. Damn. Wow.” nominate it for a Perfect Post Award.