Disclosure: I received a free Omron GOsmart Pace/Distance tracker for this review, as well as a free t-shirt, water bottle and ear buds.

I figured if I walked up the big $&%^-ing hill to the bakery shop, I deserved to have a cupcake at the top, so I set off on my walk. Then I turned around on my front porch, went back inside and grabbed the Omron GOsmart Pace/Distance Tracker I was sent to review because this seemed like the perfect time to see if it could actually measure my pace, distance, steps, calories burned, and all that fancy stuff it claimed to do.

I’ve mentioned in the past that I’m not really a pedometer person, but I was interested in this device because it calculates your pace, which I *am* interested in. Over the past year I haven’t been running, but I’d like to get back into a run/walk routine now that I’ve moved to a walkable neighborhood. (Yes, I know I made up the word “walkable.” I don’t care if Merriam-Webster gets pissed at me. Nevermind! Merriam-Webster says it *is* a word. Microsoft Word is in the wrong here, with its erroneous red squiggly.) It’s always encouraging to get positive feedback, so I wanted to track my pace and hopefully be encouraged when I get better and faster times.

When I turned on the pedometer pace/distance tracker, I had to go through a quick setup where I entered the time, my height, weight and other info which helps the pedometer tracker estimate how many calories I’ve burned. What I loved was that by entering my height, it estimated my stride length for me automatically. I really don’t have the patience to get out a measuring tape and try to calculate the length of my average pace. It makes me have flashbacks to marching band where I had to learn eight-by-ten and six-by-ten stride lengths and no amount of practicing in a marked-off section of my basement could make me get it right. Marching band is hardcore y’all! Don’t be fooled by the silly tassels on the hats!

Once all that info was entered, I had the option of using the device as a straight-up pedometer that would track my steps, distance traveled and calories burned. But, if you hold down the “Mode” button for two seconds, you go into workout mode where it will also track the amount of time you’ve been walking and calculates your pace for you. It’s got a clip so you can attach it to your waist, or you can just put it in your pocket and pull it out occasionally to check your results as you’re walking. There’s a 7-day memory too which saves your previous workouts so you can compare your results.

So, I huffed and puffed and made it to the top of the hill, which my pedometer tracker said was 1.3 miles. I checked later with my car’s odometer and this seems to be a fairly accurate measurement. However, I probably should have paid less attention to my pedometer tracker and more attention to the red exclamation mark that popped up on the weather app on my new smartphone. It started to get dark on my walk up the hill. I heard the crash of thunder in the distance and the winds started whipping up so hard I got smacked with a dry leaf right in the eye. OUCH! All of which meant—horror of horrors—I had to turn around before I made it to the cupcake shop. IT WAS AWFUL!! I walked up this huge $%&^-ing hill thinking I’d get a hit of frosting and moist, velvety cake as a reward, and all I got was a chance to do my pedometer pace/distance tracker review. *sigh* I made it back down the hill safely, and was able to note my pace time increased because going down a hill is much easier than going up it. I was also motivated to walk faster when I feared an imminent lightning strike. Luckily, I made it back to my apartment literally right as the rain began to fall.

Overall, the Omron Pace/Distance Tracker is a handy little device. I had to refer to the manual to complete the setup, but I was able to figure out the device pretty quickly after that. You can also visit TeamGOsmart.com, a site that’s designed to be community for their users. They’re pitching their other new product there too, the Omrom Pocket Pedometer with Activity Tracker. If you buy a device, you get a free 8-week training program too that you can use on the Active Trainer web site. I signed up for one and it sends you e-mail reminders of your scheduled exercise for the day, and also lets you enter your results online. I wasn’t a huge fan of the site’s interface, which could have been cleaner and a bit better organized, but hey, it’s free, so I shouldn’t complain.

Ok, now as a reward for reading to the bottom of the review, here’s the information regarding the giveaway. You can win your own pace/distance tracker, which retails for $49.99, as well as an Omron T-shirt, water bottle and earbuds. To enter, leave a comment on this entry telling me where you’d walk with your pace/distance tracker. Contest ends at 11:59pm on Sunday, August 1 July 25, 2010. Winner will be chosen randomly. Only one entry per person.

I haven’t posted a new entry for over a week now, which might be a record for me. There were moments in the past week when I thought, “I should post something. People will wonder if that IKEA bookcase I assembled fell over and crushed me dead.” But then my next thought was, “What should I write about?” and the honest answer was, “I don’t have anything I care enough to write about right now.” Sure, I’ve got dozens of little notes saved for post ideas, many of which are worth writing about eventually. But during each moment I thought about posting last week, nothing seemed so immediately important that I had to write a blog entry about it RIGHT NOW.

Certainly, there is something to be said for writing when you don’t feel like it. If you want to be a professional writer, you’ll spend plenty of time writing when you don’t want to. That’s why it’s a job, because it’s actual work. However, I feel that bloggers feel extra pressure to produce something daily, quickly, endlessly, or else we’re told we’ll lose all our visitors and our pagerank will decrease and no one will care about our blogs anymore. There have certainly been times when I have posted entries out of fear of losing everything I’ve worked hard to build. Those quick and dirty entries are sometimes funny and good, but sometimes they’re kinda’ shit. And I don’t want to be shitting on the Internet.

So, for this past week, I decided to keep my mouth closed and my fingers still. And it was good. I didn’t pop in to tell people, “Gee whiz, I haven’t posted for awhile, have I?” because I figured you are observant enough to notice that without me commenting on it. And commenting on it serves no purpose, other than to give into that fear of being un-Google-able, which seems like a silly thing to be afraid of. Spiders? Sure. Low Google search results? Eh, have you ever had a nightmare involving your pagerank? (If yes, you should probably keep that to yourself.)

This attitude towards my blog is something I hope to continue. I want to stress quality over quantity. I stopped checking my web stats several months ago because I got sick of wondering if people were visiting my blog and where they were coming from and all that rigmarole that is so easy to get sucked into. I’ve been blogging for over 5 years now, and I feel like I’m getting too old for that shit. I’ve seen my stats go up, and then down, and then up again, and then down again, and then…you get the picture. There was certainly a time when I chased pageviews and hoped for more visitors, but I feel like I’ve been there, done that. Yeah, having lots of visitors can be fun and it’s got its own advantages, but it’s got disadvantages too. When I think about what I’d like this blog to be, I’d rather that it be well-written, thoughtful and entertaining than it be published daily and have a bazillion readers a month. If I want it to be the former, I can’t really think about the latter.

This type of philosophy has been around for awhile, typically referred to as the “Slow Blogging” movement. The term is partly a reference to Alice Waters’ slow food movement which emphasizes cooking quality meals that take time rather than consuming fast food that is quick but less nutritious. You can read a New York Times article about slow blogging from 2008, and a slow blogging manifesto here, though I prefer the one listed in the sidebar of this blog which says:

1. Slow blogs are well written (the writing would still be considered good had it not been not published on the internet)
2. Slow blogs are focused on content over format
3. Slow blogs celebrate authenticity
4. Slow blog writers don’t feel restrained by formulas
5. Slow blogs posts are sometimes long
6. Slow blogs are original (not composed of mostly recycled material)
7. Slow blogs do not have, as their primary aim, the goal of selling things
8. Slow blogs are not unfairly critical of bloggers with different agendas. It’s still a free world.
9. Slow blogs encourage community building
10. Slow blogs are worth the time

None of this is to say I’m going to try to drive visitors away from my blog either. I’m not going to stop certain posting habits I like that I also know are considered to help increase readership. I’ve been trying to post a picture with most of my posts lately because it makes the entry look more enticing and readable. I think this increases the quality of my posts, so I’m going to still do it, regardless of whether it brings more readers or not.

It also does NOT mean I’m going to write posts weeks and weeks in advance and revise them heavily before posting. Blogs do tend to be in the moment, and I don’t have a problem writing something in the moment like some of the slow bloggers seem to.

I can guarantee there will still be typos.

Overall, I’d just like to blog when I want to and not because I think I have to. So, you might be seeing a little bit less of me. There still might be weeks when I feel a need to post four entries. There might be weeks when I post none. We’ll see. Let’s just take it slow, ok?

1) Indiana has The Flying Cupcake. Chapel Hill has The Flying Burrito. I’m glad my relocation hasn’t led to a lack of airborne edible objects in my vicinity.

2) There are three highways that all have the number 5 in their name around here and at one point they all merge into one before diverging again. This will not be confusing in the slightest bit, I’m sure.

3) “Are you a student?” No, I am not, but I might start saying I’m one if people keep asking me this. It seems to be the standard way to open a conversation here. (That, or to check that you’re not jailbait.) I suppose this is what I get for moving to a college town.

4) This place called Chapel Hill has lots of hills. Who’d have thunk it?! My little 4-cylinder Saturn is discovering gears it never knew it had when we lived in the post-glacial flatland of Indiana.

5) This city is very bike friendly. I’ve seen lots of bike lanes on the road and lots of cyclists actually using them. Makes me want to get out my bike and ride. Then I remember the hills.

6) The sales tax here is 7.75%. Ouch!

7) I went to update my Amazon Associates account with my new address information. (This is the program that allows me to earn a small commission on any Amazon.com purchases made through this site.) When I hit “Submit” I got a big red error message alerting me that citizens of North Carolina may not take part in the program. CRAP! Did some research and learned this happened last year over a tax dispute. Did some more research and found a legal way to circumvent the problem, but geez, get with the program North Carolina. Literally, get with the Amazon Associates program and work this out.

8) My neighbors’ unsecured wireless internet appears and disappears like Brigadoon. Is sorta annoying, but I’m thankful that I can get any Internet access at all since Time-Warner is making me wait over a week for installation. Somewhat tempted to knock on my other neighbors’ doors, get flirty, and ask for the passwords to their secured networks. So sad that I would think of whoring myself out for wifi.

9) The clerk at Best Buy asked me what my zip code was earlier this week, and I was like, Crap! What is my zip code?. Quickly remembered, but figure this hesitation will continue for awhile, particularly after I get my new phone number.

10) Am still getting used to new local news personalities, different focus on the weather map, and new grocery stores. There is no Kroger or Marsh near here. Now I have Harris-Teeter and Food Lion. We even have Kangaroos! Er, a Kangaroo Express, anyway.

11) I would be the world’s crappiest mover. I am constantly banging furniture into walls and railings. Whoops! Hope you weren’t attached to that chunk of drywall!

12) Moving right before the 4th of July holiday weekend is awful timing. Everything closes down, your new smartphone is stuck in-transit at the Knoxville post office hub for days, and people light up loud explosives when you are the most exhausted you will be all year.

13) To turn on a gas stove, you must first turn the dial slightly counter-clockwise to the words that say “Light.” Wait a few seconds for the flame to light, and THEN turn down the flame to the adjusted height. Turning the dial directly to the number you want, like you did on an electric stove, will just make you look like a moron.

14) If you are listing your beloved Steelcase desks on Craig’s List because you’ve decided they’re too heavy to move, ask the respondent to your ad what they plan to do with them. If you don’t, you may come to learn they are hauling them to the recycling center to redeem scrap metal for pennies a pound. My poor, Steelcase desks! I’m so, so, sorry! Your death is on my hands. I hope you are reincarnated as something beautiful, and not just a water heater.

15) Chapel Hill is located in Orange County. That’s right, I’ve moved to The OC.

16) I was driving down the street when I saw a peculiar sign that said “Speed Table.” What’s that? I thought as my mind started to envision a spreadsheet with a table listing different speeds and—BUMP! Ah, that’s what a speed table is—it’s a big long speed bump.

17) When I was checking out apartments last month, I mentioned to the rental agent that I was from Indiana. “Oh, I used to live in Crawfordsville!” she told me.

“Wow, me too!” I responded, because I had indeed lived in Crawfordsville for two years as a kid. Crawfordsville is a tiny, little town—dare I say it, a podunk town. So it was odd to run into someone who lived there when I was all the way out in North Carolina.

Then, I set up a new bank account yesterday and told the agent I had just moved from Indiana. “Oh, I used to live in Indiana!” she said. “We lived near Crawfordsville, on Lake Holiday.”

“No way!” I said. “We lived in a rental house on Lake Holiday for a few months before moving into our house.”

So, I am now convinced that everyone in Chapel Hill is originally from Crawfordsville, Indiana. Prove me wrong. I dare you.

One year ago was the last time I got up at 7:00am to drive to the full-time job I enjoyed so much that it made me want to freelance full-time. (Lesson learned: Me and big corporations do not mix.) July 8th, 2009 was a Wednesday. I’d originally intended to give my notice on a Friday, but I got halfway through the week and just couldn’t take it anymore. Some problem I can’t remember sprung up at the beginning of the day and I started thinking, What the hell am I waiting for? So, I walked into the boss’s office and said good-bye.

I know a lot of people fantasize about doing that and imagine it as a gleeful moment of emancipation. While I was definitely happy with my decision, the actual moment of resigning was a scary swirl of emotions, like good feelings and bad feelings had collided like high pressure fronts and low pressure fronts, creating an emotional tornado. I instant-messaged my best friend at work, telling her, “OK, I’m going to do it. Wish me luck.” Then I got up and headed to the office like a walking Jell-O mold, quivering inside with the knowledge of what I was about to do.

Once you turn in that resignation letter, you’ve crossed the point of no return. I almost felt like I was about to rob a bank or break into someone’s house. I was going to commit an act I could not easily undo. Yeah, I was certain I wanted to do it, but I also knew I could be broke and unemployed a year later if things didn’t work out right. Plus, my boss was a nice guy, and I felt bad that my departure would put a strain on the department. Granted, I didn’t feel bad enough about it to stay though.

I entered the office, closed the door and stumbled through my prepared speech. My boss understood where I was coming from, even if he wasn’t thrilled to see me leave. And then, God dammit, my eyes got a little bit too full of salt water and an itty-bitty tear slinked down my cheek. Damn you, emotions! Why must you make me look weak and girly?!

Two weeks later, we had my going-away party and then I was on my own. I woke up the next day at eight o’clock, cooked some oatmeal and made some coffee, establishing a new routine, the morning ritual of a real-life freelancer. Than I got on my computer and started figuring things out. And here I am, 12 months later, still not broke! I’m happy not to be living under a bridge, especially since it’s hard to steal a wi-fi signal through concrete. I still feel a bit weird telling people I am a freelancer, as if I’m telling them I’m a traveling gypsy or a circus performer. As if they’ll say, “Really? People actually do that?” Still, it feels less strange than telling people I’m a writer, which always seems a tad pretentious to me, though I should probably get over that already.

When I look back over the past few years, I can see that the moment I really started to take charge of my life was back in 2005 when I started to lose 200 pounds. I don’t believe you have to be thin to be happy, but spending two years working towards a seemingly impossible goal and actually getting there made me feel like a lot of other stuff was possible that used to seem impossible. So, even though I’ve gained back some of the weight I lost, I haven’t lost that feeling that I can steer my life the direction I want to. I quit my job. I moved to a different town. Dunno what I’ll do next, but I know I can do it, whatever it is.

I must say, you guys have been instrumental in allowing me to establish this new lifestyle. I’ve gotten tons of referrals from people who read my blog or who I’ve met through blogging. This little blog here has let me do a lot of amazing things, and I’m so grateful to everyone who has helped make it happen. Big thanks to my Internet peeps!

K, now back to work.

Friday, July 2, 2010

9:30am – Sleep in because I can. Eventually get up. Pour the cat food and the coffee. Try not to consume the wrong one.

10:00am – Call the water, gas and electric companies to get utilities set up in my name.

11:15am – Drive to grocery store next to post office to scope out PO Boxes. Enter the Food Lion and go to the customer service counter to get my MVP card so I can get deals and they can overanalyze my oatmeal purchasing habits.

11:25am – Buy another bottle of wasp killer, just in case. You can never have too much wasp killer. DIE WASPS, DIE!!

11:45am – Return home. Home! This is my home now! How cool!

12:40pm – Leave for Big Bro’s house. On the drive over, I realize I will have to reset all my radio presets. Such a pain.

1:00pm – Arrive at Big Bro’s house and sign up for cable internet installation using his secure internet. They can’t come out until next Saturday. SATURDAY!! Eight days from now!! How dare they take a long weekend off to celebrate this nation’s independence! That’s sooo un-American.

2:30pm – Baby Bro and I get in Saturn so we can pick up the Budget truck and return it. I am fussy worrying about getting there before the 4:30pm closing time, reminiscent of my mother’s tendency to worry about similar things.

“So, how does it feel to be turning into Mom?” Baby Bro asks.

“I dunno. How does it feel to be turning into Dad?” I reply. I may be exhausted, but I’m still witty!

3:00pm – Arrive at apartment. Try to enter address of rental return place into GPS. Cannot figure out how to enter “HIGHWAY 15 501 S” into GPS. Try everything. In act of total desperation, I do the unthinkable. I call to ASK FOR DIRECTIONS. Crazy! How 1990’s of me.

3:30pm – Drop off truck at the world’s most stupidly designed gas station/Budget rental return. Almost collide with another Budget truck and a silver Honda Civic in less than 5 minutes.

4:00pm – Eat late lunch/early dinner at Jimmy Johns. Thank Baby Bro effusively for all his slave labor this week. This $6.00 sandwich is on me!

5:00pm – Return to Big Bro’s house. Hang out.

6:00pm – Big Bro returns from work and makes brief appearance before changing into black track suit and leaving for fencing lessons. Yes, fencing lessons.

6:30pm – Awesome sister-in-law grills chicken sausages, stuffed hamburgers, and tilapia for us.

8:00pm – Leave for my apartment. My apartment! How cool!

8:30pm – Come back home. No kitties in site. Must still be hiding behind boxes, terrified by change.

8:31pm – BEEP!

8:32pm – BEEP!

8:33pm – BEEP!

8:34pm – Consider breaking window of downstairs apartment and ripping smoke detector out of the wall. Call maintenance and leave a message instead.

8:40pm – Think about taking a shower, but I don’t know where my towel is. Douglas Adams would be so disappointed in me.

8:41pm – Put on headphones and watch videos on my laptop.

11:50pm – Go to bed, happy that everything went smoothly and we managed to overcome all unexpected obstacles with a cell phone call or lethal pesticides. There will be boxes to unpack and I still need to buy a bed, couch and a desk, but I am here. My life is NOW!

11:55pm – Sleep. Sweet, sweet, sleep.