I’ve lost weight this week even though I haven’t really been trying to (any more than I ever am). Weight loss used to be my biggest hobby, and now it’s something I do when I get around to it, like the laundry. It’s still on my mind, but sometimes the pounds pile up rather high before I can knock them off again, leading me to a life of weight maintenance instead of weight loss. My loss happened despite eating pizza two out of the last three days too. Go figure.

I’ve been trying to figure out what exactly I did so I can keep on doing it. All I can guess is that I’ve kept my self happily distracted the past week with work, TV, Internet surfing, and socializing. The socializing included pizza and cake though, so I don’t know how that figures in. I’ve felt happier and bouncier ever since the sun returned to Indiana. The secret to weight loss might be happiness. I know people tend to believe weight loss leads to happiness, but [...]

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Did I tell you my friend Dana got a job at Twitter? I know! I am so much cooler than you now, if only by association. The next time I see the fail whale, I’ll be sure to complain to her personally for falling down on the job. Dana is shipping off to San Francisco soon, leaving Indiana and all our cornfields behind for street trolleys and outrageous housing costs. So, I made her a stuffed, crocheted Twitter birdie so she’ll remember me once she’s made all her cool new friends. (She already met Will.i.am during her first week!)

Dolls like these are called “amigurumi,” a Japanese term that combines the words for “crocheted” and “stuffed doll.” I used the Lion Yarn pattern for an amigurumi chick (requires free registration to view). I crocheted the body with a strand of teal yarn and a strand of blue eyelash yarn worked together, which gave it the fuzzy appearance. The eyes are black buttons, and I made the feet with yellow pipe cleaners so the bird can perch [...]

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Traineo.com recently contacted me about a special offer they’re running until the end of the month. I checked it out, thought it looked pretty good and decided I’d pass on the info (with the hope that I do not look like a sell-out corporate whore, or if I do I at least look like a twenty-dollar whore and not an eight-dollar one).

Traineo is a web site that offers tracking tools and community support for weight loss. I use one of their widgets in my sidebar to track my weight loss, or lately more like my weight maintenance. (At least it’s not a gain!) The TraineoPLUS service costs $59.99 a year and offers slightly more advanced tracking and daily e-mails that provide information and guidance along your weight loss journey. Here’s a video that CEO Alasdair McLean-Foreman narrates in a cute accent explaining the features:

If you’ve been thinking of signing up for TraineoPLUS, if you do so by April 30th, 2010 and enter the coupon code “PASTA” at checkout, you’ll receive a Garmin Forerunner 50 [...]

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Nicole Scherzinger, the favorite to win this season of Dancing with the Stars and lead singer of The Pussycat Dolls, went to my high school…and I have absolutely no memory of her! She was two years ahead of me, so we must have walked past each other in the hallways or back and forth from the Youth Performing Arts School where I took band classes. But there were 1600 people at my high school, and there’s no way I could be best-est friends with everyone. I was doing pretty well to have any friends, quite frankly.

Recently, I dug out my old yearbooks to see if I could jog any memories of Nicole, and certainly not because I hoped her yearbook photos would be as embarrassing as everyone else’s, proving that even beautiful, famous people were once ugly-duckling nobodies like the rest of us. Sadly, neither hope came to be. Here is Nicole in 1995:

Pretty darn pretty, just like today. And here is me in 1995:

I had way more curly hair than I could possibly handle. [...]

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Uh, no thanks. I don’t think I will. My cat might be interested though.

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