Photo by wheelo28 / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

I’ll be getting my geek on and driving to Chicago today for this weekend’s Wordcamp conference. Wordcamp is when you pack up your morphemes and syllables and send them off for the summer to live in bunk houses and—oh wait. That’s a total lie. Wordcamp is a gathering dedicated to the WordPress blogging software, which is responsible for a big chunk of my living these days at Make My Blog Pretty. You know what that means? Tax write-off! I’ll be keeping my receipts.

I expect there to be a high concentration of pasty people and nerd boys at this shindig, so I’ll be highly disappointed if I’m not one of the hottest chicks there. I’m a pretty purty pasty girl. If you’re going and you see me there, say hey!

People have asked me, so I wanted to let everyone know I’m not attending the BlogHer ’10 conference in New York. I’ll make the probably erroneous assumption that anyone cares that I’m not going, and continue on with this entry. (If [...]

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I was rifling through my mother’s cupboards the other day looking for a snack, when I found this:

I was less interested in the tomato soup than the contest advertised on the side where you could win a walk-on role on the TV show American Dreams. If you’re not familiar with American Dreams, that’s probably because IT WAS CANCELED IN 2005.

I’m pretty sure that contest has expired, and looking at the red stamps that say “August 2006″ on the bottom of the cans, I’m pretty sure the soup has expired too. This is one American dream that won’t come true.

ETA: I just discovered when spell-checking this entry that both “canceled” and “cancelled” are considered proper spellings. The former is American, whereas the latter is British, but since this post is about American Dreams, I went all American.

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A reader, who we shall call Susie Spouse, recently wrote me with this dilemma:

I currently weigh 330 pounds and my back and knees hurt almost all the time. I want more that anything to exercise and eat healthier…My husband is also a big man and I can not seem to get him interested in eating better or exercise. It seems harder without his support and I don’t know what to do… It seems like every time I bring it up he responds with “if you force this it will not work.”

I’m not married myself, so any advice I could give is speculative at best. But I figure I must have readers out there who are experts at manipulating their spouses. So, how can Susie Spouse get her husband on board with her healthier lifestyle? I know it’s a whole lot easier to make changes when you’ve got the support of the people who live with you.

• Continue reading "Help a reader out: How do you get a spouse to lose weight with you?"