It’s odd that the one thing that stops me from blogging for almost a week is a blogging conference. The busier my life gets, the less time I have to write about it. Let’s just stick to bullet points so I can take another nap while my body tries to figure out what time zone I am in.

In San Francisco they paint their houses pink, purple, orange, blue and all sorts of beautiful colors. If I see a purple house in Indiana I automatically wonder, “Was purple paint on sale that week?”

I could not get over how many hills there are in San Francisco. The world has a third dimension, did you know that? Every time I’d drive up a street I’d say, “Wow, look at that hill!” Indiana is so flat that it was shocking to be able to see buildings rising up above and below me on sharp inclines.

I now have 4 USB flash drives. Thank you, swag tables.

My panel went very well. I did not fall off the stage and I kept [...]

• Continue reading "Oh, right, I have a blog"

Today I’m speaking on the Blog to Book panel at the 2008 BlogHer conference, though hopefully none of you are reading this while I’m speaking on the panel because that’s kind of rude. Eyes to the front please. Oh my God, everyone’s staring at me! Look away, look away!

If you’re stopping by for the first time, hopefully my blog will make you laugh your ass off. It did that to me. I lost 190-something pounds over two years (via diet and exercise) and blogged about it along the way because typing burns calories. These days I blog about my life through the filter of health, fitness and weight maintenance. Some of my favorite posts include:

Definitely not the tea room

My first half-marathon: What, no bagels?

I support your right to look good

Feeling strangely fine

…more greatest hits

My book Half-Assed: A Weight-Loss Memoir was published by Seal Press in May 2008. You can read a series I wrote about my blog to book experience on my book blog, appropriately titled Blog to Book. If I don’t see you [...]

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“Hey, beautiful!” I heard a man yell. I kept walking towards downtown. “What’s going on?” I slowed down and looked towards the voice yelling these words and saw a 20-something, man dressed in street clothes crossing the street, arms open, looking at me. It then occurred to me that, oh my, he was talking to me.

This left me greatly confused.

I gave the man a befuddled look, as though he’d just asked me where the library was in Portuguese. I kept waiting for him to follow up with, “Can you spare some change?” but he didn’t, so I kept walking in the other direction. As I continued down the sidewalk, I came upon another man who looked at me and said, “Hey, how you doing today?” Dear Lord, why were people being so friendly on the street? What was this, the deep south? Here in the Midwestern states we typically ignore our fellow pedestrians and let them live out their hollow lives in peace, thank you very much.

I still don’t know why I suddenly attracted the [...]

• Continue reading "Hotter than I thought"

I don’t think the Internet hates me enough. I was sitting around last night thinking, “Hmmm, what can I do to get the Internet to hate me?” I could go to Chicago and eat deep-dish pizza, a cannoli with filling as sweet as frosting, chocolate-chip cheesescake, some apple crisp, a delicious lobster bisque, a million tasty hors d’oeuvres and I think there was a cherry cobbler and a cookie in there too. Then I could wash it down with some rum and coke (not diet!) and a pina colada and go home and weigh myself and discover I have lost a pound. I’m pretty sure that will make the Internet hate me. Do you hate me yet?

This weight loss business never ceases to confuse me. Sure, I did go on a 7-mile bicycle trip. And I walked a mile from the hostel to Union Station dragging my 40 pound suitcase behind me because I couldn’t find the right bus stop. And I walked another mile or two when circling in on the W hotel (which [...]

• Continue reading "Weighing in on July"

While I was in Chicago, Kathleen tried to kill me. This is Kathleen:

Kathleen was the homicidal bicycle I was assigned on Bobby’s Bike Hike, an otherwise awesome bike tour through Chicago. I thought about the boat tour or the highly recommended architectural tour, but when I saw an ad on the hostel’s bulletin board for a bike tour, I knew that’s how I’d be spending Sunday afternoon before my bus ride home. Back when I weighed 372 pounds, I could have handled floating around on a boat and my feet probably would have survived a walk around Chicago with only a few blisters, but there was no way I would have mounted my huge butt on an itty, bitty, bicycle seat. My butt rarely even fit into regular-sized chairs. So I decided I needed to bike around Chicago simply because now I can. And of course, I had a coupon. (When don’t I?) I also loved ringing my bicycle bell! I just wish there had been streamers on the handle bars too and a big [...]

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