As some of you already guessed, I moved in with a roommate a few months ago to help cut my rent costs. Sorry, I am not shacking up with a guy, which is too bad because in 16 months my COBRA runs out and I’m gonna’ need some health insurance. If I were smart, I’d start hunting down well-insured grooms right now. Anyway, I agreed to keep my roommate off of the blog as one of the terms of our co-habitation. However, I can talk about indirect events that have happened since we moved in together, in particular the fact that I now have cable television and it is the mental equivalent of eating everything off of that bakery markdown tray. It looks good, but it’s probably not that good for me.

I lived without cable television for…five years? I don’t really remember. It was a long time and particularly unexpected because I grew up on television. In 4th grade, we had to track how much TV we watching in a week, and I was [...]

• Continue reading "The curse of cable television"

I have joked that I used to spend all day on the couch, but that was an exaggeration. I actually split the time between my couch and my computer chair and I occasionally got up to go the fridge. But Sunday I literally did lay on the couch all day next to Mr. Food Poisoning and a 4 gallon blue bucket and you know what? Sitting in one place all day makes you really sore. My body ached more at the end of the day than it ever has after weight-lifting. Of course, that might have been related to me slipping on black ice outside the laundry room on Saturday because I didn’t know I needed to wear Yaktrax to wash my panties. I spent all Sunday crammed up on a loveseat slightly too small for my full length, watching Kiki’s Delivery Service twice because if I got up to change the DVD, my brain would start sending the message “Barf! Barf!” to my stomach. The only redeeming element of the day came at 9:00pm [...]

• Continue reading "American Gladiators is back: Spandex, trash talk and a lake of fire!"

As I was watching the NOVA Marathon Challenge last night, which followed twelve regular people on “Team NOVA” training to run the 26 mile Boston Marathon, I came to a shocking realization. I too was once on Team Nova.

Sixth grade. Louisville, Kentucky. Westport Middle School. Each grade was separated into three or four teams of students who had the same teachers. It was a way of dividing up the student body to make them more manageable. Our teams were astronomically themed: 6-1 Nebula, 6-2 Nova, 6-3 Pulsar, and 6-4 Fine Arts and Humanities a.k.a. Snobby Little Bitches who were too good to be named Quasar or Red Dwarf. As you can see I was chubby even back then and had a propensity for correcting our yearbook staff’s typos with a ballpoint pen. I was on 6-2 Nova, but they never made me run a marathon to graduate, thank goodness. I didn’t even have to take PE. Otherwise I might have been a sixth grade drop-out.

They expected at least half of PBS’s Team NOVA to drop [...]

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The only marathons I have been a part of involve 12 episodes of Law & Order aired back to back and the loss of sensation in my buttocks. Another type of marathon is being covered tonight on PBS and it doesn’t involve a dozen hours of Sam Waterston. Tonight’s episode of NOVA is called the Marathon Challenge and follows 13 novice runners as they train to run the Boston marathon. I’m really looking forward to watching this because…I signed up to run a half marathon! Woo-hoo! Me and the Indianapolis 500 Mini-Marathon on May 3, 2008, baby! I’ve lost half my weight, I wrote a book called Half-Assed: A Weight-Loss Memoir and now I’m going to run a half-marathon. I hope to learn a lot from this show and I hope no one gets horribly injured or collapses in a pool of vomit because that registration fee is non-refundable. Check your listings for time and station.

• Continue reading "No, not that kind of marathon"

My hostel friend Adrienne, who writes Baby Toolkit, has tagged me with a meme. That’s my “hostel” friend, meaning I met her at the youth hostel during the BlogHer conference, not my “hostile” friend. I don’t think I could be friends with a hostile person whether I met them at a hostel or not. Here’s the rules:

Meme Rules:

1) Post these rules before you give your facts

2) List 8 random facts about yourself

3) At the end of your post, choose (tag) 8 people and list their names, linking to them

4) Leave a comment on their blog, letting them know they’ve been tagged

I’ve spilled my guts on this blog so much I sometimes feel like I need my own biohazard waste bin to clean it all up. But here are eight health and weight-loss related things about me that you probably did not already know.

1) I don’t care if artificial sweeteners kill me, I’m eating them anyway

I know some people don’t like to use aspartame, sucralose, saccharin or any of those sweet, sweet, chemicals that end in [...]

• Continue reading "Just the facts ma’am"