A Dumbbell In A Home Gym

Fifteen Minutes of Fame.

Say -- did y'all know that if you write a blog entry and link to something in the Washington Post, your blog may eventually show up in the Post's "Who's Blogging?" box right next to the article? Because I sure didn't. And then I saw my referrer logs this morning and clicked over to that Carolyn Hax article on the Post site to see what in the world was going on. Eep!

I don't know why it was showing up twice.

Yes, I'm well aware that it makes no sense at all that I publish stuff on the World Wide Web and then get freaked at the idea that a lot of people might actually see it. This is an issue I've been grappling with since the days when I kept an online journal and would be shocked and horrified whenever someone I knew who hadn't been given a link stumbled across it. Seven years later, I'm none the saner about this.

Anyhow. Thanks for the kind comments on the last entry. The kitty still seems to be doing reasonably well. Not great. Not awful. I'm still a mess and will be for a while yet, but I made a point to get in a lot of walking today. It's better than nothing.

Entries I read by Little Miss Ess and Laura Bora from Bufadora today rang all too true to me.

I wanted to chime in with my own horror stories (if you couldn't tell from the last entry, I definitely have lots of coughissuescough on this subject), but then it hit me:

You know what really sucks?

I could recite an entire litany of these incidents, and where I was when they happened, my approximate age, what I'd had for lunch that day, what the weather was like, who was President at the time ... we're talking total painful recall.

But if I have to think of nice things people have said to me? Hmmm. I have to stop and ponder that one.

And there's just something fundamentally wrong about that. I need to make more of an effort to hang on to the good stuff, not because what strangers say validates me but because it's important to remember that sometimes people can be amazingly kind too.

So in the spirit of honoring the good people rather than the assholes, here's the best offbeat compliment I ever got from a stranger:

I was 21 or 22 and I was in a grocery store, lost in really deep thought over something earth-shatteringly important like which salad dressing to choose.

And an old man came around the corner, saw me, gave a start, and said "Golly! You're as pretty as a butterfly!"

Isn't that lovely?

Thank you, Old Man. That made my day. Sometimes it still does, even now.

If anyone else has any warm fuzzies they'd like to share below, by all means do so. I think I could use them today. Happy almost Friday.

Comment Spammers Bite My Ass Parade.

Whee! It's another one of those smorgasbord entries!

1. While hunting through my site stats, I discovered that a NicoleW (which is the handle I use on TypePad and Blogger) has been posting comment spam on Blogspot sites. Lots of Blogspot sites, from the looks of it. I wouldn't think anything of it -- if only I weren't getting "credit" from some folks for posting this rubbish.

If you got comment spam from a NicoleW and your Web search for this person led you here, I'm not your culprit. But hi! Feel free to hang around and read. Unlike my Blogspot doppelganger I've got no male sex toys to offer, but maybe you'll get a laugh or two.

(And if I were going to promote sites that hawk male sex toys, I wouldn't be doing it under my own handle. I mean, c'mon. I may not always be the brightest bulb in the chandelier, but gimme a little credit here, huh? My boss could be reading this.)

Now that we've got that cleared up, on to the usual eating/fitness babble.

2. I'm in another good news/bad news situation. The good news is that my eating is definitely back on a more even keel. The bad news is that I've been sick all week and my exercise has been fairly pathetic as a result. I'm starting to wonder if I'm ever going to get both things in synch at the same time ever again, with the exercise and the eating ying-yanging in perfect harmony and all that. Sigh.

I looked through my FitDay entries from last week and noticed that I'd been eating a much lower percentage of protein and fat than I normally do, so now I'm wondering if that's why I felt munchy all the time. I'm not a carbophobe by any means, but I definitely feel more satisfied and less prone to eating anything that won't run away when I eat a more balanced diet. I'm making an effort to do that this week.

3. Today, another complete stranger approached me on the street and asked me if I'd lost weight.

I cannot tell you how much things like that continue to weird me out. I mean, it's nice. I'm not complaining. It beats the hell out of strangers making Fat Albert "Hey hey HEYYY!"s at me. Even so, it freaks me out a little. I don't know what it says about me that while I'm used to strangers being rude, I never know quite how to handle it when they're really nice.

4. Speaking of strange web searches showing up in my site stats, I get one that pops up fairly frequently: "Ass Parade Nicole". That totally sounds like something people probably call me behind my back.

Because I never learn, I ended up Googling that phrase myself just to find out what on earth people were looking for. I was smart enough to not do that search at work, at least. As anyone who isn't me probably guessed, it's big butt porn. I don't know what else I thought it could possibly be.

And this entry should end up earning me all kinds of nifty web searches. Which I'll probably write about in future entries, leading to even more wacky searches. It's the gift that keeps on giving ...

Happy Friday and great weekend, everyone.

And A Little Bit More About That "Visibility" Thing...

This morning, I was waiting at the intersection in front of my office building.

A woman I cannot remember ever seeing before walked up to me and said "Oh my goodness! You've lost a lot of weight! I didn't even recognize you! Good for you!"

I thanked her graciously but I'm sure I probably had a bit of an "OMGWTF?" look in my eyes because she went on to say "I know we don't know each other, but I've seen you around a lot." And then "What you're doing is hard. Keep up the good work!" And with that, she headed off.

Wow. I never thought strangers would notice my weight, much less bother to give me a little encouragement.

But that was an incredibly cool way to start a Friday.

This 'n' That.

Bear with me tonight. I have all kinds of disjointed thoughts bouncing through my head in place of one coherent entry. I'm sorry.

1. A big hello to people who've dropped by in the last few days; thanks for reading.

2. I'm trying to get back into the routine of my evening workouts. It's not easy. I'd gotten incredibly used to those morning hikes and bike rides during our vacation week. Slogging on the treadmill at night is downright depressing in comparison. Bah.

Of course, the routine is going to get blown all to hell again next week when I go to Atlantic City. I'm going to be very interested to see what the gym facilities in my hotel look like. The hotel's website sure gives their "spa" a hell of a buildup on the info page. However, I can't help but wonder how gawking at the beach through binoculars -- offered as something "inspirational" on the aforelinked site -- is supposed to factor into my fitness routine. Frankly, that sounds a little skeevy to me. Perhaps I lack imagination.

3. Being depressed over being back at work brought on a terrible urge to comfort eat on Tuesday. For the most part I was able to fight it off, but when I was making a potato curry dish on Tuesday night I may have tossed a few extra baby potatoes down the hatch while I was draining and cutting them. Oh well. It's not like I smothered them in butter and cheese first. And hey -- they were quite comforting. I love potatoes.

4. How in the heck did Lane Bryant manage to make a skirt that's both too tight and too big on me at the same time? Today I finally wore one of the skirts mentioned in this entry -- I didn't want to wear it without tights, and this week has been the first week cool enough for tights. At first I thought the skirt fit me now and was quite chuffed with myself for losing the extra weight that quickly, but then I realized that while it's loose around my waist, it's still tight and grabby around my hips and my butt. Worse yet, the waist is so loose that the skirt slides all around me when I walk. And the skirt has a flirty little side panel of lace, so when it starts doing The Twist, the flirty little panel ends up sliding around to the back and revealing more of my big flirty ass than I care to show to anyone who is not my husband. I'd end up stopping every few seconds to give everything a good yank back into place during my lunchtime walk today. Smooth.

5. Speaking of flirting ... hoo boy. It's been happening to me lately, and I'm really out of practice with this. I used to be an outrageous flirt back in my single days, and I was often outrageously flirted with. It hadn't happened much in the last few years, but as I'm married to an amazing man I just couldn't bring myself to care that I no longer held any attraction for random horndogs.

But in the last couple of months, it's definitely started happening again. And it's very strange. It took me completely aback at first. A few weeks ago in the subway, some young guy with gorgeous blue eyes looked at me and said "Well, HI there!", and I literally did that thing where I glanced over my shoulder to see who he was talking to. (I was sitting against a wall at the time. As I established in #4, I am Smooth.) He couldn't possibly have been talking to me, after all.

That's not to say it isn't nice (heck, it's always cool when someone makes you feel cute for a few seconds), but it's just weird. It makes me think of that early "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" episode with the unpopular girl who turned invisible because everyone always treated her that way. Except that I feel that I'm now crossing back into visibility. And I'm going to have to adjust to being visible again.

That's probably enough randomness for now, eh? Hope everyone has a great weekend.

Go Sit In A Corner.

The scale is being punished.

After tantalizing me with a weight that was almost within five pounds of that magic 200 (but for one of those wretched .5s), it decided to get cute with me earlier this week and try to tell me that every day, I was gaining another pound.

Ha. I really, truly don't think so.

So I decided that instead of giving it the attention it's obviously craving by pulling a stunt like that, and starting off my mornings in a bad mood, I'd just ignore it for a few days. (Preferably until after That Time of the Month has come and gone, but I don't know if I can hold out that long.)

The scale can just sit there, alone and unloved, and think about what it's done.

Yesterday I went on another bike ride and was able to go from one end of the trail to the other with only a few stops for Gatorade, or for pushing the bike up a steep hill I just couldn't hack, or for finding out what the hell was causing that strange noise my bike was suddenly making (it was my seatbag coming loose and dragging against my rear tire). And today, I had two different people tell me I was looking good.

In your face, stupid scale! External feedback, both from other people and from my own observations of what my body is capable of doing now compared to how weak and out of shape I was last year, is more meaningful than what some smartass chunk of metal and plastic says anyhow.

That's not to say that I've got everything all sorted out. Tonight, for the first time in a long while, while I was eating dinner I had an overpowering urge to go load my plate up with a second helping of pasta. I knew I wasn't hungry; I just wanted to eat some more. "Aw, c'mon. It won't hurt you *that* much, and you can go back to your normal eating tomorrow."

I fought off the urge, but I wasn't happy to be hearing from that particular voice again.

I think the nice cafeteria cashier who complimented me today put the idea in my head. I bought some fruit off the salad bar and a single-serving bag of peanuts for an afternoon snack. She thought that was all I was eating for lunch. "Fruit and peanuts for lunch! No wonder you are getting (and here she held up her hands and moved them together to indicate a fat person getting thinner)".

And you know, maybe I should have explained that I'd already had a bowl of pho at a Vietnamese restaurant downtown and the fruit was dessert and the peanuts were for a snack, and that I don't and won't starve myself in order to lose weight. But I just smiled and thanked her and allowed her and everyone in earshot to think I was Being Good.

So yeah, I totally deserved a visit from the Evil Eat Everything Voice.

Anniversary! (Or: Freaking' FINALLY.)

So today it's been eight months since I started the whole exercising and eating less thing. Fifty-eight pounds gone. And the fitness is coming along swimmingly as well. I looked myself over tonight, flexed my leg, and noticed that I'm building up a hell of an impressive quadricep muscle in my right leg. I'm the only one who can really tell because the thigh is still blanketed in flab, alas, but at least I know that sucker is there.

And at long last, someone at work noticed. Sheesh. I bought some fresh fruit from the salad bar in our building's cafeteria at lunch. The cashier rang me up and then said something so quietly that I had to ask her to repeat herself. Finally I caught it:

"You are getting smaller!"

Yes! YES! Glory hallelujah! At long last, someone who's not related to me or in my circle of friends said something. O frabjous day!

Really -- the approval of strangers shouldn't matter this much. But after dropping at least four clothes sizes and steadily shrinking for eight months and getting absolutely no reaction from anyone, I was pretty much at the point where I was wondering if there were two Nicoles: an alternate universe Nicole who was exercising and losing all the weight, and the regular Nicole everyone at work sees, the same fat schlub she's been for years.

It got better: Tonight I had to go shopping for birthday presents for Mom and, well, maybe one or two (or four) things for myself. Cough. I made a point of grabbing much smaller sizes to try on than I usually do. And they all fit. Keep in mind that the majority of the grabbing and trying on happened in the plus-sized clothes section of Hecht's, the place I slunk out of in defeat last autumn when I realized that I'd gotten too fat for most of their clothes. I had on an adorable 1X top. It's almost too big across my shoulders.

Then I did something I haven't done in years: I walked into Coldwater Creek, a store that's not a plus-sized store and that doesn't have a separate plus-size section. I picked out a really cute leopard-print skirt in an XL and tried it on.

And then I had to ask the fitting room attendant if she'd get me the L. That XL? It was too big.

A very, very good anniversary indeed.