Burning Some Awards

I have a friend who burns Christmas cards.

Seriously, once the holidays are over, she gathers up the odd assortment of well wishes and photos of smiling children and tosses them, one by one, in the roaring blaze.

When she first told me about it, I was aghast. We had just sent out a really fantastic card featuring our daughters in some extra-cute pose.

“Surely you didn’t burn our card?” I exclaimed, but it turns out that it was nothing but ash now. My wife Anita wanted to permanently strike her from our Christmas card list.

I went so far as to Google the subject, curious to see if this was something rational people normally did. In Britain, there seems to have been a tradition that children used to burn their Christmas cards in the fire so they can float up the chimney with smoke and wind can be transported magically to the North Pole. Other than that, I couldn’t find much on the subject.

“Why do you burn Christmas cards?” I asked her.

“Because I don’t want them cluttering the place up,” she replied. “And I hate throwing them away.”

Apparently her and her family have created this little holiday tradition of looking at the cards for a moment, maybe commenting on the person or the card itself, then chunking it into the fire. When you stop and really think about it, it makes a certain amount of sense. It's actually kind of touching, in a bizarre sort of way.

I mention this because I recently was awarded two more bloggy-love badges just as I was getting ready to throw the ones I’ve already received into the fire. Tony at The Anti-Jared recently asked me why I have no blogroll on JSGF, and as Tony has an annoying habit of doing, he made me start thinking.

I thought it would clutter things up, like a bundle of Christmas cards. Plus, I’m constantly asked to put people’s sites on my blogroll, and I liked the simple response of “Sorry, I got no blogroll.”

But I realize that there’re few bloggers that receive any more blogroll love than I do, so I’m throwing my awards and badges… new and old… into the fire and cramming in a blogroll over there. I follow a bunch of blogs, and because I know how much people’s comments mean to me, I try my best to be an active and involved participant.

Anyway, here’s the latest blog bling to cross my doorway. Unfortunately, they came through at the exact same time and got morphed into one award. According to the rules of the Beautiful Happy Blogger 101 Award, I have to tell you seventeen things that secretly make me happy (in no particular order)…

1. A British accent on a GPS navigation system
2. Marvel comics from the 60’s
3. Antique toys
4. Buying electronics
5. The last five minutes of a workout
6. Jethro on The Beverly Hillbillies -- my all-time favorite line on TV was when the Clampetts were going to England and Jethro wanted to be a knight...
   
   “What’s your name?”
   “Jethro.”
   “What’s your surname?”
   “Sir Jethro.”
   
   
7. Feet in the ocean
8. Made-up words
9. Basketball… watching, playing, discussing
10. The smell of curry simmering
11. A well-turned phrase
12. Giving good gifts
13. Making my daughters laugh
14. Getting a new laptop
15. Being a super-fast typist
16. Looking at our photo albums
17. Having a good idea

Thanks to Phil, Lisa, Cactusfreek, Sarah, 266 (and anyone else I’m leaving out) for sending out the love.

Since I accidentaly jumbled up the award, I don’t feel quite right passing it on to anyone else, so I guess it’s just off into the fire with the rest it goes. However, I do encourage you to check out some (or all) of the fantastic folks on my low-calorie but very filling blogroll.

x

"Large" And In Charge

Weekly weigh-in: 217.0
Weekly weigh-in: 215.2
Loss: -1.8
Total loss: 76.3 lbs.
Emotion: Large/In Charge

So there I was, in a place completely foreign to me: a fitting room.

As a guy, I’ve always had a pretty simplistic approach to shopping. I saw something I liked, I grabbed my size and made my purchase. Sometimes, it turned out that the size (always either XL or–preferably–XXL) was a little too snug, but usually it was okay. The fashion industry seemed to be embracing my former fat-assedness by making just about everything in double wide-load.

Now it seems all my shirts are too big, and I didn’t know what to go grab. So I actually went shopping and tried sh*t on. “Large” seems to be the size that looks least like a mistake on me right now, and I’m still not completely comfortable with the idea.

Speaking of “large,” I’d like to thank everyone for the XXL-sized reaction to my finally posting some before-and-after photos. I knew that I needed to do it, because I do want readers to take the “weight loss” part of this blog seriously, even if I seldom do. But I wasn’t expecting the outpouring of compliments and well-wishes that I received. Honestly, I was expecting a weight gain this week just from my swollen head.



Speaking of gaining, Chris at Chris’ Challenge thought that I hadn’t won enough feminine weight-loss blogging awards or told enough embarrassing secrets about myself, so he slapped me with the Gorgeous Blogger award, which has the same sort of blah-blah and rules as all the other awards. I’m supposed to tell you six things you don’t know about me, so strap in…

1) I once spent $120 on an antique G.I.Joe doll, even though I’m not a toy collector. It just looked exactly like me. I mean, exactly. It was freaky.

2) The first time I went snow skiing was with Anita and her family, who were all pretty experienced skiers. I took one lesson and then was let loose on the mountain. During the lesson, I just learned “The Snowplow,” which is basically just putting the tips of your skis together in kind of a pizza-slice shape and pressing outwards to slow down to a gentle stop. Easy peasy, huh? Anyway, our condo was at the end of one of the mountain's longest runs, and you had to take a lift to the top to get over to our side. “You sure you can do this?” Anita asked as we sat at the lodge and I drank beer after beer to steel my courage. “You can take the bus around and meet us there.” I shook my head, “I’ve got this.” As we were riding up the lift, I was sitting there in the cold, biting wind and wondering what exactly I had gotten myself into. Things started off okay, with everyone racing down the mountain and me trying to do my back-and-forth snowplow nonsense. But then a funny thing happened. I started picking up speed. I passed the other beginner skiers. I passed the intermediate skiers. I passed Anita and her family, who cheered me on. I passed dudes who were bent over in perfect form, their poles tucked beneath their arms (mine were flailing around like I was even drunker than I was). It wasn’t like I wasn’t trying to slow down; I was in full snow-plow, and blowing snow behind me like… well, a snow blower. I was digging in so hard that I was leaving a trail of bare earth behind me… and still I was gaining speed. And then, out of nowhere, I was airborne. “This isn’t so bad,” I said, and then a split second later, my mouth was full of snow and I was cartwheeling down the mountain, a giant snowball with arms and legs (the skiis and poles went who knows where). Anita said it was the most spectacular thing she’d ever seen. Who knows? It may have been what sealed the deal with us.

3) When I was young, my mother Shirley was a typist for a court reporter, so she had a sleek IBM Selectric typewriter that I learned to type on when I was very young. It was pretty sweet, let me tell you. You just brushed a key and it typed. By the time I was in high school, I was typing over 150 words a minute, so I decided to take Typing for a no-brainer “A”. Two problems: the school had just bricked up all the windows in that classroom because they were converting the building to central air, but the system wasn’t working right yet and (b) it was the last year before the school changed over to electric typewriters. Yes, it was manual typewriters (geez, that makes me feel really old just to type that). Anyway, the very first speed test, I took off and was flying through the assignment, just absolutely tearing it up. When I finished, I looked up and realized that I hadn’t made a single impression on the page. I basically had to re-learn to type in a sweat box. Worst. Class. Ever.

4) One of the most harrowing three months of my life began when I noticed a lump on the side of my neck. I thought I had slept on it funny, so went to the doctor to see about getting a muscle relaxant. “That’s cancer,” the doctor told me. “I’m 80% sure of it.” I made an appointment with an oncologist and they confirmed my worst fears: “It appears to be Hodgkin’s Disease,” he told me. They did a biopsy, and I got the call later in the week from a nurse: “The test came back negative. Please get in touch with the doctor.” With a deep sense of relief, I made the call. “Oh, you misunderstood,” he told me. “The test was negative. We couldn’t get any information from it.” I saw several more doctors and finally went in to have them cut me up and look around. Once they sliced me up, they quickly realized that it was simply an infection that was pushing the muscle up, which explained why the lump was so hard. Everything was A-OK, and I got a tough-guy neck scar that was extremely intimidating (“I got in a knife fight with some gang-bangers.”)

5) In junior high, my formidable juggling skills landed me a roll in the big school play, some crazy circus story. My best friend Van and I had to wear gold sequined Tarzan outfits and stand in front of the stage juggling in the big finale. Van and I had a bet on which one of us was going to mess up first, so we were both working really hard not to let any balls hit the ground. During most of the rehearsals, I was the one who’d flub up, and Van would laugh and laugh. So finally during the big performance before the entire school, there was Van and I out in front of the stage, doing our thing. I glance over for a quick look-see, and spot Van scrambling around. Turns out he dropped a ball and it hit his foot and took a wicked bounce out toward the audience. Well, I busted out laughing, but managed to keep juggling because that's what kind of trooper I am. What I didn’t realize was that I had backed up a couple of steps and was guffawing almost directly into the microphone that was on the piano accompanying the song. Anyway, my laughter basically drowned out thirty people singing on stage, and the entire audience just busted a gut laughing.

6) I’m sitting here watching Chitty Chitty Bang Bang with my daughter Pisa as I write this, which really isn’t a secret, but I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t have guessed it (okay, you might have guessed it).

The next part of the deal is that I’m supposed to name 7 other blogs that should get an award.


I’m going to pull the old bait-and-switch here, and instead award seven individuals with my own “Really Sh*tty Weight Loss Blog” award which recognizes those weight loss blogs that have… well, their own special aroma about them.

Mommy2Joe at Did I Just Eat That Out Loud?
Karen at *Fitcetera*
Lucas at Petite Flower
TJ Renee at TJ's Weight or the Highway
Anne at Carb Tripper
Chris at A Deliberate Life
Candice at Life According to Candice

Allow me to quote the rules for the Really Sh*tty Weight Loss Blog Award:

First off, there’s no passing it on to five, ten, fifteen bloggers. You don’t see Kate Winslet get handed an Oscar and then having to go give duplicate statues to Meryl Streep, Charlize Theron and Phyllis Diller. If there’s somebody you really want to recognize for their sh*tty contributions to the weight loss community, please feel free to do so. But it’s not a requirement.

Speaking of requirements, you must (like the Oscars) write an eloquent acceptance speech in which you name five… no ten… no seven things you admire about the person that gave you the award. That may sound self-serving, but… well, now that I think about it, it’s incredibly self-serving. My award, my rules.

Congrats to the worthy recipients, and thanks again one and all for your over-the-top sentiments about the pics. And as Caractacus Pott so eloquently put it in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, "You'll find a slight squeeze on the hooter an excellent safety precaution, Miss Scrumptious."