So last week I happened to mention that my super-duper-high-speed weight loss phase of the diet was over and presented “six days in a row at basically the same weight” as evidence. I thought it was a very straightforward statement, but the ladies did not quite take it as I intended. Paraphrasing several replies: “You can’t quit now Charlie!” “Hang in there!” “Cheer up or we will hunt you down and force feed you rice cakes!”

It reminded me of a blog post I came across a couple weeks ago. It was an essay of sorts on fiction writing, specifically, “How to write male characters.” (Primarily, of course, for female writers.) Here’s the brilliant excerpt:

I had always assumed that women understood men. We are, after all, pretty simple. Generally, we say what we mean. Guys don’t generally try to lay down a trail of hints that have to be figured out.

Apparently, a lot of women don’t know that. Apparently, when a guy says, “Your hair looks nice today,” a lot of women assume there is some hidden meaning, such as:

• Your hair usually looks terrible. It’s about time you did something right with it.
• Your makeup is a mess, but at least your hair is OK.
• You’re fat. The hair compensates a little, but you’re still fat.
• Let’s hop in bed, you nymph, you.

The reality is that when a guy says, “Your hair looks nice today,” the secret encoded message which he hopes you pick up is, “Your hair looks nice today.” In the vast majority of cases, that’s all he means. No more. No less. There is no implication that your hair looked bad yesterday or that your makeup suffers by comparison or that you have a weight problem or that it’s time for a roll in the hay.

Furthermore, the guy is not fishing for some return compliment. It’s quite plausible that the guy in question doesn’t even view his comment as an actual compliment. Likely as not, this guy is merely making an observation akin to “Nice weather we’re having today,” or “The Dow is up ten points today,” or “The Padres are making a nice run at the division championship this year.”

So ladies, when a guy says, “Your hair looks nice today,” the correct response is, “Thank you! That’s so sweet of you to say so.”

Some examples of wrong responses are:

• “What was wrong with it yesterday?”
• “Don’t you like my mascara?”
• “I’m trying to lose ten pounds, so cut me some slack, all right?”
• “Sorry, but I’m not that easy, you dirty-minded lecher.

You can click here for the original article. And I’ll try to be more careful next time.

p.s. Happy New Month! Can you believe it’s September already? Or September 2010 already?

p.p.s. Check out my new Facebook “Like” feature below. Go ahead and click it. Lots. Then I’ll be famous. I promise I won’t forget all the little people I stepped on to get to the top.

In case you haven’t noticed, it’s been a long time since the continental U.S. has seen a total solar eclipse: February 26, 1979 to be exact. And even then, the greatest point of totality was only visible from Canada. That’s a fairly long dearth, considering the size of this country and how long I’ve been jumping up and down in place trying to alter the earth’s orbit to make one show up sooner.

Well, the long wait (and all that jumping) is about to pay off. Assuming the world doesn’t end in December 2012, the US is going to get its first total solar eclipse in nearly forty years in 2017, a mere SEVEN years away. I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty worked up about this. Being an amateur astronomy buff and sky-gazer essentially my entire life, this is the Big Show. Peering up into the sky to see cool stuff just doesn’t get any better than this. And since I’ve never really had the means to travel to Turkey or Australia or Detroit to see one before, I’m definitely going to do everything I can to take advantage of this.

Of course, knowing my luck, I’ll drive 800 miles to see it and it’ll be cloudy. Or, I’ll accidentally get locked in a porta-potty. Or perhaps the world will end in December 2012.

Fortunately, if I miss it due to one of the first two reasons, I’ll have another shot at seeing one after that. “But Charlie, won’t you have to wait another forty years for that second chance?” I’m glad you asked, concerned reader. Because I’m happy to say that I will only have to wait SEVEN years to see another one. Further, if you happen to live just south of Carbondale, IL, you’ll get to see two total solar eclipses, just seven years apart, without having to leave the parking lot of your local Dairy Queen.

Even better, if I’m still in Austin in fourteen years, the path of totality in 2024 will cut straight through my flippin’ backyard. I’m so excited I could pee (but I will avoid getting locked in the bathroom at all costs).

So will you be able to see it? Check out the map below. The downward sloping path is 2017. The upward path is 2024. The closer you are to GE (“greatest extent”) the longer it will last. And remember, you have to be as close as possible to the blue lines.

See you then!

The Backstory

Back in February of 2009, I received an email from Roni addressed “to my fellow fit bloggers*”. I was one of three recipients and also the reason for the footnote on her salutation, which said, “Yes, Charlie, you’re a fit blogger even if you don’t think you are.”

This was over thirteen months ago and I didn’t disagree with her. Back then I posted five times a week, had far, far more traffic than I do now, and even inspired a few people to do better in the midst of their own weight loss struggles. It wasn’t a bad situation, but it was taking away what precious little free time I had from my primary passion: writing. (Yes, I realize that technically a blog constitutes as writing, but I’m specifically talking about 400-page novels. Not 600-word humorous posts on cheeseburgers and bacon.)

As the year progressed, Roni continually asked me to come to the conference and I continually put her off. Finally, on December 1, 2009, she wrote:

OK, it’s time. You must decide. FitBloggin’ or no FitBloggin’? I think I know the answer but I’m going to make you say it anyway.

I replied with three, single-syllable words: I’ll be there at which point I think she had a small heart attack.

The Conference

Fast forward to March 19, 2010. I left Austin just after sunrise, as shown here, flying to Baltimore via Detroit. Long flights always make me pensive.

See how pensive I look? Once on the ground, I grabbed a shuttle from the airport to the hotel which may, in fact, have taken just as long as the flight from Detroit. I checked into my hotel room, simply happy to have stopped moving (I hate traveling by the way: see Thing #11 here.)

My first order of business, early check-in for the conference.

“Attendee, Speaker, or Sponsor?” Dawn asked as I approached the table.
“Speaker,” I replied, since that was the closest choice to “Semi-Reluctant Panel Moderator.”

Just after donning my name tag and collecting my swag bag, I heard a squeal off to my right. I turned just in time to find Roni, already more than six inches inside my personal space, and closing the gap fast. We hugged and I stepped back to look at her with that weird feeling you get when you see someone you’ve known (for a while now) in person the very first time: wow, you’re a real life human being, aren’t you?

After registration, I took a quick look at the scenery from the hotel:

It really is a nice looking city. I had no idea. But enough with the sight-seeing. It was time to start drinking. I headed down the hall to the cocktail hour. As I approached, though, my pace slowed. “Wait a minute,” I said to myself. “I don’t know a soul in there.” I wondered who would I talk to? What would I say? I mean, look at this tough crowd:

In spite of Roni’s explicit invitation to Those of The Y-Chromosome, let’s face it, this slice of the blogosphere is heavily dominated by women and the conference’s 40:1 ratio reflected that. This made talking to people even more awkward, because, let’s face it, who’s that creepy guy walking around with no friends? Can someone call security?

But it wasn’t as bad as I’d feared. I finally met MizFit even though we live just a few miles apart. A few moments later, I met Esther Brady Crawford who I remembered seeing in a series of youtube videos two or three years earlier. And within the next half hour or so I met everyone on my panel: Linda Konner, Jennette Fulda, Caitlin Boyle and Brett Blumenthal.

But meeting people is hard work. Where’s that damn drink? Oh, there it is! A dense cloud of fitbloggers surrounded two overworked hotel employees serving up Pomitinis at the rate of one drink every five minutes. I tell you, there’s nothing like a six hour wait to make your drink even sweeter. Even so, I managed to get two of them (sorry, Ron) before heading downstairs for crabcakes and asparagus and bread:

Brett, Ted Rubin, Anne-Marie Nichols, and Josh and I gathered in the hotel’s restaurant for conversation and food. The food was good. The conversation, better. And Anne-Marie, I’m still positive you over-stated your age by ten or fifteen years.

As enjoyable as dinner turned out, it got real late real fast and Saturday was a big day. I simply had to get to sleep. So I did. On a bench in the hotel bar. I’m pretty sure no one noticed, though. I mean, there wasn’t that much drool involved.

I woke up around four in the morning, disoriented and still very tired. It was then I realized FitBloggin hadn’t actually started and I was sad. That meant there would be no sleeping in today. I was about a half hour late to breakfast and dismayed that only oatmeal and bananas greeted me. Where was the sausage and bacon? Where was the biscuits and gravy? Or the stacks and stacks of butter-drenched pancakes? What kind of fitness conference was th– Oh. Oh yeah. Damn.

I met my panel to go over the general form of our presentation. We’d tried for weeks to talk about this, but it’s quite difficult coordinating five busy folks such as ourselves.

I did some last-minute editing:

While Roni kicked things off:

The morning flew by. I barely ate a thing for lunch. And then it was time for our panel: Beyond the Blog: Getting Published. For obvious reasons, I wasn’t able to take a photograph of myself. But thanks to a quick Google search, I found one taken by Whit and have reproduced it here, without advanced permission. (I’m hoping forgiveness is easier to get.)

That’s me fumbling with the microphone just as things got underway. I’d like to tell you all about this panel but I don’t remember most of it. I kept the panel stocked with questions, related some of my own publishing tales, told a lame joke or two, and then just like that, it was over. I think it went well: I heard a lot of good things about it afterward.

The rest of the day flew by. Around five thirty that evening we had the wrap-up cocktail hour, complete with book signings. Four authors set out our books for purchase and signage: me, Brett, Jennette, and David Grotto. David is a lot like me except taller, cooler, smarter and he actually writes real books.

Jennette made it into two pics. I wish I had a shot of all four of us. Ah, such is life.

Book sales were brisk. I sold more books in this one sitting than I sold all of last year put together. Unfortunately, I only sold two books last year. I’ll be ready for that second print run any decade now.

When the crowd cleared I got to see Roni a second time, where the aforementioned Mr. Grotto snapped this picture of us through my phone:

Taller, cooler, smarter, and a much better photographer. Thank you, kind sir! And thank you, Roni, for all your hard work putting this thing together. I know you’ve already heard it a hundred times or more, but you’re teh awes0mez.

Post Conference

Dinner was much more low-key this evening. Brett and Ted and I met up again but we dragged along Denise Gass for the ride. The three of them dragged my picky palate to a Lebanese restaurant. (I took a few pics there, but they’re all dark and blurry and not worth the bandwidth. Sorry.) Denise represented Thriv, a company that makes clothes out of bamboo. I had no idea that was even possible, and I’ve seen a lot of Kung Fu movies too.

We had pita bread, oil, oregano, and alcohol for appetizers. For dinner, I had what our table affectionately called “meat rods”, swimming in a very spicy sauce. For dessert we had our choice of baklava or melted probiotics. Everyone opted for the baklava.

The evening ended back at the hotel bar where I had not one, not two, but zero additional drinks: the exact amount I needed. There we met up with Esther again and Bookieboo’s Chief Mom of Operations, Leah Segedie. A good time was had by all, though I was fading fast again. Nights like this are a lot harder than they were twenty years ago. You know, back when all these other bloggers were eight years old. *sigh*

I slunk into bed that night very tired and very happy to have the work behind me. I woke up the next morning to a day full of promise: a day full of writing. I’ll tell you more about the Second Draft in a future post. For now, suffice it to say that it began with some writer’s block:

Followed by some fresh air and a food run:

And ended with actual words on the screen:

Whew! While I could have certainly been more productive, I won’t feel bad about the 9,202 words I did get done that day. (Not to mention getting up to 15,071 by the end of Monday.)

The trip officially ended when I got picked up at the airport.

Enter Life Milestone #37: having your kids drive to the airport and pick you up. Zoinks.

Me? I’ve been around the blogosphere once or twice. As I scour food and diet sites, one thing has become extraordinarily clear: oatmeal is important. I don’t know why (and I’m not sure I want to know) but the fact remains: eat oatmeal or risk mortal peril.

I figured I must be missing out on something so I decided to give it a shot last night. Not knowing which of several thousand blogs and recipes was the correct one, I decided to just head to the pantry and wing it.

This is my story.

The first tidbit uncovered by my research is that there are two basic kinds of oatmeal. Kind #1 is what’s known as “Regular”:

Kind #2 is what’s known as “Variety”:

Being new at this, I wasn’t sure which one to choose. So I inspected the packages more closely. As you can tell, the Variety Kind is blurry, so that turned me off a bit. But then I looked at the Regular Kind and noticed something alarming. Regular oatmeal is freakin’ old:

I don’t know how you people eat that stuff. So, having missed the cutoff date by a mere two months and twelve years (or who knows, maybe that’s the year 296), I decided to go with the other box, the blurry oatmeal. I removed two packets since one packet alone seemed insufficient for my hunger needs. The packets themselves are awesome. They are so chock full of fun facts and information, it probably makes Wikipedia jealous:

Next I checked the instructions. Apparently you need to add some form of liquid to turn the dried oats into a bowl of delicious mush. You have many choices, such as milk, water, or beer:

I opted for milk. Until I smelled it.

Luckily there was a fresh gallon in the fridge. Yay. I poured it over the sawdust and was ready to roll:

Into the microwave it went. I’ve heard you can do this on the stove top, but if I had that much time on my hands, I’d start a blog. After two minutes, the scalding hot container was enough to give me second degree burns. If this had been a McDonald’s, I would have written a strongly worded letter complaining that no one warned me the oatmeal I was about to enjoy was extremely hot.

The second thing I learned on my tour of the blogosphere was: never eat oatmeal plain! Never, never, never. All I could gather from this is that plain oatmeal is poisonous. Not wanting to risk a few days of illness, I looked around to find some stir-in ideas. Here’s what I came up with:

I was torn between the Flintstones vitamins, the garlic, and the barbecue sauce. In the end, however, I settled on two of my favorites: blue food coloring and cookie sprinkles:

Yum! Now the last thing I learned on my tour of the blogosphere was this: make sure you put the finished bowl in a pretty table setting, adorned with lots of oatmeal accessories, such as bananas and real cloth napkins. Then take a photo and upload it for the world to marvel at. Now that’s kickin’ it old school. Unfortunately, this wasn’t in the cards last night:

I thought perhaps the meal wouldn’t be a total loss if the dog ate it, but she took one sniff and ran the other direction.

Oh well. I tried. Maybe next week I’ll give it another shot. Either that, or just go back to talking about really disgusting cheeseburgers. Ah, those were the days, weren’t they?