Diet myths

There's a popular saying in weight-loss groups that goes like this: "Nothing tastes as good as being thin feels." Um, I don't think so. Whoever said this definitely never stuffed a fistful of french fries into a piping hot Double-Double.

Here's something else tossed around in these circles that isn't exactly true: In those commercials for diet products like yogurt and Slim-Fast, they often have this slender young woman who warily pulls her thin jeans out of the back of her closet, and when she tries them on OMIGOD! They finally zip up! And off she bounds to the mirror to admire her perfectly flat tummy. Yeah, that's not usually how that experiment goes.

Don't get me wrong, if you're like me, you definitely try for that moment. You just have a habit of showing up to the party like ten pounds too early. So you huff and puff and wiggle and jiggle and twist and tug, and 20 minutes later, you're in. But just as you're about to shoot a victorious fist into the air, you look in the mirror and see that whatever didn't get squeezed into the denim is now bubbling up like an inner tube. Meaning your "thin" jeans make you look like way more of a blubberbutt than you actually are.

So I use pants to measure weight loss in a different way, one that's much easier on the self-esteem: When I can slide my jeans off my body WITHOUT EVEN UNBUTTONING THEM, that's how I know I'm making big-time progress. This week, eight pounds lighter than I was at the start of December, I reached that milestone. My husband can confirm this, since he witnessed the shrieking lady jumping up and down in her underwear, waving jeans above her head. Which I'm thinking would be a far more entertaining commercial.

Catching up

Ten things I have done since my last post:

1. Made my first turkey dinner. Was dismayed to learn that in addition to the bag of giblets stuffed into the bird's chest cavity, there's a second bag in its ass. File under: Who knew?!

2. Received some excellent Christmas gifts, including perfume scented with black cherry, creme anglaise and sandlewood; fuzzy pajamas with actual footsies; and a jar of homemade tomato jam.

3. Stole away with my husband on a romantic hotel mini-vacation right in our very own downtown San Jose, for a weekend of cocktails, corn dogs, a comedy show, more cocktails, ice skating, Indian food, and also cocktails.

4. Joined Weight Watchers and lost 6.3 pounds. Sal joined, too, and has lost more than 12 pounds due to the infuriating fact of life that when a man spends five minutes even PONDERING a celery stalk, his ass gets smaller. Whatever, dude.

5. Participated in a blood drive at work. When I stopped by the restroom to pee before my appointment, I pulled my pants down and my driver's license (which you must bring with you) fell out of my back pocket. Missed the toilet by, like, one centimeter. Had a chuckle about how awful THAT would have been. After giving blood, I stop to pee again. (It is normal for me to pee 20 or 25 times per day.) While pulling up my pants, I hear a tiny, sickening splash. Whirl around and peer into the toilet to find my own smiling face staring back up at me, as my license floats around the water, amid the pee and the toilet paper. I stare, horrified, for about four seconds until I hear the grinding of the automatic flusher starting to rev up. I gasp, and before I know it I have plunged my BANDAGED HAND (due to finger-prick-test at blood drive) into the pee water to retrieve license.

6. Attended weekly trivia night on Mondays at Trials Pub. My husband is some sort of genius trivia savant, so I let him fill out all the answers for our "team" while I devour a big, steaming plate of spicy chicken curry that is so delicious, my mouth filled with saliva even as I typed this.

7. Became a person who wakes up at 6 a.m. (WHILE IT IS STILL DARK) and goes to the gym before work. Focus is mainly on weight-training and yoga. Oh, oh! OK, so this is cool. There's this one yoga pose where you lay on your back and raise your legs over your head. Like bicycles. Did you ever do those in P.E. when you were a kid? Well, it's not as freakin' easy as it was back then. It's called an "inversion pose" and I am HORRIBLE at it. (These photos, while illustrating the pose nicely, are also highly comical.) So while everybody else in the class gently and quietly flows in and out of the pose, I fling my legs up, grasp wildly to get a grip on my ass, and then I crash back to the ground with a noisy THUNK. Anyway, I don't know if it's the weightlifting or the missing pounds or what, but lately I'm actually getting the hang of it. There is still some flinging and falling, but it's more controlled. And it sounds a lot less like a hippopotamus being felled by a jungle rifleman.

8. Saw the following movies: I Am Legend; Cloverfield; Miracle on 34th Street; It's a Wonderful Life; The Orphanage; Waitress; Once; and the most dreary disappointment in cinematic history, Ocean's Thirteen. A.K.A. The Movie That Makes it Painful To Watch CLOONEY, For Christ's Sake.

9. Learned how to make homemade tamales from my mother-in-law. It turns out that masa plus lard plus pork? Not a diet food.

10. Was convinced by my darling friend Robyn that I should start blogging again. You see, here's one thing about me. I start to freak out if I haven't blogged for awhile. I just sit there envisioning all three of you staring at the same dumb post for days and days thinking to yourself, "Lordy, this chick is lame." So in December, when holiday and work madness caused the water to creep up above my ears, I just had to blow the whistle entirely. And then I was afraid to start blogging again, because what if, again, life got too busy and I dropped the ball? But Robyn said blogging some of the time is better than blogging none of the time. Which I can buy. So in 2008 I resolve to blog when I can, and not when I can't, and to be fine with that. And all you have to do is promise to not think I'm lame. Unless I post ACTUAL lame shit. Then you're fine.

Oh, hi!

Are you here to see me? How disappointed you must be. Because here I am, at long last. Only I'm here to do the thing I swore I'd never do. Which is to apologize for not blogging. God, I can't stand when people do that. It's the weakest post ever. But the only thing I can't stand more than that is to envision someone checking back repeatedly, only to find the same dumb stale post. I hate when bloggers do that to me, even more than I hate whiny posts about being too busy to blog. What a tizzy I'm in.

Tell you what. I like blogging, and maybe you like when I blog. I really would like to get my own URL fired up with some sort of interesting design, something that really SAYS "chickenbone jones." But if I don't have time to blog, I REALLY won't find time to get that project cooking. So I will leave you hanging no longer: I'm calling a little blog break while I figure all that out. I'll post an update here when it's ready. Or, if you want, I'll even send you your very own personal e-mail when the real CBJ.com is up and running. Just post a comment or shoot me an e-mail if you'd like that. You are a great person.

Mildly disconcerting

I entered a stall in the ladies room at work and sat down to begin the business, then saw a copy of today's newspaper on the toilet-paper holder, folded to show the column with my husband's grinning face on it.

Home improvement

For six months, my bathroom has been begging for a face lift.

The previous owners painted much of our house quite colorfully -- a splashy red wall in the dining room, hues of blue in the kitchen, and peaceful greens in the master bedroom and living room. But the bathroom walls were boring off-white blah. There's also a salmon-colored sink and bathtub, which really stumped me. Just what is one supposed to do with a pink bathtub?! And the mirror was simply horrid. It was chipped all along the bottom, plus it was the wrong shape -- a vertical mirror hung in a horizontal space, which was totally fengin' my shui. Oh, and it was hanging on the wall by a COAT HANGER. This must be what mirrors are like in prison.

So a few weeks ago during our vacation, I began the great bathroom do-over. First I spray-painted two really awful dark-wood fixtures: that light above the sink and this unusual medicine-cabinet-type thing built into the outside wall of the shower:

I used antique white spray paint to match the trim on the window. I also replaced those puny little transparent lightbulbs with fat, white compact fluorescents, because we here at CBJ.com are incredibly environmental.

Then I picked paint colors for the walls. On the wall above the sink went French Cream by Valspar, which makes the pinkish sink and tub look pretty neat. The other three walls were done in Babbling Brook by Olympic. I also used a 40-percent-off coupon to purchase a big silvery mirror at Michael's for just $30, and then I replaced the grody old wood light plates with brushed silver fixtures.

Now I'm all through, except we're still waiting for the arrival of a train shelf and towel ring we ordered from Restoration Hardware, marked down by about $100. So the entire project cost just a little more than $300. But can I tell you? My finest moment during this makeover wasn't finding a good deal. It also wasn't figuring out how to paint the wall behind a toilet, or how to open a 6-foot ladder in a bathtub. No, my finest moment was when I INVENTED SOMETHING.

So when I pulled off all the blue masking tape, sometimes there were little dribbles of paint on the trim or caulking. Horrifying. So, thinking fast, I looked around the bathroom at what I might use to fix the problem. I happened to find this:

What is a bottle opener doing in a construction zone? Well, me and a couple Sierra Nevada Pale Ales think that's pretty obvious. Anyway, then I grabbed my plastic container of paint wipies. I don't know if that's what they are really called, but that's what I call them. They are like Wet Ones, but for your paint-spattered hands:

Then, I wrapped the wipie tightly around the top of the bottle opener:

Now, WITNESS THE GENIUS:

Isn't that outstanding?! I was able to wipe away the dribbles without disturbing the wet paint. I call it "The Paint Editor™." And because you were so nice as to read this entire blog post all the way to the very end, you may use my invention whenever you wish, absolutely free.

BK Safety Dance

This week I evidently have 14 seconds to set aside for blog posting, and luckily for you, they start right now! Watch this video to see how flipping the bird was never so much fun:

Debut

When Chickenbone gets a great dog treat -- and I'm not talking some dumb milk bone; I'm talking something so very special and savory that it blows his little MIND -- he does this weird thing where he whines and scurries around "burying" the treat over and over. It's ridiculous. I read somewhere that when a dog gets something it really adores, it instinctively feels it must do SOMETHING to protect it. But domesticated dogs don't really know what that thing is, as it's been awhile since they had to worry about enemies stealing their food or whatever. So they just sort of fret and worry as they try to figure out the protocol for handling such a treasure.

Well, one of Chickenbone's favorite treats is the pig's ear. A triangle-shaped dried piece of flesh that actually came from a pig's head. You can actually see little veins and stuff inside. It's grotesque, but boy, does Chickens love these babies. The other day I gave him a really gigantic ear, and I used my digital camera to film this video. It took me six hours to load it onto the blog, so, like, there probably won't be a sequel. Also, it's not edited whatsoever, and it's sort of shaky. But this is my very first video, so what do you want? Also, my house is kind of messy. So just don't look at that part. Enjoy.

Chickenbone and the pig's ear from Amy on Vimeo.