Not a blog for people who hate lists

Today ends my six-year run in the Mercury News sports department. Starting next week I'll be working in features as Food+Wine and Home+Garden editor. Let's toast the occasion with a list, shall we? (List now, vodka later!)

10 cool things at my desk that may or may not survive the move:

1. Faded blue and green streamers, hung up by my friend Tball, who decorated my entire desk to celebrate my wedding engagement.

2. Page from The Onion day-by-day calendar, with photo of a somber, uniformed feline standing at a podium above this headline: "War on String may be Unwinnable, says Cat General."

3. Bobblehead doll of "Crusher," mascot of the Bakersfield Blitz, which is the arena football team I covered when I first began working in sports.

4. Baseball ticket signed by Oakland A's shortstop Bobby Crosby, whom I met (stalked, tackled, whatever) in 2005 when Sal and I attended FanFest.

5. Signed photograph of the Sharks' Patrick Marleau, who joined me in reading to a class of schoolchildren a few years ago.

6. Now-deflated SJSU Spartan "Thunder Stix," once banged loudly above my head by the joker who sits in the cube next to mine, as I sat here typing furiously and sweating bullets to make Friday night football deadline.

7. 2007 calendar with images of Maui, purchased on the honeymoon.

8. A book, left on my desk as a joke, called "The Only Boy in Ballet Class."

9. Dilbert cartoon, in which Dilbert goes "I think we have snails in the office. There's a slime trail on everything." Thought bubble above Tina the Tech Writer reads "That might be the second sign that I'm addicted to hand lotion," as she pushes down on a lotion pump that's as big as her head.

10. Four mostly empty bottles of lotion.

Life list

The almighty Mighty Girl did a really cool thing on her blog, and I was so inspired that I'm stealing the idea for my very own! Maggie calls it "100 things to do before I go." I'm not sure I'll get to 100, but I did bang out 1-25, and I'm working on 26-50. You should totally do this, too. Putting form to your goals and wishes is a splendid way to pass the time in boring meetings or when you're trying to fall asleep at night. I think everyone should spend more time dreaming of things they want to accomplish!

1. Make homemade pasta.

2. Own decorations for each holiday.

3. Plant a garden.

4. Finish my wedding album.

5. Put together an emergency survival kit for the home.

6. Learn to swim properly.

7. Take a cooking class.

8. See the Sphinx and the Great Pyramids.

9. Run a marathon.

10. Make homemade tortillas.

11. Go on a real picnic.

12. Stay at a bed and breakfast.

13. See a Broadway show.

14. Swim with dolphins.

15. Completely finish one room in my house.

16. Teach Chickenbone "Come"and "Drop it."

17. Take my kids camping.

18. Make homemade tamales.

19. Go on an African Safari.

20. Complete my china set.

21. See a rain forest.

22. Become a member of a church.

23. Be able to do 10 real push-ups.

24. Stand in a sunny meadow or a green valley, with no roads, no power lines, no people, no signs of civilization in sight.

25. Eat a proper English breakfast.

Remedy

I fell ill last week with a nasty cold. By the time my friend Beth sent me this recipe for a home-cooked medicinal brew, I was already on the mend, but let's keep it on hand for next time, shall we?

"Mix together ginger juice (preferably squeezed/pressed from fresh ginger root), 1/2 fresh lemon juice, and hot water. It's the perfect thing to kick a cold. The lemon makes your body less acidic because bugs like it spicy and won't hang out if you're not so acidic; the ginger makes you hot and speeds up your metabolism so you kill the bugs; the hot water flushes you out."

It could happen

Every time I go see a scary movie, I have a secret fear that some crackpot in the audience is going to pull something like this!

Nitpicker

Tuesday, 11:34 p.m.

Me: Better get ready for bed. We gotta be up in six hours.

Sal: Isn't six hours from now 5:30?

Me: Yes, but ... OK, by the time you get your ass in bed and asleep, it'll be midnight. And then it'll be six hours.

(Silence)

Me: Why do you do that? I mean, I'll never stop rounding up. I'll never shake that habit.

Sal: Because it's fun.

Me: Really.

Sal: Yeah. It's like pulling the wings off flies.

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.