My sister has chickens. They lay eggs. She gives me eggs. I really appreciate her chickens and their awesome egg-laying skillz.

So around the beginning of the year, January 2nd to be exact, I finally got fed up with my weight, AND heard some very good things about a simple and free app for the iPhone/Touch. I like simple. I like free. Who doesn’t? The app is called LoseIt! and basically you enter your vitals (age, height, weight) and how much you would like to lose total, and how much you want to lose per week (.5, 1, 1.5 or 2 pounds a week). Boom you’re done. You have a daily budget, and now you just log everything you eat, or all your activities. 1/2 an hour of bowling? That’s 105 calories my friend.

I’m closing in on losing 20 pounds now. I don’t think this weekend is bringing me any closer, but I probably won’t GAIN anything either. I seem to have started to be able to eyeball things pretty well. I’ve gained a level of self-control that I never had before. For example, after eating my Caribbean salad with grilled chicken at Chili’s (instead of unlimited chips and queso and a big juicy burger) I did NOT grab a spoon and dig into the community dessert. I could have, I would have just had to figure out how to add it to my cals for the day, but I didn’t WANT to because it would take me just that much longer to FINALLY get to the 20 pound mark. Which I had hoped to do by now, but hey, that’s just how it goes. I can safely tell you that as I come up on 3 full months on this diet, I have NEVER stayed with anything this long. South Beach, which was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do (as a carb addict) lasted about 2 months, I think. Yes, I did lose some weight, and I learned a lot about carbs and what they do to your body, but I gained it all back because there was no way I could go without carbs. I’m not wired that way. I’m pretty sure I could give up meat and veggies if you told me that I could live completely on carbs. Sign me up for the bread and butter diet. I’m THERE.

Anyway, I’ll probably check in periodically when I hit milestones, but otherwise, I’ll try not to bore you with things like the discovery that half (one section) of a Take 5 candy bar is only 100 calories. (Fear of boring you is why I’m not going to talk to you about my diet.) You holier than thou people who are horrified of someone eating a candy bar on a diet should move along right now, because once a month, if I can’t have a little something candy-bar-ish, I start writing a hit list. And getting that out of my system with 100 calories of a candy bar (or 4 Hershey Kisses with almonds, for 25 calories each) keeps me ON the diet. There’s no “I blew it so I should just forget the whole thing” because the calories are measured cumulatively over the course of a week. If I go over my daily budget on Tuesday, I have Wednesday through Sunday to be under that number of calories. A daily budget of 1600 calories is actually a weekly budget of 11200 divided by 7. Get it?

So anyway, because I’m actually being successful with this simple little tool, and because I want to share the love, as some of my friends did with me, I highly recommend LoseIt! Now I have to go add coffee and peanut butter english muffin to my log. I’m saving some calories for a light beer tonight. Living the dream, kids!

If only there were a free wealth-gaining app called “Find It!” I would be writing this to you from my own private island. Someone get to work on that.

I keep accidentally breaking things. I thought that the conversation from Blogger to WordPress would keep a lot of the structures I had, but apparently trying to replicate the old site exactly so that Google might actually point to the right pages was a giant failure.

Given that my itty bitty tiny handful of daily traffic was attempting to go to a specific page, and the fact that those pages were moved or removed, I have been getting a massive FOUR or fewer hits per day. It makes it all the work I spent “fixing” things all worthwhile. Or not.

To celebrate, I’m going to eat cheese and Slim Jims for dinner. And no, there isn’t enough for all of us.

I haven’t been able to pull up all the legacy content into this new WordPress blog, but I will eventually! You may see some small changes as we go along and I fix and tweak things. Do let me know if you run into any problems, or have feedback. Remember, I’m not as good at this as you think I am, so no recommendations for anything TOO flashy.

(All old posts through 2004 should be here, as should most of the comments posted since 2006. Just FYI.)

(Updated 2 hours later: I have added a couple of the original Open Letters to the 2001 posts. Some of them were actually from back then, so it seemed appropriate. A lot of the Open Letters are a little too dated to move over (Susan from Survivor, anyone?). Time to write some new ones.)