With this, I will slide into another of my hiatuses. Unlike the last one, which was fake (I merely shoveled in old, recycled material from decades earlier), this one is a real interruption, serving an actual professional purpose. I'm going full Hollywood makeover. I can just about guarantee you won't believe what these two branding professionals (Erin Hall and Erin Muller) have achieved in order to show this old dog new tricks.    It will definitely be a case of old wine (or champagne, as it were) in a new bottle. That's because what I'm writing now has been what I've been writing s ..read more

   I did not want a photoshoot. The fact that it was my idea is beside the point. That dang cabbage patch kid diet, or whatever it was called, was also my brilliant idea, but that doesn't mean I had to like it, and I didn't.     The first thing I didn't like about the shoot was that I was the subject of all this visual attention. (It's all in support of my blog's upcoming makeover and relaunch, about which, more later.) Whatever the photographer was thinking, one thing was certain. She knew she wasn't on assignment for GQ. Weight Watchers magazine maybe, taking all th ..read more

For those of you keeping tabs, this will be the last blog that refuses to talk about my diet experience. It's not because it was a dismal failure. It wasn't.  It wasn't a rousing success either. What it was was that if I'd kept on it for a very long time, it would eventually put me at the weight I desired. And that's when I concluded I'd rather be content and fat, rather than miserable and svelte.    Mind you, I'm not throwing in the towel on at least watching my weight. I have a cap that I will not exceed. (Cynics will say it's more like a hot air balloon than a cap.) I will n ..read more

As I've written, the worst people are the ones who can't stop talking about how much weight they've lost with the latest diet fad. In a way, it's like bragging about your body-mass index measurement or your "good" cholesterol. Really, when did the subject of normal health maintenance become a "thing"? This is why I refuse to write about the recent success I've had with the diet I've been on. It's not like you've scaled Everest or swam the English Channel, though both would indicate you're in pretty good shape already.    Usually, these people who have lost what amounts to the weight ..read more

  Dieting is like suffering any other kind of loss. It's just to a much different degree. But make no mistake; there is grieving. And just like all grief, there are stages. The difference, though, in diet grief, is that all five stages occur daily, in random order. And in those darkest moments, as in trying to whistle past the refrigerator, all five may hit you simultaneously. I think if Kubler or Ross had ever gone on a diet, they'd revise their theory pronto. DENIAL "The scale can't be right." You look down at those three accusing digits glaring back up at you, and you know it  ..read more

   I don't care for people who talk about their diets. They go on and on how wonderful it is, how much they can eat and how great the food is. As they're talking, you can see that they've lost about 20 pounds in four days, and you hate them for it. Either no diet like that has ever worked for me, or I couldn't stick with it long enough to find out.    So I won't be writing about the one Carol and I started the day after Labor Day. She's been on it several times in the past with great success. But Carol is not me, which is to say, she's not a spoiled six-year-old when it co ..read more

   According to my Kindle reader, I've read from my Kindle library for 207 consecutive days. I checked. 208 days ago, Carol and I married; therefore, that was the last day I didn't read my from ebooks. Funny, because that was the very day Carol started reading War and Peace.    Just kidding. But it is reassuring to know that should I ever be in danger of forgetting our anniversary, I'll have Kindle as my backup. After all, you wouldn't want your spouse seeing your phone buzz with a calendar reminder on that of all days. Instead, I'll hear, "Reid, how sweet of you to rememb ..read more

The other day, Carol was picking up after me (I should say she was whistling a merry tune as she did so), when she said, "I can't imagine what this place would look like if you were a bachelor."    I have photos should she be interested in knowing.    I'm not sure what the specific transgression was that caused Carol to make that remark (I know I ate red beans straight out of the Tupperware I'd frozen them in, but that was to save her from having to rinse and put another plate in the dishwasher, so it couldn't have been that), but I am learning slowly but surely there is k ..read more

Somewhere along the line, I developed the habit of having the TV on with the sound off. All day long, most days. I'm not watching TV, mind you. I'm usually reading or writing. It's mostly sports that are on in normal, non-pandemic times. Especially baseball, since that tends to be televised all hours of the day and night. I'm writing this, as a matter of fact, while a White Sox game is on silently in the background. It can become mutually distracting, particularly in bases loaded situations that are happening while I'm stuck looking for a five-syllable word, where a single syllable would be m ..read more

  W.C. Fields once returned to a bar following an evening of imbibing, and he asked the bartender, "Was I in here last night, and did I spend a 20 dollar bill?" When the bartender confirmed he had, Fields replied, "Good. I thought I'd lost it."    Carol and I were happy to discover one lazy afternoon that our food and wine purchases over the course of the pandemic lockdown have amounted to more or less the same amount. We were able to verify this fact, thanks to our Instacart and Total Wine order histories. Carol was somewhat chagrined to discover the equivalence, while I celeb ..read more