. . . who can’t get youTube @ work and should have to suffer along with the rest of us.

Not as bad as your Hippopotamus song (I won’t sully my blog with that one) but picture it in a 30 song rotation on an 8 hour shift and I think you’ll feel for me).

I’m having mixed feelings this holiday season.

On the up side, I’m home and very suddenly free of the pressures of work whilst still drawing a paycheck.

On the downside, I have only until January 13 to find a new home within my company or become unemployed. And given that I work retail, this is the absolute worst time of the year for me to find a job.

This week, of course, is one of the busiest in the retail industry, so I can’t get anyone who matters to take a minute to even talk to me about coming onto their team.

And next week is the week we traditionally start letting the temps go and taking winter vacations to save on labor. Not a good time for a fresh start in this business. In fact, it sucks.

But for all the suckage I find myself enjoying this rare opportunity to spend an unprecedented abundance of time with my family over Christmas.

But the future looms.

And it looms especially large in my anxiety-riddled dreams. I haven’t had a peaceful night since late November.

Despite my sleeptime angst, however, I have this odd feeling that everything is going to work itself out.

One of my friends on Facebook was complaining about how Christians have usurped Saturnalia with the saying *Jesus is the Reason for the Season* . . . And perhaps predating even Saturnalia the natalis Invicti, the return of the Unconquerable Sun.

These days even the Christians are grumbling because it turns out now that *Spending Lots of Money* is the real reason for the season and patriotic Americans should be doing their part to strengthen the economy.

Well, I’m going to cry Bah, Humbug! on the lot of it.

I am indeed thankful for the Solstice that signals the lengthening of days and the hope of coming light, for on the most primal of levels, light is life. Whether you believe in random evolution, creative design, or some middle ground that makes sense to you, there is no denying that light is essential for life as we know it.

Even Hollywood hasn’t managed to muck that up for us, though they’d have us believe that the devil is the Warden of Hell (though the Bible merely names him chief inmate) and the Prince of Darkness (though the Bible calls him an Angel of Light).

But I digress. [Pop theology is a personal peeve of mine].

I am thankful for the Archetypes associated with the season, be it Saturnalia with its merrymaking and mischief, or the festival of the Unconquerable Sun with it’s hope of light and rebirth, or the Nativity with it’s promise of intercession and understanding from an otherwise aloof and far off God.

All the more I am thankful for the far reaching mind of man that allows us to fling our consciousness outward and search for meaning and patterns beyond ourselves, so that instead of cowering in the dark we instead search the heavens for the returning of the light.

I am even thankful for our culture of rampant consumerism because I bloody well like buying things for my family and seeing the smiles on my kids’ faces Christmas morning.

That is where I’m at this Christmas. Yule. Saturnalia. Whatever.

For all the chaos and turmoil in my life at the moment I have much to be thankful for. And my experience with deity tells me to look outward, to search for the light, for the darkness will not always remain.

-Tip O’ the Pen to PJ for the title for today’s post

This past weekend at my brother in law’s wedding reception one of my wife’s relatives complained about her *christian testimony* on facebook.

Which I find more than a little amusing considering our pastor is one of her facebook friends and she is keenly aware of everything she says and does on there for that very reason.

I also find it amusing that the only people who can even see her *christian testimony* on facebook are people who already know her. Not strangers. Family. Friends. People to whom her behavior should be no new news.

And how tarnished would my own christian testimony be if I used the selection of tainted English that’s burrowing around in my brain over this to outline my contempt for their opinion? My wife’s relatives are fortunate in their cowardice – (they confronted my wife when I wasn’t around to stand up for her, and they did it at her brother’s wedding where they knew she wouldn’t make a scene) – because had they said any of this to my wife in my presence I’d have surely given them an earful despite the venue.

Carry your hypocrisy elsewhere, my crusty, bitter extended family.

I am confident in God’s judgment of my wife’s words and deeds as portrayed in our isolated little facebook village as well as on the world wider web and the vast reaches of our meatworld life.

She has nothing to be ashamed of, and if you had been brave enough to tell her specifically what *unchristian* thing you found so offensive, I think you would be surprised to find she is probably rather proud of what she’s done.

I know I am.

You are cowards.

The lot of you.

Are you a food addict?

I’ve gone off on this particular subject before on my old blog, but the absolute ridiculousness of the term begs for it to be done over and over and over again until every bloody soul on the planet takes a good long hard think about what the f*ck it is they are actually saying when they use that bloody phrase.

This video is done from the perspective of fat acceptance, and while that might seem a bit counter intuitive on a fitness-centric blog, it really, really isn’t.

Because you can lose all the fat in the world, but if you don’t eventually come to terms with yourself and get comfortable in your own skin it will all have been for nothing.

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If you want to make changes, by all means – make changes.

But demonizing your fat is too close to demonizing yourself. When the fat is gone you still have you to deal with, and you will have much more success IMO (and enjoy your success more) if you deal with yourself first and treat your fat as the byproduct of life that it is.

I’ve found one of the biggest things that sabotages my diet is food anxiety. My family lives pretty tight. We have a budget and we stick to it.

There is always plenty of food in the house.

But there is not always money in my pocket.

And that is where I get weird. If I know I have money to buy food if I decide I want it, then I’m fine and often can go hours without eating and without thinking about eating. When I don’t have money, I think about food all the time and I get anxious and antsy and will generally find some (usually unwise) way to get some money.

It might only be a couple bucks.

But I’ll scrape together pennies until I have enough money for a candy bar or some other verboten thing that even as I’m purchasing it I recognize that I don’t want it. But I buy it. And I eat it. And as I eat it I realize I reeeeaaaaalllly don’t want it.

At that point I’ll either angrily finish it or angrily toss it out the window of my car.

It’s something I am actively working on correcting.

One thing I’ve found that works is making sure I take enough food with me to fill me up and a pocket-snack (usually nuts) for *emergency* hunger pangs (read as hunger pangs that are still there after I’ve swallowed half a quart of water).

Some days are better than others. But I find the more I focus on it the better it gets.

So any of you who know me know I’m death on gym memberships and expensive equipment.

For one thing, I don’t have the money for either. But more importantly, I don’t want to be beholden to either.

So, sometimes I make do with what’s available. Like cinderblocks.

And sometimes I get creative.

For instance, I’ve recently started my son on lifting awkward weights. Like cinderblocks. But one of his exercises involves carrying said cinderblock to the bottom of the hill behind our house and then turning around and hurling it as far up the hill as he can, running and snatching it up and hurling it a little farther up until he gets to the top.

Only problem is he lurches forward as he throws and ends up on his hands and sometimes the cinderblock comes rolling back pretty fast. Images of a brained child on my back hill led me to come up with a better solution.

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So yesterday and today my son has been going down to the creek and collecting pebbles by the bucketfull and hauling them up to our back porch with the promise that they would somehow become exercise equipment.

And when I got home tonight, they did.

I took an old pair of jeans that were stained and no longer fit, two shoe laces, a heavy duty plastic trash bag, and a roll of duct tape out back where he had dumped his rocks.

I cut the leg off of one side of the jeans and slid the trash bag inside so the bottom came out the hemmed end of the pants leg.

Then I tied the bottom off with a shoe lace and duct taped it into a stubby handle.

That left the top end of both the bag and jeans open, and I had the boy start scooping rocks in until we had just enough room to tie off the top and duct tape it into another handle.

The end result looks like this.

It weighs 29 lbs – 1 lb more than the cinder block.

Here’s a few pictures of the boy trying it out.

I think he likes it.

I couldn’t find anything aptly silly enough for a Silly Sunday post.

Or, more to the point, 4th of July weekend being the anniversary of my father’s suicide, I really wasn’t in the right frame of mind to appreciate much silliness.

So I spent the afternoon putting quotes at the top of each of my blog pages. Quotes attributed to S. Page aren’t really quotes at all, just sh/t I’ve made up over the years and thought was cool enough to memorize and repeat.

I’ll try to keep it to the silly quotes. You can click through the pages to see the rest if you want. They’re all at the top.

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“My favorite thing about the internet is that you get to go into the private world of real creeps without having to smell them.”

- Penn Jillette

“There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.”

- Bertrand Russell

“A good novel tells us the truth about its hero, but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.”

- G. K. Chesterton

“An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of The Lone Ranger.”

- Dan Rather

“All bigots will be reincarnated as gay homeless people of color.”

-  seen on a pink button

“The curse of the Vampire is not that he must live for all eternity in darkness, forever denied the warmth of the sun, but that he must live for all eternity in darkness, forever denied the taste of garlic.”

- S. Page

“Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.”

- Mark Twain

“Beware of reading health books. You may die of a misprint”

- Mark Twain

“It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.”

- Bertrand Russell

“I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him.”

- Mark Twain

Today someone died who desperately wanted to live.

Today someone was raped and couldn’t fight back.

Today someone was abused by someone they trusted.

Today someone killed to protect their family.

Today someone left a baby in a dumpster.

Today someone stole because their kid had nothing to eat.

Today someone could have helped but was too afraid.

Today someone broke free from a violent spouse.

Today someone sat in their car and remembered a gunshot they weren’t around to hear.

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Sometimes the only freedom we have is the freedom to make the choices that take us to the place where there are no more choices.

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You don’t f*cking deserve it, dad . . . but I miss you.

So in my post on water weight I mentioned that I don’t use the scale as my primary guage of weight loss.

In fact, once a month, after I weight myself, I take a body-fat reading and take a tape measure to my neck, chest, waist, arms, and thighs.

But my real day-to-day measure is how my clothes and jewelry fit.

I have had to cut two new holes in my belt in the last month and there are some pants so baggy on me now that even with a belt it is not comfortable to wear them.

The watch I got for Christmas two years ago that I thought at the time I would have to add links to, it was so tight, now hangs loose on my wrist and I can twist it around full circle without unclasping it.

But perhaps the biggest tell of all is my wedding ring.

A month ago I had to wrap yarn around the bottom of it to keep it from slipping off. Yeah. Just like the little highschool cheerleaders had to do with their linebacker boyfriends’ class rings.

And now even with the yarn it hangs loose.

I swear, if it weren’t for the copious amounts of hair on my boobs I’d wonder If I was undergoing some kind of bizarre sex change rather than experiencing the  normal side effects of weight loss.