Suuuuuushi.

   I see sushi as a kind of endurance sport. Quantity and wasabi for Olympic gold. I could easily bankrupt myself on a semi-regular basis just for sushi, and I wouldn't feel any worse for it.My favourite sushi is the stuff they make at Fruit & Veg city, but the damn place is just too much of a drive out to justify getting it too often. And also, I'm poor. That makes it somewhat harder. Le sigh.
   However, the other day was monthly grocery shopping day. The banks closed, the municipal workers took a long, leisurely lunch, and GPs everywhere charged double their usual rates. We battened down the hatches and took off on the long trek to Pick 'n Pay. Interesting story:* a couple of months ago, we went to our normal Pick 'n Pay for the normal shopping trip. We kept not finding things. This was odd, as the reason we go all the way out to P'nP is because they have actual food, whereas the much closer Spar seems to object to having more than one kind of bread at a time. We were stocking up for my sister's birthday party, and we just couldn't find the stuff we were looking for. We wondered briefly why P'nP should be stocking Spar brand milk and cleaners, but thought not too much of it.

*Again, lie.

   I think you see where this is going. Twas, in fact, a Spar that had been erected exactly where the beloved Pick 'n Pay used to be. We only realised this by the end of the ordeal, when we looked up to see the Spar sign on the wall. Neither me or my dad have yet won any kind of Nobel Prize for our genius.
   The upshot is: we needed to find a new Pick 'n Pay. After me and pregnant Brenda had a bit of an adventure the other day finding some demon entity called "Centurion Lifestyle Centre", me and the father decided to try that-a-one. Happily, also just down the road from the aforementioned Fruit & Veg, which I celebrated loudly.
   We found a P'nP. I think that's where all the Pick 'n Pays in South Africa have gone. I made sure to check we weren't in a Game or a Macro or something, as this is obviously a mistake I'm prone to making, but yes, Pick 'n Pay it was. FUCKING HUGE. And considering we went on a Sunday, packed. Now, I don't like crowds. They make me feel a little panicky. Look, I'm weird, I don't like my fingernails to touch the car either, and I wear toe-socks because the skin between toes shouldn't touch. If I had had more of a stomach for it, I could have done all of my yearly bicycle and Verimark shopping
there, but as it was I think both of us just wanted to get out of there as fast as possible without getting thrown up on by a rogue infant. I don't drive, but I think steering that trolley should allow me to claim my license right now. There was signalling, T-juntions, yielding and even one or two speed bumps formed by the mass of some of the slower children. I took great care to make sure to steer around people, was mindful of elbows and behinds, and hummed to myself nervously like Sheldon. HOWEVER, I still came away from it with many a war wound, as people insist on charging into you with murder in their eyes.
   One particular woman (YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE) managed to ram her trolley into my ribs so hard it felt like G4, whilst I was legally parked by the frozen food section. I politely swore under my breath and moved myself off further to the side, and then she proceeded to take off about five cubic centimetres of shin flesh. I moved again, even though, Lady, there was ample space for you to glide past me gracefully, but now I think that special vein in my forehead was starting to throb.

  After the gauntlet was run, we dashed to Fruit & Veg, and I ran in while daddio sat in the car. I went in and grabbed some of the pre-assembled little sushi platters, and then mildly shat myself when I saw the queues. There was some queue jockeying in P'nP as my dad hunted for the shortest line and I followed the 6"10 head through the sea of people in trust. Here, people were smooshed up against one another like they were ready to commit violence on your person if you even looked like you were trying to get ahead of them for a box of smarties on the rack ahead. I stood there, sedately holding my food and kept my head down- I swear to you, the atmosphere is tangible. It's like a scene from Tale of Two Cities, with the peasant classes ready to riot, given half an excuse. Of course, with my shin still bleeding profusely (not really), the crowd-mentality encroaching steadily, and the earlier indignity still rankling, I was on a short fuse.
   Then Mr. Eager bumps into me in a leisurely, lingering manner from the right. The vein in my forehead pivots my head in his direction, and I say, with considerable irony I'm quite proud of, "Excuse me." He, missing my exquisite sardonic intention, replies "No, it's ok, I'm just trying to get in here," and pushes his trolley in in front of me where his pal had been saving a spot for him.
   Oh goodly God, this person is treading on a thin, fragile line. He does this only because he assumes, quite wrongly, that I am not liable to stab him in the eye with a chopstick.

   As it stands, I exited with no manslaughter to my name. I got into the car and simply inhaled heady sushi fumes to calm my nerves. And when I got home, I ripped into that package like a man starved of soya sauce. With every sting that travelled through my spinal chord and directly up into my brainstem, I silently blessed wasabi. It was finished much too quickly. 
   Damn, I've psyched myself up now. Where the hell can I get sushi in the next ten minutes?

For The Love Of Pizza

  Lots of news, pielovers. first most and foremost, Wednesday the very 24th of August, was the day the world (or his mother, but quibbles) gave us Stephen Fry. I celebrated by using big words at people and reading some more. I suppose I'm not a party animal, but I can at the very least be a celebratory arthropod. As you should know by now, Stephen Fry is both the For The Love Of Pie mascot, and on our coat of arms.

 

Disembodied head of slightly creepy Stephen Fry on a pale of azure on another kind of azure, little hearts gules dexter and sinister, or whatever.

   I would lead you in a rousing rendition of our school song, but I've neglectfully forgotten to write one for you. I suggest you each choose your favourite Cream song and simply hum it to yourself for pleasure.

   I do think though, to honour our mascot, we must have a quote. 

 

   That quote is from his book, The Liar, thought by Adrian as he fancies himself playing God sorting potatoes on a line. It was between that quote and one with a delightfully filthy word in it, but in the end I decided to spare any delicate sensibilities the offence of country matters.
   I truly am so thankful that we have Stephen Fry in this life; he has so greatly given me the English language, I fear I'd be mute without him. Let's hope he sticks around a great many more years, the better to balance out the vacuum left by such entities as Justin Bieber and Paris Hilton.

   Amen.

   So, let's talk pizza. I had some. Last night was monthly pizza night, and frankly diet be damned. I've actually found it's less what I eat than how much of it I eat, when I eat it, and what I drink during the day. I've cut out most (MOST, I say, MOST) of my sugary drink intake, and replaced it with a worrying quantity of water. I've taken to eating my dinner really early- almost as a late-ish lunch- and then not snacking again until I go to sleep. But when I do eat, I eat just what I damn well please, and it's working, it seems. 

   So until it fucks my scale, I refuse to shun pizza, pies or anything that forces itself down my throat like hara-kiri pastry in favour of enjoying myself at least marginally.

  


   Side note, this happened:

   Fair to say, my head asplode. I'm not particularly hip, I'm very much up where the kids today are down with one thing or another, and this whole twitter business is almost as new to me as it is to my mother. ("But the mouse won't reach the little icon, and I've got it up against the keyboard already!") I follow my favourite gods on twitter, and the whole Whedon clan is in there. For you, savy and technologically on trend reader and loyal blog-scoffer, a reply from someone as smoking as Mo Tancharoen may well be just another part of getting up in the morning. I, however, lost all of my shit. All of it, gone. Shitless. She who is Kilo and the frontperson for Lupus awareness and of the golden voice and SPARTACUS and wife to the most deliriously enviable husband; she doth replied.
   I spent several minutes after that rushing my entire blood supply to just my cheeks, looking like a surprised beet for approximately two hours. This is a habit my body has helpfully picked up: at night, my cheeks go from pasty white, to "slipped a bit on the blush there, did you dear?", to dark purple. When I say purple, I mean actual aubergine, I exaggerate not. Imagining Mo Tancharoen sitting there hopefully in her PJ's, slouched over a computer much as I am now was obviously just too much for my delicate system to handle.

   My Word of the Day email today was thusly:

   This seems to me to be a word I can so easily imagine coming from Sheldon's mouth, no? Or perhaps Moffat's Sherlock. I'm still deciding, but it's a wealth of possibilities. I like it.

   

An Unapologizing Love Letter To Jed Whedon, And Some Videos Of The Day

   I am a card carrying Whedonite. Damn me, but I love everything that family has ever touched. You, my brother, may preach all you want about Dollhouse and disappointing structural whatever and so on and blah blah blah, but I think it's an exquisite masterpiece, much like a small glass sculpture made by blind cloistered nuns in the hills of Italy. Etcetera. Give me a bit of Dr. Horrible in the gym, and suddenly I'm harmonizing to Everyone's A Hero in sweatpants and ill-fitting sneakers. I challenge you to find me genius paralleled by the brief and wondrous thing that was Firefly. Joss practically gave the world Nathan Fillion, and that alone is worth a national bank holiday.
   However, dear receptive audience, I am here to talk to you today about Joss's woefully under-worshipped brother, Jed. Jed released an album a little while back. Since then, I have listened to it in its entirely easily over 20 times. I am not one to usually like a whole album from one artist- my playlist is always limited to one or two single songs from people who I generally quite like. Jed, however, well...
   If I have not yet forced my musical tastes upon you, allow me to illustrate:

   For added awesomeness, you'll find in that little video not only the Mo Tancharoen of epicness, but also a bonus Fran Kranz WITH NO SHIRT ON for a, uhm, brief moment. *cough*
   Sometimes a song from this album (The History of Forgotten Things by Jed Whedon and the Willing) will pop up on my randomized playlist, and I find myself laid low. Tonight, I switched on the fairy lights...

   ...cranked ye oldde iTunes up to maximum maximum, and popped on my "obnoxiously huge headphones", as they have been described. Usually, I would reserve the Jed Whedon for the darkened room, isolation tank-esque treatment, but tonight I felt fancy. Man, I swear, if you could see me, you'd want to hose me down with water and call a shrink. Usually, I'm terrible at smiling for extended periods of time- even if the smile is natural, my face just seems to get really tired and forget how to hold even the most basic of facial expressions without looking Bates-ish. However, give me Tricks on Me, and I'm not only smiling like the Joker, I'm crying absolute buckets. It's amazing to me that this album's effectiveness in snotting me up hasn't worn off yet, I'm so easily overplayed on even my all time favourites. The only other album that's never worn off for me is the soundtrack to Rent, but that's only because I'm a fruit.

   I swear, somehow the melodies are
addictive enough to actually get me
tangibly high, whilst the lyrics are
actual poetry. How does one man do this?

   And, because I'm that attention-
whore of note, I'm working on a
little Jed Whedon tribute thingamy
that perhaps I can post in a few days.
If nothing else, it will give me an
excuse to tweet the man.

   Now to other matters, for I see your eyelids drooping there. I was reading an article a few days ago on some of the worst movies that could easily have been awesome, and Ali G in Da House was brought up. Some of you who were as bored as I was that year might remember that movie, but for those of you who do not, I can only but apologize for having brought it to your attention. I had seen the TV sketch show that originated the characters of Ali G, Borat and Bruno, and I was probably about 13 when the movie came out. Obviously, this was a great many years before Borat was the absolute shit, and Sacha Baron Cohen was really only know for being pretty funny in an Essex accent on TV once a week. The movie wasn't exactly highest budget, and it went for really, REALLY broad laughs akin to some recently unmentionable Martin Lawrence fare.
   However, I was 13 and a veritable moron, so me and my cousin quoted the living hell out of it for months. After that, I forgot all about its existence until I read that article. As I was reading this and chuckling, thinking about how me and said cousin loved to "beatbox" as badly as Ali G and whatever his sidekick's name was did in one scene, something dawned on me.
   Oh dear god, Martin Freeman was in it.
   It's bizarre that, years after having seen or thought of a movie, you can recognize an actor retroactively. At that time, Martin Freeman's name meant nothing to me other than I might've mixed him up with his older brother Morgan. Somehow, eight years later, my brain managed to recognize an actor from an old archive in my mind that couldn't possibly have been labelled or filed properly. And the conclusion this left me with is that, ladies and lords, your Arthur Dent and mine, did this.

 
   I find that oddly unsettling. And yet, still hilarious. The movie may be an unarguable piece of shit, but the problem is that if you attached to something that bad when you were young enough to need nothing deeper than a few good dick and fart jokes, you will inevitably hold a spot in your heart for the damnable thing even when you ought to know better. In my heart, there are reserved spaces not only for Ali G, but also for The Master of Disguise, Hudson Hawk, and The Pest. I can only apologize for what must ultimately taint your affection towards me forever.

   In closing, I'd like to share a triumph! My weight is now down to the lowest in has been in nearly two years. I am ecstatic. I've actually seen the last milestone go past in reverse, which is quite an alien feeling to me. Again, my first instinct is to take a spoon and eat my entire tub of Mango Body Butter in one sitting, but I'll refrain. I think I've forgotten about eleven things I wanted to mention here, but they'll have to wait for supplementary posts or somesuch, as I cannot be arsed to retrieve them from behind the Ali G cabinet in the storage room of my brain.
   I'll just leave you with happiest thoughts thusly:

(Why when I search Google Images for "Fran Kranz" does it suggest "Fran Kranz Shirtless" and then return nothing of the sort when I follow its advice?)

Adventures Of The Exciting Kind

   Hallo again, you gorgeous beast. My god, you are a sexy and virile thing, aren't you? It's anyone's guess how I've managed not to ravage you where you stand. Please, please; pull up a piece of carpet and sit your sweet, sweet rear down wheresoever your fancy takes you, it's story time.

   Fair warning: I lied about the exciting part. No no, I hear you protest, should I decide to regale you with tales of me boiling water, it would still carry the inimitable charisma of my narrative talent, and thusly by its very nature be hoppingly awesome. This is so, I cannot argue with your unimpeachable logic, and because you're lovely, let me challenge that presently.
   As this is a blog chronicling my progress in losing weight, allow me to update you. Not much movement on the Trouserometer.

   But then, I wasn't expecting miracles from the poor distressed thing just yet, so no harm done there.
   HOWEVER! I exclaim animatedly, the scale she says otherwise. Just to summarize for some context here, when I started those health shakes, I weighed hmhmhmhm kilograms. Then, after three shotguntotheheadtastic weeks of two a day and gymming three times a week, I had managed to pick up 4 kgs. That, as you can imagine, sent me face first into a pile of cheesecake. Then, about two days after I stopped, I'd lost about 2 of those kaygees, and not long after had come down again to the weight I had started this whole thing with. Now, I'm a kilo below that. So in summation, I have lost a whole kilogram. I think I need to celebrate with some pie.

   I am a reader. I have something like 650 books just in the west wing of my personal library (read: the TV wall in my room), and that's not an exaggeration. I counted them about a year ago and stopped at about 650, and have acquired a great deal more since then. The shitty thing is, in the last couple of years or so, I've been suffering horrible reader's block. For what ever reason, the gods are punishing me with the worst ADD ever, and even if I'm watching a video of The Excellent Gilmore Girls on my laptop (and who can honestly tear their eyes away from that kind of awesome?) I find myself constantly clicking the video pane smaller and opening a browser, having forgotten what it was I intended to do. It's compulsive. I just cannot concentrate long enough to make it through even my favourite books, and it's FREAKING ME OUT, MAN.
   I bought myself two new- as opposed to second hand- books, and felt that if I was going to expend actual monies on them, I was for damn sure going to get those monies' worth out of them. They are book 1 & 2 of A Song of Ice and Fire, so I even have the visual aids from Game of Thrones to help me here. This must be no-fail. I idiot-proofed my room in anticipation of the reading frenzy.

   I lit some calming coffee scented incense.

   I gathered and battened down cat 1 and 2.

   I switched off Dexter, my beauteous laptop, to avoid both temptation to check my mail yet again, and also to get rid of the murderous humming sound Dex makes when he's thinking.

   I put on my prime reading glasses (that I'm actually meant to be wearing all the time, but screw astigmatism)...

    ...And off I went. The cats quickly found nooks upon my person that suited their needs, and we all went on a reading adventure together. It was lovely. I won't pretend my mind didn't wander like Kerouac, and that I missed paragraphs at times to my hyperactive child of a mind's eye, but it felt really nice. Very much like I had never left at all, sort of thing. At some point, a few chapters in, I decided to rest my eyes, just for a teensy moment, as I was starting to fade a little under the heady influence of incense that smelled pretty much of incense. Just to make sure I didn't fall under completely, I left the light on. It was a sound plan.

   So, when I woke up this morning, (you fell asleep?!) I was greeted by a most welcome message- my very pregnant very best friend Brenda had asked me to come along for some baby shopping. She's been pregnant for a while now. I remember her being pregnant when we went to go see the last Harry Potter movie, and I'm definitely sure she was pregnant at some point when there was some non-fish sushi building going on in my kitchen. I think it's been at least 12 or 13 months now. She's close. It's a boy, which makes it very weird that they're naming it after me. *Shrug* Couldn't tell ya why. At least it's not going to be Phoebo. But she is awesomer even than my cats or chocolate in large quantities, and I haven't seen her since the fifth trimester, so I'm so very game. I'll make sure to post photos and/or ludicrous doodles of the pregnant bellies later.

   And on a parting note, a word with you on celery:
   An inoffensive vegetable, quite welcome in soups, stews, and any number of bloody maries.
   Apparently, favoured by the gods of the diet, as it burns more calories to digest the thing than the thing has itself. Awesomesauce, no? My dad rather eccentrically bought some the other day, so I thought I'd help myself to a stalk last night when the munchies kicked in (that incense really packs a punch, lemmetellya.) I nibbled. I'd mostly forgotten what celery tastes like unadulterated. I was not disgusted or repelled, I admit, but neither was I salivating in greedy triumph. I have concluded thusly.
   I don't think celery was ever reeeelly meant to be eaten. Sure, it's edible, but so are- I'm assuming here, shoot me if anyone is made an ass- plenty of random leaves easily picked from any still standing shrub or tree in the back yard. I'm fairly sure you can throw a stone and find a piece of greenery that will neither poison you, nor particularly edify you. I think the clue is in the fact that it literally has no nutritive qualities. Also, quite critically, it doesn't taste of anything else that is actually food. The tastes we are capable of picking up as humans are salt, sour, sweet, bitter and savoury (or umami. No really.) Celery is none of these things. It's not tasteless, but somehow it manages to taste really only of plant. I think this is a hint from the celery itself, and we should stick to keeping it sort of masked by stew or soup. Or some more bloody maries.
   I think it goes without saying that the same applies to grapefruit, for different, yet obvious reasons.

Video Of The Day

   Just a quick one, pie-lovers. This, and I can think of no better way to put it, is unmitigated awesome. Dude has crazy eyes, and he appears to be Russell Brand's Celtic cousin judging by the state of his hair. I dare you not to love this.

   Internet, I'd like more of this please.

   And on a stranger note, I found myself defending my love for Hudson Hawk in the Cracked.com comment section today. My great and abiding devotion to Richard E. Grant has hitherto taken me to some strange places, and while I would stand up for that movie in the face of even the worst of Huisgenoot Skouspel Treffers, I don't think I'm going to win over any converts today. Sigh.

Day it doesn't matter anymore

   My space pod was late. I shuffled quickly from the house when I heard the familiar rumblings of my intergalactic transport pod exiting the space-time flux and stop outside my gate. I ran out, pudgy in my massive black jacket and flailing three hundred bags with me, and seated myself with a quick hello to the driver. I leaned my head back and closed my eyes because I was massively fucking tired from no sleep the previous night because the glare of re-entering the worm-hole that would lead to our destination blinds me looking out the pod-windows.

   The capacitors start up again as we build speed, and the g-force flattens me slightly against the back of the seat. Man, space and time travel gives me such motion sickness. I'm hungry too, having skipped breakfast, and I'm acutely aware of the bloody McDonald's Restaurant At The End Of The Universe as we pass it on our regular route.
   What with the wormhole allowing us to bypass the usual super-highway, we get there in merely three quarters of an hour, as opposed to the deep-freeze stasis over two decades it would take us even on normal hyperdrive. When we get there, all I can think is that I could have used at least another fortnight to rest my eyes before pulling back out of the flux and land at work.

   So, bad news, sort of. The Lipidsana experiment has been canned. There are a great many reasons for this, but one that kind of matters is the fact that it wasn't working for me. This may be because my body is bloody stubborn and refuses to respond to scientific stimuli like any normal body would- I couldn't tell you why. I picked up about 4kgs since starting, and two days after I stopped taking it I've lost that again. I shan't stop my ever gallant attempt to lose weight in the face of a horrifying physiology, and I shall certainly keep writing crap here and making you people read it. I intend to switch to riding a real, physical bike up and down the streets for exercise instead of a still-standing machines that tantalisingly pretend movement. I'll update my new revised battle-plan as I think it up, to be honest. Perhaps I'll just end up lovably chubby by the end of all this, who knows.
    I also think that removing my well-stocked self from the slightly creepy gym environment will allow me to bust a move when and wherever I choose, which I'm fully of the belief must be much healthier for my heart. Goddamn, when was suppressing your smooth moves to Son of a Preacher man ever good for your constitution? I make no excuse for my technically terrible but perversely satisfying popping-and-locking, my good people.

   I've had a new mission this last week, however: learn two whistle with two fingers! I feel like adding a few more exclamation points in there to emphasize exactly how epically awesome that would be. I'm refraining out of the knowledge passed on to me by the great Terry Pratchett that the more exclamation points you tack on to the end of your sentiment, the further past the sanity border you've paddled. The quest started slow, with naught but great gobs of errant spit all across goddamn everything to show for my diligence. Slowly and pleasingly, something like a whistle started to emerge, and almost immediately my cats suspected foul play. Turkish was brave enough to climb all the way up the slope of my front to bite my fingers in the hope of MAKING IT STOP.
   I have been driving all the lovely people in my home insane as I walk down the hall whistling like a leaky air mattress, increasingly proud and irritating as my progress progressed. Now, I can almost always consistently produce a low-volume whistle after several tries and repositioning my fingers multiple times. It's AWESOME. I suspect the intense satisfaction I feel at making the right sound must be akin to the feeling pianists must have when they can simply hit piano keys and produce the exact tune they have in their head. (As opposed to poking at the poor instrument over and over again and managing only to recreate the first three notes of chopsticks with any regularity.)
   My dad just rushed into the room, insisting he heard me practising my whistling, only to realize it was an actual bird singing outside. This is the absolute apex of my musical whistling career.

   I'll start thinking of some new features, maybe I'll source some low-fat recipes or review my bad habit of reality food shows. Certainly I won't be shying away from sticking in as many pictures of my cats and references to Stephen Fry as is humanly possible. I'm nothing if not comfortingly predictable.

Day 14: Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.

   Baddest man in the whole damn town.

   Allow me to interpret: I'm in a bad mood. I got the blues, I'm down 'n out, not a whole lotta loving going on in my day. I had some bad news of a non-Lipidsana nature yesterday, and it has managed to throw my entire groove off. Seriously, I didn't even feel a twinge of an urge to bop or boogie or bust any sort of a move in gym today. It's fast becoming my favourite part of the day- it's not like it's massive massive exercise or anything, the trainer has been nixed once and for all now. It's really just down to moving a little bit everyday for the sake of a bit of fitness really, and somehow the empty repetition of physical movement seems to have become hypnotically enjoyable. However, today, the spirit of the inappropriate dance left me entirely, and instead each new song and rhythm seemed only to further enforce my terrible mood.
   Yes, Kate Bush, I agree entirely, if only you could make that deal with God and swap places with whomsoever it is you're singing to, I believe the world would be a much shinier place. I feel the hopelessness and gravitas of your pop dilemma right with you, sister.
   Indeed, Chevelle, you find yourself up against such mindless bureaucracy in this world, and you continue to fight the good fight despite all the demoralizing and frustrating powers that be. Yes brothers, I feel you deeply today.

   I assure you, it would not have needed something as drastic bad news to crimp my funk. In all honesty, something as small and insignificant as BBC Lifestyle changing the timeslot of my daily Gordon Ramsay to some ridiculous hour without telling me could easily be the cause of this moodiness. Bad days do happen, regardless of any karma points one may have racked up when one allegedly passed up the opportunity to eat half a cheesecake house on Wednesday evening hypothetically. Ah, but I hear you say, simply take refuge in your fitness regime, the endorphins released are sure to give you something of a high as well as the unmistakable glow of a sweaty demon. I put it to you that a modest but sizeable Powerball winning will produce much the same, if not better, of a result. I would heartily welcome the opportunity to test this theory in practice.

   But allow me digress from my eloquent whining for a moment. I had a haircut.

It's the one on the front left.

  

   Hurrah, n'est ce-pas? It may not look much different, but it is, I assure you. Take my word for it. I feel liberated- I am not much of a haircut-every-two-months kind of person, so this was luxury.

   Then also: I have found my favourite pair of trousers that do not and have not fit for quite some time. It was such a sad loss, I could not bear to toss them simply for the folly of my waistline, so I've decided they shall be my barometer trousers. I shall measure my progress on the Lipidsana shakes not by the scale alone, but largely on merit of how much I have to hop around the room to get these trousers on. 

They are deeply stylish in a way only fully knowable whilst in the 7th grade.

   Current trouser status:

   I shall periodically check and update the Trouserometer 2000. It conveys rather depressing content in a prime-colour, fun-tastic sort of a way, doesn't it?

   The shakes are finding a home in my constitution. You can most certainly feel them taking effect in the morning, and while the first one of the day still induces weird science in my mid-section, my body seems to be adjusting to them. As an experiment, I did one this morning without checking the flavour on the packet- I was quite convinced of vanilla, only to discover strawberry. This is not to disparage the taste- they really are very decent tasting for health shakes, but I have been on many such a shake, and even the best of the best still present the problem of blue salad. By this I mean: 

   When I was about 10, it was my job to make the salad for a big family braai. I got a little carried away with the thrill of responsibility, and decided that for flair, I was going to add several drams of blue food dye to to the mayonnaise dressing. Somehow, even knowing that all it was was a little colouring, I could not bring myself to eat the damn blue salad, and I don't think very many other attendants finished theirs, either. This, my friends, is blue salad. Lipidsana is not fishy tasting and it really does bring to mind an actual milkshake, but in the end, there is neither strawberry or vanilla, but that thinking makes it so.

  

   In order to go out on a high note, I leave you with the heartwarming image of my two cats vying for space on my not insubstantially sized lap.

   

   The white one is Tesla, and the one obtusely parking on top of her is Turkish (named after Stephen Fry, obviously.) Look, you can keep the hypothetical, comically sized cheesecake. As long as my cats keep disregarding common sense and basic comfort in order to out do one another on my person, I don't need none of your stinking cheesecake.

Day 10: Sing-Along-Blogs

   I do believe the weekend is unmistakably over. Yes, I feel that irresistible pull, the haunting allure of the unattainable mid-day nap. Last night was a no-sleep, lay-in-bed-constantly-rolling-over-onto-the-cat kind of a night, for the fates are cruel and bored. I shall call it Sunday Syndrome. Of course, the paradox is that whilst I and any rational thinking man upon this earth fears a Sunday with a spine-chilling devotion, I also tend to wish the days over 'till Sunday, as that is when my True Blood, Entourage and Leverage episodes air. It's but a small consolation.
   Food wise, doing rather fine, although drowning your bad mood in a glass of water has little of the punch of its cousin, 5 litres of ice-cream. Surprisingly though, gym is becoming more of a habit and less of a schlepp. I'm still randomly besieged by the urge to start acting out the physical choreography of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog when "Everyone's A Hero In Their Own Way" starts to play into my ears, though. To circumvent the boredom factor, I must throw my mind into the music that comes up on random from my playlist, but the down side of that is that people seeing me mouth the lyrics to myself think of me as the Very Special Gymmer by now. Ah, if they only knew how much worse it could be. *Jazzhands!*

 Pictured: Today.

   My doctor has advised me that I am allowed two half-fruits a day. Unless he means Elton John during the hetero-marriage years, I call that cruel. I cannay give up my Gordon Ramsay of a weekday evening, so you are already asking me to pretend I don't want the scallops he's making in some form of a butter sauce (even though I've never had a scallop in my life, and I generally don't like seafood. Thus is the nature of the BBC food channel.) Now sir, you ask me to pretend you didn't just R999.99 me? Two half-fruits is a fruit. Count it out and poke me if I'm wrong here, I've been known to stumble on basic arithmetic, but I'm coming to a total of one fruit. I'm going to have to start bringing a watermelon to work, aren't I?

   I did not post my vitalstatistix over the weekend, for one very good reason: my vanity can smack your vanity in the face and go "La, Sir." The space-pod at the gym tells me I've picked up *cough* amount of kilos, despite being of the simultaneous opinion that my fat percentage has gone down. I'm calling it a draw for now, until such a time as the bloody scale decides it is willing to be reasoned with like a normal household appliance. 

   It looks like Personal Trainer Ross Kemp might well be back on the scene, and failing that, it may be another, as yet unnamed trainer. Dude had little winged earrings in his ears, which I found somehow fascinating. Very messenger of the gods. I shall have to approximate myself a pair like that immediately. I'll be breaking out the hot glue and crafting supplies tonight, boyo. 

   Goodnight and goodluck duckies, I must go enjoy my orange. Perhaps I can fashion some kind of a napping hammock from orange peels and office supplies.