It's been a while since I posted. Heck, I'd almost forgotten about this blog until I spotted it in my bookmarks at home over the weekend.

So, what's new?

It's been a busy summer. Not, unfortunately, busy with "summer things" but busy work-wise. As friends can attest, I've had little time to spare even for e-mailing over the last couple of months as I buckle down and try to do my fair share to get this company off the ground and self-sufficient. We've got 3-1/2 months left to start supporting ourselves or I'm back on the unemployment line with several million other people who have been enjoying the fallout from the economy's "jobless recovery."

Other than that, I've gone on a diet, an occasion mostly notable for it being the first time in a decade I've actually taken serious action to lose weight. For the past couple of years I've been using the "think system" of dieting. I thought about it quite a lot. Unfortunately, no weight loss resulted.

Anyhow, at a semi-annual doctor's office visit in late July, I was stunned by the news of a 5 pound weight gain. Stunned. Shocked. Nauseated. 5 pounds? In five months? That did it. I was determined to take off 25 pounds by February (when I'll have my next physical).

It was, I suddenly realized, the single current goal of my existence to get back to the same weight that used to make me avert my eyes when I passed a mirror.

My standards have fallen considerably in the last 20 years.

By dint of much effort, I managed to take off two pounds but I could feel them hovering there in the wings, waiting to pounce back on my butt the second I relaxed my vigilance for a moment so when my roommate discovered this diet, and lost over three pounds in her first week, I whipped out my checkbook and signed myself up.

Owing to a number of factors, mostly involved with my own reluctance to actually follow the prescribed diet, my weight loss was confined to a dispiriting 1/4 pound or 1/2 pound per weigh-in. Last week, I finally got serious about it and between Thursday and yesterday (Monday), I took off three whole pounds! That brings my total weight loss to nine pounds. 16 to go and for the first time, I actually think I'm going to make it.

That's what this blog entry is about. Me celebrating the unusual occurrence of the scale actually moving down each time I step on it.

I mean, it was time I lost weight. I can tell, because when I informed friends and co-workers that I intended to lose 25 pounds, not one, single person consoled me with, "oh, you don't need to lose that much." (I'm just saying, okay? As far as I'm concerned, a friend owes it to you to insist that you need to lose less weight than you think you do. If any of you guys go on a diet, expect me to be callous and insensitive in return, okay?)

I have one of those brains that's not convinced of the value of anything that doesn't take time and cost money. I weigh-in twice a week, a nuisance since it takes at least 45 minutes to make the drive from my office, and the protein supplements (which are, by the way, delicious) cost me around $40 a week. To offset that, there's all the money I'm saving on potato chips and chocolate bars, so my total food bill really isn't much different than it was before. I'm also having to eat fish, a substance I haven't touched since I got food poisoning from it in the late 70s, but that's a different subject.

They swear that by the time I finish, they'll have my metabolism revved back up to where it was when I was 25. I was pretty stoned when I was 25, so I don't remember much about it, but I do know I drank a lot of beer and didn't get fat, so maybe that will be a good thing.

As long as they rev my butt down, I don't care that much. I'm learning to accept that I can't eat the way I did when I was 20. I'm bitter, but I'm learning to accept that I'm getting older not exactly a teenager.

Still, it's working so I'm not complaining. (Well, yeah, I am, but I complain about everything.)

I think about my butt every time I reach for the refrigerator door these days. Not that that makes a difference or anything, but I spent years working on the "think system" and I'm not really willing to give up on it entirely.

I have little to say about fandom. My apologies to anyone who might have stopped by on the off chance that I had something to share that might be of interest to the public.

I understand there's the usual kerfuffle about the demise of fandom but as you all know, I gave up on it quite a while back. Rape fantasies written by people who have never had sex and have only the sketchiest idea of the mechanics, much less the emotions of the act. Stories written by people who have seen one episode of a show, or just the previews, or even who have never seen it but who liked the fanfic someone else wrote. S&M stories written by people who would file a lawsuit if they received a harsh look from a partner. Interminable WIP written by people unable to string together a coherent e-mail, much less to construct the kind of detailed plot required to carry 200,000 words. (Such a decision can only be confirmed by the revelation, shared with me recently, that someone actually wrote a story where HP had sexual relations with a snake while being unaware that said reptile was Snape's animagus form. Seriously, people. Put down the keyboard and get some therapy, okay?)

Some have recently expressed surprise to me that there's a move afoot to suppress, even abolish slash. Since there's been a body of fans who have wanted this same thing since the year dot, I am unable to share their surprise.

The same people who will write a story postulating that the male lead of a series would willingly rape his female co-star and that she would subsequently realize that she loved him and live happily ever after with him in a vine-covered cottage find slash to be an inappropriate and distasteful expression of human love and sensuality.

The stupid and narrow-minded are always with us. (If for no other reason than as an object lesson and a warning of what we might become if we don't nurture a spirit of acceptance of our differences, which is clearly something I have a bit of difficulty with.)

Others have marveled that some long-time (relatively speaking) slashers are speaking out about their determination to have no more to do with the genre. I attribute a lot of this to 'stories' like the one cited above.

Slashers were always the ones who cared most deeply about the characters. It was the slash lists where you got the detailed discussions of motivation and the debates about the conflicts of opposing personalities. It seems only natural to me that it's the slashers, then, who are most deeply wounded by the puerile thing that slash fandom has become and who are, in consequence, speaking out the loudest about their determination to eliminate it from their lives.

No doubt I could say more, I never run out of opinions, but the truth is that I'm no less pressed at work today than I have been for the last eight weeks, so I'll stop for the moment.

Y'all have a nice day.