Here’s a short video I took with my little Canon Elf.

I love our athletes. They worked hard to qualify for the Olympics, they trained their asses off on the way to Beijing, and they’re giving their hearts and minds and muscles over to winning the games.

But after the race, or meet, or game, every time, they’re dealing with the sharks.

The American media.

Why is the media so hard on the athletes that trained and raced and qualified to be on our American team, but “only” got silver, or bronze, or didn’t get a medal at all? Why does an adult ex-athlete ask another athlete, moments after losing a qualifying match, “do you think this is because you changed coaches last year?” or “Your family has been with you all along. Can you tell us how they felt just now [as we watched you sob into their arms]?” The guy did his best and came up short - often less than 30 seconds ago - and now he’s on international T.V.! Is making him cry into your microphone really that important?

Then to cutaway and see the tremulously toupeed Bob Costas comment “he just dropped an egg in The Bird’s Nest”… ARGH! Give him a freaking break, dude!

Obviously I’m conditioned to political reporting, where the hard questions and mean comments simply never come. Can you imagine any American other than Jon Stewart asking President Bush if he thinks he made the right call on… anything?

Why is it okay to be this harsh with our athletes and not our elected politicians? Can the media get in the game, please?!

First off - for those of you who are about to attend, or who have already attended our workshop, the handouts and supplementary materials from the workshop are available over at Emma’s site.

I’m not going to try to recreate our talk in this post, but I’ll say this: you don’t need to know much about the web to have a website, or a blog, or both. You also don’t need more than about $8/year* to have a site of your own. And it’s really, truly, honestly not hard. Go to Wordpress.com** and sign up for a free blog (even if what you really want is a website and not a blog). Once you have your free Wordpress blog, write a few pages; you now have a web site. Write some posts, and you also have a blog. (Don’t want a blog? Don’t write posts.) Choose a Wordpress ‘theme’ and you have a professional design. Write compelling, audience-focused content, and you’ll have an audience!

Yeah, okay, that’s some work, I grant you. But hopefully it’s not too scary. (Secret/not-secret: You can create many Wordpress blogs! for free! if you hate the first one, make a new one. They’re all always free.)

I hope that I get to see some of you tomorrow, and for those who attended the workshop and are reading this post after-the-fact, thank you for coming! I appreciate you taking the time and hope we were of some help.

There, now I can fall asleep without the fear of Emma’s wrath following me into my dreams.

(Who am I kidding? Emma put her stuff up on her site WEEKS ago. She’s wanted to kill me for WEEKS.)

Happy Conference!

* To register your domain name (also known as your “URL” - for example michellemcginnis.com). More details on that over at Emma’s site.

** No, I don’t work for Wordpress. There are other excellent, free blog/site options out there, and we list a few others in our handouts. I’ve just personally used Wordpress the most often, so I feel the most comfortable recommending it.

So Catherine’s ‘tag’ requires writing 6 random things about myself.  Hmm.  I’m just going to do this as fast as I can.

1. I’ve never punched someone in the face, and I’d like to. It’s on my list of “to-do’s” before I die. (I’ve slapped, but never punched. The slap I’m ashamed of. I don’t think I’d be ashamed of a punch.)
2. I crouch like a goblin in my expensive Aeron chair, making the good-for-my-back thing entirely moot.
3. My first instinct is to take things literally. I’ve tried to break myself of the habit but my brain don’t bend that way. Damn it.
4. I love the smell of hot concrete after a rain. As a child, I would lick it.
5. I read “Katherine” by Anya Seton when I was in the fourth grade, and fell in love. I read the book so often growing up that the greatest threat my parents could levy against me was to take Katherine away. When I was confirmed in the Catholic church I took Katherine as my confirmation name. I had to do a lot of interesting-but-beside-the-point research on some saint called Catherine in order to achieve this.
6. I prefer going barefoot to wearing shoes. Period.

Okay, now I’m supposed to tag people — Tagerific! Here are Les Rules:

• Link to the person who tagged you — me!
• Post the rules on your blog
• Write six random things about yourself
• Tag six random bloggers by linking to their blogs
• Leave comments on their sites to let them know they’ve been tagged
• Let your tagger know when your entry is up

And I’ll tag……. drumroll please! Ha.

• The lovely and talented Lady Jane Sevier
• My new friend Farrah Rochon
• Delectable Sherry Thomas, whose Delicious debuts this month
• Writing fiend Tracy Wolff, whose avalanche of literature will soon bury a bookstore near you
• Kit Frazier, the Texan Sue Grafton
• Rae Ann Parker, my conference friend who I’ll miss very much this year!

This gem of a Firefox plugin allows me to block myself from viewing certain sites at certain times of the day. (Leeching away my valuable writing time.)

It’s simple: when I sit down to write, I enable Leechblock by selecting “Lockdown” for a certain amount of time. I can still get to Wikipedia to look up that all-important street name I need for a scene, but I can’t get to Gmail or News of the Weird or IMDB YouTube or any of the blogs I follow.

Voila! The best thing about this plugin is that it’s smart. It has options to disable its own options while a block is active (! get your head around that!) so that my very tech-savvy inner procrastinator doesn’t do a system runaround and turn the internet back on when I’m jonesing for a fix.

Check out the plugin author’s site to get a full list of the many terrific options.

Are you getting sick of pictures of leeks? Then you can imagine how I felt when I awoke this morning to yet another cup of hot leek tea. (The “soup” concept? Pshaw. It might psychologically help those who just loooove spooning up soup, but I’m a tea drinker. Put that broth in a mug and I’m happy.)

Lessons learned from yesterday, day one of my all-leek diet:

1. Pepper is the spice of leeks. Put some fresh-ground pepper on mashed leeks or even into a mug of hot leek tea and you’ve done yourself a favor.
2. Dried tarragon doesn’t develop its flavor fully enough when added to the leeks; don’t bother with it.
3. Celery seeds ditto. They add crunch, but not worth it.
4. Lemon + olive oil = yum. So to recap: the suggestions Mireille Guiliano makes in her book are the best ways to eat leeks. I haven’t been able to top her. <sheepish grin>
5. I’m a fan of variety, but I’ve also been known to eat nothing but Mexican food for days on end, or to content myself week after week with corn tortillas and slices of cheese every day for lunch. The key to successful repeat-mealdom? You have to like the meal the first time. A lot.

So based on lesson #5, here’s my advice. Before trying this diet, try having leeks as part of a meal. Experiment with the various ways you can make them delicious. Enjoy them. Then maybe, just maybe, you’ll be able to look forward to two days of nothing but leeks. I didn’t have that attitude, and though the leeks aren’t tasting horrible or making me ill, I’m not tap dancing on the walls.

Will I ever do this again? Maybe. I’m not going to shout Never! and stomp my feet, but it’s a bit tortuous. Day two is better than day 1, probably because the “oh my GAWD I’m hungry” stage has passed. And on day 2 I got to wake up having lost 4 pounds, which started the day off right.

I’m looking forward to a real meal this evening, though!

Yesterday I posted about leeking off some poundage. Today is day one of my leek-only diet. (Don’t worry, it’s only a two day diet, and tomorrow night I get to eat food again, so it ain’t going to take over this blog.)

This morning I woke to the smell of French Roast wafting through the house, teasing me into getting out of bed and into the shower before Termite Inspection Guy showed up. Alas, I am not allowed to drink coffee today—so I trotted downstairs to boil me some leeks.

I must admit it’s been years since I’ve eaten anything leek-inspired at home, and I don’t think I’ve ever handled a leek myself until this weekend. I learned things! Did you know, for instance, that over half the weight of a leek is in the green leafy part? Yep. This is a two-pounds-of-leeks recipe, but after I chopped off the dark green bits (leaving the recommended ‘suggestion of pale green‘) the little white stubs weighed less than a pound. Was this okay? No idea. I moved ahead and put them in a pot, covered them with water, and boiled.

The concoction then simmered for 25 minutes. The rich scent of brewing coffee disappeared into clouds of oniony-leeky steam that permeated every dusty nook of the house.

Drawn to the smell of my only allowed food, I plucked out the three stubs of leek and chopped them up, then dumped them and the leftover leek juice into separate Tupperware. I prepared my first half-cup of mushy leek, and seasoned with a tiny bit of salt and pepper.

(I have to apologize to Mme. Guiliano, as yesterday I raved about not being able to use any herbs or spices in this soup. Rereading her recipe and the surrounding instructions, she does allow a sparing use of salt and pepper when eating the mushed up leeks. Whew!)

I ate. And you know, it ain’t half bad? Boiled leeks taste like sweet, very mild onions. I also drank a small cup of the hot leek juice; not so good. Hot leek juice has a slightly oily consistency and tastes like—yep, you guessed it. Leeks.

We’ll see what types of herbal mischief I can inflict on my poor foodstuff later this afternoon.

I’ve begun having nightmares about the backs of my thighs. They wobble. They pucker. They pool in bucket seats, overspill the edges of wooden stools and squish through the mesh of my Mirra chair.

They’re not large, not compared to transatlantic jets or sperm whales, but the fat content outweighs the muscle and bone content by about two-to-one, and that’s not good.

Even before the nightmares I’d already been playing around with the idea of dieting, or rather, eating better. Hell, I’m going to Spain in a month for a wedding. When I’m there I’ll see people who last laid eyes on me when I was 25 and in the best shape of my life. Dieting isn’t an option, it’s a necessity.

But it’s not one of my strengths, self-control. I’ve had success with, and actually enjoy, the Atkins approach; fewer carbs, lose weight fast. But I’ve done it so often it’s boring. So a week ago I bought French Women Don’t Get Fat by Mireille Guillano, which sounded like a diet I could enjoy. For one thing, we share the same attitude towards dieting. It’s far more successful if it’s not considered a diet. Think of it as living life well, as opposed to punishing yourself, and you’re more likely to continue the modified food intake. It is not a diet. It is a philosophy of life. Check.

So, I bought it. I read it. I buy into it. And the first step?

Leek soup.

Let me give you the short (and, coincidentally, the long) version of this recipe: Put leeks in pot. Add water. Boil. Simmer. Cool. Drain (reserve liquid). Drink.

Annnnnnd that’s it. You make this “soup” (c’mon, it’s leek water! LEEK WATER!) and ingest nothing else for two days. Just leek water every few hours and if you’re really jonesing for the hard stuff, you get half a cup of mushy leeks with some olive oil and lemon juice to tide you over.

I’m going to go for it—I have the leeks. I start tomorrow.

But here’s the question, the reason I turned to the world wide interweb just now for some fancy Google footwork: Why the hell can’t you season this soup?

Would a little thyme really kill the diet? Pepper? I get that salt’s going to do that water-retention thing you’re trying to avoid by drinking a whole mess of leek juice, but surely plain tarragon would zip right through.

I could not find the answer, so I’m going to experiment and see what I can learn on my own. I will begin with plain leek juice, then add herbs and spices on subsequent trips back to the leeky well. I’ll let you know how it goes.

But first I’m going to go scarf an avocado. With salt. And a chocolate chaser.

Now - does anyone disagree with this definition? I’m not familiar enough with the subgenre to have an opinion, but I’m interested.

UPDATE: Just found another very interesting post on a similar topic from an editor at Juno Books called Notes on “Urban Fantasy” & Roots of Kickassitude.

(It’s the Grayboy Allstars “Still Waiting” video, btw.)