About the long lost author

I hate mealy apples. I bought a sack-full of apples on Thursday and the first two that I ate were mealy. I had started to fear for the whole bushel until I found a nice crunchy one today. Crisis averted.

There are two diet plans that Weight Watchers users can choose from: the Flex Plan (which I am using) and the lesser-known Core Plan which champions healthy eating over counting Points. In an effort to meet my personal goal size and weight by Easter I've started eating Core foods. On Monday I replaced Kashi bars, soy crisps, Lean Cuisines, kettle corn, cereal, and ice cream(!) with bananas, carrots, frozen berries, beans, grapes, and fat-free pudding. My healthier choices are laden with fiber so I never eat all of my Points and I spend all of my free time researching weird foods (bulgur, anyone?) finding recipes and not blogging (obviously). I'm so excited about my newly-modified diet that I've even taken to working out four days a week. I love my new Pilates DVD and I endure the "Banish Ab and Back Fat" workout from my Fitness magazine and I've lost 3lbs.

This little piggy has come a long way in a year, let me tell you. My mom even asked me to help her come up with a diet for my dad over spring break. Such a request would have been unheard of last spring break when the request would have been more along the lines of "tell me what you eat so I can do the opposite" (per my oh-so-right boyfriend). The inspirational "fat picture" that hangs in my medicine cabinet and serves as an ever-present reminder of just why I'm eating pinto bean chili instead of pizza was taken last Easter. Ideally, it will get a companion "after" picture in about a month.

I was immersed in the International Phonetic Alphabet all last week because I had a Linguistics midterm on Wednesday and I'm a changed woman. I love translating words to and from the IPA now! In case you are not a liberal arts major, the IPA is a set of symbols that represent the sounds in every language. Crack open your Merriam-Webster and you'll see a pronunciation key next to every word. The pronunciations are written with the IPA. The following paragraph is another example of the IPA and of my total lack of self-control:

If that doesn't make your heart twitter then congratulations! You are a typical, red-blooded American! If, on the other hand, those symbols set off your translation alarms and send you into a frenzy, you are probably me. By the way, here's the translation: No non-linguistics minor should like using the IPA this much. No non-nutrition major should like healthy food this much. [Sentence 3 is my bitter little secret]. But I do!
Man, what a psycho.