In case you haven't met your advertising intake quota today...

I need some advice: how can one find time to blog? Cause I just don’t seem to have it. Right now I am “cheating” by blogging while I am at work and therefore supposed to be working on things other than my blog. As a result, my billables will be low today. If you do not know what billables are, consider yourself very fortunate.

So yeah, any advice on efficient blogging methods will be most appreciated. In return, I will share with you a few of my more recent fascinations:

The Nike+ Sportband

If you haven’t seen this, it is a pedometer and a watch and a running diary and the display of a treadmill all in one—the cross-promotional brainchild of Nike and Apple, corporate giants who I think are worthy of their own celebrity relationship name, like “Nipple.” Or maybe not.


So… you put a little chip in your shoe and it transmits info to the sportband while you are walking or running, like the distance you’ve traveled, your pace, the time elapsed, calories burned, etc. Then you go home and plug a removable portion of the sportband into your USB drive where it uploads and tracks all your information for you on the Nike+ website, which is managing that “Human Race” project appearing in annoying pop-ups all over the Internet. The website lets you set all sorts of training goals and participate in virtual running groups with people around the world.

Oh yeah, you can also skip the sportband and have the chip communicate with your latest gen Nano… but I love my regular iPod and the sportband is a heckuva lot cheaper than buying a Nano just for this purpose.

One warning—when I first got it about two months ago, I just put the chip in my usual running shoes. This was painful at times (like having a smooth rock in my shoe) and the results were less than accurate. Last weekend I finally splurged on a pair of the Nike+ shoes, which contain a compartment for the chip under the lining in the shoe. Not only are the shoes super comfortable, but I have since tested the sportband on a couple of treadmills and it was so precise I chose not to mess with the calibration.

The Kiltie

I have been known to make an accurate fashion prediction or two. (Remember the cameo jewelry trend of 2003? I totally called that one in summer ’02. And remember how I bought a Vespa before people were fighting over them like Tickle Me Elmos and you could actually get one below MSRP? 'Nuff said.) Anyhow, I think this adorable golf shoe staple is going to make a big comeback. It will start out on sports shoes and loafers but will eventually inspire all sorts of fringes and trims, even going so far as to replace the grommet.
Being ahead of the trend and all, I fell hard for these Puma Golf Cat shoes with a removable kiltie and might have bought them in a couple of colors when I recently wandered into a Puma outlet despite the fact that I know I have no business going to Puma outlets as such are very dangerous places for me and my pocketbook. I also bought them despite the fact that I don’t play golf, but they have rubber soles that can be worn anywhere, including on a Vespa.

(And for those of you who are horrified that this post refers to the recent purchase of several pairs of shoes, you clearly don’t know me…)

(And thanks to recent birthday girl wingonwing for the LAist article.)

Rainy Days and Tuesdays

Well, I lied about the “live from Seattle” broadcast in the last post, as I am now back in Los Angeles. But those few faithful readers of this blog probably expected as much. The great news is that Pdaddy survived his 8-hour esophagectomy and has been recovering up in Seattle like a trooper. And seriously, folks, this is a particularly difficult (dare I say horrendous?) recovery and Pdaddy deserves oodles of credit for his ongoing good attitude. How would you like it if you weren’t allowed to drink anything for days, eat anything for months, and had to sleep with your head at a 30-degree angle for the rest of your life? I, for one, would not like it. I also would not like the constant poking, prodding, draining, blood-taking, and 14-different IV tubes refilling that Pdaddy was subjected to during his week-long hospital stay. (Double hooray—as I was writing this post I received word that Pdaddy had just been discharged from the hospital, several days earlier than anyone expected!!) When Pdaddy finally returns to his home on the range in AZ, he will get another round of chemo as a welcome back present. And yet he hasn't complained a whit. I hope he realizes how much the whole wide world appreciates everything he has endured and given up just so we all can have the luxury of hanging out with him for awhile longer.

The not-nearly-as-great-but-still-good news is that I got to see Seattle on a few short occasions, and it only confirmed the opinions I had formed through prior visits and years of Frasier reruns. If, like me, you attended high school in the early nineties and are therefore acquainted with oldies bands such as Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr. and Mudhoney (I know, I know… it’s hard to remember a time when band names weren’t required to begin with an article) and if, like me, you occasionally experience nostalgia for that long-lost, dirty-haired era, I might suggest taking a trip to Seattle, where nothing has changed since 1993. Sick of the young ruffians loitering at your local shopping mall in their tight-fitting, gluteus-eliminating skinny jeans? In Seattle, I saw tons of kids still wearing the long-johns & combat shorts combo that Matt Dillon donned in Singles. Tired of the Seacrest metrohair phenom? In Seattle, there were plenty of guys still sporting the half-shaved, half-long hairstyle that Anthony Kiedis had before his coif was so obviously influenced (infiltrated?) by the likes of Keith Urban, Pete Wentz and Ellen Degeneres. (Seriously, will someone please cancel his subscription to US Weekly before he gets a John Mayer perm? I know I’ll probably get in big trouble for saying this, but some people just look better when they’re strung out on heroin.)

The kinda bad news? Well, if you live in Seattle, it’s apparently kinda bad news that it rains a lot there. This was a bit surprising to me and Mary Ess and Pdaddy, all of whom naively assumed that people in Seattle were used to the ample precipitation for which the area is famed. Not so. It rained while I was there, and this was BIG NEWS. As in, “let’s cut into the DNC and the GOP VP announcement and other large, acronominizable events to talk about how it’s still raining” BIG NEWS. Err… I don’t get it. In LA, that kind of “news” would have been relegated to the very end of the newscast, along with all the gang-related shootings. In LA, if it didn’t warrant regular updates on TMZ that day, it wasn’t big news. (Of course, in LA we are also in such a state of drought that we could really use some big news kind of rain. I swear, Gov. Schwarzenegger is now asking us to recycle the water we use to brush our teeth.)

The worst news? LA is sunny, but smoggy, and it looks flat and void of greenery when one has just returned from a week in Washington. Today the rush-hour traffic doubled, as it always does on the day after Labor Day, officially signaling the end of summer. And today I had to go back to work.