Okay, I know that I really don't have full bodied pics here....but my hubby and I dressed up for his cousin's wedding and we looked so adorable...so here's what I do have....( Adorableness. )That last one is my favorite.

1540 words, just ekeing out my theoretical minimum. Progress is progress. I'm pretty sure this is also progress.

Mostly, I'm just describing planets as seen from space. I wonder if anybody would notice if I did that four hundred pages.

16200 / 100000 words. 16% done!

so i know that this is not fatshion related really, but i trust you fatties more than anyone else to give me good advice, and... perhaps some other people are interested in my question and have not had the chutzpah to ask.

has anyone had any experience with online dating? i know... i know... I KNOW. its online dating, but i'm SERIOUSLY lonely right now, and i have some (skinny) friends who have met a few great guys online and have been having a lot of fun. are there sites that cater to fats looking for dates? i guess if anyone has any general advice in this area... let me know!

thanks all, and love love love.

Hey guys!

Under the cut I have a few pictures that showcase some of my favorite pieces and outfits (plus a few funny photos of bad fatshion growing up!)...Very few of these pics were taken to showcase my outfits though, so use your imagination!



here's the link as I'm having trouble embedding!

Your model is 5'7", roughly 210 lbs. Size 16 on top, 19 on bottom :)

Well, it's been a very long day--clothes shopping, baby shower, social things. But I am home and dry at last and commencing my work day.

I have put on my work clothes (green and purple plaid pajama pants with a silver stripe, fuzzy slippers, and purple long johns--with the important protective gear of my wrist braces!), made myself a pot of tea, and with the assistance of my coworker I'm about to start the day's work.

Here's my office.

Today's tea mug is kitty in a filing drawer. Today's tea is vanilla rooibos.

Sometimes this job doesn't suck.

See you in six pages.

It's been a wonderful week of weddings!

I'm glad I have a job I enjoy.

I remind my Phoenix LJ peeps that I'm moving in one week. We need help lifting things like mattresses, chests of drawers, bookshelves, and filing cabinets. We'll have a truck and moving dolly, and will only focus on big items. I will try to get all of the smaller stuff out of the way, so we don't have any of the usual foolishness.

At my house, we have the refrigerator to move, and at Krista's, there is the refrigerator-sized freezer.

Please contact me if you can help out: cseggerman@hotmail.com

For a muddle of reasons, I recently started a second twitter account under my real name. The inciting factor is that a work colleague who is leaving for a cool new job doesn't use facebook, which is what I've been using as my casual keep-in-touch app. Colleague does use twitter pretty extensively, though. Colleague is not someone I mind meeting my non-work persona, so I could follow/reply under my withneedle account. However, Colleague's twitter persona knows those of various other coworkers from whom my pseudonym would like to keep some distance, so it seemed to make a kind of sense to create a persona who could interact with those entities as well.

I don't see this separation of my pseudonym and my work personae as hard-and-fast. For instance, my boss has met this blog, as I have met his. (He's probably forgotten about it, but I don't take that as a given.) It's more that I want the ability to preserve a distinction between the kind of colleague with whom I might have coffee if I ran into them out of context and the kind of colleague with whom I'd exchange nods and smiles. People can and do move back and forth from one category to the other in real life, but that seems much harder to manage and enforce online.

The other reason I created a second account is that I'm bemused that my pseudonym has more of a professional online presence than my work persona does. It's not a huge footprint, but it's still more than the real me has. Even so, I'm damned if I know what I'm going to do about it, because I'm not crazy about the way most of the people in my field handle their online presences. Pretty much everyone in my field who blogs does so to establish an online brand, and as such, they blog (or twitter, or whatever) under their own names. I always get the feeling that they have one eye on the next job or client, and that limits them to discussing solutions rather than problems, for fear of coming across as whiny or unknowledgeable or otherwise undesireable. I can't say they're wrong to take a conservative approach to their online presentation, but as a reader, I find it terribly depressing that everyone but me seems to know how everything; as a writer, I'm not interested in only talking about problems I know how to solve. So there's that to be figured out as well.

On a lighter but related note, these conversations between tamnonlinear's Reptilian Hind Brain and Fore Brain inspired me to wonder how I would characterize my opposing internal voices. (Yes, I have voices in my head. Doesn't everyone?) Deborah Knott, the main character in Margaret Maron's mystery novels, has a preacher and a pragmatist. Julia Spencer-Fleming's Clare Fergusson hears the voices of her Southern grandmother and her survival school instructor. I sometimes think I have the Dashwood sisters from Sense and Sensibility, e.g.

Marianne: I want stuff.
Elinor: We have stuff.
Marianne: That's old stuff. I want new stuff.
Elinor: Sorry, no, the house is stuffed to the gills. Won't old stuff do?
Marianne: Old stuff is boring.
Elinor: (roots around in yarn closet) Even this hand-painted sock yarn?
Marianne: Where did that come from?
Elinor: We bought it a year ago.
Marianne: I don't remember it.
Elinor: Of course you don't. Long-term memory is my job. But will it do?
Marianne: (pets brightly colored sock yarn) I've never seen this before, so it's new and shiny...
Elinor: You are so easy sometimes.

Back in October a group of Chicago fats met up for brunch. We had great food, great conversation and visited Vive la Femme, a plus size boutique here in Chicago. This was my first trip to VLF and it was like I'd stepped into a fairy tale. All the clothes were made for bodies like mine! I was with a group of women who understood the struggles I face when buying clothes. We had show and tell and it was just the best experience. I walked away with the most gorgeous dress - it is the most expensive dress I've ever purchased - even more than prom and bridesmaid dresses, but this dress was like Cinderella's slipper. Three of us tried it on. One girl didn't fill out the top. Another filled it out a little too much. Then in a "what the hell" moment, I tried it on. It fit perfectly. See the dress and an interview outfit under the cut.

Smart brain. Of course Danilaw likes 20th century rock music. First of all, it's a worldbuilding point (which I will not spoiler.) But if he speaks archaic English, however haltingly, it also lets him talk to the people on the generation ship, now doesn't it?

1629 words on Grail today--just over quota, but as soon as batwrangler gets here, I have to go to New Jersey. This is my last commitment for a good long time, though, and I'm looking forward to crawling into my hole and pulling it closed after me until I get a couple of these damned books written and revised.

The more accomplished I become as a writer, and the more confident I am in my skills, the worse my drafts get. In a lot of ways, this thing I am writing looks very much like a really elaborate outline. It's full of bracket notes that say things like [show don't tell] and [make these characters' voices sound different]. I'm choosing to believe that this is because my subconscious has accepted that there will have to be heavy revisions once I figure out what the book is about, and the only way I have ever been able to figure out what the book is about is to work through it.

Sometimes I outline. Sometimes I don't. Sometimes I go back and outline stuff I've already written to see where it's going and get some distance on it. Sometimes I write out of order and sometimes I'm linear. Sometimes I scribble bits of scenes on scrap paper. There are no rules, only tactics that work or do not work.

Lately, my process seems to involve writing all sorts of sketchy things, bits and fragments and scribbles--and then later constructing a narrative out of them. This would terrify me, except I already did this on Chill and Bone & Jewel Creatures, and the final drafts of both books strike me as rather decent work.

Mean things: fears of the Other, barbarians, fretting by the phone.

16640 / 100000 words. 17% done!

it's like he's talking directly to my soul

Does anyone have experience with this coat from Old Navy? Does it fit true to size?

And this is probably a long shot, but does anyone have these boots (or any Durango boots, really) and know how the calf sizes are? Mine's about a 15-16" and I'd like to make sure those fit before I buy them.

Thanks all!

i am forever buying bras & then ditching them cause they are never right, they poke or slip or just suck. normally i buy a 40dd, the LB girl said i need a 42dd but im pretty sure that would be too big since the 40's are sometimes loose so some of the ones i wear are 38dd's, lol anyway i guess im looking for something between a 38dd -40dd or possibley E :) and im poor, lol so if ya have anything good but fairly cheap let me know

looking for the coat pictured below, willing to purchase in either used/new condition. 3x, from fall/winter '08.