This past Weetacon, we were given another chance to try out some IGIGI fashions. We had a little fashion show and there was much squealing and delight… and that was just in my living room when Suzanna and I were unwrapping all the dresses before the weekend. Seriously, though, the IGIGI fashion event is always well-received by the Weetacon audience, many of whom run home and tell their bffs about the amazing quality plus-size fashion they saw strut down the improvised runway of the Waterford room. Of course, having the designs modeled by our lovely ladies of Weetacon doesn’t hurt IGIGI either. They are certainly savvy, those IGIGI ladies.

I was given the opportunity to try out the Tatiana dress. It’s one of those stretchy, flowy designs that I LOVE from Yuliya Raquel. You know, the kind with amazing prints and a lining that allows the fabric to kind of drape over everything in the whole Grecian goddess way. These dresses are kind of Barbara Walters fuzzy lighting for your least favorite body bits. And it’s got my favorite thing in the world going for it: it’s impossible to wrinkle. You see,  I travel. I travel a LOT, and with tight business trips, I almost never check a bag, which means that all of my stuff must fit into a miniscule bag that fits snuggly in an overhead bin. I suspect I could shove this dress into the bottom of my laptop bag, shake it out and it would still look perfect for dinner, drinks and dancing into the wee hours of the night. Plus, the neckline is low enough to keep things intriguing but not so low that you’re going to be called down to HR, you know?

Also, brace yourselves for what I’m about to say: the Tatiana dress has pockets. OH YES. POCKETS. Pockets that somehow lay on either side but add zero volume to your hips. How does IGIGI accomplish this? I don’t know, it’s a mystery. A mystery that I adore. And there’s a long sash! Super long, that you could either wrap around yourself twice and have a nice bow, or go for the long low drama with dangling tails. Or not wear it at all, like our friend the model did on the left. Isn’t she pretty? I wish my bangs looked that good.

I do know that I’m extremely fortunate that I got hooked on IGIGI a million years ago, so my closet is seriously stuffed with Yuliya’s designs, but it’s an addiction that feeds my joie de vivre. I could literally go on a series of twelve job interviews and never repeat a design. I know that many plus size sisters break into a sweat when they have a wedding coming up, or a formal dinner or a cruise, but once you go IGIGI you’ll never worry again. It won’t be that sick feeling of dread where you’re thinking  ”What can I wear?” but instead a feeling of delight, thinking “Oh my gosh, how will I pick?” And that right there is worth it.

We’re giving away more than $1000 in IGIGI fashion!

I want you to experience some of that joy for yourself. If you’re a plus size lady and you haven’t tried IGIGI, if you have a few key pieces or if you are an IGIGI hoarder like I am, IGIGI and Weetacon wants to give you the gift of fashion. Here’s the deal: Go shopping on the IGIGI website right now and pick out a garment that you’d like to have. Then come back here and leave a comment and tell me what you want and where you see yourself wearing said garment. IGIGI is going to give one commenter a $50 gift certificate to spend on anything on the IGIGI site (yes, including sales and clearance!). It’s just that easy.

But wait! There’s more! You have more than a dozen opportunities to win $50 IGIGI gift certificates!  Just go check out the other participants in the Weetacon 2012  fashion show and leave comments on their reviews too. It’s just that easy. No catch. Just fun and fashion.

The fine print: Participants must fulfill all requirements of the contest to win. Only the first comment from any one commenter will be counted. Individuals may win multiple $50 gift certificates in the Weetacon IGIGI giveway. Comments must be received by May 15 at midnight. Reviewers received products in exchange for honest reviews but IGIGI has no input on what goes into our descriptions nor do they have any ability to edit or alter our views. All opinions are that of the author(s) of the reviews. Did you really read this far? If so, I love you more than every other reader out there. However, that love will not influence your ability to win the gift certificates, however I will definitely tell you that you are very very pretty. And you are.

No, I’m not wearing white tights. Those are my actual legs. Yeah, I really am that pale. Do not be concerned. Go look at the other photos where the sun was setting on my Victorian pallor and we can all pretend I have some melanin. Now leave some comments or the pug will be very very sad.

]]> http://thatsmybix.com/2012/04/27/wendy-bix-reviews-the-igigi-tatiana-dress-and-a-giveaway/feed/ 52 http://thatsmybix.com/2011/12/29/im-a-unicorn-no-longer/ http://thatsmybix.com/2011/12/29/im-a-unicorn-no-longer/#comments Thu, 29 Dec 2011 20:55:53 +0000 WendyBix http://thatsmybix.com/?p=3372

After much ado, Hodor has left the building.

Hodor is the name that Jane gave to my evil twin lump in my noggin. It was a pretty good name and also, I am likewise reading A Game of Thrones and found it funny. And also, my lump would frequently shout “HODOR!” by means of giving me a low throbbing skull ache.

I went in to have Hodor removed and my adorable doctor took one look at Hodor and said “Yeah….. I’m not touching that. You need to have that done by a specialist and shit.” She didn’t say shit. It is authorial intrusion. Forgive me. The evil twin makes me want to swear.

True fact: when you have an evil twin growing in your noggin, they send you to an Ear, Nose and Throat guy. For real! Even if the evil twin has nothing to do with an ear, a nose nor a throat.

I went to the ENT dude, who was, by the way, DELIGHTFUL, all expecting to be de-lumped that morning. However, so sadly, he looked at the lump and said “Uh… yeah….I’m not touching that in here. We need to have that done in a hospital and shit.” He might actually have said shit. I don’t recall because of all the brain juice being sucked up by my evil twin.

(It did actually occur to me that perhaps the evil twin was using some kind of telepathy to subtely change these doctors’ minds. It totally could happen!)

Because I thought I had an assload of travel coming up in January (actually, I’m still traveling in January, just not an assload), he offered to de-lump my skull on the very next day, which was a Saturday. Apparently with the holidays and everyone’s insurance being jacked up by the evil insurers (who may or may not have evil twins of their own), the specialists end up working every single weekend in December, removing polyps and nodes and nodules and creepy badness from the population. Who knew these people had such sucky Decembers? Yeah, I kind of feel bad for the medical staff under their own crushing insurance woes.

At this point, I really didn’t care what they had to do. My three month headache was about to turn into a four month headache and I was ready for it to be pretty much over. If he told me they couldn’t do it once I was in the hospital, I probably would have gone at it with a melon baller or something. Or for a holiday motif, I could try using an ice skate, like Tom Hanks did on his rotten tooth in Castaway.

On Saturday, Esteban decided to go brew beer at Scotty Boom Boom’s, and I was pretending to be tough and noble, so I told him it was fine and that I could drive myself. And truthfully, I was actually fine, until I walked in and saw the freaking operating room, complete with giant doughnut thing to hold my head still while they SLICED INTO IT LIKE A CANTALOUPE.

True fact: when an ENT is going to slice into your noodle, they wrap you up in a sheet and then clip it closed using giant binder clips so that you don’t freak out. Unless being basically confined in a straight jacket freaks you out, of course, and if so, you’re screwed.

The ENT staff were basically jovial and had a little comedy routine to distract me from their grisly task. The only part that really sucked was the Lidocaine, which I already know sucks and I already know that my body metabolizes it way faster than normal people and I need like four times more than most people. After it finally took hold, though, the entire thing was done in the matter of minutes. Best part? ENT dude said it was just small enough that he could perform the lumpectomy without shaving my hair off, and the stitches are all internal, so I don’t have to go back and have anyone poke Hodor’s old crib.

Afterwards, though, I got a little shaky and spazzy. I drove home in somewhat of a weird shock and then hated everything. I had to go out and run an errand and as I was backing my car out of the garage, I pulled out at a weird angle (or had parked at a weird angle) and managed to crack the passenger mirror on the garage door like a fucking female driver stereotype. Then I was pissed, sore AND a numbskull.*

I took pictures of Hodor, of course. It was FASCINATING. Even the doctor was impressed at how large it actually was, and after seeing the little bastard rolling around in the specimen cup, I’m surprised the headache wasn’t worse. It was an unbelievable thing to be trapped between a skull and a scalp. It was bigger around than a nickel, but it was spherical, so imagine something as big AND as round as a nickel. Also, it was surprisingly weighty.

You want to see the photo, don’t you? I knew you would.

I wanted to take it home with me, to float it in formaldehyde in a jar on my desk and point to it whenever I was at a loss for a particular word (I blame Hodor for all of those words that are on the tip of my tongue. Hodor took them and keeps them locked up in a box, only taking the words out on special occasions) but the medical people needed to medical stuff to it and make sure it wasn’t cancer.

True Fact: It wasn’t cancer.

If you like medical rubbernecking, read this: Hodor was probably caused by some violence done to my head when I was a teenager, which caused a tiny nip of skin to get tucked into itself/healed over and then the hair follicle of said skin nip then started growing bigger and juicier and then growing a conscience and then sentience until it became HODOR! and began punishing me with nonstop headaches. And for you, here’s a video (keep in mind that the camera is distorting my fingers to look bigger and Hodor looks smaller because its further away, but in reality it was probably about as big as my thumbnail.) If you want to read more about Hodor’s actual diagnosis, here’s the wiki on it.

Speaking of headaches, I had been hoping that my constant headache would go away the moment Hodor was ripped from my brain. Alas, it was not so. There was a ton of swelling and ache-y crap that I ended up plopping an ice pack on the back of my head and holding it there with a long towel most of the weekend, all the while putting up with the same damned Hodor headache I’d had all along.

BUT! About a week after the OR visit, I noticed that the headache was definitely subsiding. I still have a bit of one but my regular doctor said that there are probably a few toxins still hanging around in the general area and it might be as long as a month. However, given how much the headache has already gone away, I am pretty optimistic that my evil twin has done its last damage.

Esteban, however, postulated that perhaps Hodor wasn’t the evil twin. Perhaps it was the GOOD twin and now the evil twin is writing this here blog entry. Interesting concept. If so, I can only hope that Hodor was keeping me from becoming the evil genius that I was destined to become all along. They have the BEST secret lairs, after all, and also, I am quite looking forward to having henchmen.

Truthfully, I have some ambitious home improvement projects planned for 2012 and henchmen would really come in handy.

*That was actually one of the ENT doc’s OR jokes. A riot!

Here’s a very true fact: our cat Jincy is the boss of all of us.

She’s the boss of me, she’s certainly the boss of Esteban and she’s even the boss of Avi. The pug weighs twice what the cat does, but you wouldn’t know it for the furious ass kickings that are doled out nightly in our den (aka The Thunderdome). What’s more, Jincy has decided that Avi’s nice big cushy dog bed is in fact the perfect place for a 10 pound grey and white cat. Please be aware, Jincy already has her own elevated kitty beds in my office, Esteban’s office (where there are TWO) and the den, as well as a super cushy smaller cat bed of her own. Not to mention that the entire loveseat in the living room is basically hers as well, as it is covered with Ikea sheepskins and one of my fleece hoodies that has also had the misfortune of being Jincy’s favored sleeping places. No. She also would like the pug’s giant bed, please and thank you.

It’s so sad: Avi will walk into the living room, spy the cat in the dog bed, and then sadly slump off to sit in the only cat bed that is pug-accessible. There, she spills over the side and crushes the top until she gets more or less comfortable and then sighs a giant world-weary breath and closes her eyes against the cruel world.

I realized that I’ve been doing that for the last year. The sighing, the making do, the tiny ridiculous attempts at getting comfortable.

I have a giant lump on my noggin. It’s not a tumor. It’s completely normal or normal for me or something. It might be something gross or it might be something even more gross or maybe it’s a vestigal horn or a third nipple or (here’s my hope) it might be an absorbed twin fetus (fingers crossed).

It was pea-sized since I was a teenager and was something I kind of lived with, but in the last year, it’s started hurting off and on. Then it started always pretty much being a low grade headache emanating from the lump. I mostly blew it off because I figured my life was a fucking mess with my grandmother’s illness and death (something, in retrospect, I have not been dealing with well) and why wouldn’t I have a stress headache pretty much all the time? Except that it just got worse and worse and then just when I thought I could deal, it got even worse. Incidentally, the lump is also in the same spot where my neck muscles always seize. Coincidence? It turns out maybe not, since the lump is apparently full of evil. That’s what my doctor said. She used the word “evil”. When I become a super villain, remember this absorbed twin fetus thing for my origin story.

I let Sarah feel it in October and she compared it to a malted milk ball. I let my sister feel it over the weekend and she pulled her hand away like it was going to bite her. It’s the lump that keeps on giving.

How long do you put up “wait and see” before you do something about it? Or is the twin inside my brain trying to chew its way out of my skull and maybe the neck pain is the little malformed feet kicking their way to the surface? Because if so, that’s going to be the fucking BEST story at parties.

Tomorrow, my head is getting cut open and my lump/twin fetus/devil horn is going to be cut off my skull. Just my luck, my super short haircut should show off the shaved section quite nicely for the holidays. Maybe I can ask the surgeon to use red and green stitches.

Unfortunately, there’s no similar hope for the pug.

PS. I updated to tell you this because I’m trying to be a better, more consistent blogger, especially now that the NaNo business is done. But you don’t have to comment to say anything about good wishes or hugs (or huggggsssss!!!!) or anything like that. I assume that you guys wish me well. I really just posted so that you could rubberneck my weird medical drama, quite honestly. Peace out!

I’ve been writing a lot, although not here I’m afraid. I’m actually digging into my shark Thing I’m Doing for NaNoWriMo. Oh, I think I’ve raged against NaNo in the past (in fact, I know damn well that I have) and I still have rage issues, but I’m working through them. More specifically, it has caused me to write far more words than the words I wrote this summer on the other Thing I’m Doing (working title: The Next Harry Potter–Stop Laughing I’m Serious. Watch for it in whatever passes for a bookstore near you in the next decade or so) in far less time, which is exactly the point, I guess. Yes, I’m being begrudging about this crap, but you know what? It really has helped.

You know what has actually helped? Esteban is also writing a No for NaWriMo. Yes, apparently my motivation involves statistics and numbers, but it also goes on overload when there’s a freaking competition. My cred is at stake here and nothing burns my ass more than when he announces that he’s 2K words ahead of me.

Also contributing to the busyness: my little sister is getting married, to a guy she fell in love with at Weetacon. It shouldn’t be a surprise that an event that started with a marriage proposal should be racking up love matches left and right, but so it seems to be. Come to Weetacon, single people! We’ll find you a mate! Or something!

(Seriously, though, registration for Weetacon is open, and there’s currently one spot left, so if you are so inclined, head on over to the website and check it out. We won’t bite and I promise we won’t even try to set you up with someone until at least your second ‘Con.)

So things have been a little crazy busy, and I totally forgot to post here that we’re doing our mumble somethingth annual Holiday Card Exchange! That’s right, if you are interested in getting lots and lots of holiday greeting cards from all over the country, continent and the world, you can sign up once more using this handy dandy little form. Since I got such a late start, I’ll give you until this Friday, November 25th at Midnight CST (although I’ll probably let you slide, PSTers, and as long as it’s there when I wake up on Saturday, you’ll be good) to sign yourself up.

Not sure how the Holiday Card Exchange works? Here’s the FAQ, and as always, the comments are ready to take any additional questions you may have.

What are you waiting for? Sign up already!

Did you guys know that things break on houses? It’s absolutely true. But did you know that they all conspire to break at the same damned time? Also completely true. Case in point: Casa Bix tried to pretty much mutiny over the past several weeks.

We were feeling pretty good about ourselves, actually, so we were really to blame. The house felt our hubris and decided to teach us a lesson, undoubtedly. You see, after more than a decade of dissembling our horrible refrigerator every three months (I don’t mean cleaning it out, I mean we had to actually empty the freezer, remove the back panel and the defrosting unit — using wrenches and stuff — and chip away the ice that had built up inside the mechanism, causing rot water to drain into the fridge part and onto all of our food), we had found a fix for the design flaw and haven’t had to fight the fridge funk since. Victory!

Except…

First, the dryer stopped working. Well, it kind of stopped working. You see, when we bought the house, the dryer was the only appliance we could afford to buy new (and only because Esteban was still working for a big blue box store and had a crazy pants great discount) and while we’ve since replaced the other appliances with varying degrees of success, our Maytag has lived up to that brand’s storied dependability.

Until it didn’t. Except when it did.

And we weren’t sure if it was just time to buy a new dryer (after all, we’re talking 14 years here… man I’m old) or what. It was very very frustrating, because you’d run the dryer and then find an entire dryer full of still mostly wet clothing. Most of the time, it all needed to be rewashed because by the time we realized it hadn’t dried properly, it was permeated with the funk. You know the funk, right? You put on clothes that are saturated with the funk and blammo, you smell like a cross between a bum and a drowned rat that washed up under the pier.  Bum rat soaked mold clothes, you do not make for sexy times, let me tell you.

Esteban tried replacing the whosits and the whatsits, and it would seem like that was it, but it wasn’t, and we were starting to look at the mate for our ridiculous hippy washing machine, which was going to cost fourteen million dollars. But then, during one of our many poolapalooza sessions this summer, Ward took sympathy on our state and decided to look into the matter. He found out that the thingy that the whoosit was attached to was ALSO a problem for this dryer. So he replaced it. Problem solved, right?

Wrong. The VERY SAME NIGHT, the hippy washing machine threw a code. Yes, a code, because while our dryer is circa 1996 and uses the same technology was 1970 dryers, our washing machine has the pants of fancyness. It has CODES, people. Codes that tell you nothing.  We basically will do anything to avoid another visit from the Hippy Washing Machine Repair Guy, if only because his Mercedes-Benz makes my Murano feel ashamed of itself. Again, to the internet, where the root cause was either a Faboozle or a Schlamozzle, but to get to those things, Ward actually had to build wooden stands so that they could tip the washing machine on its side. I am not making this up. The man built temporary wooden STANDS to fix our washing machine.

Thankfully, that should have been the end of it. Except not less than a week later, as we did our preparations for autumn, it became very apparent that both our chimney was about to fall down and also, the roof was going to pour great flumes of water into our bedroom until the entire bedroom ceiling let loose on our heads some evening in the very near future.

Here’s a secret: We’ve redone almost our entire house, but our bedroom still looks exactly like it did when we bought the house in 1996 (this December 6th is our 15 year anniversary in Casa Bix… have I mentioned that I’m old?) with yellowed and stained staple-up ceiling tiles and warped, badly installed 70′s rec room paneling. I hate it in there. No, I LOATHE it in there. However, until we got it to stop leaking, it wasn’t worth fixing it. And believe me, we’ve tried everything, shy of a new roof. So, yeah.

We went through the entire process of getting roofing estimates and many learned opinions and then we handed over another four million dollars and a bunch of guys (many of whom did not have teeth and made me feel very awkward when I bought them doughnuts) tore off our roof and then put a new one on. Woo! I did a sigh of relief, because at that point, we had now replaced or dealt with everything in our house that could possibly be a nightmare, right?

Within minutes of the roofing trucks departure, Esteban noticed that the toilet had departed this earthly plane. Yes, that would be this 1949 bungalow’s sole toilet, and he discovered this while getting ready to take a shower. Why does Esteban end up doing plumbing while naked? Apparently the universe has decreed that it should be so. I would take the time to enjoy it, but usually he’s not in a fantastic mood while doing his naked plumbing, so I try to keep my sarcastic and/or bawdy comments to a minimum and decided to be nice and hook up the dishwasher for him. I even stroked the appliance and assured it that it was very pretty and wonderful and I loved it very much. I really didn’t want the 9-year-old dishwasher to shit the bed too. I think Esteban would leave me if we had to slog through manual handwashing all of our dishes. I am truly a messy cook, and if I haven’t used every single surface and every utensil, then I don’t really feel like it’s a worthwhile endeavor.

Finally, he managed to get the toilet to stop hemorrhaging water and took his shower. However, when I detached the hose for the portable dishwasher (reason #5748 not to buy an old house) I noticed that while it normally burned me slightly, the water was ice cold.

Uh oh.

“Hey hon, did you have hot water for your shower?”

“Well, now that you mention it… it was pretty unimpressive toward the end there. I figured that the dishwasher just used all of it up.”

Except no. No.

Bye hot water heater. We hardly knew ye.

You know what’s awesome? Living like an Amish person for the weekend. Luckily we had the washing machine fixed… except we couldn’t wash any clothes! Or any dishes! It’s like a fortune cookie saying or something. I felt bad about my missing roof until I met a toilet that couldn’t flush. Or something.

Esteban fixed the toilet, and then four days later, we got a new water heater.  And now I am very poor. Very very ridiculously poor. On the bright side, I’m pretty sure that there’s nothing left to break in our house.

At least until we crank up the original central air unit next May, that is.

No whammies, no whammies, no whammies!

Whenever I start feeling bad for myself, I think about this dog, whose owner dressed it up like a chicken. And then I laugh because my god. A chicken pug. It will never stop being funny.

So, I’ve been working on this project. A writing project. Ever since I went to Writer Camp, I’ve been little Pollyanna with keeping my internal demons at bay and have trucked through 18K words of new fiction in two months.

Ok, I know Nanowrimo people poop that out before lunch, but for me, that’s a huge freaking deal.

You want to know my secret? A freaking Google document. Yes, I know, I preach about SMART goals all the time, but it never occurred to me to apply it against writing, which is such a hippy dippy, scarf and feathers kind of experience that the left brain kind of goes to sleep so as to not scare the muse or some crazy shit. Anyway, one Google spreadsheet and a mapped set of benchmarks later and I’m on a freaking roll. I expect to be looking at a mostly complete first draft of an N word by the end of 2011, amazingly enough.

(And to give you a peek inside my fucked up brain, you should also know that I’m about 5K behind my own schedule right now, so instead of being happy that I’ve written about 17K more words than I would have during the summer, I’m tsk tsking about how I’m behind fucking schedule. Ok, still progress to be made on the internal demon thing. (Someone smack me.))

I’m also doing a lot of careful reading of fiction novels. I love reading, but I tend to read not as a reader but as a writer. It’s possible that my creative writing graduate program broke me or maybe I just need to get my head out of my ass.

However, to that end, I’m starting up the That’s My Bix book club again, just in time for Back to School! No need for number 2 pencils or even a book bag (although if you want an excuse to buy those things for yourself, be my guest), we do it all via email discussions.

Last time, we read Liam Callanan’s All Saints (brilliant brilliant BRILLIANT book) and this time I have similar high hopes for Susanna Daniel’s Stiltsville. She is a first time novelist, a graduate of the writer factory that is Iowa Writer’s Workshop and she is also on twitter as @SusannaDaniel surprisingly enough. The book was named one of Amazon’s Top 10 debut novels of 2010 and it also earned won the Robert Bingham PEN American award last week. She also debuted at the One Story Debutante Ball this past spring and they published a very cool interview with her. I chose this book because she lives in Wisconsin and then it won the Bingham, so I’m now actually going to do it.

Want in? Simple!

How this book club will work: read the book by Sept 15 and then participate in the discussion on this email list. Simple, right? So, some people like to write long responses and some people just get a lot of enjoyment out of reading those responses and saying “Yes, me too” which is fine as well. There is no pressure, this is supposed to be fun! Leave a comment on this entry and I’ll add you to the super secret book club mailing list. You’ll need to leave the email address you want to use for the discussion list, but don’t worry, I’m the only one who can see your email address and I promise the spam bots can’t get at it.

Also, there are already 20 or so participants signed up from previous book club participants and also, I mentioned it on Twitter and Facebook, so the number of comments on this post are not indicative of the number of participants.

We have a winner in the Wendy Bix photo giveaway!

And it is Lorraine, who said that the barissta entries were her favorite. Ah Sbux, how pedestrian it has become, and yet how it filled my heart with joy back when it was still a novelty and a paean to conspicuous consumerism. I kind of miss those innocent days of being excited about Sbux too. We now save our Sbux runs as a treat on the weekends, since we have purchased a super-automatic espresso unit of our very own and can make fancy and delicious coffees for pennies. Our barisstas still give us crap about how we’re no longer their best customer. Ah well, what are you going to do? We all grow up eventually.

I’ve sent Lorraine an email and anxiously await her choice. Will it be City Girl, the single most popular item in my entire Etsy store (and to be honest, the screen saver on my iPhone as well)? Or will she go off book entirely and request something custom that isn’t in the store but is something she remembers from a blog entry long ago? It’s anyone’s guess!

Congratulations Lorraine!

One of the side benefits of my new (well, six months old) job is that the hour or so that I used to spend commuting to and from the office is the make or break hour for planning ambitious meals. Not that we’ve been ambitious, mind you, but we certainly do more eating at home now and there are far fewer “I don’t want to cook, let’s order a pizza” nights than there used to be.

(Also, in case you’re the nosy type, I along with a few of my fellow Double Income No Kids friends are tracking all of our nightly dinner adventures on the Twitter feed DINKdinners.)

It’s also prime Farmer’s Market season, so every Saturday, Esteban and I are waking up early and scurrying down to the big market where we scope out the produce, and then we typically head out to what I call “the good meat place” to get some kind of animal protein for the week.

This week, I was in the mood for skirt steak. Oooh, marinated with cilantro and garlic and lime and maybe a little Vulcan Fire Salt for the hell of it? Yeah, that was just about perfect. Unfortunately, skirt steak isn’t terribly popular here in the land of Hamburger Helper and cream o’mushroom soup chuck roasts in the crock pot, so we headed over to one of the other meat counters that is reputable and doesn’t give me the vapors. They were out of skirt steak, but of course the almighty chuck roast was on sale and actually looked pretty good.

You should know that I’ve been fooled by chuck roasts before, so many times, and yet, I keep going back for more. Come on, baby, look at all of this marbling! they call out to me. They are like that ex-boyfriend who you know is a cheating asshole but you keep taking him back because he smells so nice and looks so adorable when he smiles and shows those dimples. I know better and yet, I just keep setting myself up for disappointment.

I had random delusions of turning it into burrito filling, but of course, didn’t follow through and ended up making your run-of-the-mill boring ass pot roast. And even after putting extra effort into it, applying all manner of flavor-building spices and aromatics, it STILL tasted super pedestrian. I mean, it was tasty, but tasty in a Swanson’s dinner kind of way.

Why do I do this? No, the question is why do I keep doing it? Even as pot roasts go, the chuck roast will never be as good as other cuts of meat in the same application. As far as I can tell, chuck roast exists for one purpose only: to be ground up and turned into meatloaf or braised with a bunch of cumin and chiles to later become an ingredient in burritos.  I even once followed Thomas Keller’s pot roast recipe to the letter which involved wine and a mirepoix and kitchen twine and a slow braise in my French oven — even after all of that, it was so underwhelming that I think I actually heard snoring coming from the carrots on the plate.

So tell me, commenters, what are your no fail super exciting and oh-so-delicious chuck roast recipes? Save me from another boring dinner! Tell me what I’m missing because generations of housewives and church lady cooks before me cannot possibly be wrong!

Also, you have until July 15th to enter to win a Wendy Bix 16×20 photo print! Details over on this post!

Many of you started reading my Diaryland blog back in the day. I have actually owned Thatsmybix.com for years (YEARS) while still updating at Diaryland because A)I had no idea how to physically maneuver 8 years of blog entries over onto WordPress B) I didn’t want to deal with the extra work… let’s face it, Diaryland is limited but it’s EASY and it never changes and C) Mimi Smartypants once told me that she was proud that she and I were still rocking the old school Diaryland blog updating and not caring about having a Diaryland URL for our blogs even after the giant exodus in the early 2000s. Then my Conde Nast work dried up with the economy and I decided that it was a good time to go legit and stop paying for two different websites.

One of the things that happened when I flipped the switch is that I had to set up a redirect on Weetabix.diaryland.com, which essentially, hid all of my archives from view. Sure, I could get at them, but I couldn’t link back to something and also, I felt a little bit like a poser saying that I’ve been blogging since before they were called blawwwgs, but my archives at That’s My Bix Dot Com only went back to 2008. I started copy/pasting my archives and had gotten about three years done when… blammo, the stupid Russian hackers hit in 2009. I really didn’t want to do all of that copy/pasting a second time. I knew there had to be a way to get everything back automatically, but I just didn’t know how. There was an old script at one time, but the download was invalid now and everyone who might have cared about importing Diaryland to Word Press did it so long ago that their method didn’t really work well with later versions of WP. So instead, sometimes when I was bored, I’d sit there and copy/paste my entries, fixing links and adding categories and tags, cursing my fate with every entry. It was unbelievably tedious and even after a year of concentrated copy/pasting, I had only done maybe 100 entries. At that rate, I’d be finished in 10 years. UGH!

I mentioned my conundrum to Jennette, one of my very smart friends who happens to have her own business fixing people’s websites. And wouldn’t you know it, Jennette figured out a way to upload all of my Diaryland entries into my Word Press website without affecting the existing (new) entries and comments! Easy peasy!

There you go, long time Weetabix readers who missed your Dumber Than A Box archives. They’re back. Every last loving one of them.

Now, if you too are a former Diaryland user who has a bunch of entries sitting in Andrew’s lazy little hands, you can also have Jennette rescue your archives and import them into your existing Word Press website at the low low rate of 10 cents a diary entry (seriously, that is so crazy cheap).

Here’s what you have to do:

1. Log into the Diaryland account that you want archived.
2. Look at your Profile. That will tell you exactly how many entries that account has posted.
3. If you’re no longer a Gold member, then pay for a 3 month Gold membership (it’s $12) which is the cheapest tier, and then wait an eternity for Andrew to flip the switch on your account and send you the email that you’re Gold again.
4. Go to the Gold Member resources.
5. Select Download Diaryland Backup or something like that. That will trigger a giant file that may take a very long time to build. When it finishes, save that file as an .html on your harddrive. It might be helpful to rename it (YOUR NAME) Diaryland Backup.html.
6. Send it to Jennette along with your Word Press admin address and log in information. She’ll send you an invoice for half of what she expects the work to cost and she’ll also let you know when she’ll have it done by.

It’s just that easy but if you don’t believe me, check out her details. And if you have a Diaryland account, chances are that you remember the general HORROR around the blogosphere when Stephen Dekken killed Diary-X back in the mid-2000′s and lost every Diary-X user’s archives with zero warning. Do you really want to wake up one day and realize that Diaryland is gone and with it, a huge chunk of your online writing history? I sure didn’t.

As far as I know, Jennette is the only person offering this service (believe me, I’ve been figuring out a way to port my archives since 2008 and I’ve never seen it) and honestly, her rate is so reasonable that you really can’t afford NOT to do this.

And of course, if you want your Diaryland archives off of Diaryland but don’t have a Word Press blog, Jennette can help you with that too.

To celebrate the return of my archives, I’m giving away a free 16×20 Wendy Bix print to one random lucky commenter on this entry. That includes any photo that may have appeared on the blog in any of its incarnations too, even if it’s not in the Etsy shop, just let me know. All you have to do is tell me your favorite Weetabix/That’s My Bix entry of all time. (Offer good to US and Canada only, sorry out-of-towners!)

The comments do not need a prop!

Oh you guys, Writer Camp was so awesome.

I can’t even begin to tell you how awesome it was. Everyone was awesome. Awesome. It’s an overused word, but I mean it in the truest sense: I am full of awe.

Every day, I took a tiny little cranky elevator down to the Writer Camp headquarters and then sat in a classroom where we talked about the process and wrote some words and then wrote some more words and then Lynda Barry would make us laugh and then we’d all evacuate when the screenwriting lady came in, and I’d go sit in the cafeteria and try to find something edible (true fact: nothing served at the Indiana Memorial Union is actually edible unless it’s a naked scotcheroo pile (You know how delicious scotcheroos are? How normal people make the scotcheroo filling and then press it into a pan and cover it up with melted chocolate chips? Yeah, well, the geniuses at the University of Indiana skipped that there step and just dumped the filling into a pile to be served as an “no bake cookie” or whatever they called it but I’m here to tell you: it was a pile of scotcheroo guts and it was delicious and totally worth catching the diabetes) or a gingerbread man with red hot eyes (apparently these are famous or something because everyone was talking about them. I don’t know why the scotcheroo piles aren’t famous but the gingerbread men WERE pretty good) and read tons of short stories and write cogent and thoughtful critiques (at least I tried) and then eventually wandered across the campus, through oh my god unbelievable heat and humidity (look, I spent most of May in Las Vegas and I’m telling you, this was some egregious heat) into a scarcely cool classroom building to discuss character intent with a bunch of other word nerds. And it was bliss.

Bliss with scotcheroo pile cookie things.

This conference totally made up for the last two conferences I went to, the one where Amy Hempel couldn’t be arsed to show up and the other one where everyone seemed like they spent more time talking about writing than actually writing. I’ll admit: I’m in danger of falling into that camp and I recognize that those people are INSUFFERABLE to be around. You know who is awesome to be around? Lynda Barry. No lie. I have a crush. I’m not even joking that I’m placing her up on a pedestal next to Mr. Rogers and you KNOW how much I adore Mr. Rogers.

I may have cried on her a little bit on the second to last day, but then she made up for it for being a dirty rotten cheat at drinking games that night. Oh yeah, I may have gone out drinking with Dan Chaon and Lynda Barry. Just a little bit.**

I also made new writing friends. They are awesome and made me happy and also, gave me hope for writing conferences of the future (also, weirdly a lot of my new writing friends are blonde! And beautiful. Writers are pretty sometimes. It’s true!) Fantastic stories in my fiction workshop! Ones that didn’t start with alarm clocks going off. Brilliant discussions and also, writer dinners at weird ethnic places, filled with laughing and gossip and then readings EVERY blessed night. This is pretty much my idea of heaven, right there. Plus, free wine (although I rarely had any because it was so fucking hot that I drove the 11 blocks to the reading every night. Also, the readings happened right in the middle of the two block Bermuda Triangle where Lauren Spierer disappeared and everyone was kind of freaked out about walking alone at night.)

I have but one regret and it is that I was not able to get my phone out fast enough to record Dan Chaon saying “Wendy (Bix) is beautiful.”** And then when I DID have it out, he refused to say it again. He’s wily, that Dan Chaon. Brilliant and more than a little wily.

I also regret that I still don’t know how to style my new short haircut. But I’ll figure it out eventually. Or continue to walk around looking like Rosie O’Donnell in that movie where she’s playing a mentally handicapped person. Or just Rosie O’Donnell in general.

(I’m not trashing on looks, but lady could benefit from a good bra and some eye cream. Well, to be honest, who among us can’t benefit from a good bra and eye cream?)

There were so many fantastic moments, like when Lynda* mooned me or when I recognized a fellow bloggers work being cited in the blogging session being referred to as a Mommy blogger (and is, in fact, a dude and would likely be very upset or conversely turned on by the confusion) or skipping the Mexican Mennonite movie to go watch XMen at the local cinema with Esteban like a fucking bad ass (and finding out later that it was probably the smartest decision I made all week) or trying a voodoo spell to help the ancient hotel room’s thermostat dip below 73 degrees or when Dan* walked into workshop, sat down and said “Wendy… darlin… Mommy’s not feeling so good right now”.  There are too many choice moments to pick from and I couldn’t possibly do any of them justice to describe them, especially when the only words that float into my brain are “Again! Again! Again!”

But perhaps it is this one that was the truest to the reason I went.

One night before dinner, I was waiting for my writing posse to check out a Turkish restaurant for dinner and Dan Chaon was reading the newspaper, probably waiting for HIS posse, so he called me over to chat while we waited.

At one point, after telling him about how I defended his honor during my master’s thesis committee, I said “Ok, so I’m here to learn how to write a novel… so, how do you do that?” and I googled my eyes at him, because even though my last blog post promised that I wouldn’t get too tongue-tied around Mr. Chaon, I still acted like a class one dork half of the time (Note to famous writers: I’m actually quite reserved and normal, despite appearances(I’m probably lying right now)) and he shrugged and said “You just do it.”

And then I whined about outlines and snowflake methods and might have said “I don’t know how to DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO IIIIIITTTTTTTTTT” like I was eight and someone just asked me to do something I resented like picking up dog vomit or running a marathon or climbing the wall on an obstacle course — or all of those things combined.

He waved me off and said “Nah, forget all of that stuff. Just write it. Just dive in from chapter one page one. You can fix it later.”

It’s some powerful faith, for those of us who are so worried about mucking things up with our clumsiness that we are frozen. Those ideas inside our head are so perfect right now, just as they are, and we’re absolutely certain that we’re just going to fuck everything up. But apparently the trick is in just closing your eyes and diving in.

So here we go.

*I’m trying to be cool here, but in my head, I still think of them as “Dan Chaon” and “Lynda Barry”. How do you just call him “Dan” like we tried to during our workshop, but some of us couldn’t do it without a little smirk tickling the corner of our mouths, because seriously, it’s DAN CHAON! LYNDA BARRY! Are we clear on that?

**So totally better than France. No question.